Irresistible Forces by Danielle Steel Page B

time to attend to. It had been a hellish week for him, but as promised, he had walked out of the unit at noon, and when he saw his wife, he grinned, and tossed his pager on the kitchen counter.
    “If that thing goes off in the next three days, I'm going to kill someone,” he said as he helped himself to a beer and sprawled across the couch with a look of admiration at his wife's white satin bra and panties. “I hope this isn't a preview of what you're wearing on the road show. You might sell a lot of stock, but you could cause a riot.”
    She leaned over and kissed him, and he ran a practiced hand up her silky thigh, and then took another sip of the icy beer before setting it down on the coffee table. “God, I'm tired,” he admitted. “Half of New York must have shot each other this week, and the other half fell on their asses and broke something. If I see another damaged body, I think I'm going to have a psychotic break.” He smiled at her then, beginning to unwind from the pressures of three days straight at the trauma unit. “It's good to see you. I was beginning to wonder if we were still married. It's like being married to a flight attendant, every time I'm here you're not, and when you're home, I'm working. It gets a little old sometimes, doesn't it?”
    “It does, but I just couldn't help it for the past two weeks. When I get back, everything will calm down again. I promise.”
    “Yeah, for about two minutes,” he said, looking uncharacteristically weary, but he'd had roughly a total of six hours’ sleep in the past seventy-two hours. She wondered how he did it. At least she got to come home at night, and get some rest, before rushing back to the office again the next morning. “I hope you don't have another IPO for at least another six months,” he said, and she smiled.
    “I'm not sure my partners would be too thrilled with that,” she said, taking a sip of his beer and sitting down next to him on the couch. Even with the air conditioning on full blast, it was still warm in the apartment. It had been over a hundred degrees all week, and still in the nineties at midnight, and several times that week they'd had a brownout in her office, but she and her associates worked right through it. Only the hospitals were unaffected by it, as they had their own generators and couldn't afford to lose power, in the midst of surgeries, and with all their essential life-preserving equipment.
    “What do you want to do this weekend?” he asked, looking at her lovingly, and running a hand gently over her pale blond hair. He was dead tired, but he couldn't help noticing that she looked sexy and pretty. She never looked like an investment banker to him, just a very beautiful woman. Her professional expertise was purely coincidental, and about as unimportant to Steven as her income. He was proud of her, but he had never cared about how much money she made. When he married her, when she was in business school at Columbia, she had been on a full scholarship, and didn't have a penny. And all the good fortune, and rich rewards that had come her way since seemed nice to him, but he wouldn't have cared if they'd been starving and living in a studio apartment somewhere on the Upper West Side, which they would have been, if they had been living on his wages. But the financial disparity between them had never been an issue to either of them. She made a huge salary, and had made some excellent investments over the years, but he regarded it as a bonus for them, and in truth, it was of no real importance to him.
    “I'd love to go to a baseball game,” she admitted with a grin. She was an avid baseball fan, when she had time, and so was he, but for once he was less than enthusiastic about the suggestion.
    “In this heat? I love you, but I think you're crazy. How about a movie … after I spend the next twenty-four hours in bed with you. First things first, Mrs. Whitman.” He smiled at her lasciviously and she laughed. He had a