Читать книгу Versed in Desire - Anne Calhoun - Страница 5

May…

Choices come with consequences. I knew that, so I said, “I really shouldn’t.”

As I expected, a chorus of supplication rose from the group of young advertising execs clustered around me. The ringleader, a ruddy-faced blond as confident he was my type as I was sure he wasn’t, raised his voice above the good-natured entreaties. “Come on…just one poem.”

A rather uproarious loft party hosted by my boss of two weeks wasn’t my usual venue, but Tony had invited me for my renown as a slam poet, not my skills as his administrative assistant. Gregarious and well-connected, Tony routinely gathered people from the upper strata of Manhattan’s various tribes—fashion, Wall Street, advertising, publishing, the arts—and provided generous quantities of premium alcohol. I stood in the center of a whirling melee of noisy talk and alcohol-fueled laughter, not the ideal conditions to recite verse.

But this group didn’t care much about poetry in the first place. I was merely a pretty girl promising a moment’s entertainment, and the easiest way to extract myself from the situation was to give them what they wanted. Experience has taught me that going into performance mode would distance all but the most ardent admirers, and I had other techniques for them. “All right,” I said. “Just one.”

I inhaled, drawing energy from the party and the street noise drifting through the enormous open windows, let the breath out slowly as my listeners quieted, then I inhaled again and began. The words of the poem that a month earlier won the New York Invitational Slam came automatically as I scanned my audience, drawing them in. Despite the background clamor and two glasses of wine, I knew I wouldn’t stumble. I wrote poems with performance in mind, knitted them into my breath as I strode along city streets, absorbed them into my body with the clatter and sway of the subway.

But when I made eye contact with him, I stuttered, then stopped. Standing alone in the noisy crowd, he seemed impervious to the sound and laughter cresting around him. Espresso-brown hair matched the shadow on his jaw and the intent expression on his unsmiling face. The bold look in his dark-chocolate eyes sent a bolt of visceral attraction streaking through my body, leaving hot spots smoldering in my nipples and pussy and a lone thought in my brain—oh, to get you alone….

It was a great line. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a line in my poem. The look held for two seconds, then three. Too long to be part of the piece’s natural rhythm. Not long enough.

I tore my gaze away to finish, grateful the heat of the room and the wine would explain the blush creeping up my neck. Despite the mistake, I achieved my goal; my audience paid their compliments and drifted away with only a few admiring glances. Alone again, I sipped my drink and tossed a glance in his direction.

Our eyes didn’t meet right away because he was finishing an unhurried visual tour of my body that started at my calves, toned and taut above four-inch leopard-print heels, paused at the curve of hips accentuated by the tie of my wrap dress, dipped with my waist, lingered at my shoulders where my hair blended with my shimmery black dress, finally dallying at my mouth. When our eyes met my raised eyebrows made it obvious I’d caught him staring, but there was nothing apologetic in his gaze.

Oh, fun. I held out my hand. “I’m Corryn,” I said.

He closed the short distance between us to take my hand in a firm grip. “Luke,” he said. Despite a day’s worth of stubble he was too clean-cut to be in entertainment or the arts; a low-key pair of dark-blue jeans and an olive V-neck sweater put him in either the Wall Street or the advertising clans. As we ended the simple handshake, one long finger stroked across my palm.

Understated, but with a hint of scoundrel. Very intriguing.

“You made me falter, Luke,” I said, mustering irritation to cover something far more primitive simmering in the pit of my belly.

Up close, I saw dense lashes and a mouth that walked the seductive line between full and sulky. He was just a couple of inches taller than I am, but I was wearing heels. Barefoot, or better yet, naked and spread for him, I’d tuck under his chin just right.

A small smile quirked the corners of his mouth as he watched me assess him. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said.

Still not even a hint of apology in his demeanor, so I continued with mildly irritated. “What on earth could make up for me looking like a slam virgin in front of the frat boys?”

His dark eyes held just enough amusement to tell me he took the remark no more seriously than I’d meant it. “Tell me what you want and it’s yours.”

A surprisingly blatant offer from a man still water-calm in the midst of a party bordering on outrageous, but I’d take it. I’d lay him back and fuck him until I was satiated and he was the one fumbling for words.

After I knocked some of that confident amusement out of his eyes.

“Restitution is most meaningful when the offending party designs the recompense,” I said archly. “You tell me what I want.”

His gaze never left mine. “You want me to put you up against a wall.”

I’m not often stunned speechless. Luke had accomplished that feat twice in five minutes. I gaped at him, the rapid thud of my heart echoing in my ears.

