Pure Attraction Page 16

  After a few months of spending weeks here and there together, Jessie had moved to Hawaii, though she’d still kept her apartment in San Francisco for when she traveled back for meetings. She could have given it up and stayed with Jillian and her boyfriend—who actually was turning out to be a great guy—but she needed her space, too. Plus, spending a week on her own made coming home to Byron even better. It wasn’t hard to recall the reasons she’d resisted the idea of being together for real, but it was hard to remember the fear that had gone along with that resistance. That was what had changed the most. And in place of that fear, she and Byron had found their own kind of love.

  “You still want to go out for an afternoon session?” Byron asked.

  “I definitely need to get out today,” she said. “I’ve been at this desk for the last eight hours, combing through the new developer’s fixes.”

  “I noticed.”

  But she knew he wasn’t upset, even if it was his day off. That was one of his promises to her, freely given: if she moved to Hawaii, he would never want to bother her about her long and sometimes odd hours.

  “How’s the new developer you brought on?”

  Jessie stood up and started across the room “She’s fantastic. When we’re out of this training period, my workload is going to be cut in half.”

  She stopped in front of Byron and wrapped her arms around his neck. “But I’m done thinking about work for today.”

  “Fine with me.”

  His hands moved to her waist, down over her hips, pulling her closer. He bent his head and kissed her.

  “What are you thinking about now?”

  “You sure you can’t figure it out?”

  “Tell me,” he said, his voice a little huskier. “You know I’ll give you exactly what you want.”

  As he spoke these words, every last thought about her workday faded. She kissed him again, not a prelude or an invitation, but an answer to his offering. She loved this man who wanted her just as she was.

  So she told him what she wanted, her most honest answer. “I want to spend the day with you. It’s hard to be away from you when I’m in San Francisco. So much for needing my space, right?”

  He smiled a little. “It’s hard for me, too. But we still have all of today and tonight and tomorrow morning.”

  Another reason she loved him: because he never used these moments where she revealed her vulnerabilities to talk her into something, like, for example, giving up San Francisco altogether. Because he understood what it meant for her to stay in full control of her life.

  And yet, the decision to move in with him had been so easy. Spend most of the month at Byron’s house, in the most beautiful spot on this incredible island? Ordering meals from the Kalani anytime neither of them felt like cooking? They didn’t even need to do their own laundry, and Byron certainly had no expectations that she would do any more around the house than she wanted to. Yeah, really hard decision...

  His big hands moved slowly up to her waist, then down to her hips and around her ass, cupping it, like he was concentrating on the way she felt. And, damn, it was a turn-on when Byron made it so clear he wanted her, no one else.

  “If we do this now, we’re not going to make it out surfing,” she said.

  Byron chuckled. “Is that a no to sex?”

  “Not really. Just a fact.”

  But he gave her a squeeze and pulled back. “But you’re the one going back to San Francisco for a week of meetings. So you’re the one who won’t be able to surf.”

  A smile tugged at Jessie’s lips. “If you’re turning me down, then you deserve to be tormented a little.”

  “As you wish,” he whispered in her ear.

  It was her cue that the game was on. She resisted a smile and instead gave him her haughtiest look. “I’m going to put on my bathing suit. You can wait in the car for me.”

  His cock jumped against her belly, and she stifled a sigh of pleasure. This was going to be a fun evening.

  * * *

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  CHAPTER ONE

  RORY MORTON KNEW perfectly well she wasn’t supposed to be in this room of the extraordinarily posh Parisian private home she was meant to be cleaning. The many bedrooms, studies, and other public areas were to be dusted and carefully made even more beautiful than they already were. The kitchen was to sparkle, the bathrooms were to be left immaculate, and all the glass, chrome, and marble was to shine. The office—visible behind glass and neat as a pin—was not to be disturbed. The garage was not to be entered. The grounds on this parcel of land in the Golden Triangle, located in Paris’s upscale 8th Arrondissement, were tended to by a different service and should be left alone—unless, of course, Rory noted some cause for concern.

  And the locked door on the second floor was to be read as a KEEP OUT sign and obeyed.

  It had all been clearly laid out in the pages upon pages of instructions she’d received from the fussy assistant of whoever owned this surprisingly large property set down in the middle of the city that she’d been hired to clean.

