Leather Bound
Shanna Germain
The closer Janine gets to Davian, the closer she gets to choosing between the safe life she thought she wanted, and a dazzling but dangerous future of adventure and pleasure.Shanna Germain’s ‘Leather Bound’ is a sexy erotic novel perfect for fans of Sylvia Day’s ‘Crossfire’ series.Janine Archer has everything she wants: a private house in the coolest part of town. A hot man to share her bed when she’s in the mood. And best of all, her dream job at Leather Bound, the bookstore that she co-owns with her best friend.But when a beautiful man named Davian arrives at Leather Bound, looking for a book that doesn’t exist, Janine finds herself oddly compelled to track down the mysterious volume.Perhaps it’s the book itself, with its compelling promise of sexuality. Or maybe it’s Davian himself, with his dark sensuality that pulls on Janine’s lust and heart with unexpected fierceness.As Janine searches for the elusive book, other parts of her perfect life begin to change.She discovers a sexual world she never knew existed, and follows its erotic lure into a secret underworld of submission and pleasure.
Leather Bound
Shanna Germain
(http://www.mischiefbooks.com)
‘Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.’
Laurence Sterne
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ub9b7229f-5e6c-5f90-9655-e52a3c8b4d18)
Epigraph (#u399fab91-98be-5fcf-a828-b90b5435d5ca)
Chapter 1 (#ue66838a2-4b4a-5b79-86d8-ded46e91e396)
Chapter 2 (#u518f56b2-43bf-55e2-8222-685d5d9fdad9)
Chapter 3 (#uf17ab431-8af5-5036-bc01-433796ff329b)
Chapter 4 (#u1d1fbd2b-0da3-542c-940d-e348f244e946)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
More from Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
About Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_a9091978-336a-5e4a-aea6-74c5b3fb0f27)
Gorgeous green eyes. Blond curls. A perfectly trimmed golden goatee that highlighted a square jaw and delicious cheekbones. Thick, full lips just right for kissing.
It was the kind of face a girl could fall in love with.
Every girl but me, that is.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I had the lust part down. Kyle’s face was so perfectly made, so sexy, that even when he was asleep, eyes closed tight to the world, just looking at him sent little flutters of want through me. And that was with most of his long, lean body hidden away beneath the covers. Sometimes I wanted Kyle with a fierceness that made me ache, even when he wasn’t in the room.
Lust? Yes. But love? No.
We’d been having sex for about six months and our relationship was fun, hot and absolutely casual. Just like we wanted it. Which is why I found it weird that he was now asleep in my bed, conked out with my arm trapped beneath his head. In six months’ worth of delicious sex, this was the first time we’d actually slept together.
While it was weird, I wasn’t sure I minded all that much. We’d had a nice night –dinner on the back porch followed by giggling, groping, delicious sex on the living-room floor – despite the fact that Kyle had seemed preoccupied by something. He wasn’t the kind of guy to keep things in, but he also wasn’t the kind of guy to stay over. I wasn’t sure what it all meant, but I figured he’d tell me when he was ready.
In the meantime, I needed a shower, something functional to wear to work and at least two cups of coffee. I’d let him find his way out of the apartment whenever he woke. He worked as a tat artist, which meant a lot of late nights inking customers. Something told me that mornings weren’t his speciality.
I tugged my arm quietly out from under Kyle’s head, trying not to wake him. He shifted, but didn’t open his eyes.
Showering as quick as my own sleep-slowed body would let me, I padded back to the bedroom in my bare feet and opened drawers in the half-dark, trying to be as quiet as I could. Unfortunately, I’m a klutz in general and even more so before I’ve had my coffee. When I slid the closet open, it bumped against something with a bang. Kyle made a cute dreaming noise, and I stopped to look down at him half-buried under the covers. All I could see were strands of his dark-blond hair and one hand thrown over his face. He stirred, opening one green eye blearily. Even half-asleep and in the dim light of the bedroom, he was so very fuckable. It nearly made my mouth water.
‘Mmm, you left me,’ he said.
‘I have to go to work,’ I said. Unable to resist, I reached out to touch the soft curls that fell across his cheek.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Come back. We have warmth. And cock.’
‘Cock, huh?’ I was tempted. I was always tempted around him.
The bedside clock told me I wasn’t late for work. Yet. I needed to open the bookstore, but since we showed up early to prep things, a few minutes wouldn’t make too much of a difference.
‘How much can you do in fifteen minutes?’ I asked.
‘I only need eleven to really blow your mind.’ He was all grin and dancing eyes from his cocoon beneath the covers.
‘Really? Eleven?’ I said. ‘I think I’m disappointed.’
‘Get in here,’ Kyle said, clearly more awake now, lifting the blankets to beckon me in.
I slid in beside him, scooting myself beneath the covers. He really was warm, his lean frame radiating heat. He ran a couple of times a week and his long muscles flexed beneath his skin as I settled against him. Running my hands over his body was a visceral pleasure. It was easy to get lost in the feel of him.
He touched his mouth to mine, sleep-soft lips parting with a quiet laugh. His morning stubble scratched my cheeks. He smelled like sweet chai, cloves and cinnamon, and I inhaled him deeply, lost for a moment in the sensations of touch and scent.
‘I brought you a gift,’ he said, whispering against my mouth, his hips moving forward to grind slowly against me. His bare cock nudged my thighs.
‘Mmm … what is it?’ I couldn’t help but giggle. He was always saying dorky but adorable things in bed.
‘You’ll have to see,’ he said.
‘A gift, huh,’ I teased. ‘Did you wrap it?’
‘Not yet. It’s like a reverse gift. First you get it, then you wrap it.’
‘Funny man,’ I said as I reached between us to stroke him. ‘Oh, you did sleep well. That’s some lovely morning wood.’
I loved the way he curved upward slightly when he was fully hard, how he pulsed lightly against my palm. He had a beautiful cock, a smooth length that bowed into an impossibly soft head.
‘Maybe I should stay over more often,’ he said.
I only hesitated a second before he gave a teasing nip at my ear. ‘Maybe you should,’ I said. ‘Especially if it means I get to do this before coffee…’
I was still speaking when he slipped a hand between my legs, parting them with the spread of his fingers. With a firming touch, he stroked me, wrapping his fingers lightly to tug at my dark curls. I felt myself open under his touch, already growing wet. It never took much around Kyle.
Kyle leaned in to kiss my neck, letting his mouth linger in the hollows, his tongue moving in time to his fingers. I couldn’t help but buck my hips up toward his fingers. His touch was too soft. I wanted, needed more.
‘It’s almost like you want me or something,’ he said, teasing with his tone as much as with his fingers.
‘Kyle…’
Still he teased with soft strokes, refusing to give in to my low whimpers of want.
‘Cruel,’ I said. My voice stuttered with the sweet pleasures of his touch. ‘So cruel.’
His grin was sharply wicked. His touch even more so, as he brought his hand back and then thrust forward, two fingers sliding deep inside me. I brought my hips up into the movement, letting my body welcome him. He curled his fingers against my g-spot, tugging forward until I felt small bursts of pleasure coil up through me.
So close. I loved that sweet moment when you can feel orgasm just over the horizon, can see it from the corner of your eye but can’t quite reach it.
‘More?’ he asked.
‘More, please,’ I said.
He pulled away again, a gesture that left me emptied of pleasure and breath. With another thrust, he entered me again, more fingers, stretching me wider. I bucked against him, taking the lead to angle myself where his touch gave me the most pleasure.
His mouth found my nipple, tongue looping it lightly before he closed his lips to tug against the sensitive skin. I loved having my nipples sucked – sometimes I thought I could get off on that alone – and I arched into the pull of his mouth. He took more of me in, the pressure and release matching the movement of his fingers inside me. I groaned softly, unable to resist making the noises my body wanted me to make.
Kyle pulled away to look at me.
‘How much time?’ he asked.
‘Five minutes,’ I breathed.
‘How do you know?’
‘Internal clock?’
‘I think you’re full of it…’
‘Listen,’ I said, panting. ‘I can use my mouth to argue about it or I can use my mouth to kiss you while you fuck me.’
He snapped his fingers in the air as if signalling someone. ‘I need this gift-wrapped.’
Laughing, I reached out and grabbed a condom from the dresser. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which side of the condom was up. Of course, I got it wrong the first time, trying to roll it down the wrong way over his head. I flipped it, got it wrong again, and then flipped it one last time. This time it worked perfectly.
‘They should paint glow-in-the-dark arrows on these things,’ I groused, even as I slid the rubber down over his erection. Condoms were a necessary evil, but there was something I liked about rolling them down, stroking the length of him in the process. There was something he liked about it too; I could tell by the way he arched his hips, pressing his cock upward against my touch.
‘It’s like a USB plug,’ I said, when I had it on.
‘What?’ He put his hand over mine, urging me to stroke him.
‘Um. Hot man with beautiful cock, about to fuck me,’ I said. ‘Will explain technology later.’
‘Geek,’ he said.
‘A geek you’d like to fuck,’ I said.
‘Isn’t that a song?’ he said.
‘Don’t know, don’t care. Why are we talking about this when I could be riding you?’
I rose over him, letting my legs rest on either side of his hips. I loved being on top, loved that moment when I first started to lower myself down over his cock, that moment of connection, when I knew what was to come. He sighed beneath me, eyes meeting mine, his hands settling on my hips. He didn’t pull me towards him, just let me ride myself slowly down on his cock, feeling it fill me, displacing the emptiness inside me with the lovely fullness of pleasure.
For all our playful banter beforehand, our actual sex was quiet. The only sounds we made were a lot of signs and groans, underwritten by the soft slap of our bodies coming together.
I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his, our hips rising and falling in unison, the strokes between us starting slow, a grind that left both of us groaning each time we came apart.
From this position, I could feel the way his cock curved against the hollows of me. Every time I rose off him, his head slid against that sensitive bulb of my g-spot, making me gasp.
His fingers curved tighter around my hips, lifting me higher with each stroke, setting me down harder on him with each return.
‘Touch yourself,’ he said. ‘Please. I want to watch.’
‘I’ll fall.’
‘I’ve got you,’ he said. He shifted his hands slightly, moving them down to cup my curves more fully, holding me up.
Leaning back slightly, I pressed two fingers to the sensitive tip of my clit. He watched me as I touched myself, green eyes lidded with desire. He lifted me in time to the circles of my fingers, matching stroke to stroke.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love watching you.’
His fingers tightened, nails digging into my skin, his breath as fast and ragged as mine. I couldn’t stop looking at him looking at me. Getting myself off was hot. Getting myself off while getting fucked and watched by a beautiful man was so far off the scale of hot I had no words for it.
I tried to wait, to keep breathing through the pleasure that rose up through me, to stretch out that delightful moment before I came, but at the sound of Kyle’s broken groan of my name, I couldn’t hold off any more. He arched up under me, nails biting my skin, eyes closing. The pulse and clench of him brought my own orgasm, a quiet rippling sweetness that spread outward on threads of pleasure, until I could feel them all the way to the tips of my fingers.