“In those heels we can probably manage it,” he added, the cadence of his words rumbling under the party’s high-pitched din. He looked around nonchalantly, as if he hadn’t just traversed the gap between introduction and intimate with a single sentence. “Finish your drink first. You’re a poet?”

I welcomed the opportunity to sound like a rational human being, and the game wasn’t over yet. While I loved the spoken word, the sound and shape and taste of syllables in my mouth, arranged on the page, performance poetry was my labor of love, working as Tony’s admin my labor for money to pay the bills. Given Luke’s focus I doubted he cared much about either. “Just a word geek. You?”

“Math geek,” he said.

This time he startled me into a laugh because I’d no idea math geeks looked like the devil incarnate. Self-possessed Luke studied me as if I’d disappear if he blinked. There was no doubt in my mind he wanted me up against that wall as badly as I wanted him to put me there.

I don’t remember what we talked about after that because the connection that had snagged me from ten feet away was like holding a live electric wire up close. He asked reasonable, thoughtful questions, a nice change, but the way Luke listened, his attention totally focused on me, drew me in as surely as if he had me on a hook. Every time he looked at my mouth as he leaned a little closer to hear what I was saying, electric pulses skittered down my backbone and heat flared in my pussy. After twenty minutes of me talking and him listening, sheer, visceral longing thumped in my veins.

I swallowed the last of my wine and set the glass down with a cluster of others on the battered grand piano, then cocked an eyebrow at Luke. He took my hand with a casual possessiveness then lifted it to his sensual mouth for a single, simple kiss, his languid gaze holding mine.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

The more polite equivalent of your wall or mine?

We were working our way through the throng that was surely in violation of the fire code and had made it as far as the foyer when my new boss, Tony, appeared from the door leading to the rooftop garden. Luke dropped my hand to give him a three-step, back-slap handshake. The familiarity of their greeting gave me pause, but my blood turned to ice when Tony said, “Corryn, you’ve found Morrison.”

Names weren’t my strong suit. I’d heard dozens of them in my first two weeks at Cooper Bensonhurst and was just beginning to remember the ones I could attach to faces. The other shoe dropped: Luke the tongue-tangling rake was also Luke Morrison, VP of Special Acquisitions, Tony’s best friend. We hadn’t met because he’d been in Tokyo for the last two weeks, acquiring something special worth just over half a billion dollars.

Math geek, my ass. Corporate raider, more like.

Speechless yet again, I took what I hoped was an inconspicuous step away from Luke and did my best impersonation of innocence for Tony.

“She’s awesome,” Tony continued at full volume, oblivious to the severed power line of longing showering sparks around us. “Don’t even think about stealing her away to replace Bonita.”

Bonita was Luke’s beak-nosed harpy of an admin, and on my best day I couldn’t hope to match her scary efficiency. “That wasn’t what I was stealing her away for,” Luke said. I shot him a quelling look, but thank God Tony was already gone, drawn into a circle of fashion types.

Luke and I stood immobile in the foyer, people parting around us to flow in and out of the open front door. I looked at him and he looked at me. “I thought you said your name was Erin.”

“Cor-ryn,” I enunciated twenty minutes too late. It wasn’t the first time someone had substituted the more familiar Erin for my unusual name.

Hands on hips, Luke looked at his battered Birkenstocks, then stepped towards me, using his body to shift me back, out of traffic. He shoved his hand through his hair, which was a couple of weeks past a haircut and starting to curl. “Let’s pretend that didn’t happen.”

Trapped between him and the wall, oh, how I wanted to agree, to sneak out with Luke and channel the wildfire flowing between us. I had a healthy appreciation for the adrenaline rush of casual sex…but not with my boss’s best friend two weeks after I’d started a job at the most prestigious investment house in New York. I’d scraped by waiting tables and temping. Cooper Bensonhurst paid well enough for me to get my own apartment and I had big plans for a writing schedule set around the regular hours.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. I laid my hand on his chest as I spoke, intending the gesture to appease, but the heavy thud of his pulse traveled through my palm and up my arm. Our heart rates slowly synchronized and for a bewitching, bewildering moment the connection seemed to amplify the pulse and rhythm I felt emanating from the city. My fingers curled into his sweater.

He read my mixed message without effort. He leaned in, brushed his beautiful mouth over my cheek, then murmured, “You sure?” in my ear.

I could smell whiskey on his breath and that hot-earth aroma of lust rising from his open collar. Backed into a wall, Luke tense and expectant mere inches from my body, my senses jerked into overdrive, recording the images his question inspired. Hiking up my dress, gripping my ass with both hands, sliding inside. Heat flickered through my pussy and a little breath of a sigh wafted into the air between his mouth and mine.

