The List (4 page)

“Is that what you’d call what we just did?”

He thought before he spoke, a point to his advantage. “No.”

“What I do is what we just did.”

“Take a risk. A dare. A challenge.”

“Exactly,” she said, and slid her phone into the pocket of her jacket.

“Hmm,” he said, soft and considering.

“I have to get back to the shop. I told my assistant I’d bring her a latte”—she checked her watch—“thirty-five minutes ago. Not even Starbucks is that slow.”

“I want to see you again.”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob, and considered him. He waited, silent, unmoving. Through all of that, he hadn’t moved, his arms still folded across his chest, his legs still crossed at the ankles. If he was aroused by what they’d just done, he kept it contained. She remembered his first impulse, the one he revised. She was sure he’d started with something sexual, not a decorous dinner invitation. They’d had a couple of discarded drafts, but hit their stride with his texts.

She opened her clutch and withdrew a silver card case, then a business card. Her name was engraved on one side in Garamond. The other side was blank. On it she wrote her address, then held it out to him.

“I’m having drinks with a friend,” she said as he took it, “so I won’t be home until after nine.”

He traced the edges of the card, then looked at her. “You’re serious.”

“About sex? Always.” She opened the door to his office. “Have a pleasant day, Agent Logan.”

D
id that just happen? Did that really just happen?

Turns out his second experience of Tilda Davies in the flesh was no less of a kick to the head than the first. Daniel was supposed to escort visitors back to the reception desk when they left. The brass frowned on unescorted civilians wandering through the office, but he couldn’t move. His feet were nailed to the floor, his butt glued to his desk while his body battled a dozen conflicting urges. Getting off was priority number one. Not happening. Not with Tilda Davies walking down the rows of cubes like it was a runway. Her legs were steady, her shoulders straight, her neck exposed. She didn’t look back, didn’t throw him a teasing bone or a coy bone or a sultry come-over-and-fuck-me-soon bone. She swept through the door a dumbfounded agent held open for her, and disappeared.

If he didn’t have her card in his hand, he wouldn’t believe what just happened. Her card. Thick, made of stiff paper slightly rough to the touch, with just her name in bold, clear letters. No address, no phone number, no job title. Matilda Davies, with her address handwritten on the back. She’d pulled out a pricey pen to write it down. He automatically registered the cross streets. Perry Street between Bleecker and Hudson. West Village. Nice. What passed for quaint residential in Manhattan.

Who did that? Who still handed out cards like they were in
The Age of Innocence
? Everyone their age just pulled out a phone and entered a number into the contacts, then sent a text to establish the connection. Letters and personal cards, handwritten in ink, suggested Tilda wanted a more permanent connection than pixels on a screen forming a number. She had a cell phone, but she gave him a card. Not a business card for West Village Stationery. A Tilda card. He had her cell phone number, and now her address. It felt like a victory, and not a small one, either.

Outside the glass, a couple of agents clustered in a group around a desk turned to look at him, then mouthed,
Lunch in ten?
Daniel pulled himself together and picked up his phone. He had voice mail. He always had voice mail. New York City was the hub of the financial world, leaving more than enough crime for the FBI, the SEC, the DOJ, Treasury, and the NYPD to share among them.

Time seemed distorted, the leaves rustling in slow motion, twisting and dappling the sidewalk as they walked to the restaurant. He surfaced enough to order, but didn’t remember eating his food, too busy imagining what it would be like to get Tilda Davies in bed. He talked, but what he said, or what anyone else said, didn’t really register. He went back to work, made more phone calls, reviewed reports, got in a heated argument with his boss over a plea bargain for a repeat offender specializing in work-at-home scams. It wasn’t the high-profile financial services fraud he wanted to work, but he’d left the NYPD to come to the FBI prepared to do his time before moving up the food chain.

The office emptied out as the light melted from day to the burnished gold of evening. Daniel looked up at the clock again to find that six o’clock had come and gone. He hadn’t felt this out of time and place since . . . ever. But, in his defense, he’d never met anyone like Tilda Davies before. In the privacy of his office, with his notebook before him and a pen in his hand, he noted the date, the time, the weather, and then started a list of pertinent details.

Black hair, curly, exposed nape.

Eyes that could only be described as gray, not blue, not green, certainly not anything in the range of brown. Thick black lashes.

Pale skin. He knew it had seen sunshine, because a faint smattering of freckles dotted her nose and her cheeks, but she looked like a woman who disdained the sun.

Thin, wide lips, the barest hint of color over the natural pale pink.