We stayed like that for a moment, me still on top of him, our breaths catching and releasing, kissing softly. He felt different after sex, his lips softer and fuller, his touch gentler, and I relished the changes in him for a moment, knowing they’d been brought about by a pleasure similar to my own.
‘You’re awesome,’ he said with a sigh.
‘You’re awesome too,’ I said. ‘But I have to run. Have a bookstore to run and all that.’
‘We can’t do this again? I’ll be quick.’
‘I wish,’ I said, with a true sense of wistfulness. Maybe it was the fact that I was quickly approaching thirty or maybe it was just that my life had slowed down to a steady routine lately so I had more time to think about sex, but it seemed like my lust clock was always in overtime these days. My uterus didn’t want kids, but my clit wanted sex. Pretty much all the time. Even with Kyle around a couple of times of week, I’d made pretty good friends with a whole community of vibrators in the last year. Turning down sex these days was akin to turning down coffee – something I only did with a great deal of reluctance.
I kissed Kyle’s nose, with a sigh of regret.
‘Sadly, if I stay I really will be late, which Lily will certainly hold over my head all day long if she can. Maybe longer.’
‘You’re afraid of Lily? Just threaten to mess up her hair.’
That made me laugh, as Kyle often did. My best friend did have perfectly coiffed hair. The kind that’s so perfect you have to hate her, just a little, for having it.
‘No go,’ I said, as I pulled myself from the bed.
Getting dressed was me rushing and tumbling while Kyle watched me from his sprawl under the covers. Too late to do more than pull on whatever was closest, I grabbed a simple black dress from the closet and threw my dark hair into a messy ponytail. My store key on its red ribbon around my neck for pseudo-jewellery, my little librarian glasses, and I was calling it good.
When I sat on the bed to pull on a pair of knee-high boots, I caught Kyle’s glance. He looked oddly serious for post-sex reverie, his usual grin replaced with something far more contemplative.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
He reached out and touched my arm. ‘I just got fucked by a beautiful woman. How can I not be good?’
‘Good.’ I grinned at him before I kissed him, letting my lips linger against his for a long moment. ‘You know how to get out, right?’
He nodded, reaching out to run his hand along my arm as I turned away.
I was at the bedroom door, mind already turning to work and the bookstore, before he spoke again.
From the depths of my bed, he said in that sexy, post-orgasm voice that never failed to turn me on, ‘Janine. Marry me.’
The heel of my boot caught on the area rug, sending me sprawling against the doorjamb.
‘Funny man.’ Laughing, I turned to shake my head at him, at his impossible joke.
And in that moment, standing there in the doorway, I saw that he was serious. That he was, really and truly, asking me to marry him.
Shit.
* * *
Shit. Shit. Shit.
That was my refrain the entire fifteen-minute walk from my house to Leather Bound. What the hell was Kyle talking about, marry him? We had a perfect, lovely, sexy thing. Get together a couple of times a week, have dinner, get hot and heavy. Good fun sex on the kitchen floor. Or the couch. Or behind the couch. Then he went home and I curled up with a cup of coffee and a couple of books.
Lust. Not love.
Marriage. Was that why he’d been so quiet all night? Who the hell asked a girl to marry him from bed anyway? From her bed, no less. And, more importantly, why?
I was still turning a million questions over in my brain when I reached the bookstore. The door was locked – we didn’t open for fifteen minutes or so – but the back lights were on, letting me know that Lily was already inside. Webster, the store cat, was snoozing in the big front window display, his grey striped tail tick-tocking, probably in time to some mouse-hunting dream.
I fished my skeleton key from where it hung on the long ribbon around my neck. Lily and I’d had them custom made when we opened the store, and I loved the heft of mine, the curled metal J of the bow.
Even when I was in a rush, even on a morning where I felt my world had just been turned upside down and carelessly shaken, unlocking the front door to Leather Bound felt like entering a far-away universe. Or someone else’s story, right at that point where it all comes together and you know the ending is going to be fine. Everything dropped away in the seconds it took to slip the long metal key into the ancient lock and turn it.
As I stepped inside and shut the door behind me, I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of paper and leather with a pleasure that I reserved just for this place. Yes, the bookstore was work, and sometimes it was hard and thankless work at that, but it was also a sanctuary. A little corner of bookworm heaven, made just for me.
‘You, Miss Janine, are late,’ Lily said.
I opened my eyes. From where I stood, Lily had her back to me so I couldn’t see her customary smirk, but I could see the back of her legs, the black tattoo of the word read curled up the back of one calf, the red curlicues of the word lips scrawled up the other. She had lots of tattoos – most of them words – but I bet none of them got as many questions as that missing my. I’d seen it, of course. Kyle had done it for her. But I’d promised never to tell anyone just where that particular piece of lettering was situated.
‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ I said. I meant it. My co-owner worked her ass off at Leather Bound, maybe even more than I did, and we were supposed to share everything half and half.
Lil stretched to tuck a book into the upper shelf, tsking her tongue teasingly. As her black pumps lifted off the ladder, I caught a glimpse of one tan sole covered with hand-written book titles. Being book geeks was one of the few things Lily and I had in common, but it was a big enough thing that it had kept our friendship thriving for nearly ten years. Not to mention convince us to go into business together. It was a decision I’d never regretted.
While she finished shelving the books in her hand, I tugged at my buttons with cold fingers. My coat and scarf were collaborating to kill me, getting caught in my hair and glasses while I tried to get them off. ‘I got stuck –’ I started.
‘Not stuck. Fucked. You got fucked, Janine.’ Lily’s laughter floated down at me. ‘Don’t lie. I don’t even have to turn around and look at you to know.’
My cheeks burned hot all the way to my ears, the way they always did when I got busted trying to fib. I’ve always been horrible at even little white lies. I don’t even know why I try. Especially not around Lily. She’s like a genetically enhanced bloodhound when it comes to lies and falsities.
Still laughing, Lily made her way backwards down the ladder. Her cherry-red hair bounced against her shoulders in perfect ringlets. The one problem with Lily was that she was always picture perfect. Make-up. Outfit. Hair.
I touched my scarf- and sex-mussed ponytail, not even bothering to try and smooth it into something presentable. I’d had enough experience to know that, in some cases, attempting to fix things only made them worse, and gave you gigantic tangles in the process.
‘How do you always know when I have sex?’ I asked. ‘I never know when you have sex.’ Of course, Lily seemed to have a lot more sex than I did, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell. Or maybe I was just oblivious.
‘I can smell it on you,’ she said.
I sniffed myself. I smelled like cold wind and conditioner. Maybe a little like Kyle – he always smelled like chai and sometimes like those cinnamon candy hearts – but that didn’t mean sex. And what did marriage proposal smell like? Would she be able to tell that too?
‘You can not,’ I said. I hoped.
Lily was still snickering when she hugged me, completely ignoring the fact that her gesture made it even more impossible to get my coat off or to keep my scarf from strangling me. ‘You’re right. It’s just that you’re never late for any other reason. Also,’ she pointed out, ‘you didn’t bring coffee. And you always bring coffee.’
‘Jerk,’ I said, laughing.
‘You love me.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, as I managed to untangle myself finally from coat and scarf and stuff them under the front counter.
Then I took a minute to get my bearings. From the front counter, you could look out of the picture windows at the world going by. But the worlds in here were what interested me most. Ancient books all shelved and labelled in their perfect little rows, just waiting for someone to adopt them.
Leather Bound was a lot of things to me, but mostly it was my second home. Sometimes it felt more like my first home. There were few things I loved more than being surrounded by books, especially old books. The scent of leather and paper and glue, the edges roughened by unknown fingers riffling the pages, the stories told black on white, permanent and yet ever changing. Different every time you read the words.
There were a lot of people who wouldn’t understand that, who had moved on to video games, ebooks, videos, and argued that they were the same thing. Or, at the very least, that you could get the same enjoyment from them.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like new technologies. I did. I read ebooks almost as often as I read paper books. It was that it felt like the difference between masturbating and having sex. Masturbation was fun, but it was certainly not the same as having another warm, aroused body pressed against you.
Just the thought made me think of Kyle, and I shivered a little.
‘Aha,’ Lily said, pointing one ring-laden finger my way. Her bright-blue, perfectly kohled eyes flashed at me. ‘You were having sex.’
‘I said I was sorry.’
‘You didn’t,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s fine. I’m only a little jealous.’ Lily handed me the change bag from the bank. I started counting bills into the register while she leaned on her elbows on the counter. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I mean … who wouldn’t want to be here opening the store we own together while you’re off getting pinned to the bed? Me, I’ve run through every vibrator in my toy box at least twice in the last week, and I’m still bored out of my mind.’
‘What happened to that –?’ I gestured with my stack of bills. Apparently I couldn’t think of names and count fives at the same time. ‘The girl with the motorcycle. She was –’
‘No,’ she said, tugging one shiny red curl between her fingers. It sproinged back up perfectly when she let go. ‘Just no. Don’t even go there.’
Lily had the worst taste in women. Not physically. They were always hot as hell. But emotionally they were always just shy of bat-shit crazy. Some of them weren’t even shy of it. I’d hoped the new girl would be different. She’d had a motorcycle, sure, which hadn’t boded well for Lily in the past, but she’d also seemed nice enough. And she’d clearly been into Lily. She’d even come into the store and bought a book, some ancient tome on early motorcycles.
‘Women suck, but I’m fine,’ Lily said.
Despite her brave words, she was hurting. Lily believed in true love and happy ever after more than anyone I’d ever known. It sucked that she had such a hard time finding it. I wanted to offer her something. Condolences. Dating advice. The number of a totally hot girl who would be just perfect for her. But considering how screwed up my own relationship was at the moment – even the fact that I was suddenly thinking about Kyle in terms of something as serious as a relationship was a sign of things being way, way off-kilter – I wasn’t in any position to offer her anything beside a heartfelt ‘I’m sorry’.
She waved a hand at me, her nails perfectly polished in a blue-black hue that somehow matched her shirt exactly. Some days I dreamed I would wake up and have the kind of put-togetherness that Lily did. The horrible thing was I’d seen her get ready for things. What took her five minutes would have taken me five hours and turned me into a wailing mess with nail polish all over my bathroom and mascara smeared across both cheeks. She just had those skills somehow. I swear women like Lily are born knowing how to get their hair to behave perfectly just by looking at it sternly in the mirror.
An old boyfriend once asked me if I kept my face natural because I wanted to show off how I looked without make-up or because I was lazy. I didn’t have the courage to admit that I kept my face ‘natural’ because I didn’t know how to do anything else with it.
Lily raised her hand again and flipped off what I imagined to be a whole wall of former exes. The blonde biker chick. The beautiful volleyball player who’d had a penchant for threesomes. The teacher who’d shown up at Leather Bound in her glasses and her button-up cardigans, but who Lily said fucked like a wildcat in heat. And those were just the ones I could remember recently.
‘Fuck love,’ Lily said.
