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“Do you know him?”
I nodded. “They’re all signed.”
She stood on tiptoes and reached up for one of the thick adventure novels, and the shift in her body only served to further emphasize the slenderness of her and the tantalizing silhouette of her breasts.
She eased one of the books from the shelf, holding it like it was some precious thing and flipped open the cover to the first page.
“For a man amongst men – my friend, Jonah Noble.” She read the inscription aloud, then closed the cover and looked at me again. “Sounds like you have friends in high places. He’s always on the best-sellers lists.”
I shrugged. “He was close to my father,” I said. “I kind of inherited that friendship after the old man passed away.”
She carefully set the book back on the shelf and continued to wander while I watched her over the rim of my glass.
She stopped at the end of the bookcase and reached for a large leather-covered binder, thick with a layer of dust. It was on the bottom shelf. She knelt on the rug and opened the binder. I watched her expression.
Leticia’s brow creased into a puzzled frown. She rifled through the pages, and then looked over her shoulder at me.
“What’s this?” she was curious. “Why do you have copies of all these old newspapers?”
“They were mine,” I said.
“You keep old newspapers you buy?”
“No. I owned the actual newspapers.”
There was a long pause as the realization slowly dawned. She turned on me slowly, the folder still clutched in her hands. “You mean you owned these newspapers? You were the publisher?”
I nodded.
“You let me babble on like a school-girl downstairs, telling you about Saturday editions and four-page spreads when all along you were a publisher?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you were so enthusiastic and so excited. It was the first time I had ever seen you like that.”
She sat down in the chair opposite and slowly leafed through the folder. The pages were all yellowed with age, their edges tattered and curled. There were a dozen different mastheads from across the country.
“They were weekly community newspapers,” I explained. “Years ago, my father bought them when they were about to fold, and we built them back up into profitable ventures.”
Leticia glanced up at me sharply. “The Examiner is here.”
“Yes. That was the first paper my father bought.”
“But you don’t still own it, do you? You don’t publish the newspaper where I work – do you?” she suddenly sounded very wary, almost suspicious.
I shook my head. “No. We sold every one of those newspapers just before my father died.”
I saw her visibly relax, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
“We ran those papers very profitably, but I could see the internet, looming on the horizon and building like a storm that was going to change publishing forever. I could see the writing on the wall for local community newspapers, so we sold them all at just the right time, and changed the direction of our investments into property – where they still are today.”
“But you know the newspaper industry?”
I nodded. “I ought to. I personally ran several of those newspapers you have in your lap.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. “Once my father realized I was never going to become a lawyer, despite his best efforts, he decided the best thing I could do was learn the business I would one day inherit. At the time we had just acquired a new free weekly newspaper in the L.A. area. I spent twelve months running the business. In the process I learned about the print industry, and how to manage people.”
Leticia sat forward. “What about women? Does the move to L.A. have anything to do with you becoming a BDSM Master?”
My mouth curled lazily into an insolent smile. “They overlapped,” I said. “The office was staffed by eight women and one other man.”
“How old were you?”
“I was twenty-four, and I was living thousands of miles away from my father’s influence in an expensive apartment.”
“I bet those women didn’t know what they were in for,” Leticia said. Her instincts told her it was time to reach for her notebook and pen.
I inclined my head, but I didn’t smile. “Four of the women in the office were advertising sales reps. They were all attractive, well-presented – kind of like female real estate agents. Two of the other girls handled the accounts, and two were secretaries,” I explained. “A couple of the women were happily married or engaged to guys with names like ‘Skip’ and ‘Tyler’.”
I refilled my glass and poured a little into another tumbler for Leticia. I didn’t ask – I just poured, and left her glass sitting on the edge of the table between us. I got to my feet. By now, she knew what to expect. I saw her shift her weight in the chair, like she was preparing to watch a tennis match as I strode from one end of the library to the other.
“There was one woman there that caught my eye,” I said. “Out of them all, there was one girl who had something special. She wasn’t the prettiest, she was the sexiest.”
Leticia arched an eyebrow. “Define sexy.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I can,” I confessed. “I don’t have a definition, nor do I have specific parameters. It’s not any one thing about a woman that makes her sexy in my eyes, it’s a collection of things – an intoxicating fusion of the obvious and the subtle that merge together.”
I replayed that explanation back over in my head. It sounded lame, but I had nothing better by way of a definition.
“This girl had ‘it’,” I went on. “She was one of the secretaries. Her name was Sherry. She was my age, but she was so dainty and petite, she looked like a teenager. She was barely five foot tall. She had this waif-like physique: tender pubescent-shaped breasts, delicate little hands. She had long black hair, and her skin was smooth and pale.”
Leticia wrote it all down, and then sat back, gazing at me. Perhaps she was waiting for me to continue, or maybe she was imagining Sherry’s slim body in my arms. I pulled my hands from my pockets and scraped them down my face.
“I was in a difficult position. My father had warned me about the dangers of ‘dipping my pen in the company ink’, and I still had memories of Claire that had stayed fresh in my mind.”
“Claire?” Leticia was surprised. “Wasn’t that years before? Surely there must have been plenty of other women between nineteen and twenty-four. You’re a good-looking man. I can’t imagine you had any trouble with the ladies.”
“I did all right,” I said vaguely. “And yes, there were lots and lots of brief encounters during those years. They were all learning experiences. I gradually began to understand a little more about what women wanted, and how they wanted to feel in the bedroom. But I mentioned Claire because of the blackmail issue. Now I was running a business on the other side of the country, but I was acutely aware that Sherry was an employee. I wanted her – fuck, how I wanted her – but I didn’t want her because she worked for me and needed her job. Can you see the problem?”
“Uhuh,” Leticia said. “But I don’t see how you could have found a way around it.”
I nodded. “I just couldn’t see a way. Even if I invited her out for dinner, she would still feel like she was under some obligation.”
