The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club) (17 page)

It was our first real kiss.

His mouth crushed against mine, firm and demanding, and my eyes slid shut. My clients wanted to kiss me, sometimes, and I would give them a dry peck on the lips and direct their attention elsewhere. It wasn’t that I had anything
against
kissing, I just found it kind of tedious. It was inefficient, and not very interesting.

But with Turner, oh—it was something else entirely. He ran his tongue against the closed seam of my lips, and when I opened for him, he teased me with teeth and tongue, nibbling at my lower lip, sliding his tongue against mine in an exquisite glide. My backbone turned to liquid. I gripped two fistfuls of his shirt and surrendered myself to him. I had never imagined that kissing could be like this.

He pulled back, finally, and rubbed one thumb along my cheekbone. “I’ll have to send you home,” he said.

His voice was tinged with what sounded like regret. What was it that Scarlet had said? Hook, line. Sinker. I opened my eyes again and looked up at him. The expression on his face was so raw and open that I instinctively looked away, like I wanted to respect his privacy or something. When I glanced back a second later, he’d wiped his face clean of whatever it was. The man returning my gaze was Mr. Turner, The Owner, cool and unreadable.

But beneath that was Alex, hidden inside.

I understood him, then. We weren’t so different after all. We were both concealing something: our true selves, the careful heart, the hot blood. What my mother would have called
the soul
.

He saw it in my face. His hands, resting against my knees, flexed once, fingertips digging into my thighs, and then fell away. “Okay,” he said.

It was strange to hear him say that word. It seemed too casual. “Okay?” I asked.

“If you won’t leave, then you can help me,” he said.

I didn’t remember telling him that I wasn’t planning to leave, but whatever. He was a puzzle, and I wanted to spend a while longer poking at him. One of my brothers, when he was about ten, got a Rubik’s cube for his birthday, and spent a solid two weeks doing nothing but twisting it around and around, trying to get the colors to line up. I understood the impulse, now.

“Help you with what?” I asked.

“Crisis at work,” he said. “I could use an extra set of eyes to go through this paperwork.”

“What kind of crisis?” I asked, worried. “I was there, like, three hours ago and everything seemed normal.”

He frowned at me, brow furrowed. “You were—oh.” His face cleared, and he laughed. “You sweet thing. The club is fine. Surely you don’t think that’s my only business venture.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked, and then blushed and wished I had kept my mouth shut. He had just
told
me that it wasn’t, and now I looked like an idiot.

“You really don’t have any idea who I am, do you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“You’re Alex Turner,” I said. “You own the Silver Cross Club, and you’re the only person I know who doesn’t have a television.”

He leaned in and kissed me again, slow and heated, and then pulled back and said, “I haven’t watched television in five years, and I don’t intend to acquire the habit anytime soon. Now, are you going to be a good girl and help me, or do I have to send you home without any dinner?”

“Yeah, I’ll help,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve done for a client.” I said that deliberately, trying to provoke him with the reminder of all the other men I’d been with, but he just turned away and picked up a manila folder.

“I need you to go through these papers and highlight any mentions of Bywater Ventures,” he said. “And if you see the name Martin anywhere, or Reginald Martin, set it aside and show it to me.”

He handed the folder to me, and I took it. It was several inches thick and bristling with sticky notes. A few paper-clipped sheafs of print-outs poked from the top. God, what had I gotten myself into? “Don’t you have a secretary for this sort of thing?” I asked.

His mouth twitched to one side. “No.” I waited for him to continue, but he sat down in front of his computer and pulled a stack of papers toward himself with every indication of going right back to work.

I sighed. Getting information out of him was like squeezing blood from a stone. I slid off the table and sat across the table from him. I watched him for a few moments, waiting for him to announce that this was all a big joke and we could have sex now, but he turned pages and pecked at his laptop and didn’t pay any attention to me.

Fine. I leaned across the table to grab one of the highlighters sitting beside his computer. He didn’t blink or look up. I uncapped it and stuck the cap on the end. I opened my folder and picked up the stack of papers, and whacked the bottom edge on the table a few times, straightening things out. Turner didn’t react.

Well, there was no helping it. I gave in to the inevitable and bent my head to work.

It was incredibly boring. The papers were some sort of business document, and I didn’t understand half the words they used. It was something about buying and selling, and stock offerings, and something else about reorganization and shipments. I saw Bywater mentioned here and there, and I highlighted the name each time it appeared. A few dozen pages in, I found a reference to a Mr. Martin, and I highlighted that and set the page to one side.

After a while it got to be automatic—scanning the page, highlighting if necessary, moving to the next one—and my thoughts wandered. If Turner didn’t
only
own the club, what else did he do? What sort of crisis had him enlisting me, a woman he was paying an awful lot of money in exchange for sex, to review paperwork on a Wednesday evening? Maybe he was in the Mafia, and federal prosecutors were building a case against him, and I was his last chance to avoid prison. I spent a few minutes in a romantic daydream about visiting him in prison. I could take him care packages with books and baked goods, and the other prisoners would be so jealous of his sexy visitor that they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.

Then I realized what my brain was doing while I wasn’t paying attention, and rolled my eyes at myself. For Christ’s sake, Sasha. Prison wasn’t
romantic
.

He probably wasn’t in the Mafia, anyway.

I came to the end of one paper-clipped set of papers and decided I needed a break. I capped my highlighter and said, “You aren’t in the Mafia, are you?”

Turner looked up, frowning. He narrowed his eyes at me. “I’m afraid I misheard you.”