‘Fuck love,’ I said. Right now, I couldn’t agree more. Love, or maybe the lack of love, seemed to screw everything up.
‘Maybe you just need a quickie,’ I said. ‘A loving fuck to say fuck love?’
This time she flipped me off, her throaty laugh filling the front half of the store with sound. ‘Seriously? Last time I did that, I almost ended up in Vegas saying “I do” to a vegan wiccan in front of a guy who didn’t look in the least like Elvis. Worst. Quickie. Ever.’
I laughed with her, even though I felt my own throat close up a little as she went on.
‘I mean, can you seriously ever see me getting married? Little white dresses for both of us? House with a picket fence? Adopting kids or fighting over who gets to be the biological mom? Jesus.’
Can you see me getting married? I thought. Because I certainly can’t. And, oh, Lily, my life is a little fucked up right now.
I’d never wanted to get married. I could easily give my entire life to a bookstore that was barely making ends meet, but couldn’t seem to handle a relationship that required anything more than delicious sex and maybe dinner a couple of times a week.
I used to think I just hadn’t met the right person, but now I wondered if something was wrong with me. Maybe I should think about getting married. Everything in my life was good, even if it was sometimes a little staid. Leather Bound was almost making enough money to keep us afloat. Lily and I worked well together. Kyle’s work as a tattoo artist was getting recognition. Our sex was great.
‘Actually,’ Lily said quietly after a moment. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.’
For a second I thought I’d been speaking out loud. My hands shook as they slipped the bills into their proper places in the register.
‘OK, stop talking,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll have to start the count over again.’
It wasn’t entirely true, but I needed her to be quiet because my heart was thumping too hard in the hollow of my chest and, every time Lily said one more thing, I wanted to cry. Uncertainty and confusion do that to me sometimes. It’s the little things that get me. When things are big and bad, I’m all strong and stoic on the outside. But when they’re small and confusing and complicated, well, just bring on the tears.
When our friend Conrad died a couple months back, I didn’t cry when he announced that he was sick, I didn’t cry at his hospice bed and I didn’t cry at the funeral. But when he shipped us a box of all the books he’d bought from Leather Bound over the years with a note thanking us for all the beautiful stories we’d given him, I fell down on my knees and wept until I’d ruined the letter with my tears.
Unwilling to think about that, I decided I’d tell Lily about my morning. Maybe she’d have more insight into the situation than I did.
‘Hey, Lil,’ I started. ‘Kyle asked me to –’
At just that moment, the front door opened, and Lily and I both looked up in surprise.
My first thought was a very articulate ‘I thought I locked that.’
My second thought was simply, ‘Yum.’
* * *
Despite the fact that Leather Bound is a brick-and-mortar store, we don’t get a lot of early-morning walk-ins. Probably because we only stock rare and old books. Obscure first editions and things signed by dead people are our speciality. So, things that people don’t typically browse for. They call ahead, see if we have what they want and, if we do, they come by and pick it up. If we don’t have what they want, I do my best to get it for them. It’s something I’m known for, finding the obscure.
When we do get walk-ins, they’re one of two kinds. The first is older men – book dealers, collectors, professors, the generation that still likes to fondle the books and eschew all technology, including the phone if they can. Lily calls them our Grounders, because she’s afraid to get up on a ladder in her short skirts, in case she gives one of them a heart attack.
The other kind are the Velvets. Also Lily’s name. They come in, usually looking either all sheepish or all professorial, and then they make their way, casual-like, towards the back of the store, like they’re invisible lions sneaking up on prey.
We’ve got velvet curtains hung floor to ceiling back there. And behind them? A little room, not much bigger than a closet, the shelves stuffed full of delicious naughtiness. Not new stuff, though. Old stuff. Ancient versions of the Kama Sutra and Victorian-era sketchbooks and Sappho and Anon. You’d be surprised how much less repressed they were in years gone by.
So, Grounders and Velvets. Those are the kinds of walk-ins we get, on the rare occasions when we do get walk-ins.
What we most certainly never get are walk-ins who show up before we’re open, sporting chocolate-caramel eyes and a lazy, dimpled smile that gave me a nearly irresistible urge to lick the corners of his mouth.
The guy in our doorway was beautiful, in that rugged, strong-jawed, day-old-stubble kind of way. Dark shiny hair that looked like it would tousle into perfect waves with a pair of hands in it. White T-shirt and grey button-down that brought out hints of gold flecks in his light-brown eyes.
I took hold of the counter while the air did that thing it does where it gets all thin and makes you dizzy for no reason at all.
Apparently Lily wasn’t immune either. Which was odd, considering I’d never seen her go gaga over a male before. Except maybe a male puppy. And even then she was hard-pressed to admit it.
Not to mention, this was the longest I’d heard her be silent in about a year. She was still standing in front of the door, pretty much blocking his entrance.
‘Lily,’ I hissed. ‘Let the man in.’
‘But we’re not open yet.’ Her mock whisper was all mock and no whisper.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Close enough.’ Plus, hello, who cared? A man like that walked in your door, and I was pretty sure you opened for him … opened the door for him … any time of day.
I swallowed and tried to right myself so that I could put my professional face on. Thankfully Lily beat me to it. Sort of. Her social skills, as a general rule, far exceeded mine, a fact that I was ever grateful for.
‘If you’re looking for the sex shop,’ she said, ‘it’s two blocks over and down on Mississippi. I can take you there.’
I tried not to gape at her. So much for that socially skilled thing. Why was she talking about the sex toy store?
She looked back at me for help and if I hadn’t completely understood her distress, I would have burst out laughing. Even back here, I was having a hard time thinking. I couldn’t imagine what it was like being so close to him. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to Lily for being on the front line or jealous that she was in touching distance.
The man’s mouth was hanging open slightly, just like mine probably was. Somehow the expression didn’t make him less sexy. I had no idea how that was possible, but it was. It sent me off in a small daydream, thinking about all the things that mouth could do. Beautiful white teeth that probably nipped at the edges of things just right. Thick, full lips with just a hint of sheen, as though he’d already been thinking about you and it had made him lick his lips in anticipation.
‘The sex shop,’ he said. Somehow he made it not so much a question as a flavour. As though he was literally tasting the idea.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily said. ‘I just thought you might be looking for Lashes & Lace.’
‘I know the place,’ he said. His mouth had closed slightly, and now wore just a hint of a smile. Something hidden and teased in the half-curve.
‘Well, people get us confused all the time,’ Lily said. She was trying to recover, I could tell. But she was failing. Any time she absently fingered the yellow rose tattooed along the curve of her ear, she was either deep in thought or thoroughly embarrassed. Right now, she was scrubbing at it so hard it was like she was trying to wash it off.
‘They do?’ he was asking her. ‘People come here accidentally to buy sex toys at …’ He looked at his watch. It was a beautiful leather and chrome piece, with what looked like a genuine antique face. The leather was old but so well oiled that I bet if you stood close enough you could smell it, animalistic and heady. I imagined myself leaning in to sniff his wrist, the place where the leather and pulse came together, that lovely heated skin.
Then I noticed the leather briefcase in his other hand, the copper clasps polished to a sheen. God, a man who looked this sexy who also appreciated old things? I was going to have to get a grip on myself.
‘… at ten in the morning?’ he finished.
I barely remembered what the two were prattling on about. Focus, Janine. Confusing us with a sex toy store at ten in the morning. Got it.
‘You’d be surprised. It’s an honest mistake.’ I could practically hear the purr in Lily’s voice as she got a hold of herself and started to turn on the classic Lily charm. She surreptitiously wiped her palm on her skirt before she stuck her hand out. ‘I’m Lily Marshen. Welcome to Leather Bound.’
He slipped his hand into hers. A shiver of want wiggled through me as their skin touched. I wondered what his skin felt like. How his long fingers would feel against mine. What he smelled like when his skin heated up.
I shook my head and focused. What was wrong with me? Yes, I was a sexual creature, and happily so. But I wasn’t usually a drooling idiot around anyone, especially not around someone I hadn’t even met. Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t have enough lust and love trouble at the moment. I was not about to pile on even a tiny bit more. I had a feeling that this guy was a whole lot more, in both lust and trouble departments.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And while I’m a fan of a good sex store …’ Did Lily actually blush when he said that? I could have sworn I saw some pink flash over her perfect, pale cheeks ‘… I’m actually in need of a book.’
‘Oh, you’ll want to talk to Janine then,’ Lily said. And bless her if she didn’t sound just a little sad to let go of his hand.
For the first time, the man glanced my way. His eyes were the kind of thing you look at first and then can’t stop looking at, the irises showing swirls of golden honey and caramel all rimmed in black. His lashes were so thick and dark, it almost looked like he was wearing eyeliner. Thank God he wasn’t. Not that I minded guys in make-up, but having two people in the same room as me who knew how to use eyeliner better than me would have killed what little make-up ego I had.
He smiled at me. Watching him smile was like opening a book for the first time. That slow reveal, full of promise, just inviting you to come closer, to learn all the nuanced secrets that awaited within.
I tried to smile back, but my lips got stuck on my teeth somehow and I could just tell that I was grimacing at him instead. Lily cleared her throat. It was time for me to introduce myself, to be professional, to come out from behind the safety of the counter, but I couldn’t quite remember how to make my feet do the thing they were supposed to do.
I remembered Lily’s shoes with the book titles on them and imagined my own soles were covered in verbs.
Step, Walk, Move all too quickly became Kiss, Suck, Fuck.
I shook the mental image from my head, since it clearly wasn’t helping, and forced my feet forward until I was standing before him. This close, he was taller than I’d thought. Even with my heeled boots on, I had to look up a little. From here, his eyes were more complicated, an overlay of honeyed caramel flecked with nearly hidden hints of green and gold.
I could hear Lily breathing somewhere near me, but I was having trouble focusing on anything beside those warm eyes and that dimpled smile.
Think of Molly Bloom, I told myself. Think of Hester. Think of Lolita.
No, wrong ones.
Thinking of literary characters was my usual trick in getting through panicky situations, but every time I thought of one now, it was a woman and she was not exactly doing innocent things in the recesses of my brain.
I had to break eye contact and look over his shoulder, to the street outside where normal people were doing normal things. A woman walked by with a white dog the size of a teacup curled in her arms. A couple stood arm-in-arm just outside the window and kissed briefly, his lips touching hers with a familiarity that made me feel like a voyeur.
Looking away, I forced my gaze to land on his, taking in his unusual eyes, his attentive expression. After a long moment, the air righted itself so that I could breathe and then again so I could talk. Soon enough I could even stick my hand out, worrying only a little whether I’d been sweating.
‘I’m Janine Archer,’ I said, quickly, before he could take my outstretched hand and render me speechless yet again.
He spoke as his hand settled in mine. His skin was as warm as I’d imagined, a soft heat that seemed to sink into my palm. His fingers were firm, confident. He didn’t shake my hand so much as hold it, tight and secure, as though it was an important package that had been given to his care.
He’d said something.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said. I hadn’t heard him at all. What I did hear was Lily giving a quick, sharp laugh behind me and then trying to hide it with a cough.