A slim, angular body, bordering on bony.

She’d come alive in the night, something he knew now that he’d seen her during the day. A nocturnal animal, he finally decided, out of step with the natural rhythm of day and night.

He left the precinct just before seven, not enough time to head back to Brooklyn before knocking on Tilda’s door. Instead he walked over to the High Line and strolled the length of it, watching the shadows lengthen as the sun set over the Jersey shoreline. Sitting on one of the rolling benches, he wondered if Tilda liked this park, or if she liked green spaces at all. He wondered what he’d have to do to find out.

He knew this feeling, knew it well, recognized it from sense memories burned into his nerves. The swoop and tumble of his gut the first time he arrested someone, the first time an arrest went bad, the first time he put handcuffs on a murderer. He liked puzzles. Solving them was better than trying to get promoted or get laid or get rich. Tilda Davies was pure risk, and he was an addict.

Promptly at nine he rang the bell at Fifteen Perry Street. She appeared wavy and disjointed through the leaded glass windows until she opened one half of the double door, then leaned one shoulder against the opposite side and tilted her head. She was all angles and opposites, body moving one direction, head moving another, cheekbones and chin and collarbone visible in the dip of the same sheath dress she’d worn this morning.

“Hi,” she said.

He’d expected something profound, something astonishing, so the mundane greeting made him huff. “Hi,” he said.

“Something tells me this isn’t your first time doing this.”

“Showing up at a woman’s house for sex? No. Sorry. Were you hoping for a virgin?”

“Quite the opposite,” she said, the same little smile on her face.

He had a sudden urge to wipe it off her mouth with his. God, she was tough. “You going to let me in, or are we going to do this out here?”

Another pause. “The slate will be quite hard on your tailbone and my knees,” she said, and stepped back to admit him.

The double door was only the width of a typical front door, so he had to angle himself through, into the foyer. The walnut flooring gleamed in the low light, drawing the eye to the back of the town house. The stairs and handrail were made of the same polished material, but the risers and rails were painted white. Black-and-white prints framed in black mirrored the handrail’s progress to the second floor, but he couldn’t see the images, just the contrast.

“Nice,” he said.

“It’s my mother’s,” she replied, and stepped out of her heels.

He bit back the automatic questions because she’d bent to pick up her heels and was climbing the stairs. He followed her, up to the second floor, around the bend, past two closed doors to another set of stairs. On the third floor, the doors were open. He saw a desk and a chaise through one door and a big bed through another. She walked into that room. He took five seconds to peer out of the floor-to-ceiling windows down at the tiny private garden below, added another quarter of a million to his estimate of the town house’s value, then followed her into the bedroom.

“Does your mother live here, too?” he said to the empty room.

She emerged from the closet, still in the dress but without the shoes. “She lives in London,” she replied, and walked around the bed to the nightstand. “Were you serious about the restraints?”

“Yes.”

“I’d prefer not to use handcuffs. They’ll scratch the wood.”

“Fine,” he said.

He caught a quick glimpse of the drawer’s rather interesting contents before she withdrew two satin cords and tossed them on the mound of pillows at the top of the bed. She flung the white comforter to the foot of the bed, then reached behind her for the zipper.

“Stop.”

She stopped, her head tipped forward, as if bending her head made it easier to reach the tab, then looked at him. There was another second of odd alignment, where he realized his brain was automatically filling in the movement of hair, to hide, to tease, the obvious mark of femininity. But Tilda was all cheekbones and spiky eyelashes, shoulders and elbows, the collar of her dress gaping forward to reveal her collarbones.

He walked around the foot of the bed. “Let me do that,” he said quietly.

Her hands dropped to her sides. Permission granted. He pressed a thumb and index finger to the tab and drew the zipper down. The still air in the house seemed to absorb the noise. It was so silent here, Manhattan’s energy dampened, no radio or iPod, just the tap and swish of the leaves against the windows at the other end of the hall, and Tilda’s spine, revealed in the white light.

He slid his palms over her shoulder blades and eased the fabric forward, watching the bumps and fibers catch the light before dropping down her arms to the floor. She wore sheer white underwear but of a surprisingly modest cut, the cleft between her buttocks a shadowy secret, a hint of lace at her hipbones and between her breasts as he bent forward and set his mouth to her nape.

“I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I saw you.”

Goose bumps shivered under his lips, down her arms, pebbling her nipples in the sheer white fabric. “Kiss my neck?”

“Yes,” he murmured into her nape, then licked each bump on his way down to between her shoulder blades. She arched and flexed like a cat.

