“It was nothing special. Just dinner at a restaurant with a velvet rope to manage the crowd. Paparazzi everywhere. A couple of movie stars inside. Very expensive. Very public, which suited both of us. It was late, almost midnight, when we got back to my place. She poured me a whiskey . . .”
He stopped, remembering the moment. He’d become the kind of man a woman managed, getting him a drink, then giving him a new toy. It was so artificial, so practiced, the way she moved, what she did and said. Roles. They were playing roles.
“Jameson?” she asked.
“Macallan’s,” he said, to tempt her because she obviously knew her whiskey. “Then she slipped down the hallway to the bedroom. I stood in my living room—”
“Describe the view.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were closed, possibly because he was massaging tiny knots out of the muscles connecting tendons and ligaments to bones in her hands, possibly to let her imagination run wild with his words. He had no idea what she was imagining: him with Jade, him with her, her with some other man.
Then again she had no idea whether the story he was about to tell her was true or not. Go on, Simone. Close your eyes. I’ll draw you in. Make you mine.
“I live in one of the buildings near Columbus Circle,” he said. “My living room looks out over Midtown all the way down to the tip of Manhattan. At night you can see the bridges, the lights on ferries and sailboats and cargo ships moving out of the open water into the rivers.” When the knot at her elbow released, she made a little rasping noise and let her head droop forward. He rubbed thumbs and fingers into her arm, all the way down to her wrist.
“Keep going.”
The massage or the story? He picked up her other hand, the tips of her fingers damp from the condensation on the beer bottle, and closed his own eyes, the better to tell the story exactly as it happened. “When she comes out of the bedroom, she’s wearing heels, panties, and nothing else. She’s carrying the corset and the robe. She’d worn her hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail while we were out, but now it’s tousled around her face and her upper arms. It doesn’t quite hide her breasts. The ends curl around the curves, and around her nipples. She lets me look. She told me at dinner that her ambition was to do the Victoria’s Secret television special and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She likes being watched.
“Without a word, she holds out the corset. I take it and move behind her, leaving her exposed in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Midtown Manhattan. Goose bumps rush up her arms and her nipples tighten. She’s definitely getting off on being watched. I situate the corset around her midsection. It fits perfectly to the curve of her hips as I fasten each hook and eye. When I finish, I pause for a moment, then reach over her shoulders to gather her hair in my hands and drape it so it hangs in waves down her back. The movement exposes her entirely to the windows.
“I lean forward and put my mouth by her ear. ‘Anyone could see you,’ I whisper. Her nipples tighten even more, perhaps from the words, more likely from the image they conjured. I stand behind her, fully dressed in suit, tie, and wingtips, and set my hands on the bare skin between the end of the corset and the elastic of the panties, stroking the dimples on either side of her spine with my thumbs, and her taut abdomen with the tips of my fingers. At the touch, she shimmies a little. Reflected in the glass, her breasts swayed just enough to draw my eye.
‘Movements will only make it more likely you’re seen,’ I murmur.”
Simone had gone remarkably quiet for a woman who hummed with presence. He lifted his gaze to Simone’s face, curious to know how this affected her. Was she enjoying it? Turned on? Turned off? Appalled? The muscles under her delicately freckled skin were slack, and her eyelashes drooped. Bedroom eyes. If he’d had to guess her reactions, he would have started with appalled, then amused, then disgusted. Instead she met his gaze with far more desire than he’d felt in the moment, when he’d been posing Jade like a breathing doll. His blood heated, pooling low in his belly. She pulled her left hand free, and for a moment he thought that was her way of ending the story. Then she put her right hand back in his.
“Keep going.”
She could burn him down to the ground, nothing left but ashes and charred bones. He knew where she held her tension now, his hands easily finding the tight knots at her elbow, coaxing them to release down to her wrist. The underside of her forearm rested on his knee. The intimacy made his brain stutter, hitch, then find traction again as he continued the story.