‘I said …’ He enunciated each word carefully, as though I was eight, but a smile played lightly at the corners of his lips as he spoke. And besides, I guessed I deserved it. I was certainly acting like I was eight. Or at least eighteen. ‘I’m Davian Cavanaugh.’
‘I’m Janine Archer,’ I said. Again.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You told me.’
This time, Lily didn’t even bother to try and hold her laughter in, damn her. Did I mention she’s the world’s loudest laugher? I wanted to turn around and pinch her earlobe or hide her away in the back room. Or something. It was impossible to be angry with her, though, once she started laughing. Shaking my head, I smiled apologetically at our potential customer.
‘Please excuse us,’ I urged. ‘We’re usually far more professional than this. It’s just been … one of those mornings.’
I fully expected Lily to make some kind of crack about me smelling like sex. Then I would have to kill her and stuff her into the back room.
She was blissfully quiet. For once.
Davian lifted his brow into a high arch, his expression clearly stating his disbelief that we were typically more functional than this. I couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t exactly seen us at our best. The old me, or rather the young me, would have written this entire conversation off as a disaster and fled the room with her cheeks burning and tears threatening to fall. But this was the new me, the adult me, the me who had a business to run and bills to pay.
Think Scarlett O’Hara.
That worked. I straightened my back and let go of Davian’s hand.
‘So, what book are you looking for, Mister Cavanaugh?’ I asked. ‘If it’s rare, first-edition, banned or signed, I guarantee I can find it for you.’
He took a moment to look around the store, letting his gaze linger over the shelves before he turned slowly back to me. I was struck again by the caramel swirls of his eyes, the way they seemed to radiate heat.
‘It’s none of those things, actually’ he said. ‘The book I’m looking for doesn’t exist.’
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_ecb69e56-10de-5b85-a6ca-a38793e04c34)
I barely missed a beat.
‘Luckily for you, books that don’t exist are my speciality,’ I said.
If he’d expected me to balk or turn down his offer, he didn’t let his surprise show.
‘I’ve heard that about you,’ he said.
Which caught me all off-guard.
‘What? You have?’
He shook his head, his smile turning slightly guilty. His eyes flashed darker with amusement.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought you were kidding. So I was kidding too.’
‘Actually, I was kidding.’ At least I thought I was. Now I was confused. Had I been kidding? Mostly. Hard-to-find was my speciality. Doesn’t-want-to-sell was also my speciality. Signed by a dead person in archival blue ink was also something I’d found once, at quite a price to the buyer. Was non-existent and completely bizarre my speciality? If this morning was any indication, it just might be.
I took a quick breath in through my nose, trying to get myself back onto a professional business track. I was well aware that Lily was making noises of shuffling papers on the counter behind me, but what she was really doing was recording all of this for later with her impossible memory. I’d hear about every single nuance of this as soon as she and I were alone.
‘In truth, I expected you to turn me down,’ he said.
‘I haven’t said yes yet,’ I countered. ‘But I like challenges.’
I especially liked challenges from men with caramel-coloured eyes and more than a little wickedness in the pages of their smile. More importantly, I liked the kind of challenges that forced me to use my brain, the kind that could distract me from my current challenge, who was probably still sleeping in my bed, dreaming about wedding rings or something.
This guy would either turn out to be a crackpot – chasing down a book that didn’t exist was one of the favoured pastimes of those with too much time, money or craziness, or all three, on their hands – or he’d turn out to be actually looking for something that didn’t exist. Either way, it was something to keep my mind occupied and my field of vision focused somewhere other than my love life.
‘You like challenges,’ he mused. There was something in his gaze that implied so much, and yet managed to still remain above board. I liked that, the sexuality that seemed aimed just at me, while maintaining a sense of decorum. It made me wonder what he’d be like at an elegant dinner party, all dressed up and making small talk while fingering you under the table.
‘Even impossible challenges?’ he asked.
I still had visions of his fingers, and what they might to do to me. The idea lent my voice a low tease that I didn’t mean it to have.
‘Let’s just say I’ve believed impossible things before,’ I said.
‘Even before breakfast?’
Was he ever going to stop throwing me for loops so I could get my brain in order? I felt suddenly and fiercely like Alice going down her rabbit hole.
‘Did you just misquote Lewis Carroll at me?’ I asked.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
Curiouser and curiouser. A lot of our customers covet books like fine art or hot women, but never actually read them. This man was not just looking for a book. He actually read books.
Could he possibly get any sexier? A better question was: could I trust myself to behave like a professional around him? I thought I could, but standing right here, right now, I had to admit I would have bet on anyone but myself to win that argument.
I figured I’d better get him into my office and put my work face on before I delved too deeply into questions I didn’t really want answers to.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Come on back, and we’ll see if I can help you make your unicorn of a book magically appear from thin air.’
From behind me, I heard Lily give another quiet snort of a giggle, but she suppressed it so fast I was hopeful that Davian hadn’t heard. If he had, his face didn’t change expression.
‘I would appreciate that,’ he said.
‘Right this way,’ I said.
* * *
While Davian followed me back towards the office, I kept wanting to turn around to look at him again. I resisted the urge, but barely. I could hear his fingers brushing the occasional book as he went by them, the soft whisper of skin to spines that you only hear in bookstores and libraries.
I wondered, as I often did, if books could feel us, if our very touch was enough to bring them alive. And I wondered, specifically, if they could feel Davian’s hands on them, what the soft stroke of his fingers felt like to their bindings, to the edges of their pages.
‘Here it is,’ I said, turning to face him again, one hand out towards a wide set of built-in bookcases, full of oversized first editions.
Davian lifted that single eyebrow again, clearly confused.
Yeah, I’d felt that way the first time I’d seen my office too. Of course, it hadn’t been my office then, but it was still a huge part of the reason I’d fallen in love with this space, long before we’d rented it and turned it into the store. Before Leather Bound was ours, it had been a bank, complete with a hidden swinging door for getting into the super-secret vault without attracting attention.
Friends had helped us turn the hidden door into a hidden bookshelf door for us before we opened.
I couldn’t help showing it off sometimes. I kind of loved the moment of revelation. It made me feel all Nancy Drew.
While Davian watched, I slipped a book from the shelf to expose a single keyhole. We’d had it made to fit the same skeleton key that opened the front door.
Suddenly I realised that, in my secret joy at showing off the hidden door, I’d put myself in a dilemma. I had to either try and remove the key and ribbon from around my neck – an action that was sure to end up with my hair or my earrings caught in tangles and leaving me looking incredibly stupid in front of this man – or leave the key in its current place and bend down in front of him to open the lock.
After a brief hesitation, realising that he was watching me far closer than I would have liked at the moment, I chose the latter option. If he was going to look at my ass, that was fine, but I didn’t think I could stand to look like a fool in front of him. Again, I meant. Considering I’d already done it once. Or twice. I couldn’t quite remember.
I bent and slipped the key in the hole. The skirt of my dress suddenly felt too short and too flimsy to cover my ass, even though I knew it did. Please let this look good on me, I thought stupidly, selfishly. Not at all professionally.
Lily and I had secret codes for lots of things – ‘I have a stone in my shoe’ meant ‘You have something in your teeth’ and ‘I need a raspberry lemonade’ meant ‘It’s time for us to leave this party/bar/guy’s house.’ But we didn’t have a secret code for ‘the hot guy behind you is staring at your ass in that skirt while you bend over in front of him.’ So I couldn’t tell if he was or not. I also couldn’t tell if I would have minded.
I stood, giving my butt a quick shake to make sure the fabric fell back into the right places, and then slipped the key back into its place between my breasts.
The bookshelf opened outward, exposing the small office hidden behind it.
‘Nice,’ he murmured, and I couldn’t tell if he meant the hidden door, the office or my ass. Was it so wrong that I secretly hoped it was all three?
I held the door for him, noting that he was tall enough that he kind of had to duck to get through it. Thankfully, the ceiling was higher, and he could stand upright as soon he got inside.
I followed him, stepping into a room that, if anyone cared to look, showcased more of my personality than any other place in the world.
A big ancient solid oak desk took up all of one corner of the office. I’d bought it at a garage sale and then paid all my and Lily’s friends in pizza and beer to help me get it in here. It was so big we’d had to take the secret door off its hinges just to fit it. It had one leg shorter than the others, a flaw that our friend Conrad had fixed for me by stuffing an old book under it. I loved it like no other piece of furniture.
The desk’s wide surface had nothing on it except my laptop and a pile of books I’d been using for another client’s research. Normally, I was a clutter bug, but I’d spent a whole month sanding down and then re-varnishing my baby, and there was no way I wasn’t going to look at it (OK, and run my hands over it, if I was going to be honest with myself) every chance I got.
I beckoned to the chair across from the desk, a double theatre seat that I’d scavenged from a dilapidated cinema a couple of years ago. Davian glanced at it before he settled himself into the folding seats. He could have taken up both, but he didn’t. Instead, he sat on one, crossing his long legs to the outside as though someone was already sitting in the seat next to him. His jeans were dark, with just a hint of wear at the creases of his pockets. His grey shirt showed off his shoulders and the width of his chest.
While the seat next to him was tempting – oh, God, was it tempting – I knew myself better than that. There was no way I’d be able to sit that close to him and not touch him, accidentally or otherwise. Instead, I lowered myself to sit on a corner of the desk. I had a notebook in one of the drawers here somewhere, but I couldn’t be bothered to look away from him long enough to get it right now. I’d just have to wing it.
‘How did you hear about us?’ I asked, mostly just to hear his voice. ‘If you don’t mind. Most people don’t just walk in our doors looking for invisible books.’
‘It’s not invisible,’ he said in all seriousness. ‘It’s non-existent.’
He opened his briefcase, the two copper toggles slipping with ease through the rich, dark leather. As he scanned the contents, I found myself scanning him, my gaze travelling the length of him, from the single dark curl that fell across his forehead to the open neck of his button-up shirt, to his broad shoulders and slim hips. I wanted permission to reach across the room and slip that very top button through its hole, just one, to find out what lay hidden underneath.
I liked the way he took up a space. The fold of his body had a presence that felt solid and real, without needing to make more of itself. Even his fingers, shifting the papers as he looked through them, contained a quiet strength that I found appealing.
Davian pulled out a small rectangle of vanilla-hued paper and held it out between two fingers. Even before I took it, I knew what it was.
What I didn’t know was how he had got hold of it.
I turned it over, face-up, and stared down at it.
Leather Bound, handwritten in dark red with Lily’s calligraphic swirl. Another brilliant idea of mine that had turned out to be not so brilliant after all. Before we opened, I decided we were going to hand-ink all of our business cards, to give them a personal feel. I made one, realised my handwriting sucked, and then handed the project over to Lily, who’d studied art in college. She’d gotten through about twenty of them before we both decided it was my worst idea ever. Lily hadn’t even offered her usual ‘I told you so’s. She just went out and had some real ones made by an actual printer.
