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been more embarrassed by such a disclosure, but Bomstad was a different breed. His blue eyes were soulful. His hair, combed in a perfect but casual do, gleamed like gold in the fluorescent light. His features were broad but lean, and his fingers on the heavy crystal were blunt, scrubbed clean, and square-nailed.
    “That and other things,” I said, trying to make light of it. Impotence is hell on men, I guess.
“It drains them of their self-worth, often causing them to draw into themselves when they most need the support of others.”
Or so the textbooks said. Regardless of that, however, I thought the board probably wouldn’t understand if I told them I took him to bed in my ever-increasing desire to help a client rid himself of such a debilitating problem.
    “Don’t you never get tired of talking about other people’s troubles?” Bomstad asked and turned his head slightly. The tendons in his wide, suntanned throat pulled tight as he looked at me. His eyes were ultra blue and as sensitive as an angel’s—a gentle soul in a gladiator’s finely sculpted body. The kind of guy who could win the Super Bowl, cook a five course meal, then round off the evening by jotting down his deepest emotions in his tattered journal.
    He had told me about his diary on more than one occasion. Originally, it had been my idea that he record those moments that were most important to him, but he assured me with a boyish spark of enthusiasm that he’d been doing so for years.
    Since that day, I had filled many a spare evening with the thought of him sitting in front of his hearth, maybe on a bear rug, shirtless, of course, after a grueling day on the battlefield. His golden hair would gleam in the firelight as he bent over a leather bound notebook.
    I had asked him if he’d like to share his diary with me sometime, for professional reasons only, of course. And he’d said he’d maybe like that, once we got to know each other better.
    I stifled a girly sigh and brought myself back to the present.
    “You must have problems of your own,” he said and caught my gaze. “Don’t you need to share them sometimes?”
    I knew I should bring the conversation back to business. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I felt something stir deep in my belly. It might have been hunger, but I had a bad feeling it had something to do with my glands, so I cleared my throat, shuffled some papers, and imagined being smeared with tar as the smell of chicken feathers filled my nostrils. “But it’s my job to address
your
problems,” I said, maintaining an admirably steady tone and managing to keep a good four feet of air space between us.
    “But don’t you ever just wanna . . .” He shrugged and lifted his glass. “Let your hair down?”
    I could imagine the feel of those blunt fingers against my scalp, skimming through the heavy waves of my mahogany hair as it slipped from its stylish coif to my shoulders.
    But wait a minute! The purple images screeched to a halt. Maybe I was thinking of a romance novel. My own hair was confined to the back of my head with enough hair spray to stick a cat to the wall. It was straight as a stick, tended to be overly fine and, without the assistance of Madame Clairol, strongly resembled the color of dirt. “Perhaps we should confine our discussion to your problems, Mr. Bomstad.”
    “You must have problems, too.”
    “But I’m not paying you a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to discuss them.”
    He laughed again. The sound was deep and tantalizingly masculine. My stomach did a funny little double loop. “Maybe I’d listen for free.”
    I sighed internally. It took me a minute to recognize the sound, but when I did I gagged it with manic haste and straightened in my chair. “That’s very nice of you,” I said, pretty sure my polite but dismissive expression was firmly back in place. “But I can’t help you if you don’t—”
    “You’ve already helped me.”
    “I have?”
    He glanced down. He