The Switch by Sandra Brown Page B

panting. Inside his underwear he felt stirrings he knew were sexual and therefore wrong.
    Stop! What was he doing? He mustn't let himself get distracted. Mustn't let himself be ensnared by the wicked whore Gillian Lloyd. He set down the glass and turned his back on it, symbolically turning his back on temptation. Quickly and silently he retraced his steps to the front room of the house, where he paused to calm down and reorient himself.
    Extending from the main room in the opposite direction from the dining room and kitchen was a darkened hallway. Three doors opened off it. One must be the bedroom in which she slept. Imagining himself to be just another shadow, Dale Gordon crept down the passageway.
    The first room he came to was furnished with a desk and computer terminal, file cabinets, fax machine. On the wall was a corkboard covered with handwritten notes and business cards. Her home office.
    The second door opened into a small, neat bedroom. The bed had a pretty pale bedspread and an old-fashioned quilt folded over the foot of it. An easy chair. A round table with a cloth matching the bedspread draped over it. Obviously a guest room. He stepped back into the hallway.
    Blessed with a keen sense of smell, Dale Gordon knew before stepping through the door at the end of the hall that he would find her there. He could smell her shampoo. The scent of her skin, warm from sleep, was like a taste inside his mouth.
    The room was dark, but his eyes were so accustomed to the darkness by now that he could see her plainly. Either that or the divine guidance that had accompanied him this far was serving him well now and providing enhanced night vision.
    His heart thudded, but not from fear or anxiety. From excitement. From the thrill of being this close to her. One of the chosen. One of the select. At least she had been until...
    But he wouldn't dwell on that or he would get angry. If he thought about the tall man mauling and pawing her, defiling her, desecrating her body, he might become ill again. If he imagined her clutching him and moaning in pleasure and responding to such defilement, he might actually retch.
    She was sleeping on her stomach, her head turned to one side on the pillow. One cheek, one eye, one delicate ear were exposed to him. Her breathing was almost silent, but he could smell the flavor of it. Her dark hair was fanned out over the pillow, untangled and silky smooth.
    On the floor beside the bed were two articles of clothing. He bent down and picked them up. Pajamas. The short jacket was sleeveless and buttoned up the front. He fondled the soft cotton that had covered her breasts. He lifted it to his face and inhaled deeply. It made him giddy to think about her bare skin rubbing against the fabric, about her breasts reshaping it. The soft cloth would have defined her nipples, nipples from which the baby would suck.
    Only now there wouldn't be a baby.
    Sadly, he lay the pajama top on the foot of the bed. But he continued to hold the shorts, gently squeezing them between his hands. Even though he knew they couldn't have retained her body heat in the cool room, he imagined the fabric still to be warm. Warm and moist from her woman-place. He turned the shorts inside out, spread them over his crotch, and began rubbing himself.
    Even through the layers of clothing, he could feel his arousal. It was a rare sensation for Dale Gordon. Ever since that episode in gym class in junior high school when the other boys had stripped him of his underwear and ridiculed the smallness of his penis, he had denied the nasty thing that lodged between his legs. He resented having to touch it even to urinate. Or to hold it while he scrubbed and scrubbed until it was clean.
    He was mortified on those mornings when he woke up to the realization that it had betrayed him in his sleep, that his sheets were stained ... just as they had been that morning Mother discovered the bad thing he'd been doing in his bed each night. She had made him beat