We’d never given these handwritten cards out to customers and definitely not to strangers. Only to a few close friends and supporters, the people who’d helped get Leather Bound off the ground, financially or legally or emotionally.
I’m a bad liar and even worse at keeping my mouth shut. So I couldn’t not ask the thing that was in my brain.
‘Where did you get this?’ I asked. ‘We’ve never met.’
I’m decent with faces, but I’m not as good as Lily. I’m better with voices. I can hear one note from a singer and tell you who it is and how recent it is. But a face like Davian’s? I would have remembered him. Without a doubt.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ve never met.’
‘Then where did you get this?’ It was an invasive question, but I asked it quietly, and he didn’t seem put off by it.
‘A … friend,’ he said. With a just-long-enough pause that I could almost read what he wasn’t saying. Perhaps a former lover. Or someone he desired. Clearly someone he didn’t want to talk about.
Despite my curiosity, I let it go. For now. I was good at digging. It’s what I did. But privacy is privacy. Unless it became important in finding his book, I wouldn’t pry any deeper than I had to.
‘Well, tell your friend I said thank you for recommending us,’ I said.
Something played across his features then, an odd darkness that pulled his caramel eyes slightly closed. His lips tightened a little, making his mouth seem drawn and concerned.
I waited to see if there was more, but he didn’t say anything. I wondered if that meant I was right about it being a former lover. A former love. Probably very recently former, from the look on his face.
Time to change the subject. As much as I wanted to know all I could about this man – including how he liked to be touched and what he tasted like and, oh, dear God, what he might look like beneath those perfectly fitted jeans – he was, first and foremost, a potential client. I didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable. Or sad, which was what seemed to be slipping into his eyes the longer we sat there in silence.
‘Why don’t you start at the beginning, Mister Cavanaugh, and tell me everything you can about the book you’re looking for.’
* * *
‘Only if you call me Davian,’ he said. ‘I still like to pretend I’m too young and wild to be a Mister.’
Which, of course, made me wonder how old he was. He looked my age but since nearing thirty I thought everyone either looked really young, really old or exactly my age. Which could not have been true.
‘I’m afraid to say you don’t look particularly wild, Davian,’ I said. I liked the way his name felt on my tongue. Devilish and yet comfortable, as if I was reading a new story in a very old book.
He didn’t say anything to that. His smile, however, was a little wild. I caught a glimpse of the devil in that grin and I’m not afraid to admit that it ratcheted my heart more than a little. Smart bad boys wrapped in well-tailored shirts are on my fetish list. Along with leather, voyeurism, great nipples, pretty cocks and, well, any number of things that I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about while talking to a potential client.
Resisting the urge to say his name again just for the fun of it, I said, ‘Tell me about your book.’
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. The dark edges around his irises made his caramel eyes even more like chocolate. It’s weird to admit that I kept wanting to lick his eyeballs, but they just looked so much like a decadent dessert.
‘What would you like to know?’ he asked.
What I wanted to say was: I’d like to know why every time I look up at you, my whole body goes a little trembly. I’d like to know what your mouth tastes like. I’d like to know how your face looks when I very lightly touch the underside of your cock. Whether you’re the kind of man who will hold my wrists down on this very desk while you fuck me.
What I actually said was: ‘How about a title, an author and a publisher, for a start.’
‘Well, that’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have any of those. Thus the non-existent part.’
I nodded as if I understood what he was saying, but a bad feeling was forming in the pit of my stomach. We occasionally got crazies at Leather Bound, people who were obsessed with finding something that only existed in their own minds. I hadn’t pegged Davian for that, but you never knew.
‘Well, tell me what you do know,’ I said.
From my semi-precarious position on the desktop, I grabbed my laptop and popped it open, then started taking notes.
‘It’s the only copy, because it’s handwritten, and it’s old,’ he said.
After a hesitant pause, he added, ‘Also, it’s the manifesto of a secret sex club.’
It was only by the grace of some deity that I didn’t fall off the desk. Or laugh out loud. My internal ‘is this man crazy?’ quiz-taker checked off another box towards a ‘yes’ answer. That made me sad.
‘A secret sex club,’ I said.
He had the decency to look slightly chagrined. ‘I know how it sounds,’ he said. ‘And it’s going to sound even worse when I tell you it’s for a friend.’
He was flipping the copper closures on his briefcase, staring at me intently. It wasn’t a fidgety gesture but one of intense concentration, as though he was trying to figure out something that was swirling around in his brain. I did that kind of thing sometimes when I was thinking, usually playing with an earring and a pen until Lily had to swat it out of my hand. Something told me it was way more irritating when I did it than when he did; on him, it reminded me of a lion studying prey, deciding on weaknesses before gearing up to pounce.
‘It’s called The Keyhole Club,’ he said.
‘The book or the club?’
‘Both.’
While trying to type THE KEYHOLE CLUB, my fingers kept going to the s and x keys. I got SEXHOLE the first two times, but I finally nailed it. My ninth-grade typing teacher would have been so embarrassed.
‘And it’s a manifesto on sex,’ I said.
He nodded. This time, my fingers still managed to find the wrong keys. KEY, I wrote. I backspaced three times and then wrote SEX.
‘Anything else? Sex is pretty broad.’
He shook his head.
‘Davian, if you’re uncomfortable talking about sex…’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not uncomfortable talking about sex. I’m not uncomfortable with sex at all.’
He shifted forward in the chair, his hands resting on his knees. Only half a foot closer to me, and the hair on the back of my neck lifted at his very presence. Despite how strongly he was falling into the crazy category, that honeyed gaze kept threatening to do me in.
I shifted back slightly and looked over his head at a blank piece of wall. Nothing to see here. Move along, libido.
He let me shift back, but didn’t move away himself. I knew it was impossible to feel his breath from where he sat, or to feel the heat from his skin, and most of all it was impossible to feel that he was somehow hitching my lust up with every exhalation, and yet there it was.
‘In fact,’ he continued, although I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t, ‘I’m very comfortable with sex. I just –’ and at that he did sit back, and my lust took a little tiny tumble down the stairs, my body sighing in both relief and disappointment at being released. ‘– haven’t ever seen the book myself, so I don’t actually know very much about it.’
You could just tell he was the kind of man who was used to knowing things. Being in a position where he had to admit his lack of knowledge seemed to put him on edge.
‘So you’re looking for a non-existent sex book for a super-secret sex club that a friend of yours, what, lost?’
Despite the lust that kept blooming in my body at every turn, I was definitely starting to think I was getting taken for a ride. Either that, or this guy had lost his marbles.
The potentially crazy guy nodded.
‘That’s really not much to go on,’ I said.
He caught me with that gaze again, a tormented heat. I felt the weight of his want as solidly as if he’d pressed himself against me.
Why do I always have a thing for guys with complicated eyes? Never do I fall for a clear gaze, a simple, single colour. I’m a sucker for a little sadness behind the eyes, a fierce spark of defiance.
Kyle had that. Davian too. Probably, if I were to look back at every man I’d fallen in lust with, it was true of them all. There was some kind of warning sign in that, if I was smart enough to pay attention.
But Davian’s gaze was on me, and I couldn’t think beyond the needy lust that licked at my thighs.
‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘I walked in the door with this urgent need to find this book for my friend, but, since I got here, all I can think about is you.’
His voice carried both surprise and a sense of wonder. I had no idea what to do with either the shift in tone or the complexity his words carried. It was like Davian’s sole purpose was to accidentally keep unbalancing me. It was certainly working.
‘By which I mean,’ he added, ‘all I can think about is kissing you.’
More unbalance. Teeter-totter all the way down.
At that, my cheeks flushed hot and fast, damn them. In the process of bringing my hand up to my face to cover the red, I knocked an entire pile of books off my desk. He didn’t bend to pick them up nor offer to help. Instead his gaze stayed solidly on mine, almost as if daring me to reach down and get them.
I left them where they’d fallen, waving my errant hand at them as if to say, ‘No worries, they do that all the time. On their own. For no reason.’
‘I don’t … I, uh …’ Get it together, Janine. Least professional bookstore owner ever. Least professional professional ever.
Professional. That’s what I kept thinking. Be professional. I needed cheerleaders in front of me, doing that thing they do. Rallying me. Gimme a B. Gimme an E. Be professional. B. E. Professional.
Of course, it wasn’t working. Davian had this presence about him, something dark and fierce, that made it hard to think. Maybe it was his contrast with Kyle’s sweetness. Maybe it was because I was freaked out about the marriage proposal. Or maybe it was just my hormones, my pheromones, my lust clock, wreaking havoc with my usual held-together self. For whatever reason, my libido had become a tangible entity in the room, winding its way around my brain with its ridiculous and incessant needs.
I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing myself to stay in my seat. Or on my desk, rather. It was a skill I’d learned a long time ago, at my first job. Before I learned that I was a much better boss than employee. Sit still, breathe, don’t speak until you already know what’s going to come out of your mouth.
‘I keep thinking about kissing you too,’ I said.
Well, that didn’t work.
* * *
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Now that that’s out of the way.’
‘Gah,’ I said. My usual articulate self. ‘I’m so sorry. This is why I usually let Lily do all the talking.’
‘I’m glad she’s not talking now,’ he said. His gaze just kept melting the edges of me. Like licking a lollipop, until bit by bit you got to the sweet, juicy centre. I flexed my thighs together, tight, willing the pressure to quell the beating pulse between them.
‘I kind of wish she was,’ I said, even though that wasn’t true.
Somehow we’d gotten closer together, although we hadn’t moved. Or rather I was pretty sure I hadn’t moved. And yet I was sitting on the very edge of my desk, as though every cell in my body was working hard to bring me closer to Davian.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be vague, and I certainly don’t want to hinder your work. I just –’
‘Have trouble trusting people?’
It came out more biting than I meant it to, and I clamped my teeth on my tongue, hoping it would keep me from talking for a while. If I wasn’t trying to fuck the customer, I was trying to poke him with the sharp stick of too much honesty. Nicely done.
‘I won’t deny that,’ he said. Thankfully, he laughed a little as he spoke, easing some of my embarrassment.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Can we take this slow? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here, and I don’t want to screw it up.’
That sounded more like the beginning of a relationship than a business proposition. Still, I understood where he was coming from. I’m the kind of girl who jumps too quickly into business relationships and painfully slowly into anything that so much as smacks of love. Maybe he was just the opposite.
‘Slow is fine,’ I said, not at all unaware of the odd role reversal that was happening. ‘But I still need to know as much as you can tell me so that I don’t walk into this blind.’
Sighing, he nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
He settled back into the chair and crossed his legs.
‘My friend wrote me a letter, asking me to find a very important book that he, to use his words, “accidentally misplaced,”’ he said. ‘Which is very unlike him, but I wasn’t able to ask too many questions.’
After a pause, he added, ‘And that’s pretty much the whole story.’
I didn’t think that was true. There was more going on there, behind those complicated eyes. But he’d asked to take it slow, and I’d said yes.
