Looking Inside

She went still. “I am?”

He nodded and took a drink. He took his time swallowing, letting the taste of the bourbon soak into his tongue, studying her face the whole time for clues.

“You blew me away last night with that dance,” he said quietly after he swallowed, setting down his glass. “You could be a professional dancer.”

“The second person on the planet to think so aside from my mother,” she said with a patentable, mischievous grin.

“You’ve blown me away since I first set eyes on you. The sexy book. The sexy clothes. The way you move. Everything.”

Her grin faded. Her mouth trembled.

He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “Is that what turns you on, Eleanor? Having a man watch you? Is that what gets you off? Is exhibitionism your kink?”

He saw her elegant throat tighten in the charged silence that followed.

“I like it,” she admitted softly. Her cheeks deepened in color, but she didn’t look away. “I liked having you watch me.”

“I’ve known a few women who had a proclivity for exhibitionism. I was never into it—or them—personally, but I can’t blame a person for having their own thing. It always seemed relatively harmless.” The thought of how she’d looked in that window, of how she’d dangled him on her hook, flamed in his brain. So did irritation. “You, however, were downright mercenary about it.”

“I wanted you to notice me.”

He straightened, taken aback by what struck him as a burst of honesty and annoyance on her part.

“How could you think I wouldn’t notice you?” he asked baldly. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just arrange a meeting with my doorman? Or, you said you knew I was a member at the museum, right? Couldn’t you have just introduced yourself sometime, maybe while I was there for an exhibit opening or something? How come you wanted to torture me?” Jesus, she’d flashed him her pussy the first time he’d ever sat in a public place with her. She couldn’t just have said hi instead? Not that he was complaining about her alternate form of greeting.

Well, maybe a little part of him was. The part not located at his crotch.

She bit at her shapely lower lip. It might have been a nervous gesture on her part. It might have been intentional seduction. In that moment, he didn’t care. The result was one and the same.

“I did it because you tortured me,” she said. He made a sound of disbelief at the unexpected flash of fire in her eyes as she said it.

“I tortured you.”

Her indignation vanished as quick as it came. She glanced aside, her fingers moving faster as she flipped at the edge of the cocktail napkin. “That didn’t come out right. I know you didn’t do it on purpose . . . torture me those times.”

“Eleanor?” he prodded. She glanced up skittishly. “What times, precisely?”

Her mouth pressed tight. He had a strong urge to pry it open with his tongue. For a few seconds, he thought she’d refuse to answer.

“T

hose times I saw you naked,” she finally said, her voice just above a whisper, her eyes downcast. His body tensed. He couldn’t unglue his gaze from her moving mouth. “The times I saw you . . . with other women.”

Her hoarsely uttered words seemed to hover in the air between them.

“That’s an invasion of my privacy.”

“I realize that.”

“Maybe it’s partially my fault for leaving open the curtains. But you could have looked away. You could have drawn your own curtains. You didn’t have to keep looking.”

“Yes. I did.”

She inhaled choppily, her eyes going wide, like the words had escaped her throat without her permission and surprised even her.

“So you got off on watching me with other women.”

“No,” she replied, shaking her head rapidly. She looked a little desperate. “I mean . . . I got off on watching you.”