The Fifth Favor (25 page)

“What about your article?” Confusion flushed his features and stole his hayseed accent. “You hardly asked me anything. I can tell you whatever you want to know about this place.”

“I have all the information I need.” All the information she’d ever need when it came to heartache and bad decisions. “Goodbye, Joe. And please, thank Azure for me. I won’t be back.”

She darted through the crowd to the entrance, where she waited with her heart drumming while the well-favored butler retrieved her silk wrap and swung open the door for her.

“Billie,” an infuriatingly familiar male voice rose over the steady din of chatter behind her, but she didn’t stop. “Billie, wait.”

“Go to hell,” she muttered, her heels tapping out her rage in hard staccato against the steps.

She shooed off a valet and headed down the sidewalk, unsure of her direction, knowing only that she wanted to get away from Avalon. Adrian’s voice drew closer.

Damn his long legs. Damn her strappy, too-high sandals. She paused, hopped on one foot to remove one shoe, then the other. Then she sprinted, mindless of the punishing concrete, weaving between pedestrians, the warm wind shaking free her carefully styled chignon.

Despite her mad dash, Adrian caught up with her a block from Avalon. Grasping her arm, he swung her around to look into her hot face.

“Don’t touch me.” Panting, she shook off his hand, but he captured her wrist. She didn’t know she was crying until she heard her own voice, choked and raw, pierce the night. “I thought I could handle it. Azure sent—she said—damn it! I thought I could still get the answers you wouldn’t give me about Avalon, about you, but it was foolish of me. Let go of me, Adrian. You don’t do relationships, remember? You’d rather screw 137

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total strangers and have no one give a damn about you, your needs, your pleasure…you don’t want love. You want an opponent, and I’m tired of playing.”

Instead of releasing her, he drew her into the darkened doorway of a vacant boutique and pressed her against the brick siding. They were both panting, two runners fleeing the truth. Heat radiated from his body, through his clothes, through hers. He burned her alive.

“I’m losing my mind,” he whispered into her hair. “And probably my job too.”

Something in his words made her push on his chest to get a better look at his face.

“What are you talking about?”

“I shouted your name across the entire party.” A rueful smile tugged at his lips. “I blatantly abandoned a loyal customer in the middle of one of the most important events of the year to chase after you. What the hell were you doing there?”

A bittersweet wave washed through her anger. “Maybe you should ask Azure. That woman’s a smart cookie. She’s the one who invited me.” Her voice quavered on a fresh wave of unshed tears. “At first I didn’t know why, but now I see her plan. She knows about us, doesn’t she, Adrian? I’ll bet she warned you to stay away from me.”

He hesitated, his eyes narrowed as realization flashed behind them. “She found out about the concert. She knows we’ve been seeing each other.”

“How? How does she know?” She glared at him. “Did you tell her?”

Weariness seemed to press down his shoulders and he closed his eyes. “A client saw us at the park. Not one of mine,” he added when Billie made a sound of derision.

“But a frequent customer at the club. I’ve told you before—nothing’s sacred. Not even my personal life.”

Despair rose in her throat like clawing fingers. “This isn’t going to work. I’m going to get hurt. I already am.” She tugged fruitlessly against his grasp. “Let go, damn it.”

“God help me—I want to. Don’t you know that?”

That was when she saw his intention, and everything in her screamed not to allow his kiss; that one taste of him would surely shatter her.

But it was too late to move. His face blocked out the night as his ravenous mouth opened over hers. He kissed her until she quit fighting him and desire weighted her limbs, until her knees crumpled, and then he held her up, pressed between the doorway and his hard body, one palm flattened on the bricks by her head, the other hugging her hips. He kissed her until the breath had long abandoned her lungs and she existed solely on sensation.

Then she grew aware of the unsteady tremble in his body, and realization washed through her, brought her back to consciousness. He was shaking. Emotions stretched to the limit. Passions unleashed…because of her.

The sandals still clutched in her hand hit the ground.