‘This is a very unusual job,’ I said. ‘In truth, I’ve never had anyone ask for something like this. My rates for this kind of thing would be ridiculously high.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Money’s not a problem.’
‘You do know that you sound more than a little crazy? That this whole thing sounds suspicious.’
He smiled, sending my heart into another pitter-patter of yum.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘And trust me, if it wasn’t this particular friend asking, there’s no way I’d even be here.’
I had a moment to wonder if this mysterious friend was really Davian. Had he misplaced his own book during some moment of stupidity, too embarrassed to admit it, but wanting it back? He didn’t really seem like that kind of person. And the darkness had come back into his eyes as he spoke, a sadness that I couldn’t place. There was more here than he was letting on, but I didn’t think he was lying about his friend. Or about the book.
‘I’d like a list of his potential friends, then,’ I said. ‘People I can talk to. And all of the information you have about the sex club.’
I impressed myself with my own straight face at that.
‘Here’s the thing.’ He leaned forward, so that we were the kind of close you see in movies, the kind of close that’s reserved for your best friends and the people you really, really wanted to kiss. And lick. And fuck.
I tried to focus on his eyes, but their caramelly heat was making things worse, so I lowered my gaze to his neck, watching the place where his pulse thrummed beneath the skin. Nope, that was no better.
‘I can’t talk about the sex club,’ he said. ‘I’ve already said more than I should have.’
I sighed, and the breath leaving me was almost painful. There was no way I could take this job. Not that the idea of playing super sleuth didn’t appeal to me, but the holes were starting to show in his story. Big, big holes. He clearly thought he was part of a Fight Club-esque novel or something.
The crazy thing was that, even with all of that, I almost believed him. I certainly wanted to believe him. Hot sexy well-read guy with just a little crazy to offset the good stuff? That wasn’t too far on the wild side, was it?
Yes, sadly it was.
We sat in silence. My office got smaller and smaller with every breath, until I swore I could feel the heat shimmering off his skin, until I felt like all I had to do was reach out my hand and it would brush along his thigh.
I knew I couldn’t take this job. No matter how much I wanted to. No matter how hot he was. It was a wild-goose chase. A blind alley that led to a dead end filled with nothing but lust and failure.
Slipping down from the desk, I smoothed one hand down the front of my dress and prepared my professional voice, which was pretty much my bitch voice wrapped in some sweet coating.
‘I’m sorry, Mister Cavanaugh,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m the right person for this job. But I really appreciate you coming to see us. I wish you the best of luck with finding someone who can help you.’
Even as I stood up, he hadn’t moved back. I was closer to him than I had been before. So close I could feel his body heat, and catch the slightest hint of pine on his skin. It made me feel a little dizzy.
He took my hand. It was a gesture that seemed as natural to him as breathing, and yet he looked utterly surprised that he’d done it.
‘Please reconsider,’ he said. There was so much sincerity, so much yearning, in his voice that for a moment I wondered if I was making a mistake.
Then I thought about the conversation that had just happened. There was no way I was going to find this book, even if it did exist, and I wasn’t about to take on a client who was this sexy and this close to being clearly crazy. As much as I wanted a diversion from my current life, there was no way that saying yes to him was not the worst idea ever.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I just can’t. I can, however, recommend some other places to try.’
I meant to say something then, or ask something, but he stood, moving closer to me in the process, never letting go of my hand. He reached into his pocket with his free hand and dropped a simple cream-coloured card on my desk.
‘I don’t want someone else,’ he said. ‘Please call me if you change your mind.’
He picked up the Leather Bound card. ‘And I’d like to keep this,’ he said. ‘In case I need to find you.’
For some reason I was loath to give the card up again. As if I’d hoped to use it to find some clue about who’d given it to him, how he was connected to my life or to Leather Bound.
I wanted to make some crack about how he knew exactly where to find me. Here, mostly, with my nose tucked into books.
But of course I merely nodded and watched as he slipped the card into his jeans pocket. It would have been unprofessional to do anything else. And I was trying damn hard to stay professional.
Despite the fact that he still holding my hand and that his eyes were a creamy caramel that seemed swirled full of dark thoughts and even darker desires. Despite the fact that my life was falling apart around me and that I had an impossible question I couldn’t answer and a non-existent book I couldn’t find.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_5d64e479-3b2e-522b-b033-32fe0f7974e7)
After Davian left, walking out of the office while I stood there and refused, refused, refused to look at his beautiful ass in those dark jeans, I dropped my head into my hands. It felt like time for either hysterical laughter or panicked tears, but my body just couldn’t seem to move past the arousal state into something new.
It didn’t take long for Lily to poke her head in, her already arched eyebrows raised another notch.
‘Oh. My. God,’ she breathed. ‘I thought you were going to fuck him right here in your office for the whole world to watch.’
Lil dropped herself into the chair Davian had vacated. Her stockinged legs were just long enough that she could rest her feet on the corner of the desk. ‘And by the whole world I mean me, of course.’
Fuck. Yes, that was just what I’d wanted to do to him. Or rather, have him do to me. His presence had dredged up desires I hadn’t had in a long time. Since long before Kyle, who had made it clear early on that kink wasn’t really his thing. I’d agreed, thinking it wasn’t that important. Our sex was vanilla, maybe, but it was good vanilla.
Now I couldn’t get images of leather and submission out of my mind. I kept thinking about how Davian’s hands would feel capturing my wrists, holding me down. About him fastening a collar of leather about my neck and holding it while I sucked him.
‘No,’ I said, unsure what I was even saying no to.
‘No, what? Janine, you were practically puddling into an ooey gooey mess of melting chocolate in here.’
I gave her the look. She was used to that look. It was a look that said please stop talking before I come over there and sit on you.
It was a threat that clearly didn’t hold as much weight as it used to, because she just kept going.
‘OK, fine,’ she said. ‘But at least tell me the rest. Is he looking for some ancient Egyptian script? Some musty old academic bible? Or something juicier? Please say juicier.’ Her tongue flickered out, playing around with her ball piercing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not juicy. In fact, I turned him down.’
She quit playing with her piercing and her mouth dropped open just a little. ‘What? Why? Huh?’ She was pushing her point to the max, playing up the confusion to show me that I’d made a mistake. ‘He’s hot as hell. He wants a book that doesn’t exist. It’s absolutely perfect for your little sleuthing brain.’
I started to say something, but she wasn’t finished. ‘If you’re going to set up a no-client-fucking policy, this is the wrong time,’ she said. ‘Fuck him and take the job. You can totally do both.’
Suddenly, I realised that even as Lily was friend-yelling at me, I couldn’t take my eyes off her legs. The sound her stockings made against each other as she shifted her calves was seriously distracting me. How was it possible that I never realised what fantastic legs she had? It wasn’t that I didn’t find girls sexy. I did. It was just that I usually found guys sexier. Besides, Lily was my best friend and the co-owner of my business. There was no way I was going to get involved with her in that way. Again, I mean.
But watching the way that Lil’s legs were sliding over each other was focusing all of my brain on the heat between my legs.
What was wrong with me? It was as though since Davian had walked in the front door, I’d been nothing but a single ball of need, rolling around in lust gardens, snorting sex flowers. My own sex-filled version of the foolish lion in the poppy fields of Oz. Except I wouldn’t fall asleep. I’d be so filled with lust that I would kill myself with want.
‘Janine?’ Lil poked me with the toe of her shoe.
‘Hm?’
The silence that ensued from her was full of unasked questions. I dragged my gaze from Lil’s legs to her expectant blue eyes.
‘You were talking about fucking the sexy dark-haired man who landed on our doorstep a few hours ago,’ she prodded. ‘Or rather talking about not fucking him. No blow job, no book job, neither of which are decisions I understand.’
I got a hold of myself, shaking my head and focusing on the least sexual thing I could find, a blank spot of wall behind Lily’s head.
‘You were talking about fucking him,’ I countered. ‘I was talking about not taking him on as a client.’
‘Because you want to fuck him.’
‘Lil, you are not helping what is already a very bizarre situation here.’
Even though I wasn’t looking at her full on, I could tell when she grinned in that sly way she had, letting me know that her intention was the exact opposite of helping.
‘Um, hello, he was hot as hell,’ Lily said. ‘And you, my friend, have quite the rampant little libido. If all your little buzzers weren’t going off, I would have been worried about you. Besides, I know Kyle’s awesome, but you have the look of a woman who’s bored to death. So please please please tell me you’re going to go out with this gorgeous hunk of a man.’
Kyle. Was it awful of me to realise I’d almost forgotten about Kyle and his proposal while I’d been busy with Davian? Probably. But it was true. That was some kind of sign, wasn’t it? And what did she mean, ‘the look of a woman who’s bored to death’?
‘All my little buzzers weren’t going off.’
‘Liar.’
‘He had one of our promo cards,’ I said casually, knowing her well enough to know she’d follow the swerve in the conversation. I only felt slightly bad about using her curiosity to my advantage. ‘Our early ones.’
Those eyebrows went up again. ‘Our disaster cards?’
I nodded.
‘Odd,’ she mused.
‘Very.’
‘From where?’
I shook my head. ‘He didn’t say.’
Lily nodded, tracing the outline of the book she had tattooed on her forearm, the way she often did when she was thinking. It was one of her first tattoos, and was lightly faded, looking more like a natural part of her skin than a hand-drawn piece of art. Kyle had offered a couple of times to redo it for her, give it some more life, but she’d declined, saying it was a reminder to her. I didn’t know of what.
‘You know, I feel like I recognise him from somewhere,’ she said. ‘But I have no idea why. Or where.’
I waited to see if she had more. Like I said, Lily’s fantastic with faces. If you give her a couple of minutes, she’ll usually come up with the connection.
When nothing else came, I said, ‘If he was really looking for something, which I doubt, it wasn’t something I could have found. It was the right thing, turning him down.’
‘I trust you,’ she said. In a way that said she actually did trust me. Which I was grateful for, and was feeling like I didn’t really deserve. ‘Now, why did your face do that funny thing when I asked about Kyle?’
‘What funny thing?’
She made a face, scrunching her expression up so that it was all soured. ‘This funny face,’ she said, which came out as dish funny fashe.
‘I don’t ever look like that,’ I said.
‘I let you segue me with the disaster card bit,’ she said. ‘That was my one freebie. You’re not getting out of this one.’
Have I mentioned that Lily and I have known each other a long time? And once Lily had something in her craw, she didn’t let go of it very easily.
Caught under her stare, I relented. ‘Kyle and I are –’ I started, and then didn’t know how to finish.
What? Engaged? Unengaged? Not at all engaged? About to break up? That last one felt the most true right now. But I was afraid to voice it out loud, lest it become true when I didn’t want it to.
Lily didn’t ask what, but she’d dropped her feet to the floor, and was sitting straight up, watching me like a cat watches prey. Which meant I was pretty much the prey. For at least the second time this morning.
It was turning out to be that kind of day.
‘Kyle asked me to marry him,’ I spit out.