  Rory had come to Paris because it was Paris, which should have been reason enough. She liked to say it just like that and stare at whoever asked as if there could be no other possible answer.

  But another layer to that truth was that she’d become deeply bored with her life, all of which had been lived in and around Nashville. She’d grown up in Nashville. She’d gone to college in Nashville. She loved Nashville—but Rory wanted to see more of the world than Tennessee.

  When her two best friends moved to opposite coasts, Natalie to Los Angeles and Blair to New York, it was possible Rory h
ad felt the need to throw down a power move in the shape of Paris. And yes, she now spent most of her life taking clever pictures to plaster all over her social media accounts to indicate, whenever possible, how much more amazing her life was on the Continent. #expatlife.

  Once in Paris, she’d started a cleaning service because it was the most un-chic thing she could think of to do in the chicest city on earth, and therefore made her seem more authentic. It was a bonus that it also deeply horrified her parents—especially her mother, who liked to point out that she had come all the way to the States from the Philippines so her children could exceed expectations. Not clean up after other people.

  Her long-suffering father preferred to drink his horror in the form of Tennessee whiskey, which he liked to say his people had been making in one form or another since they’d found their way to the Tennessee hills from Scotland or Ireland or both in the 1800s. But when he wasn’t drowning his sorrows, he was still Marty Morton, and his contacts through his decades of producing music provided Rory with a roster of wealthy clients who were only too happy to hire her to clean their Parisian second, or third, or fourth homes.

  Rory liked to pretend that she was doing this because it was art. Everything is art if it’s done by an artist, she’d captioned one of her last posts, of her in profile near a priceless painting in a client’s flat, on her hands and knees with a sponge to scrub the floor.

  She liked to be provocative. She could admit that. And so far it had gotten her hundreds of thousands of followers, so she figured she was doing something right.

  And if Rory found she enjoyed the actual act of cleaning more than she’d expected—that it became almost meditative and reminded her in some ways of dancing—she wisely kept that to herself. It was one thing to do important work as a kind of digital performance artist. It would have been something else entirely to actually be nothing but a house cleaner.

  Not that Rory was concerned about her art at the moment. Darlin, you can’t tell me cleaning a toilet is anything but cleaning a got-damn toilet, her father had said the one time she’d loftily used that word to describe her work in his hearing. And she didn’t bother rolling her eyes at her father from across the ocean because what she was concerned with was the very private room in this place that had been locked up tighter than a drum for three months now.

  Frankly, she thought she deserved a medal for her restraint and respect of her client’s privacy. And for not trying to jimmy the lock. Not even once.

  Of course, the reality was that every other time she’d come here the door to the room had been sealed up so tight it didn’t budge. Meaning that Rory didn’t so much practice any kind of restraint as she’d repeatedly tried the dramatic, medieval door handle—every time she cleaned here—and always, always found it locked.

  Maybe no medals, then.

  But today, at last, the secret room was open.

  Rory had finished up her normal rounds, leaving everything sparkling and bright and lifted, because that was what actually made her happy. Then she’d taken a few artsy photos and posted them, because that was her brand. With all identifying details concealed, naturally, because her clients certainly didn’t want the masses showing up at their homes. Then, on her way out, she’d gone ahead and tried the extraordinarily over-the-top door, fitted as it was in a stone arch, complete with iron studs and scrollwork bands across the sturdy oak planks.

  When everything else in this home was sleek and modern, as if to play off the old church’s gothic architecture.

  She expected it to be as immovable as it always was, but instead, when she tugged on the iron handle, it opened.

  A thrill shot through her, a wild tingling thing that was hot and cold at once—

  “It’s just a door,” she muttered at herself, trying to tamp down all that absurd sensation.

  It didn’t work.

  She pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and hooked her spray bottle—filled with the noninvasive, nonchemical, nonharmful green cleaner she preferred, because she wasn’t a Boomer, hell-bent on destroying the world on her way out, thank you very much—on the waistband of her jeans. Then she took a few snaps of herself trying the handle of the secret door she’d posted about before, making faces upon finding it open and then pushing the door in as she went inside.

