Disclaimers:  not mine.  non profit.  derek and the PTL mob will be returned mussed but unharmed to their purveyors, SF channel, USA et al.

The Turn of An
Overly Friendly Card

© 2000, dragon

Rachel Corrigan couldn't sleep.  She had settled in, dead tired, or so she thought, and had closed her eyes.  She lay there for several minutes, then turned on her side, her other side, her stomach, burrowing her head into her pillows.  Her eyes opened, stared into the darkness between her pillow and mattress and gave up.  OK.  She was wired.  Why?

Not a single good answer presented itself.  It had been several weeks since anything sinister had occurred.  Derek was being pleasant.  Nick was cheerful.  Alex was happily translating things she didn't normally have time to translate.  Kat was doing well.  Her own work was going well.  There was simply no reason for this.

Hmph.

She got up, shrugged on her lace edged robe and turned on the lights.  She picked up a book she'd been reading and put it down.  OK.  Maybe a book from the library.  Quietly, so as to not disturb sleeping neighbors, she padded out of her room, down the hall, down the stairs and into the library.  Books.  Lots and lots of books.  She ran a hand through her fine blonde hair and grimmaced.  Nothing looked interesting.

Great.

She flopped down into a well padded, wonderfully leather smelling wing chair and scowled.  She stretched and relaxed into the chair.  She looked around.  Instead of a book left on the table next to the chair, there was a deck of cards, neatly stacked.  She looked at them for a moment and picked them up.  They weren't brand new, but they were not so old that they didn't slide slickly against each other as she sorted through them.   Good.  Not one of Kat's decks.  All the cards were there.  She shuffled them idly, bridged them, tried a card riffle and dropped half of them on the floor.  She choked back a laugh.  Thank God there wasn't anyone to see that.  She could just hear Nick.  And Alex's snicker.  And see Derek's faint, quickly hidden grin.  She got out of the chair and picked up the cards, sitting on the soft Oriental rug to put them all back in order.

She realized what she was doing and laughed.  Talk about a control freak.  She shuffled the cards again.  What was that card game she used to play?  Solitaire.  Yeah.  Or Patience, as her grandmother had called it.  Neatly, she began to deal out the cards for the familiar game of Solitaire; seven neat piles of one to seven cards.  She dealt them all face down, then neatly turned up the top card of each pile.  The cards flowed together for her, blacks on reds on blacks, neatly and orderly in their descending columns while the aces garnered their piles, also neatly, in ascending order through the jacks to the queens to the kings.

My, but she was warm.  She fanned herself absently as she realized the last few cards in the last pile were not going to turn over.  OK.  Again.

She watched her hands turning over cards, the descending columns, neatly flowing out; King, Queen, Jack -- Why Jack?  Why not Prince?  Or Knight?  Or -- She licked her lips slowly as she regarded the solemn visages of the face cards.  So prim faced, the Queen, sandwiched between -- her consort -- and -- Jack.  Oh, my.  Unbidden images and feelings came sneaking slying in to her consciousness.

She shook her hair back.  It really was warm in here.  She laid out the cards again.  Kings and Queens, the cards sliding slickly against each other, the Jacks, so sly in their sideways looks.

"Rachel?"

She started, her hands, almost automatic in their precise aligning of the cards, halted in mid movement.  She felt, rather than heard the soft footsteps that brought Derek up behind her.

Curious to find Rachel seated on the floor in the library, her legs pulled up under her indian style while her robe slipped from her shoulders and her gown seemed to have crept up her legs to puddle around her hips, obviously concentrating on something.  He stopped just behind her and looked down as she looked up at him.  He noted the graceful line of her throat, the glint of moist skin below, the unmistakably aroused state of the pale mounds of her breasts barely concealed beneath the lace of her gown.

"I -- was playing Solitaire," she said huskily, noting the gold tint to his dark eyes.  She'd never really noticed what an enticing curve his lower lip had.  She caught her own lower lip between her teeth as she considered this.

He moved around to the side to take a look at the game.  He squatted down beside her, intensely aware of the brown eyes that seemed incapable of leaving his face.  He reached out and touched the cards in her hand.  The room seemed to have gotten very warm suddenly.  Their eyes met, seconds later, their mouths were devouring each other; their hands working overtime to divest each other of the constrictions of nightclothes.

Rachel was overjoyed to find that Derek was as ready for play as she was.  With an amazing lack of foreplay or regard for where they were, she guided him to her hot, wet center and gasped as he slid fully inside her with one swift thrust.  Cards scattered across the rug as they descended into a tangle of grasping, urging tongues and limbs, responding to each other with an urgency generally foreign to both of them.  A duo of strangled cries heralded their climaxes.  They lay panting, sweat slicked in each others arms, the lazy after glow in stark contrast to the fury of only moments previous.

Rachel opened her eyes to gaze into Derek's.  She smiled and laid a light kiss on him.  She stretch, luxuriating in the feel of the aftermath.  "Now, I think I can get to sleep," she murmured.

"Then we'd best get you to bed."  Derek slid back into his pajama bottoms, scooped the tired psychologist into his wiry muscled arms, along with her crumpled nightgown, and carried her up to her room where he put her to bed.  She murmured softly as he pulled the covered up over her.  With a gentle smile, he went back to his own room and was asleep almost before his head met his pillow.

Alex Moreau, awakened by odd noises in the house, went downstairs to investigate.  Did that really sound like what she thought it did?  She peeked into the library.  Yep.  It did.  She kept to the shadows while Derek took Rachel upstairs, then slipped into the library to look around.  It might, after all, have just been a Legacy House induced hallucination.

A deck of cards lay scattered on the rug.  Alex collected them, counted to make certain they were all there, and wandered out deftly shuffling the cards in her hands.  It was wonderful how easily they slid against each other.  Was it getting warm in here?

End

Author's note:  OK, so I took liberties with Rachel and Derek.  Wonder where Nick is  <eg>  since Alex seems to have a thang about chewing on his neck.  ::chuckle::

And yes, this all started with a game of solitaire on the computer.

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