Two more people worked their way into the tiny space, urging him against me. He put a hand by my head to keep from crushing me, but I still felt him against me from hip to shoulder, the strength of his erection pressed against my belly. The other hand curled around the back of my thigh, edging up my skirt while his eyes, dark and daring, searched mine.

“I’m sure.”

My firm tone surprised both of us. He stepped back and blew out his breath, a visible crack in his cool facade. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen frustration on the face of a man who’d been denied what he wanted. It was the first time I regretted it as much as he did.

“See you at work,” I said, then slipped past him, pushing through the crowd in search of a drink and a distracting conversation.

Two hours later I watched as Luke left with the accessories editor from a fashion magazine. I went home. Frustrated. Alone.

That should have been the end of things. I’d made a choice, an unusually sensible, safe choice, yes, but I thought the break was clear.

The muse thought otherwise.

August…

Metcalf, Tony, to Morrison, Luke: Well?

Morrison, Luke, to Metcalf, Tony:???

Three months into my job, I’d mastered my most crucial task as Tony’s admin—staying on top of his email. Most of the day Tony ran client or strategy meetings from his spacious corner office on forty-four, the executive floor at Cooper Bensonhurst. My desktop mirrored his, enabling me to see every message he sent or received. Based on those communications, I would update presentations, meetings and travel arrangements before he had to ask.

This privilege unwittingly gave me a unique insight into Luke.

I saw him every day, and on the surface things were excruciatingly civil. Just as he’d suggested, we pretended. I pretended I didn’t dress for him in heels, pencil skirts and tailored blouses unbuttoned to just this side of sexy. He pretended someone else wooed me with cupcakes from the Cupcake Café, leaving them at my desk while I was out for lunch or running an errand for Tony. If Luke’s eyes held mine just a moment too long in the elevator, if he watched me walk away after I stepped into a meeting with a message for Tony, if I looked back and saw Luke watching, well, longing looks weren’t a wall.

Tony remained blissfully oblivious to the languorous seduction going on right under his nose. I’d declined the invitation to his party Saturday night with the excuse of a previous engagement. In truth, I didn’t trust myself to resist another encounter with the dressed-down, sleepy-eyed Luke, and I did need to write. My usual methods of encouraging the muse weren’t working. I’d knitted slippers for every member of my family. I’d walked off three pounds, no mean feat given the cupcakes. I’d done my time with my notebook, but I couldn’t lose myself in the work.

A new message alert popped up.

Metcalf, Tony, to Morrison, Luke: How was she?

I didn’t bother being offended. Men were men, and other women weren’t bound by the same sense of restraint keeping me from Luke’s bed. Whoever she was, she must have been a fifteen on a scale of one to ten if they were discussing her on work email. This was the first hookup debrief in the three months since I hadn’t gone home with Luke.

Morrison, Luke, to Metcalf, Tony: She was bony.

Tony and I let out simultaneous barks of laughter just as Luke rounded the corner from the elevator, his BlackBerry in one hand and a brown paper sack from the deli across the street in the other. He paused by my desk, his gaze flickering from my hair, tucked as always in a heavy bun at my nape, to the swell of my breasts just visible inside my shirt placket. One dark eyebrow lifted in an unspoken question as he pocketed the BlackBerry.

I folded my arms on my desk, leaned forward and smiled up at him. “Like any good retainer, I see all and say nothing.”

Though the words were teasing, my smile faded as I spoke. Faced with Luke’s lean body and the mental image of my dark-eyed devil making love to a lingerie supermodel, angel wings and all, heat and jealousy pumped in equal portions through my veins.

For a lunchtime strategy meeting with Tony, Luke had left his jacket back in his office and rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows. I admired broad shoulders, a promising smile or strong thighs as much as the next woman but the oddest things about Luke sent heat searing through me. His long fingers and broad palms. The twenty-dollar Timex sports watch around his left wrist when his peers wore Cartier or Patek Philippe. His tie, seemingly subdued until you noticed the manga character at the bottom. The spot at the edge of his jaw he’d missed shaving. I substituted readily visible features for pectorals and shoulder blades, the ridges of his abdomen, the girth of his cock. Long accustomed to drinking in the world in order to create, I was searching for inspiration in the mundane.

I couldn’t help myself. “Bony?”

He shrugged, but a hint of color stained his cheekbones. “Skeletal’s probably a better word. Got a water for me?”

I reached under my desk, opened the dorm-sized fridge that cooled beverages for Tony’s meetings and handed Luke a bottle.