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I needed an apartment with a lobby like this.
I would have to suck a lot of co**ck to be able to afford it.
That thought made me burst out laughing.
“What?” James asked, wrinkling his brow at me.
“You don’t even want to know.” I laughed some more as the desk clerks nodded to us. “Mr. Preston,” one of the female clerks said. I might have imagined it, but she seemed to be sticking her chest out at him.
James pressed the button for the elevator.
“What floor are you?” I asked, sticking my chest out at him.
“The top.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Of course you are.”
“Of course I am, is right.” He squeezed my hand. “Don’t be fresh, Audrey. I thought we were in love.”
“Part of being in love is calling people out when they act pretentious,” I said as the elevator rose silently.
“I’m not in love with you, so I won’t tell you you’re stepping outside your pay grade,” he said in a warning tone. “Stop being so honest. You’re about to hurt my feelings, and I don’t have any.”
“You’re the boss,” I said, laughing a little. Being alone with him in the elevator wasn’t helping my attraction to him, or my curiosity. I hoped he couldn’t hear my stupid, wildly pounding heart.
This was the thing. The thing that I was working through in my head, as I held hands with my newest, sexiest, richest John in the history of all my Johns—and there were a lot, mind you. James was gorgeous. Any breathing heterosexual woman would instantly agree to that. He had huge shoulders, a square chin, and steel-blue eyes. On top of all this, he was tall, and from what I could guess was going on under his thousand-dollar-plus suit, he appeared to be devoted to working out, damn him.
None of this would have me all that excited. Although I did like his hair, too…it was steel-colored, neither brown nor black, some in-between color of thick, wavy, glossy godliness, gelled back just enough to keep it off his face.
But wait! I was getting off track here, again. Nothing about his looks, not even that glossy hair, was that thrilling to me. I’d been with lots of good-looking men, and while it sometimes made the job a little easier, I’d found that the good-looking ones were just as likely to be as**sholes as the plain-looking ones. In my experience, they were actually a little nastier. Maybe because they’d had everything handed to them their whole lives, and it still wasn’t working out for them.
His looks weren’t what was troubling me.
The fact that when he touched me my body responded with heat didn’t bother me, either. That was one good thing about hooking, aside from the money: I usually enjoyed the sex, as long as the John was decent and relatively kind.
I also liked good-looking men with big shoulders and big…hands, which James had. Not that I’d been studying them in the car or anything, wondering if he was going to break down eventually and let me see what else he had that might be big…
I was getting off track again. What I wanted to say, in one complete and uninterrupted thought, was what worried me about James, and what was going to happen over the next two weeks, was that he seemed almost normal. Like someone I could talk to. Like someone I might need to help.
I needed a lot of things. Needing to help someone else was not one of them. In fact, that was probably the last thing I needed, on a long list of last things. I was going to have to watch my back with him. Not let him get under my skin. I had enough people to take care of.
We were both watching the numbers on the dial go up, not saying a word. I wondered what he was thinking, and whether or not he felt the same heat between us that I felt.
I wanted to un-feel it. It would just be so much easier, all things considered.
We reached the top floor, and James punched the code in for his unit.
“Holy shit,” I said, knocked out of my inner monologue by the stark beauty of James’s apartment. “This is gorgeous.”
The space was massive, with enormous floor-to-ceiling windows letting in a flood of warm sunlight. Dark hardwood floors gleamed beneath a huge couch packed with colorful throw pillows, and colored clay vases dotted the various tables in the room. It was a stunning but comfortable space, a place where you wanted to pick up a huge book and curl up on the couch.
Given James’s intense attitude, comfortable was not what I was expecting.
“I’m glad you like it.” He released my hand and motioned for me to follow him in. “Thank you. I don’t like being back up here, so I wanted the space to feel like my house in California. Lots of light. Comfortable.”
“It’s definitely not classic Boston,” I said, “but I love it.”
