And she was.
But the tightening in my gut said that her calm as I came back into the suite wasn’t a good calm.
No.
It was much like a calm before a storm.
Like that perfect stillness right before a tornado ripped through the town and destroyed everything you had come to care about.
I had no idea how right I would be about that.
I just enjoyed the amiable dinner, the easy conversation, even if my gut twisted recognizing something wrong in her posture, something tight in her voice, something that hinted at trouble, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Hell, I was pretty sure even if I had years to analyze all the possible ways this whole situation could go belly-up—and why—I couldn’t have come anywhere near to the truth.
I just basked in her smile.
I laughed at her jokes.
I told her I had a lead on her giant bats.
We talked about New Zealand and China, about Japan and India, all these places we were near enough to visit next, about all the possible tourist attractions there, about the food to be eaten, about the experiences to be shared.
I had no idea that she had absolutely no intention of going to New Zealand, China, Japan or India with me.
I had no clue, in fact, that she didn’t even plan on finishing out the week with me in Australia.
TEN
Wasp
What the hell was wrong with me?
The sound of the door slamming set my teeth on edge as I lean back against the marble wall, hands pressing over my face.
Had he fucked me hard enough to knock my brain loose? Really, that seemed like the only possible explanation for what was going on here.
I was having an affair with a client.
I was having sex with a client.
I might not have been morally against it, but I damn sure wasn’t exactly all for it either.
It made a situation stupid and messy when it should have been smart, carefully calculated, and neat.
For Christ’s sake, I didn’t do weekenders, let alone drawn-out multi-continental affairs with men. Not normal men. Not men I’d met in a bar and liked enough to go home with.
Let alone clients.
Clients who clearly were only interested in me because I was pretty. Because I had a good ass. Because I was all-too-willing to spread my legs and play by their rules.
Oh.
Good.
God.
Had I fallen into Fenway’s dicksand? Was that what this was?
The signs were certainly all there, weren’t they?
Letting him whisk me away into his world, overwhelm me with his likes and desires, forgetting about my own plans, my own goals, my own desires?
And getting screwed so well that I lost some brain cells in the process.
Ew.
I was that woman.
I vowed never to be that woman.
And it was even worse that I was that woman to this man. This man who was clearly terrible enough at some point in his life, had hurt some woman badly enough in his past, to have her seek me out, pay me an exorbitant fee, and hurt him deeply on an emotional level.
Fenway was not my Roman.
He wasn’t a good man.
He was fun, sure. He was entertaining, yes. He was even more layered than most people would know. And, of course, he was probably the best lay of my life.
But he wasn’t good.
He was just another dog off his leash that I was hired to train, to bring to heel, to modify their behavior.
No one hired me for the little jobs, the guys who forgot Valentine’s Day or shushed you when the game was on.
They hired me for the hopeless cases, the ones everyone had already tried to train.
I was for the lost causes.
I was a last resort.
I had gone and fallen into the dicksand of a man so bad that someone was willing to pay me a hundred grand to make him suffer.
What the hell did that say about him?
About me?
“God damnit,” I growled, taking myself into the glass enclosure, turning the water to cold, hissing through a frigid shower.
This was over, I decided as I dried off.
I was giving it a couple more days without the sex, without the snuggling, without falling into the trap of his infectious enthusiasm.
I was close.
I knew it.
So close.
If I withheld sex, if I had him slobbering after me, I could get those words.
Once I got those words, I was done.
I was on a plane and I was fucking done.
I didn’t know what that would mean for my mental health, if I was going to have some issue coming to grips with not only sleeping with a client, but losing my professional edge.
But that would be a problem for when I was back in the US, back in my skoolie, back on the road, back to freaking normal.
This had been a fantasy world.
I was playing Adventure Barbie and Yacht Barbie and What-The-Fuck-Were-You-Thinking Barbie.
This was not me.