He slid Stéphane a look as the other man slowly seated himself, eyebrows lifted. “Come home with me,” he murmured. “Now. Come home with me and let me show you exactly how I want to admire you.”
The tone, the comment, the scene he was making flew in the face of the intimacy they shared on her stoop. Her temper erupted, as sudden and hot and violent as a solar flare, charged and radiating particles that reacted with the lust in Ryan’s eyes. He was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to escalate this. She breathed as deeply as the corset would allow, swallowed back the rich tangle of emotions; without taking her eyes from Ryan’s, she said, “Please excuse us for a moment, Stéphane.”
“Of course,” he said, his tone amused. Ryan wouldn’t like that, being dismissed as laughable.
Temper made her uncharacteristically clumsy. She thumped her chair away from the table, rocking Ryan back on his heels. With her head held high and her shoulders squared, she stalked between the tables to the hallway leading to the restrooms. A large potted fern gave them some measure of privacy.
She stopped in the center of the hallway and turned to face Ryan, refusing to begin this conversation backed into a wall. She opened her mouth, but he got in the first word.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. His gaze flickered over the details: her forehead, her cheekbones, her lips, her throat, lingering on the notch between her collarbone, the teal silk straining over her breasts, and her tightly compressed waist. He’d seen her in regular clothes, and he clearly knew the shape of her body well enough to tell that she had changed it. He’d spent enough time in Irresistible to know how.
“You look unreal,” he said almost inaudibly, his hand lifting to her waist.
The compliment caught her off guard, but not because she thought it was unusual. Ryan would praise women as a matter of course. No, what arrested her voice and her throat was the raw authenticity of the compliment. He didn’t say she looked pretty, or beautiful, or lovely. He said she looked unreal. She couldn’t breathe, and not just because of the corset. She couldn’t breathe because Ryan was telling her the truth.
“Why are you wearing that for him?”
“I’m not wearing it for him,” she snapped. “I’m wearing it for me. If you paid any attention at all to anything I’ve said about my work, you would know that. Go home and sober up.”
In one smooth movement he stepped into her, forcing her backward against the wall, then flattened his palms on either side of her head. “Don’t leave.”
“We both have to leave,” she snapped. “You probably have yet another woman waiting and I have—”
“Your former lover? Or current?”
“You are in no position to ask such a personal question,” she said flatly. She was having difficulty breathing, and not only from her tightly constricted waist. The elemental emotions flashing from Ryan—anger, possessiveness, sheer masculine desire—took up all the air in the restaurant, the block, and perhaps the city. “You know what you have to do to earn that, right?”
Tension twanged between them like a struck power line. His arm blocked her from leaving, although she could have easily ducked under it. She didn’t. Instead she stood and let his gaze slide over her like a searchlight. The teal brocade sleeves hugged her arms from shoulder to wrist, and the cowl neckline folded away from her throat, exposing her bare shoulders and, from Ryan’s angle, the tops of her breasts, supported by the corset’s cups. His breathing slowed, deepened, as he looked at her and quite deliberately put his hand on her waist.
“Jesus,” he whispered when he encountered the steel stays. “Simone.”
They were alone at the back of the corridor, sconces softly lighting the space in soft pools. They stood in the darkness between two of the pools. His head was bent, looking into her eyes, not down the front of her jacket, as his hand trailed around to the bottommost button and slipped it free.
“Show me,” he said. “Show me what you wore for him.”
“I wore it for me,” she repeated. “Not for him.”
His gaze searched hers for a long moment. “Even better,” he said finally. “Show me what makes you feel confident. Sexy.”
His hand followed hers as she unbuttoned the rest of the placket, sliding up from the bottom. The final button, set high on her collarbone under one of the cowl’s folds, felt like stepping into thin air.
She opened the button. He spread the drooping fabric, revealing a corset that matched the jacket, a brilliant shade of teal silk without any additional ornamentation that drew attention to her body, not to the corset itself.
“How did you get yourself into this?” he murmured.
“Lorrie laced me in before she left for the day.”