‘Whoa, wait. Back up, please. When did I miss this? And how? I thought you were just, you know …’ She made the universal sign for fucking with her fingers. Leave it to Lily to offset her perfect appearance with the regular use of vulgarity.
I told her the story, the down and dirty version, leaving out this morning’s laughter-filled sex, since she’d clearly already figured that part out when I walked in the door.
‘He asked me as I was leaving for work this morning.’
‘As you were leaving?’
I nodded.
‘That doesn’t bode well for anything,’ she said. ‘And you said…?’
‘I didn’t. I came here.’
‘Oy vey,’ she said. Lily’s Jewish upbringing comes out at the oddest times, considering that most of the time she’s the least Jewish person I’ve ever met. But this time I had to agree with her.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a moment. I refused to look at her legs. Or at her face. Or at the half-curve of a smile that I was sure was resting at the corner of her red-painted lips.
‘Did we have any other customers?’ I asked. While I was in here – what had she said? – puddling like warm chocolate.
Lily snorted softly. ‘It was someone actually looking for the sex toy store. Can you believe it?’
‘Today?’ I said. ‘Today, I can believe almost anything.’
* * *
Thankfully, we were busy the rest of the day. But even with customers and orders to keep my mind occupied, I felt antsy and restless.
Kyle. Marriage. Davian. Lust. A sex club. Mysterious non-existent books. All of these unanswered mysteries were eating at my brain.
All day, my fingers beat an odd rhythm across book covers when I checked people out. I found myself shifting from one foot to the other for no reason.
An hour or so before closing time, I actually snapped my gum so loudly I startled myself. Thankfully the store was empty of customers at that point, but it was the last straw; I’d broken myself of gum snapping when I was nineteen. I had to find something to do before I made myself crazy.
I came storming out from one of the aisles where I’d been trying to organise books. Lil was behind the counter, drawing something. It’s what she did when she got bored. Mostly she drew her own tattoos. Sometimes tats for other people. Sometimes she drew Webster stalking dust motes or secret caricatures of our regular customers.
I keep telling her she could make a good career of it, but she keeps telling me that she has a good career. Which, of course, is exactly what I want to hear. She’s smart like that.
‘Why don’t you knock off early?’ Lily asked, watching with a raised brow as I tried to throw my gum into the garbage while it was still stuck to my fingers.
‘Because, because, because …’ Of all the wonderful things he does, my mind finished, stupidly. A string of quiet swear words followed while I finally managed to get the gum into the garbage can.
‘Go take care of –’ she waved her drawing pencil through the air, not being dismissive, but generally telling me she understood there was far too much going on for it to be summed up in a few short sentences ‘– things.’
‘I’m OK,’ I said. ‘I just need something to do. Maybe I’ll change the window display.’
‘We just did the display,’ she said. It was true. Our front window was big enough to set up a whole scene in. It was one of the things I loved best about the place. We changed the decor for each new season, and we’d just done the fall version of a reading room, adding a couple of chairs, a fake fireplace and a big maroon cushion for Webster to curl up on.
No display then.
‘Maybe Webster needs his nails trimmed,’ I ventured.
We both glanced at Webster, who’d forsaken his big cushion for one of the chairs, where he snoozed, stretched out, his belly to the sky. Clearly, he didn’t need my help either.
‘Go do something,’ Lily said. ‘I’ve got nothing, and I mean nothing, going on outside this place right now. Besides, I like to have you in my debt.’
‘But –’ I started.
And then I stood there, uncertain what else I wanted to say.
The truth was I didn’t want to be here, because I kept thinking about Davian with an urgency that scared me. Every time his face flashed in my brain, I got wet. Every time I saw his hands touching his briefcase, or my desk, or the tickets, my lizard brain, the part of me that was all sex all the time, woke up, aching for something I couldn’t name.
I didn’t want to go home because I’d think about Kyle. Kyle, and his proposal. And then I’d have to think about what was wrong with me that I didn’t just say yes to this smart, funny, gorgeous, talented guy who wanted to spend his life with me. Wasn’t that what every girl dreamed of?
I definitely didn’t want to go to Kyle’s, because I wouldn’t just think about Kyle there; I’d actually have to talk to him. And probably come up with some answers that I didn’t want to give.
The only other places I ever went – did I mention I was an introvert? – were Cream, the coffee shop that our friend Stefan owned, and Cock’s Tail, the bar that our friend Jay owned. Both of those places offered comfort, but they also meant someone who cared about me offering sympathy and a listening ear. If I knew anything right now, I knew that I didn’t feel like talking.
I felt like hiding out in a dark room where no one could see me, and letting all of this go for a little while. Somewhere that I could hide in the dark and think and make some of this stupid sexual desire disappear. Somewhere that I could –
Suddenly, I knew just what I needed. And I knew just the place to get it. Dark. Quiet but not too quiet. Solitary but not too solitary. I grabbed my coat and practically ran to the front desk, where Lily was still hunched over her sketchpad, chewing on an eraser shaped like a robot. A mostly headless robot.
‘Hey, Lil, did you mean it when you talked about closing up?’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I changed my mind. You must stay here for ever and ever.’
She must have seen something in my face because she started laughing almost instantly and flapped her hands at me, headless robot included. ‘Go, please. I love you, but you’re starting to make me crazy.’
I leaned across the counter to kiss her cheek, and as I did so, I saw what she’d been sketching.
It was Davian’s face. Almost. Just a little off, although I couldn’t tell how. I tried to puzzle out what it was. The eyes, slightly off-kilter? No. Not the mouth either. Something else. But it was definitely him.
‘Guess I’m not the only one with the hots,’ I teased, tapping the edge of the drawing with my finger.
‘No,’ she said. Her tongue stud flashed silver between her teeth. ‘It’s just that I do remember him from somewhere. But not here, I don’t think. I don’t know.’
‘Well, if you do think of it, let me know, ’kay? And I’ll open tomorrow. On time, I promise it!’
‘Mm-hm’ was her only response as I slipped out the door.
* * *
Leather Bound is in a part of town that most people, locals and tourists alike, just call the Sweet Spot. It’s this little area – two streets, maybe six or seven blocks long, of mixed business and residential – that’s known for being a bit risqué. It’s not a gay district per se, just a sexy district.
Most of the smart businesses play up the theme, giving themselves double-entendre names, like ours. And it works. It’s safely naughty. So if you want to bring your best friend somewhere for her bachelorette party, you’ll probably head here. Maybe stop by Cream for a cup of coffee, then head to Lashes & Lace for toys, then on to Cock’s Tail or one of the other half-dozen nightclubs that offer a naughty ambiance.
I asked around before we opened Leather Bound here, but no one seemed to know why this area is here, or where it came from.
It’s a good place for Leather Bound. Although we’re not specifically focused on sex books, we definitely do our fair share of sales in that direction. Plus, the rent is cheaper than anywhere else, we get more walk-in sales and it’s easy to get to almost anywhere from the store.
Like to Lashes & Lace, which was just around the corner a couple of blocks and down the street. I practically ran there. Now that I had a mission, I had someplace to put all my nervous energy.
I slipped in the front door, the little bells tinkling to mark my entrance. As far as sex toy shops go, Lashes & Lace is high-end, deluxe and very, very lush. The walls are painted in a lovely crimson, and the lights are kept soft and dim. There’s more a sense that you’re walking into someone’s home. If that someone owned a couple hundred sex toys and had a fetish for leather paddles as wall art.
A woman I didn’t know was behind the front counter, her ample curves tucked into a leather corset dress.
Perfect. Anonymity was the key thing I was craving at the moment, and that made things so much easier. And sweeter.
Walking past her, I caught her eye and gave an ‘I’m heading to the back’ gesture with my hand. She nodded. Sometimes I loved wordless exchanges.
A wide black curtain hung at the back of the store, and I parted it to step through. Here, it was even more dimly lit, soft cream walls and flickering electric lights that guided you down a long hallway. Doors opened off either side. I wasn’t surprised to find many of the doors marked FILLED, even in the middle of the day. L&L was known for catering to couples and tourists who wanted a clean, safe place to act out their fantasies.
I slipped down the hall until I found a door that read EMPTY. I swiped my credit card and, when the door clicked open, I stepped inside.
The room was small but cosy. Three walls were covered with long roll-up shades. I knew from experience what lay behind the fabric: floor-to-ceiling windows. On either side, the windows were two-way. If you opened those, whoever was in the room on the sides could see you. Along the wall opposite the door was a one-way window. You could watch the action, but they couldn’t see you.
I know a lot of exhibitionists, those people who get off on fucking in front of people, and I’m thankful for them because I like to watch, but I’m not one myself. The thought of being in front of people, of having sex in front of someone else, makes me feel breathless and weak, as though my legs won’t hold me.
At a basic level, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to let myself go and enjoy it, knowing that someone was watching. It’s more than that, though. I just don’t know exactly what. Maybe it’s the introvert thing. Or a trust thing. Trusting them, trusting myself.
But to sit in a dark corner and watch someone else get off? Yes, please. When I was little I wanted to be Harriet the Spy or Nancy Drew, looking through people’s things for clues, watching through keyholes, discovering the forbidden. That desire has changed over the years, it’s grown up from secrets and clues to sex and lust, but it’s never gone away.
I pushed the button on the wall facing me. As the shade began to slowly rise, I settled into the chair that smelled slightly of antiseptic, anticipating the view.
L&L doesn’t advertise what shows are coming up or send out event listings, so you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s a couple, clearly into exhibitionism, loving every second of being watched. Sometimes it’s famous porn stars, working a whole room full of bodies, orgy-style. Once Kyle came with me and we watched a threesome, two laughing, giggling women lovingly suck off a man on his knees. It was fun to watch, and we’d fucked on that fantasy for days, but at that time I’d realised something about my voyeuristic tendencies: I like it best alone.
Last time I was here, there was a gorgeous man lying on his back, bound in cream-coloured ropes that contrasted with his ebony skin, his cock beautiful and erect. No one came in or out of the room while he was there, and he never moved or opened his eyes. He was like a statue, a bound, breathing man of stone, only his cock twitching, tiny movements that were almost impossible to see. It was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.
This time when the shade slipped up, giving a small clunk as it hit the top, I sucked in my breath at the view. In the larger room, silhouetted by a single lamp that showed off her body but hid her face in the shadows, a woman sat in a small folding chair. Her long brunette hair fell about her shoulders in waves, and her hands were held, possibly bound, behind the back of the chair.
A tiny tattoo – the small shape of something dark that I couldn’t make out from where I sat – rested in the hollow of her throat. She wore a black button-down shirtdress that hugged every curve. It was open from her upper thighs down, showing off a pair of old-fashioned garter clips attached to seamless black stockings. Her chin was lowered, but her green eyes were raised, her gaze apparently resting on the man who stood off to her side.
He was mostly outside the halo of the light, but I could see he was fully dressed in an impeccably pressed pinstriped suit, the cut accentuating his wide shoulders. It was all very 1950s, right down to the hat he wore. The space he took up was larger than his actual body, a presence that was incredibly sexy even through the window between us.