“Ticklish?”

“Sensitive.”

“Good.” He unfastened her bra and let it drop onto the dress. He set his fingertips on her hipbones, then drew them up her ribs, along the swell of her small breasts, then curving around over her shoulder blades to press both thumbs on either side of her spine. At the pressure her head tipped forward. He slid one hand around to lay his index finger and thumb on either side of her jaw and wrapped his other arm around her waist to hold her exactly where he wanted her. Her hands gripped his forearms as he explored the sensitive, vulnerable skin. This didn’t work for everyone, but for some people the nape was wired directly to the sex drive in the brain. They got off on the submissiveness of this, a primitive response left over from the animals humans had once been, where baring the nape meant surrender, where biting it, as he just bit Tilda’s, meant ownership.

All her angles melted into sinuous lines, and she undulated in his grip, seeking contact where she didn’t have it. Her nipples were swollen, but he ignored them, instead sliding his hand under the elastic stretched across her abdomen and stroking the outer lips of her pussy. The curls there were damp enough to make him moan.

“Is this now, or from earlier?” he growled.

“Yes,” she said, and spread her thighs.

He shook his head in disbelief, but didn’t oblige her. Instead he cupped her breasts and squeezed, avoiding the nipples, which tightened at the touch, before letting go and stepping back.

“Lie down,” he said.

She turned to face him, eased her bottom back on the bed, then swung her legs up. There was a natural grace to the way she moved, a completely unselfconscious way of getting from point A to point B. He toed out of his shoes, shucked his jacket, and rolled his sleeves to his elbows, then caught her smiling at him.

“What?”

“You look like a man getting down to work.”

He knelt on the bed beside her and picked up the silk cords. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

In response she lay back and stretched her arms to the headboard. The movement was part surrender, part challenge, all paradox, and somehow entirely Tilda. He was thoroughly experienced, but he’d never seen anything like her before. Untouchable, and yet utterly available to him.

He looped the silk around her wrists and tied the cords in loose bows, then tapped the end against her palms. She watched him, eyes wide open, content in the silence. “One tug and you’re loose,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said seriously.

“Anything I can’t do?”

“You mean, do I have an odd quirk, like you can tie me to the bed and go down on me until I scream but you can’t kiss me? I won’t know until you do it,” she said.

The calm response surprised him until he remembered the way she swung her legs in the air twenty-two stories over the street. “You’ll let me know if I need to stop.”

“That wasn’t a question,” she said, amused.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said, and straddled her hips.

The amusement disappeared. For a long moment he studied her, the slender length of her arms hollowing to the curve of her underarm, then swelling again at her breasts. Her nipples were small, pale pink, and distended, and her skin was pale cream but for a bit of color in her cheeks and her mouth. He palmed his jaw and rubbed, hearing a day’s worth of growth scrape against his skin. The sound rasped into the room, and her mouth opened slightly.

He bent down, braced his forearms on either side of her head, and gently nuzzled her cheek, drawing rough skin down to her jaw, then turning his face to hers, chin to chin. Her lips parted in anticipation but he didn’t close the gap, just drew his lips above hers in a parody of a kiss before stroking opposite cheek to opposite cheek. A short puff of air aimed at her earlobe earned him an answering exhale that drifted over the juncture of his neck and collarbone. He retraced his steps, this time using his parted lips on her chin, a dry, open kiss of sorts.

“You have very pale skin,” he murmured into her ear. “I’m going to mark it.”

“Yes, please,” she whispered in return.

He chuckled, then pressed kisses into her eyelids, feeling her lashes snag in his five o’clock shadow as her lids fluttered. He continued down her cheek, over her jaw, to the pale skin of her neck. A very faint perfume tempted him to linger there before he slid one hand under her head and tightened his grip in her hair. One tug arched her neck. He set his lips to her pulse point just under her jaw, then moved back up over her chin to her mouth.

This time he let his lips graze hers, again and again, slowly deepening the pressure but without using tongue, detouring to her ear or the hinge of her jaw or her cheek, until her mouth was wide open. She shifted restlessly under him, her thighs pressing against his knees, her hips lifting into his, softening, opening, flooding with desire.

The rhythmic lifting movements stopped when he touched his tongue to hers. He gave her one slow lick and withdrew, and watched as she bit her lip, licked the spot, then whimpered. He bit the same spot, kissed his way down the tendon in her throat to the hollow between her collarbones, and worked his way back up again. He licked his way into her mouth, granted access to his, and felt her breasts lift as she inhaled deep need.