Power Play

Jeannette Monroe was on top of her game. She signed her name on the contract with exaggerated flourish and grinned as she handed the document back to her client.

"We'll start the preliminary drawings Monday. This is going to be the best decision you've ever made, Mr. Conner. I guarantee it." She thrust out her hand and accepted a hearty shake before exiting the 42nd floor chrome and glass office.

Best decision ever. Indeed, it would make her a ton of cash and put her on the map in L.A.'s already burgeoning building industry. It called for celebration.

She didn't even go home. She didn't mind the traffic getting back to the Valley. Her car seemed to know the way to the old neighborhood, the city blocks where she'd started out several years ago. There was a restaurant here, across the street from her old office, which served the best damned margaritas north of the border. And just maybe she'd run into some of the old crowd. Maybe even Malcolm McVee.

She should have known better. Whenever this feeling of power came over her, things happened. Important things; ordinary things with extraordinary consequences.

Still, Jeannette wondered later if it was truly the power that caused it to happen. Did she have the ability to compel someone else to act, that someone being an equally powerful and self-made man at that? The thought scared her and she pushed it aside. But the truth remained; she had wanted it as badly as he. She'd been wanting Malcolm between her legs for all the years, months, and minutes she'd known him.

Leaving La Cocina's with Mal on a tequila buzz was a fantasy turned real.

In the end, when she spent what seemed like hours in her car making the twenty-mile drive home, she realized it wasn't the softness of his lips that had unraveled her. It wasn't his crystalline eyes that disassembled her reason, not his spontaneity or even that his sexuality could cause a woman's undergarments to combust.

No.

It was the fact that he knew the lyrics to the song.