Beautiful Stranger (Beautiful Bastard 2)

“One night a week,” I said. “I’ll be yours one night a week.”

He stared at me with that calm reflective expression and I realized that every time I’d seen him before this, he’d been showing every card he had. His smile was complete honesty. His laughter was him being perfectly real. But this expression was his mask.

My stomach tightened painfully. “If you even want to see me again, that is.”

“I absolutely do,” he assured me. “I’m just not entirely sure what you’re saying.”

I stood up and walked over to the window. I felt him move behind me and I said, “I feel like the only way I can handle it right now is to give it a clear boundary. Outside that boundary, I’m here to work, to build a life. But inside that boundary . . .” I trailed off, closing my eyes and just letting the idea take hold. The idea of Max’s hands, and his mouth. His sculpted torso and the thick length of him pressing into me again and again. “We can do anything. When I’m with you I don’t want to worry about anything else.”

He moved to the side, so that I could turn my head just slightly and look right at him, and stared directly into my eyes. He smiled. The mask was gone, the midafternoon sun blazed into the room, and his eyes looked like green caught on fire.

“You’re offering only your body to me.”

“Yeah.” I was the first to look away.

“You’ll truly only give me one night a week?”

I winced. “Yes.”

“So you want to have . . . what? Some sort of committed fling?”

I laughed and said, “I certainly don’t like the idea of you whoring your way across the boroughs. So, yes, that’s part of the deal. If you even do that.”

He scratched his jaw, not answering my implied question. “What night? The same night all the time?”

I hadn’t really thought this part through, but I nodded, winging it. “Fridays.”

“If I’m not to see other women, what if I have a work function, or an event on a Thursday or a Saturday that requires a date?”

My chest twisted with anxiety. “No. No public appearances. I guess you can take your mom.”

“You’re a demanding little thing.” His smile followed his words and grew slowly, like a low-burning fire. “This feels so organized. That hasn’t been our modus operandi, to date, little Petal.”

“I know,” I allowed. “But this is the only way that felt sane to me. I don’t want to be in the papers with you.”

His eyebrows pulled together. “Why that specifically?”

Shaking my head, I realized I’d said too much. I murmured, “I just don’t.”

“Do I get any say in how this goes?” he asked. “Do we just meet at your flat and f**k all night?”

I ran my index finger down his chest again, venturing lower, to his belt buckle. Here was the part I hoped he was up for and the part that scared me most. After the club, the restaurant, the fund-raiser, I was starting to feel like an adrenaline junkie. I didn’t want to give that up, either.

“I think we’ve done pretty well so far. I don’t want to go to my apartment. Or yours, for that matter. Text me where I should be, and generally what to expect so I know what to wear. I don’t care about the rest.”

I lifted myself on my toes, kissed him. It started out teasing, but then turned deep enough to make me want to take back everything I’d said and give myself to him every night of the week. But he pulled away first, breathing heavily.

“I can avoid photographers, but I’ve become obsessed with taking pictures of you. That’s my only condition. No faces, but photos are allowed.”

A shiver moved up my spine and I stared up at him. The thought of having proof of him touching my bare skin, of him looking at pictures of us together and getting hard, made a hot flush spread up my chest to my cheeks. He noticed, smiling and running the backs of his fingers along my jaw.

“When this ends, you delete them,” I said.

He nodded immediately. “Of course.”

“I’ll see you Friday then.” I reached inside his jacket, taking a moment to run my hand over the hard lines of his chest before pulling his phone from his inside pocket and dialing my cell number. It rang in my purse. I could sense his amused smile without even looking up at his face. I slipped his phone back in his pocket, turned, and walked away, knowing if I looked over my shoulder at him, I’d walk back.

I waved goodbye to his mother and took the long elevator ride back to the lobby, thinking about that cell camera of his all the way down.

Two blocks away my phone buzzed in my purse.

Meet me Friday at 11th and Kent in Brooklyn. 6:00. Have a cab bring you and stay in it until I’ve opened the door. You may come straight from work.

Six

Back when I was young and naïve, Demitri Gerard had been the second client I ever took on. He’d had a small but profitable antiques business in North London. On paper, Demitri’s business was nothing special: he paid his bills on time, had a steady client list, and made more money a year than what he put out on expenditures. But what was truly exceptional about Demitri was his uncanny ability to sniff out rare finds that few people knew existed. Pieces that, in the right hands, sold for small fortunes to collectors around the globe.

He’d needed capital to expand and, I’d later learned, to bankroll a long list of informants who kept him apprised of what was to be found and where. Informants who made him a very, very rich man. Legally, of course.

In fact, Demitri Gerard had become so successful he currently owned twelve warehouses in New York City alone, the largest of which stood at Eleventh and Kent.

Pulling the paper from my pocket, I entered the code Demitri had given me on the phone this morning. The alarm beeped twice before the door buzzed, the lock disengaging with a loud, metallic click. With a quick wave to my driver, I opened the heavy steel door, hearing my car pull away from the curb as I stepped inside.

A freight elevator took me to the fifth floor and I slipped off my jacket, rolling up my sleeves as I looked around. Clean, cement walls and floors, bay lighting suspended from a beamed ceiling. Demitri used these buildings to house collections that would later be sold at auction or moved to various dealers. Thank f**k this collection had yet to sell.

Sunlight still poured through the dingy and cracked windows that lined two walls of the warehouse, and row after row of draped mirrors filled the space. I crossed the room, stirring up small plumes of dust with my footsteps, and lifted the plastic covering from the only piece of furniture in the entire warehouse: a red velvet chaise I’d had delivered earlier that day. I smiled, running my hands along the curved back, and imagining how gorgeous Sara would look later, naked and begging on top of it.