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“Don’t,” she said weakly when his mouth slid down the side of her neck. The damp flicker of his tongue against her sensitive skin made her shudder. “Don’t make this harder for me than it already is.”

He raised his head, his breath rushing between them. “You want me to let you go, Billie?”

No.
“Yes. And don’t you dare try to dicker with me. I won’t owe you a thing.”

“But you will.” His palm slid down to cup her breast through the thin, silky bodice of her dress. “There’s always a price.”

Billie groaned, but he swallowed the protest when he lowered his head and kissed her again, more gently this time, his tongue slipping between her teeth to caress and incite. She melted into him, but common sense assailed her when he let her up for air.

“I can’t do this, Adrian. I
won’t
.”

“Why not, when it may solve the problem?” He dipped his knees, aligned his hips against hers and slowly straightened, dragging his erection against her in a way that made her groan again, with desire this time. “A favor for a favor. Come back to Avalon.

As a client. My client.”

His words sank in, and chilled understanding settled over her, stiffening her in his embrace. “Why? So you can prove Azure wrong?”

“This has nothing to do with Azure.”

“It has everything to do with Azure, Adrian,” Billie said bitterly. “She doesn’t want you involved with me, and you know it. You’re the jewel in her crown. She invited me so I could see you at work, with another woman. To show me…”
What you really are.

Lost in a world where I don’t belong.

“God—I should’ve never come to that party.” She shook her head and slipped from his arms, needing space to breathe. She could smell his skin, cedar and passion. It soaked her senses, made it hard to think. “That woman you were with…did you have sex with her tonight?”

“No.”

“But you planned to.”

He gazed back at her, unwavering. “Not quite. She’s a voyeur.”

“Please.” Billie slumped against the wall. “Spare me the soulless details.”

“Why? You want to ask me what I was doing with her. Do you know about voyeurs, Billie?”

“I know enough to be disturbed.”

“But this one’s different.” He stepped closer and circled his hands around her neck, thumbs brushing sinuously against her collarbones. “A voyeur likes to watch other people’s pleasure. The woman I was with tonight likes to watch her companion pleasure himself.”

“It sounds humiliating,” she muttered.

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“It can be.” He leaned forward and his lips feathered over her eyebrow. “Every aspect of my work has that potential. But I let my fantasies pull me out of the humiliation.” His lashes brushed a butterfly’s kiss against her cheek. “Ask me who I was going to think about tonight, when I was jacking off for the benefit of a stranger.

Ask me who I was going to think about to get through the degradation and take me to a place of incredible pleasure.”

“Stop it.” She shoved aside the provocative possibilities and narrowed her gaze at him. “Let’s be straight with each other, shall we?”

He sighed and stepped back, weight on one foot, a posture of weariness. “All right.”

“It’s apparent you want me.”

“Yes.”

“And you know how I feel about you.”

The hard lines of his face softened almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”

“What I
don’t
understand is why I have to come to Avalon to make love with you when you could take me home with you right now.”

It rang in the air between them, the truth only one of them could speak.

When he didn’t answer, she glared at him in accusation. “You want to turn me into your client because it’s the only way you’ll be comfortable being intimate with me. You can’t stand the idea of a real relationship outside of Avalon. It scares you.”

His expression blackened. “Be careful, Billie. You don’t know me as well as you think.”

“I know you enough to be hurt by you,” she retorted. “I know you enough to see that you’re confused about me, and that maybe you want something more from me than you get from your customers.”

“Oh, really?” His arm snaked around her waist and pulled her up against him. “I know a few things about you, too, Billie. You think you’re above coming to Avalon as a client. You’re too high and mighty. The women who pay for sex are desperate, right?

Lonely. Unsatisfied with the real world. And you think you’re not?”

“I’m not.” She shoved against him, but he only tightened his embrace, reached beneath the short hem of her dress and slid under her panties, absorbing her struggle until his fingers made contact with the wet, hot evidence that she couldn’t hate him no matter how she tried.

“You’re the most desperately lonely woman I know, Billie Cort. If I put your name in the appointment book, you couldn’t stay away.”