“The Mafia,” I said. “You know, the mob. Gangsters. You don’t own any laundromats in Queens, do you?”

“The—no,” he said. “I am not in the Mafia. Are you finished with those papers?”

“Some of them,” I said, guilty. He was so focused on his work, and here I was distracting him with my dumb questions. “Here, I found one that has Martin’s name on it.” I slid the paper across the table to him.

“Excellent,” he said. He looked at his computer screen, and then said, “It’s almost 8. I’ll order some food.”

“I’m not that hungry,” I said, and just then my stomach rumbled loudly enough that I was sure Turner could hear it.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “It sounds like you’re hungry,” he said. “Late nights working call for Chinese takeout. Any preference?”

“Sesame chicken,” I said immediately. “And some of those crispy noodle things.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I’ll order some steamed vegetables instead. It’s better for your waistline.”

My jaw dropped. “Are you telling me I need to watch my weight?”

He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled slightly, and that was enough.

“You’re
teasing
me,” I said. “Oh my God. Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

“I’m fairly certain that isn’t a law,” he said. “You know you’re gorgeous. You can eat as many crispy noodles as you want.”

“
Thank
you,” I said. This was turning out to be a weird evening. First he’d said
okay
, then he teased me about my takeout order—next he would reveal that we were long-lost siblings, or something. Except that would be disgusting, so I hoped it didn’t really happen.

Plus, then I couldn’t ever have sex with him again.

I really, really wanted to have sex with him again.

And not just sex: I wanted to lie in bed with him, my head resting against his chest, and listen to his heartbeat. I wanted to wake up with him in the morning and tangle our feet together and go back to sleep for another hour. Stupid things. Unrealistic, movie-happy-ending things.

Rule fucking one.

He went into the kitchen to order, and I heard him running the tap and opening the refrigerator. Maybe he’d finally bought some food. He came back a few minutes later with a glass and a bottle of Coke, and set them down in front of me.

“You didn’t have Coke the last time I was here,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I bought some.” His tone said,
obviously
.

“Who told you I like Coke?” I asked, suspicious.

“Nobody,” he said. “It’s a common soda product. Most people enjoy it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well. Thanks.”

“The food should be here in about fifteen minutes,” he said, and sat down and focused on his laptop again.

“Why don’t you have a secretary?” I asked.

He glanced up at me and sighed. “I take it you aren’t going to sit quietly and let me work.”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m too hungry. And this isn’t in my job description, anyway. I’ll highlight some more stuff for you after we eat, but first you have to answer my questions.”

He closed his laptop and pushed it away. “I thought I was paying you to be quiet, docile, and scantily clothed.”

“You should have put it in the contract,” I said. “So why don’t you have some underling to go through all this paperwork for you?”

He sighed again, but I got the feeling he was more amused than annoyed. If he
really
didn’t want to answer me, he would just tell me to shut up or order me to go home. “My mother thinks that having my own secretary would make me lazy.”

It was strange to think of him having a mother. He seemed like he sprang directly from someone’s head, like a Greek god. I said, “My mother thinks that you catch a cold from going outside with wet hair, but that doesn’t mean I listen to her.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have that luxury,” he said, “seeing as how my mother is my boss.”

“Your
what
?” I asked. That was basically the last thing I had expected him to say. “You mean your mother owns a strip club?”

He rolled his eyes. “Sassy, the club is only a small component of our larger real estate and business holdings. You have very strange ideas about how corporations operate.”

“I didn’t know you were a
corporation
,” I said. “I thought you were just some rich guy who owned the club for kicks.”

“For kicks,” he repeated, with a look on his face like he had just smelled something bad. “Hardly. The club was my mother’s idea, actually.”

I tried to imagine his mother: a woman who wouldn’t let her son have a secretary, and who bought strip clubs as—what, as investment properties? She probably made grown men cry in the board room every day of the week. “So you have a company,” I said.

“A private equity firm. Yes,” he said. “Leveraged buyouts, primarily.”

I didn’t know what that meant. Yolanda could explain it to me. “And your mother runs it,” I said. “The firm.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a family business. My father’s family, actually, but he has little interest in finance. He was happy to turn operations over to my mother after they married.”

Christ, a mother
and
a father? Next he would tell me he had eight siblings and a love-child stashed away somewhere. “So you’re like, old money,” I said.

“Something like that,” he said. “Yes. My mother intends to retire soon and transition me into a leadership role. That’s why she won’t let me have a secretary. She thinks it’s important for me to know how to do everything myself.”

“Your mother sounds like a smart lady,” I said.

His face creased into a wide, genuine smile. It made him look younger than he was, and somehow innocent. Like he was just a regular person underneath the suits and the cold demeanor. “She is,” he said.

As long as he was in a chatty mood, I was determined to keep him talking. I wanted to know everything about him: all of his childhood memories, all of his secret dreams. “Do you get along with your parents?” I asked.

“Yes, very well,” he said. “They’re both terrific people.”

That was sort of surprising—I could imagine Turner having distant and strained relations with his parents, but a warm family life was harder to summon up. “You grew up in the city?” I asked, and he nodded. “What was it like?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t imagine it was very different than growing up anywhere else,” he said. “Where did
you
grow up?”

My heart stuttered. I really didn’t want to talk about my past with him. His life was so glamorous, and my family was—well, we were hicks. I’d been a pretty happy kid, and my parents had loved me very much, but I knew that our life—a double-wide trailer in backwoods Appalachia—would sound pitiful and grim to someone like Turner, who had probably grown up with every luxury imaginable. So I said, “It’s not very interesting. Where did you go to school?”