“What would you like, baby?” Jade asked in a low, intimate tone.
Simone was used to this, used to being invisible, talked over, and around, and even through as she fitted garments to bodies. But the look Jade gave Ryan made something simmer low in Simone’s belly. It was envy, she realized, rasping against arousal like satin against chiffon. Frequently women like Jade faked their enthusiasm for men’s attentions. Women always saw through that act, while men rarely seemed to, but Jade wasn’t faking it. Whatever had happened in that dressing room before Simone knocked on the door wasn’t something Jade tolerated in order to get a shopping trip or a bauble from Van Cleef and Arpels.
She liked the sex. She wanted more of it. She was deploying all of her rather considerable feminine wiles to get it.
Simone turned her head to look directly at Ryan. Rather than sitting in one of the chairs close to Jade, he was braced against one of the worktables, arms folded across his chest and legs crossed at the ankle. Outside the action. Watching it. Stripped of the clothes and shoes that emphasized the power he exuded, he might be rather unremarkable. Dishwater blond hair, a square face dominated by interesting eyes that started out green and turned to gray around the pupil, the body of a man who worked at a desk with a Bluetooth headset in one ear studying spreadsheets and predictions and charts, analyzing trends, searching for the best way to make billions. And yet, looking at them, she had no doubt that this man drew people to him, not just women but other men, too, because there was just something about him.
Charisma. The fashion and design worlds were full of charismatic people, individuals with brilliant ideas and the drive to see them become a reality on the runway, in fashion magazines, and worn by stars and socialites and political figures. Simone should be inured to it. But now, with Ryan in her workroom, studying the body of his current lover with a detachment Simone found both perplexing and hot as hell, she realized that she was far less inured to it than she thought.
“What I would like,” he said, still detached, still hot, “is to see how the whole ensemble looks with the corset.”
The temperature in the room shot up a couple degrees, or at least in the portion of the room the three of them currently occupied. Simone straightened, rolling from her knees to the balls of her feet, then rising. The delicate gauze of the robe brushed against the sensitive skin of her forearm, raising goose bumps, but it was the way Ryan watched the two of them together that sent a delicate shiver across the nape of her neck.
“Of course, sir,” she said quietly.
“It’s Ryan.”
She gave him a flustered nod and hurried from the workroom back to the showroom, where she selected the matching corset in two sizes, then trotted back into the workroom. Jade and Ryan hadn’t moved. When Simone reached her side, Jade fixed her gaze on Ryan’s reflection in the mirror, then reached for the kimono-style tie at her waist, languidly pulled the trailing end free so that the robe gaped open, then shrugged once. The fabric whispered from her shoulders to pool at her feet, leaving her in nothing but the satin panties and her heels.
They made for an erotic triptych in the mirror: Simone in her black pencil skirt and black heels, a silk Pucci tank top in wild shades of red and blue and orange, with her red hair coiled to lay over one shoulder; Jade, statuesque and nearly naked, her nipples peaking in the cool air; Ryan behind them, out of reach but in total control of the situation. The slow nod he gave Simone to indicate she should secure the corset around Jade’s torso once again reminded Simone of the absolute power possessed by men with money.
Simone had fitted clothes to hundreds and hundreds of women at fashion shows and private fittings, the design process by which a new collection was created. She was comfortable with bodies in all shapes, sizes, and colors. It simply wasn’t erotic. It was work.
And yet, with Ryan watching, it was unbelievably erotic.