He held a pair of long-handled scissors – the only shiny thing in the room – his hands already settled into the large black handles. As he brought the scissors closer to her, I realised that the reason her dress was open at the bottom was because he’d cut the buttons off; they lay littered about her feet on the floor. This time, he started from the top, aiming for the button that held the dress closed over the curve of her breasts.
My hand was already under my skirt, toying with the edges of my panties as I watched them. The suspense of his slow movements, her breath rising and falling as he opened the scissors over the button thread and held them there without closing them all the way, was making me feel breathless and on edge.
Slowly, slowly, he closed the scissors all the way, a sound I could hear in my head, the small snick of steel meeting steel. With a delay that seemed to take for ever, the button fell away, rolling and tumbling down the fabric and against her stockinged thigh to finally land on the floor.
Her dress had bloomed open, showing the paleness of her skin beneath the black, an alabaster hollow that was flanked by two beautiful curves. Her chest heaved softly as he guided the scissors to the next button, the movement arching her back just slightly so I could see her nipples peaked against the fabric.
The sight made me bring my free hand to my own chest, fingers slipping under my bra, tweaking one nipple softly. I tugged my panties to one side and slipped one finger along my cleft, stroking myself softly with my fingertip. My clothes were suddenly too restrictive, too cumbersome. I wished I’d taken everything off before I’d slipped the shade up. I wanted full access to myself, to pinch and tug as I pleased. The room smelled of my arousal, sweet and urgent, and I wondered what she smelled like, in that other room.
On the other side of the window, he brought the scissors to the next button, and he must have said something to her, because she looked up suddenly and shuddered, her legs pulling together just slightly. The button was quick to fall, letting the fabric slip away further.
Carefully, he tucked the closed scissor blades between her thighs, waiting until she brought her legs fully together before he let go. The scissors stayed there, upright, their sharp point buried between her thighs.
He ran his fingers over the points of her nipples, sending visible shudders through her with every contact. I sensed that this was a game of power, of how much pleasure he could give her before she opened her legs in want and pleasure, before those scissors went tumbling to the floor.
I closed my own legs, mimicking her, keeping one hand between them. The pressure angled my fingers into a new place and I moaned softly at the unexpected pleasure.
Bending down, he put one hand on each side of her dress, where the fabric had fallen open. In one easy movement, he pulled outwards. Under the strain, the buttons didn’t stand a chance. They went flying, tumbling to the floor, and the dress opened fully to reveal all of her, from her large, pointed nipples down to her lovely V of dark curls. The garter belt fitted the swell of her hips perfectly. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale strips of her thigh that showed above the stockings, the way the nylon rolled just slightly as if at some point she had begun to roll them off and had been distracted. The scissors between her thighs were the only hard-edged thing about her.
His fingers played along both nipples, causing her to squirm and arch in her seat. My movements echoed hers, as though, by watching, I was gaining a synthesis with her. He held one nipple tightly between his fingers, almost pinching it, and then tugged it, elongated it until it was thin and tight. I could almost hear her gasp, the way her mouth fell open at the sensation. He did the same with the other until he was tugging both nipples as far away from her body as they could possible stretch. The muscles of her thighs clenched, shifting the scissors. He kept his stance until she was panting, uttering words I couldn’t hear.
I feared for a second that she would lose control and drop the scissors. I didn’t know what that meant for her, but I knew it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be very, very good for him. And at that moment, with my own hand clenched between my thighs, my clit pulsing hard and fast against the movement of my finger, I wanted her to be very, very good for him too. I wanted her to get her reward, whatever it might be, so that I could have it too.
He released her nipples, and they sprang back against her body, flushed and rosy. He touched each one again, a tender touch, a finger-kiss, to soothe the ache. Then he pulled the scissors from between her thighs. She shuddered again and let her legs fall open.
I was close to coming, but I didn’t want to, not yet, so I stilled my hand for a moment, watching. He slipped the scissors between her skin and one of the stockings, slicing down the front in irregular patterns. Then he did the other. The torn-open dress and the gashes in the material combined to make her look like she’d spent the night being well fucked, even though I got the feeling that the couple had just begun playing shortly before I arrived. The look was sexy on her, and when he let the scissors drop to the floor so he could catch her hair with one hand and pinch her clit with the other, I felt the first pulse of pre-climax slip through my body.
He stroked her, hard and quick, with two fingers, and I caught his rhythm, echoed it with my own, until an orgasm rose inside me, impossible to resist. I let the pleasure pull my eyes closed, let it pull forward the loud moans that rose from somewhere in my chest and sank into the walls. There was a calm in allowing the orgasm to wash over me like that, in allowing all of the stress of the day to slide away. The pleasure was lovely, but almost secondary to the release of tension that I’d been carrying in my body. I relaxed a moment, hand wet between my thighs, letting my whole weight rest against the chair.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the man had turned around to stand behind the woman with his hands on her shoulders. Now that he was inside the halo of light, I could see him more clearly. Those hands. That build. And most of all, those impossibly coloured eyes.
It was Davian. And I could have sworn he was looking right at me.
* * *
Now grateful that I was still mostly clothed, I tumbled out of the tiny room as fast as my orgasm-wracked body would let me, breathing heavily, feeling confused and off-balance. The only thing I knew for certain was that I needed to get out of L&L before he saw me.
So much for my respite, for my chance to hide away and recover. Whatever moments of peace I’d experienced mid-orgasm slipped away as I hurried outside and then down the sidewalk, feeling incredibly exposed by the late-afternoon light.
It wasn’t until I was on the street, blocks from L&L and at the very edge of the Sweet Spot, that I let myself stop and breathe and think. I clung to the wall with one hand, panting, trying to wrap my mind around everything.
OK, so it couldn’t really have been Davian, right? That was just too much of a coincidence. That was just too … weird.
And even if it was, there was no way he could have seen me inside the room. L&L was known for its discretion, for its customer safety and privacy. If they said a window was one-way, I believed them.
Why then had it seemed like he’d seen me somehow? Why had it seemed like he’d looked right at me at my moment of orgasm? It was a fever dream born of lust, I was sure. My oversexed mind had cooked up the image of him to add to my pleasure. That’s all it was.
I walked home, still tumbling everything over in my brain. What a day it had been. First Kyle. Then Davian. Then … whatever that was at L&L. People said bad things happened in threes. I wondered if that was true about really weird things as well. I hoped so. If it was true, at least it would mean all the odd things that were going to happen to me were over for a while.
Kyle, thankfully, wasn’t at my place, although there were a number of voice messages from him on my cell when I pulled it out of my pocket. I didn’t listen to them. I promised myself I’d call him in the morning, when I was feeling less Alice in Wonderlandish.
A hot bath. Some food. And sleep. Those were the things I needed, and in that order.
As it turned out, I didn’t make it to either of the first two. To my complete and utter surprise, I got as far as undressing, and then crawled under the covers and slept. Tomorrow is another day.
Just call me Scarlett O’Hara, I thought, as I lost myself in dreamland.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_8b2b15a9-c340-59a5-a928-314ac662b2d4)
I kept my promise to Lily. I wasn’t late to Leather Bound the next morning. I even hauled my ass out of bed early enough to stop at Cream for coffee. I saw Stefan in the corner, but he was captured by an overly enthusiastic customer, so I left him to his fate and headed to Leather Bound, armed with a caramel mocha for me and a cinnamon latte for Lily. I smelled like Christmas, all wrapped up with a coffee bow.
I’d slept fine, but I’d dreamed of sex all night long. Some of it was sex with Kyle and Davian, sometimes both of them at once. Sometimes the woman in the shirtdress was there, and sometimes Lily and sometimes even one or two of my exes. But mostly it seemed I’d dreamed of having sex with a faceless stranger, who then kept turning into Davian or a Davian lookalike. I was never sure.
Lily hadn’t arrived at Leather Bound by the time I got there, so I set her coffee on the counter, hoping it wouldn’t get too cold, and spent some time giving Webster chin scratches and breakfast before I headed back to my office.
I needed to tackle two things this morning.
One, call Kyle.
OK, wait, three things.
One, figure out what I was going to say to Kyle.
Two, call Kyle.
Three, research Mister Cavanaugh and find out as much as I could about the mysterious man and his equally mysterious book. Yes, I’d turned him down, but I supposed I was like Lily in that way: once something caught my interest, especially something as shiny and intriguing as this, I didn’t let it go easily. Not to mention that I thought I saw him cutting the buttons off a hot girl at the sex store. Yesterday he’d responded to Lily’s comment about L&L with a knowing smirk. ‘I know the place,’ he’d said. If it really was him I’d seen, then he certainly did.
But first, I should decide what to do about Kyle. Second, I should call him.
So I sat down at my beloved desk and got ready to do a little research. Because clearly the best way to do the thing you don’t want to do is to tackle something else instead.
I popped open my laptop and give a couple of light strokes over her keyboard for good luck. Lily says she’s ancient and just needs to be put down, but she’s seen me through a lot of thick and thin, and I get her upgraded every couple of years. She might not even have any original parts by now, but she works like a charm. Mostly.
‘Come on, Clementine,’ I whispered. ‘Gimme something good.’
The internet is everyone’s friend when it comes to finding information, whether you’re trying to find rare books or stalk strangers. But the truth is that most people don’t know how to use it properly, or they find a bit of surface information and figure that’s good enough. My skill is digging deeper, poking into all the little corners of the web to find the hidden books and the dirt that most people don’t even notice.
I figured it would take me five minutes, maybe ten, to find out everything the world knew about Davian Cavanaugh and his non-existent book.
Turns out I was wrong.
I was still digging when Lily showed up twenty minutes later, just in time to open Leather Bound, and I hadn’t found a thing. Not a single mention. These days almost everyone on the internet leaves a trail of some sort, even if it’s accidental. In fact, it’s near impossible to not have at least something about you. Especially with a name like Davian Cavanaugh. If you’re alive in the world with a name that unusual, then the internet knows about it.
Except that it didn’t seem to.
Which meant that he’d either given me a fake name, which was seeming more and more like a possibility, or was a super secret spy. If he was a super secret spy, I was definitely changing my mind and taking him as a client. And I was definitely fucking him.
But I was betting more on the former.
Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.
‘Hey, thanks for the coffee.’ Lily poked her head in, holding up the drink I’d brought her. As always, she was impeccable, right down to her swingy skirt and her purple toenails peeking out of a pair of black sandals. It was way too damn cold for that. I was in a long wraparound dress, striped tights, and black boots and I was still freezing.
She looked me over. ‘No sex this morning, I see.’
‘No sex,’ I said. ‘Thanks for finishing up yesterday. How did it go?’
‘Steady.’ She draped herself in the theatre chair with a tired ‘oof’. ‘I’m glad we’re almost at the weekend.’
We close Leather Bound on Mondays and Tuesdays, which gives us a sort of weekend without killing our business too much. Our only other option was to hire employees, which got all kinds of crazy and expensive. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m slightly anal and slightly OCD and I’m not about to turn the store over to a bunch of people I don’t know.
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