Page 7
He sets his glass down without hurry. Everything he does is without hurry, and it’s doing more for me than the wine. “Mine. Finish your cabernet.”
I don’t finish it. I leave it on the bar with my lanyard.
The elevator is mirrored and empty. He stands behind me, one hand snaking around to my stomach, his mouth at my ear, and tells me what he thought when I walked onto that stage.
The words are polite. The voice is not.
His room is a suite. The door hasn’t finished closing when he catches my jaw in one hand and tilts my face up and studies me under the entry light. “Last exit, doc. After this, you’re mine until morning. Say it plainly.”
“I’m yours until morning.”
“Good girl.”
Oh no. My knees answer that before my brain does, and he sees it happen, and the smile that follows should require a permit.
He undresses me at his own pace, and he narrates. The green jacket goes first, folded over a chair with more care than I’ve ever shown it. “I’ve been thinking about the zipper of your skirt since noon. The sound it’d make as I unzipped it.”
“You have?”
He nods once, then closes in on me again. The blouse follows, one button at a time, his knuckles dragging down my sternum. “That bra is doing God’s work.”
I can’t help the snort that comes out. “It better. Damn thing was expensive.”
“Then I’ll be extra careful when I do this.” He flicks the front closure open with one hand, but holds it closed with his other. “Tell me what you want.”
My voice shakes a little. “For you to let go.”
He presses his forehead to mine. “I want the same of you.” Then, he releases the bra, and the cold air-conditioning draws my nipples tight as he watches. “Arms up.”
Arms up. The bra goes. I stand in a hotel entryway in my skirt and borrowed courage, and this fully dressed man walks a slow circle around me, a buyer inspecting a shipment he already owns, and I have never felt more expensive in my life.
Then, the zipper growls apart under his touch. He finds the tattoo when the skirt drops. A small pink heart, inked on my right hip at twenty-two for reasons that don’t matter now. He presses his thumb to it. “Sentimental?”
“Drunk.”
“Better.” He hooks two fingers in the waistband of my underwear and takes those too, unhurried, crouching as he goes, and looks up the length of me with those dark eyes while I stand there wearing nothing but the pins in my hair. “Take your hair down for me. Slow.”
I take it down slow. Pin by pin, while he watches from below, his thumbs stroking the outsides of my thighs, and by the last pin my breathing has gone ragged, and he hasn’t even kissed me yet.
Then, his lips are on me, open-mouthed against my hip, over the heart. “Such a cute little target.”
“And here I was worried you thought the same about me.” I mean it as a light joke, but I don’t think he hears it that way.
He stands, and now I understand why his name means wolf, because the animal is all over his smile. “Is that what I should call you? Little Target?”
I shake my head. “That’ll make me think of shopping…”
He laughs, then takes his shirt off, and my hands are in the game at last, mapping as they go, because I read bodies for a living and his has footnotes. Muscle a man half his age would envy. Ink over his ribs, old and dense, mostly black. Scars, including one low on his shoulder that was stitched fast by someone with more urgency than skill—field medicine.
I’d ask for the story, but that’s not why I’m here.
He leads me to the massive bed with golden sheets softer than anything I’ve ever laid on. “Lie back. Hands above your head. They stay there until I say otherwise.”
They stay there. That’s the part I couldn’t have predicted, how fast I hand it over, the whole exhausting machinery of deciding. All day, every day, people look at me and wait for the plan. He doesn’t want my plan. What he wants is my wrists crossed on a pillow and my attention undivided, and in exchange, I don’t have to think a single thought, and the relief of it is indecent.
He starts at my collarbone, all lips and tongue and teeth. He’s not polite about it. He holds my hips down when they rise. “We’re on my schedule, Veda. My schedule will have you coming at least twice before I drop my trousers on the floor. Would you prefer a different schedule?”
“No.” The word feathers out of me, because I don’t have the strength to say it firmer. But I still make one bid for the pace. I get a hand as far as his belt before he catches it and returns it to the pillow. “My turn,” I whine.
