He chuckled. “Hell yes, I could use a beer.”
She left him standing in the showroom while she went through the door that led to her apartment and returned with two bottles of beer. He twisted the tops off both of them and handed her back the first. “I get the feeling this isn’t how you planned to spend your Sunday afternoon.”
She gave a shrug that somehow conveyed more emotion than the typical American lifting of the shoulders. A Gallic shrug. The French were so eloquent without saying a word. “Shall we go sit outside?”
He followed her down the stairs to the stoop. The Fashion District was quiet on the weekends, lacking restaurants and nightclubs. A big window at street level displayed a mannequin in the outfit he’d bought for Jade, with “Irresistible” in gold. Simone settled on the stairs with her back braced against the black, wrought iron railing. He eased down until he was facing her. “Why Irresistible?”
“The name, or the shop itself?”
“The name.”
“What do you think?”
“It conveys attractiveness. Desire.”
“For an object,” she agreed. “People think of irresistible cupcakes, or bottles of champagne, or diamonds, or bodies. Breasts and bottoms, hips and thighs. But that’s not the definition I had in mind,” she said.
He watched as she swallowed a mouthful of beer, then set the bottle on the step beside her and dug her thumb into the palm of her hand in slow, even movements. “What did you have in mind?”
“Power or conviction,” she said. “We can feel an irresistible urge to do something, become something. It’s compelling, inexorable. Irresistible. I don’t dress women for men’s pleasure, although that certainly happens. I dress them for their own transformation. That’s what should feel irresistible to them, the possibilities. The future.”
Jesus. He froze. Her head was bent over her hand, her face exposed to the setting sun, the freckles covering her nose and cheeks and forehead turned the color of carnelian. The pose was submissive, internal, opening a view into a world he desperately wanted to explore.
He cleared his throat. “Are your hands sore?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m trying to finish an embroidery piece I started in the spring. It was time to take a break.”
Without saying a word he held out his hand, palm up.
“This is a very bad idea.”
“Do it anyway.”
A hint of temper flared in her blue eyes and she lifted her eyebrows at him. He beckoned with his fingers and then extended his hand a couple inches toward her. “It’s better when someone else massages out the knots. Trust me on this,” he said. He watched her think the better of it and then do it anyway, setting her hand in his so the tips of her fingers rested in the cup of his palm. With his other hand he reached out and massaged his thumbs into the top of her hand. Her fingers were delicate, long and slender, the nails trimmed and buffed.
It was almost surreal to be sitting on Simone’s stoop like he was a kid in Philly again. When the muscles around her eyes and mouth had softened, he continued the massage and said, “Do you want to hear how it went?”
“How what went?”
He waited until she opened her eyes again before he answered. He flicked a glance at the mannequin in the window behind her, currently modeling the same outfit he had bought for Jade. She looked over her shoulder, then back at him. It didn’t take a psychic to read her expression: part amusement, part desire.
“No.”
“Okay,” he said easily.
But he kept up the massage, stroking his thumbs from her palm around to her wrists, then moving in long, slow strokes up her forearm to the tight knots at her elbows. Her shoulders hitched down in stages as the tension eased from her body, and her lashes drooped. He didn’t vary his pace at all, just kept his touch steady, deep, drugging. She’d let him touch her. It was a potent aphrodisiac, the slightly forbidden nature of it, the hint of seduction. She was no sure thing, his modiste. The setting sun burnished her hair into flame.
“Tell me,” she murmured. Her hand in his deepened the dance with erotic temptation, the fire-tipped eyelashes drooping as if he had his mouth at her throat.
He would give anything to know why she changed her mind, but he didn’t want to give her a reason to return to rationality. The street was quiet, very little traffic in this part of Manhattan after business hours. In terms of what he needed for his cover, this was the worst place to be. Quiet. Isolated. Unlikely to be noticed.
This was exactly where he was supposed to be.