“So they are yours. I ask again, who has black pillowcases? Besides Hugh Hefner or, I don’t know, international arms dealers?”
“They are not black. They are the darkest of dark blue, called Midnight. You’d know that if you had hung around long enough to see my autumn bachelor linens.”
She laughed. “Autumn linens?”
“Yes, seasons change. And by the bye, those sheets are eight hundred and twenty thread count.”
“I can see what I’ve been missing.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, dropping the wiseass from his tone. He paused and added, “You know exactly what you’ve been missing, and so do I.”
Nikki studied him. Rook was not looking at her but into her, the candle flame dancing in his eyes.
He pulled the bottle from a bowl of ice and came around beside her to pour. When her glass was full, she rested one hand on his wrist and put the other around the bottle to take it from him and place it on the table. Looking up at him standing over her, Nikki held his gaze as she took his wrist and drew his hand inside her robe. She tensed with a shiver as his cool palm rested on her breast. And held her, warming.
Rook slowly lowered, bending himself to kiss her, but it wasn’t fast enough for what was building inside Nikki. She clawed the front of his shirt roughly and pulled him to her. Her excitement made him come alive, and he fell onto her, kissing her deeply and drawing her close.
Nikki moaned, feeling a spreading warmth, and arched backward as she rose up to him. Then, sliding herself off the chair, she laid herself down on her back on the flat of the rooftop. Their tongues reached for each other, searching in some wild, aching desperation. He untied the sash of her robe. She unbuckled his belt. And Nikki Heat softly groaned again and whispered, “Now. Now . . . ,” and moved herself to the long-past beat of the “Fire Down Below.”
Chapter Eight
Something stirred Rook awake. A siren, likely an ambulance, judging by its chirps and guttural honks, announcing itself at an intersection over on Park Avenue South before fading into the night. It was one part of New York living he never got used to, the noise. For some it became background they could tune out. Not for him. It challenged him in the day when he wrote, and he never got an unbroken night’s sleep because this was the city that never did. Somebody should write a song about that, he thought.
With the eye that wasn’t buried in the pillow, he read the luminous dial of his watch on the nightstand: 2:34. Three hours more sleep before the alarm. He smiled. Hm. Or maybe two hours. He slid backward across the bed to dock himself skin-to-skin with Nikki. When he reached the middle of the bed, he felt the sheet and her pillow. Both were cool.
Rook found her in the living room, perched on the window seat in a sweatshirt and a pair of Gap drawstring bottoms. He stopped in the hallway entrance and watched her, a catlike silhouette in the bay window with her knees pulled up to her chin and her arms wrapped around her shins, contemplating the street below. “You can come in,” she said without turning from her view of the block. “I know you’re there.”
“Aren’t you the trained observer, Detective,” he said. He moved behind her and folded his forearms loosely around her neck.
“I heard you the second your feet hit the floor in there. You move about as subtly as a draft horse.” Nikki settled back and lounged against him.
“You’ll never hear me complain when the comparison involves a horse.”
“No?” She turned her face up to his and smiled. “No complaints here, either.”
“That’s good. And saves me the trouble of leaving a survey card.”
Nikki sniffed a little chuckle and turned back to the window, this time resting the back of her head on his abdomen, feeling the warmth of him on her neck.
“You thinking that he’s out there somewhere?” asked Rook.
“The Texan? Oh, he is for now. Just for now.”