“Try me, you egotistical bastard.”

They stared at each other, both breathless, as his finger searched, probed, found the entrance to her body and brought her to her toes with a single, well-aimed stroke. Then he dipped his head and caught her mouth, angry, bruising.

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The instant she stiffened in alarm, the kiss changed. Slowing. Melting into languid gentleness as his finger thrust rhythmically into her core. Switching tactics.

Defeated by desire, Billie slid back against the brick wall. Her hands crept over his shoulders, across the smooth material of his jacket, reading the shift of muscles beneath.

He, too, was sweating from the chase, from tumultuous emotion. She wanted to rip away his clothing, feel his damp skin, the result of his exertion, the proof that he hadn’t wanted to let her get away.

They flowed together in the shadows, passion mounting between them, connected by turmoil and the sinuous thrust of his finger inside her. She was going to come. There, in public, on a city street, shoved up against a cold brick wall with a man’s hand between her legs. Nothing had ever been this degrading—or exciting. She pressed her open mouth to his shoulder to muffle her cry as the climax racked her with violent shudders.

Somewhere beyond the doorway where they stood, a group of people approached on the sidewalk, laughing, chatting, breaking the spell and spilling Billie from her unbidden ride to ecstasy.

Reality returned with all its twisted vehemence.

Adrian’s hand went still against her wet, heated flesh and he moved around to shield her with his body until the pedestrians passed. When the voices faded, he gently withdrew from her, smoothed down her dress, stepped back. The lines of his posture straightened, and Billie could read his utter withdrawal, not just physically, but emotionally.

In a sudden fit of anger and desperation, she shoved him back against the opposite wall, a feral assault that surprised both of them. It felt good to strike out, and Billie wasn’t done. She anchored herself before him, her posture threatening, fingers curled into fists at her sides.

Adrian didn’t push her away. He tucked his hands behind his back and watched her in silence, as if daring her to take it further.

She rose to the challenge, gliding over her anger with self-control born out of nowhere. “So far we’ve established the kinds of things your clients like, and that I’m to be one of the elite few, right, Adrian?”

Her fists unknotted and she let her palms sweep between his lapels, down the front of his damp linen shirt. His abdomen was rock-hard beneath her hands when she yanked his shirttails from his pants and slid beneath to touch damp, bare skin. “I can tell you right now what I want from you. I want the reins. I want control.”

His stomach contracted beneath her fingers. A shaky rush of breath slipped between his teeth and he shivered hard, but didn’t speak.

“Can you give me that, Adrian? Can you give up your precious control? I’ll pay you. A thousand bucks an hour—what do you say? Give me the control.” Her teeth closed around his earlobe, tongue flicking the gold earring there. “Or are you too scared you’ll never get it back?”

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His only answer was resolute silence.

She slid her hand lower to press against the granite evidence of his need. Her palm curved around his erection, stroked with enough pressure that she could feel the quickening throb of blood through the material of his pants. “Could we pretend, just for one night, while I’m paying you my hard-earned dollars, that you have no will of your own when it comes to me? I’m sure you’ve done it with other clients.”

“Billie,” he hissed finally, a sound of agony and delight as his palms flattened against the wall behind him, hips thrusting into her relentless caress. His pretense at impassivity fell away, exposing the man beneath as hungry, needful and just as desperate as she.

Billie wasn’t finished. “Will you let me tie you up? Touch you and tease you and taste you until you beg me to finish it? I could one-up your redheaded voyeur when it comes to doling out humiliation. And you’d let me, I’m certain, for the right fee.

Everyone has his price, right, Adrian? How much money would it take to get you to admit that you love me? Because I know—”

Tears choked off her words and she shook her head, scrambled to regain equilibrium. “—I know what a talented actor you are, and I believe, for the right price, you would admit to loving me. You would relinquish all the wonderful control you’ve wielded in our short-but-sweet relationship.”

“Damn the money,” he gritted. “You know it’s not about that.”

“It’s all about that. You’ve sold your soul for it a million times.”