“Edward?” she said.
In his drunken haze, all he could do was close his eyes as he went both limp … and hard in a very critical place. “You sound … as beautiful as I remember.”
He hadn’t heard Sutton Smythe’s voice in person since before his trip down way south, and after he’d returned, he’d been unable to listen to any of her voice mails.
To the point where he’d ended up throwing that particular phone and number away.
“Oh, Edward …”
Dear Lord, there was pain in that voice. As if the woman were looking into his soul and responding to the tangle of anguish he’d carried around with him since he’d been told he was, in fact, going to live.
And indeed, it was so close to what Sutton actually sounded like. Funny, during his captivity, he’d lost consciousness three times over the course of the eight days he’d been held. Each time he had been in the process of fainting, Sutton had been the last thing he’d thought of, envisioned, heard, mourned. It hadn’t been his family. Not his beloved business. Not the house he’d grown up in, nor the wealth, nor all the things he was going to leave undone.
It had been Sutton Smythe.
And that third time? When he’d been unable to see anymore, when he’d been unable to tell what was his sweat and what was his blood, when the torture had taken him to a place where the survival switch had been flipped off and he no longer prayed to get free, but for death …
Sutton Smythe had, once again, been the only thing on his mind.
“Edward—”
“No.” He held up his hand. “Don’t speak anymore.”
She was doing so well already. He didn’t want the woman to get ahead of herself and screw it all up.
“Come here,” he whispered. “I want to touch you.”
Opening his eyes, he drank in her approach. Oh, what a perfect silver dress that was, the hem of the gown down to the floor, her surprisingly tasteful jewels sparkling even when the light was behind her. And she also had the kind of clutch Sutton had always taken with her to formal events, the small, silk-covered square perfectly dyed to the hue of the dress even though, as she herself had always said, “matchy-matchy” was “so fifties.”
“Edward?”
There was both confusion and yearning in his name.
“Please,” he found himself begging. “Just … no talking. I only want to touch you. Please.”
As her body trembled before him, he felt reality shift and he allowed himself to go with the ruse, falling into a fantasy that it actually was Sutton, that she had come to him, that they were, finally, going to be together.
Even though he was ruined.
God, it was enough to make him teary. But that didn’t last long … because she stumbled and her eyes grew impossibly wide.
Which meant she had seen his face.
“Don’t look too hard,” he said. “I know I’m not as I used to be. That’s why the lights are low.”
Edward reached out and showed her his hands. “But these … these are unmarred. And unlike many parts of me, they still work just fine. Let me … touch you. I’ll be careful—but you have to kneel down. I’m not too well on my feet anymore, and I must confess to having imbibed.”
The prostitute was shaking from head to toe as she started to lower herself, and he sat forward, offering her his arm as if she were a lady disembarking from a car—as opposed to a working girl who was prepared to let a cripple have sex with her body in exchange for a thousand dollars.
When he eased back again, a sudden wave of dizziness came over him, testament that more of the alcohol was pumping into his system. Like all drunks, however, he knew that that was a temporary glitch that would self-regulate.
Especially given all that he had to focus on: Even with his fuzzy vision, even with the dimness, even being drunk off his ass … he was in awe.
This one was so beautiful, almost too beautiful to touch.
“Oh, look at you,” he whispered, reaching out to brush her cheek.
Her eyes flared again, or at least he thought they did—maybe he was just imagining things because of the way she drew in a quick breath. It was so hard to know, hard to track what was happening … reality was going all wonky on him now, twisting around on itself until he wasn’t sure how much the prostitute actually looked like Sutton and how much he was projecting onto her just because she had long dark hair, and arching brows, and a mouth that was Grace Kelly perfect.
The woman’s hair was down, just as he’d asked it to be, and he brushed his hand over the waves until he felt the curve of her shoulder. “You smell so good. Just like I remembered.”
And then he was touching more of her, his fingertips traveling across her collarbone, over her diamond necklace, down to the curves of her décolleté. In response, she began to breathe harder, the pump of her lungs bringing her breasts close to his palms.