  The first thing she noticed were the stained glass windows. She assumed this must have been the nave of the church, where the altar would have been, and the glass seemed warm and remote at once as the summer afternoon light streamed in. She ran her fingers over the wall beside the door, trying to blink her eyes into focus, and found what seemed like a particularly involved panel of light switches. Dimmers and another line of switches and who even knew what.

  She flicked on the light switches, blinked, and then paused. Because she’d expected...a wine cellar, or something. A recording studio, like her father’s back home that he liked to treat like it was the Pentagon.

  But not...this.

  It was a large room with warm hardwood floors. There were area rugs that looked soft and inviting. The ceilings were high and airy, with whitewashed walls wherever the stained glass windows weren’t, and loads of exposed beams and brick.

  It was nicer than her current flat in the Latin Quarter, if she was honest.

  But it was also outfitted with a great many things she’d never seen in person before. There was a bed with four very high and sturdy-looking posters, all fitted with bolts and things that clearly indicated it was used for bondage. There was a chair nearby that looked like a throne but...wasn’t. There was a huge X-shaped cross against one brick wall. On either side of where she stood, stretching down the walls, were...tools. Of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions. Whips and actual chains. Obvious sex toys she could identify and a great many she’d never seen before in her life.

  Her heart thudded at her. Her pulse felt too hot and weighted, somehow, in her veins.

  The rest of the room featured a giant mirror on the wall across from the X that she imagined could also take in the bed. There were a variety of different benches, many with interesting-looking additions, or better still, subtractions, that made her head spin. There was what looked like a padded massage table, if she ignored that the space beneath it was an actual cage. There was a hammock sort of thing slung from one of the beams, what looked like a hanging pull-up bar, and incongruously, high above, one of the biggest and most beautiful chandeliers she’d ever seen.

  And for some reason, the sight of all these things made her breath go shallow.

  If Rory wasn’t mistaken—and how could she be in the face of all this clear evidence?—this was a literal den of iniquity. A red room of pain, as such places were sometimes known. Though this room was not red.

  On the contrary, it didn’t scream out sexual deviant at all. If she squinted and pretended she couldn’t recognize the fetish equipment all over the place—all of which she and her high school friends had tittered over when they’d stolen their mother’s Fifty Shades books—it could have been an upscale, hipster coffeehouse.

  And she told herself it was surprise and astonishment that was making her heart beat double time in her chest. While an unfamiliar sensation seemed to sink down into her belly, then deep between her legs. It was...warm.

  Very, very warm.

  Rory didn’t know what that was, since she’d concluded at some point in college that she was incapable of feeling such things. So intensely, anyway. In that area.

  She rubbed a bit absently at her chest, where her heart was going mad. And sure, this place was a converted church, when she had always been a secular person—except here, now, she could have sworn she could hear a choir singing hosannas in the distance.

  Maybe it had something to do with the way the light came into the stained glass, sending beams of color this way and that, like an invitation.

  Rory drifted farther into the room, skirting the
fascinating furniture as she went. All of which, she was happy to note on a purely professional level, looked even cleaner than the house. She stopped at the foot of the huge bed, swallowed hard at all the metalwork she could see in the four posters—not to mention the bolts in the floor—and decided to take a few pictures of the windows. The stained glass glory of it all.

  It took her a few moments to figure out how to take a reasonable breath, and to start thinking of something clever she could post as a caption to hint at what this room was without actually giving anything away. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to risk getting in trouble with the mysterious owner, but deep down, there was a part of her that wanted to keep this private anyway.

  And not because she was afraid of getting in trouble, but because there was something about that warmth and the way she felt like she might be glowing like the stained glass up above. Or that the choir she almost heard was singing inside her.

  Breathing too hard still, she turned, wanting to see the rest of the room—

  And Rory forgot about the room.

  Because there was a man standing in the doorway.

  “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?” he asked in crisp French.

  His voice was precise and something like polite, though it was also so chilly it made her flinch. Especially when she noticed that chill was matched by the frigid navy blue gaze leveled on her.

  She could feel the thrust of it, everywhere.

  She knew, even though she’d never met him before, that this was the mysterious owner of this place. The man who was too busy to ever interact with his cleaning service, which was fair enough. But he was also so unknowable that even after three months of cleaning his bedroom and bathroom, she knew absolutely nothing about him. Not even his name.