They finished their smoked salmon, then she whipped up a chicken dish over rice, with a lovely sauce. They were both warm with the wine and laughing easily. Allison cleared the table, then pressed a button and it folded away electrically.

“Very slick.”

“Glad you like it.” She caught him looking at her breasts. “Any yachtsman should be able to deal with a simple square knot,” she said, knocking back the last of her wine.

Uh-oh, Stone said to himself. But he had had nearly a bottle of wine on top of the martini, and he was feeling hurt by Arrington, feeling incautious, and feeling extremely attracted to Allison Manning.

She went to a switch panel and lowered the lights; when she came back the knot in her shirt had been untied. She bent to kiss Stone, and her breasts fell free. “Let’s forget about the attorney–client relationship for the night,” she said.

Stone had a decision to make, and it didn’t take long. “It’s forgotten,” he said.

She straddled his bare legs, and he found that there was nothing under the short skirt. He shucked off his shorts, and she pulled his polo shirt over his head. A tug at a zipper and a shrug of her shoulders, and they were both naked.

“I don’t think I can wait,” Stone said.

“I can’t wait, either,” she said, reaching down and slipping him into her. “We’ll wait longer next time.”

They were both very quick and very together; they finished, clutching each other and smothering their cries in each other’s flesh. When they had both stopped trembling, she stood up, took his hand, and led him toward the aft cabin.

“Now we can start working on the next time,” she said, “and we can practice waiting.”

Chapter
13

Stone woke not long after dawn as a shaft of new sunlight fell across his face; it had been a warm night, and they were both lying on top of the bedcovers. She lay on her stomach with her head turned toward him, a strand of blond hair falling to a corner of her mouth and a tiny frown on her face, as if she were trying to figure out something about a dream. The frown lent her the innocence of a little girl.

Stone didn’t know what had motivated her to make love to him—maybe the realization that she might have no more than a week to live and the desire to make the most of it; or maybe she was just horny. For himself, he had been disappointed, angry, jealous, drunk, and, oh yes, horny. She was a client, of course, but he was a long way from the Ethics Committee of the New York State Bar Association, and he had never been any good at saying no to women. He reached over and lifted the strand of hair from her face, and, to his surprise, she smiled.