Time and Again

we'll clear it up."
    "All right." He tapped the screwdriver on the edge of the table. He didn't need a computer to tell him what a clod was. It was just one more thing she would have to pay for before this was over. "Clear it up."
    "You automatically assume that my sister, being a woman, lured your brother, being only a man, into marriage. What an incredibly outdated theory."
    His fingers paused in the act of reattaching the toaster's coil. "Is it?"
    "Incredibly outdated, chauvinistic and stupid. The idea that all women want is marriage and a house with a picket fence went out with the poodle skirt."
    Though he wondered who in his right mind would put skirts on poodles, there was something more important to touch on. "Stupid?" he repeated.
    "Idiotic." Legs spread, jaw firm, she baited him. "Only a true idiot would be alive today with that kind of neanderthal attitude. Maybe the last few decades have passed you by, pal, but things have changed." She was on a roll now, a slender steamroller with right on her side. "Women have choices today, options, alternatives. An enlightened few even figure that, because they do, men benefit from the same expanding horizons. Except, of course, men like you, who are mired in their own self-importance."
    He stood at that, in a slow, deliberate manner that would have tipped her off if she hadn't been so angry.
    "I'm not mired in anything."
    "You're up to your neck in it, Hornblower. From the minute you got here you've been trying to find some way to turn your brother's marriage into a setup created by my sister." She took one long-legged stride toward him. "I've got a flash for you. Only a fool gets tricked into marriage, and Cal doesn't strike me as a fool. That's where the family resemblance fades."
    A jerk, a clod, an idiot and now a fool. Yes, he thought, she was going to pay. "Then why did he marry so quickly, without even attempting to come home and see his family first?"
    "You'll just have to ask him," she shot back. "It could be because he didn't want to be questioned or hounded or interrogated. In my family we don't pressure the people we love. And in the real world women get along just fine without setting snares for unwary men. The fact is, Hornblower, we don't need you."
    This time it was he who took the step. "You don't?"
    "No. Not for winning the bread or chopping the wood, running the country or taking out the garbage.
    Or-or fixing toasters," she added, with a wild gesture toward the mess on the table. "We can do everything we need to do just dandy on our own."
    "You left out something."
    Her chin lifted a fraction higher. "What?"
    His hand clamped quickly around the back of her neck. Sunny had time for a hiss of surprise before his mouth closed over hers. When a woman was expecting a left to the jaw, she had little defense against a heated embrace.
    She murmured something. He felt her lips move beneath his. His name, he thought, as the whisper of sound and movement shuddered into him. He was angry-more than angry-but his hair-trigger temper had never taken him so deep into trouble before.
    And she was trouble. He'd known it from the first glimpse.
    Recklessly he ignored logic and consequences and dragged her closer. Her hands had shot out of her pockets, and now they were clenched taut as wire on his shoulders, neither resisting nor surrendering. He wanted, craved, one or the other. With an oath he nipped at her full, seductive lower Up until her gasp of pleasure shocked the air.
    She'd been right about the high-powered voltage that ran through him. Her system was jolted again and again as he held her closer, tighter, harder. She didn't struggle. For, while her body was charged with the current that raced from him into her, her mind emptied, thoughts streaming away like colored chalk in the rain.
    She felt his muscles tense under her fingers, heard his sharp intake of breath as she pressed herself more fully against him. She could taste the passion, riper, darker, than any she had ever known, but she couldn't be sure if it was his or her own.
    It was as if she had come alive in his arms. He felt her go from rigid shock to molten aggression in the space of a heartbeat. Of all the women he had pleasured, or been pleasured by, he had never known one who matched him so perfectly. Passion to passion, demand to demand.
    He ran his hands through her short cap of hair. Warm silk. Down the slender curve of her throat. Hot satin. With his tongue he sampled the potent flavors of