When he spoke, his voice had that sleep-laden husk that sent blood rushing south. “Come in, stranger.”
CHAPTER 01: OLLIE
I know guys in lingerie are a thing. I don’t know they’remything until Fen Warren shows up on my doorstep like a fantasy in fuchsia lace.
Here’s how it happens:
I’m outside when the old-fashioned chime of the doorbell rings through the open screen door. Sadie, the visiting photographer who’s currently taken over the back half of the wraparound porch, tilts her chin without looking up from her fancy camera.
“That’ll be Fen,” she says. “You mind letting him in while I finish setting up?”
“Sure.” I’ve only been awkwardly hovering, anyway. “Do I bring him back here, or…?”
“That’s fine. I’ll get him settled and blindfolded before Zachary arrives. It’s why I stagger the arrival times. To preserve the mystery until I capture the big reveal.” She shoots me a smile and lifts the camera in demonstration. I nod, wondering again about the kind of person who signs up to meet a total stranger for an intimate photo shoot.
I open the front door on the answer.
The young man on the porch could have stepped out of one of my urban fantasy novels—an undercover incubus who slays demons in his spare time.
Or one of the demons.
His hair is an improbable shade of dark pink, like the Lorelei peoniesgrowing along the back porch. Flawless skin, shimmery in the late-summer Midwest humidity, covers high cheekbones and a smooth jaw that curves into a long, elegant neck. Silver glints in his earlobes and snugs around one side of a full lower lip. His clothes are seductive and somehow violent: the tight shirt—if it can be called a shirt—is the color of orange sherbet where it isn’t cut and braided into geometric patterns that reveal more metal in his nipples and tantalizing swaths of bare flesh. A bright jewel the same color as his hair sparkles at his navel, drawing my gaze down, and—
The lingerie might not be the first thing to catch my attention, but itisthe last, because as soon as my eyes snag on the wide strip of lace cutting a path across the jut of his hip above his low-slung cargo pants, my brain slams to static.
What would that feel like under my thumb?
And then, even more drastic:Does it leave marks on his skin? What wouldtheyfeel like?
“You’re not Sadie,” he observes, and his voice is deeper than I’m expecting, rolling over the long vowels.
“Pink,” I say, my mouth determined to humiliate me by continuing to function without direct supervision from my brain. His eyebrows—dark blond and impeccably shaped—fly up in startled amusement.
“Your name isPink?”
Unhelpfully, the relevant line from “Have a Cigar”plays through my head.
“Nope. No, it’s Ollie. Oliver…Earhart. Oliver Earhart. But everyone calls me Ollie.” Desperate to shut myself up, I stick out my hand, then yank it back when the screen door threatens to slam into my shoulder.Should have let it hit me. Maybe it would have knocked my brain back into my body.
“Okay, Ollie.” The smile that’s been tugging at his lips blooms across his face in a flash of dimples and white teeth. “Aren’t we supposed to be blindfolded? Something about not seeing the bride before the photo shoot?” He leans past me to peer into the shadows of the house, and I catch a whiff of his hair—spicy and faintly tropical. “Or is this likeI Kissed a Boy, and Sadie’s lurking in there with a hidden camera or something?”
“No.” I press myself against the doorframe and hold my breath until he shifts back to a safe distance away. “She’s setting up on the back porch, and I’m not him. The other guy. Your…”Date? Partner? Co-model?“I live here. In the house.” He’s laughing at me now, and I shake my head, surrendering to my own reluctant grin. “Sorry. I swear I’m usually—well, notcooler, probably, but believe it or not, Englishismy first language.”
He rakes his eyes over me, from my wire-framed glasses to my plastic flip-flops, lingering on the illustration of Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk leaping across the front of my long-sleeved T-shirt in all her magical feline glory. The urge to cross my arms wars with the need to keep holding the screen door open, andfor fuck’s sake, why do I care if the demon-slaying incubus knows I’m a nerd? He’s here for a romantic photo shoot with another guy.
“I’m Fen,” he says. “Short for Fender, since we’re doing full names. And yes, I’m named after the guitar. My parents are both musicians. Unfortunately for them, the musical genius gene skipped a generation, so I’mforced to embrace the irony. Are you going to let me in or stand there ogling me all day?”
CHAPTER 02: FEN
I knew it was coming, but as it turns out, being blindfolded isnotone of my kinks.
After following Ollie through a maze of high ceilings, hardwood floors shamefully buried under mismatched rugs, and a veritable jungle of houseplants, we emerge onto another section of the porch—dripping with foliage and heady with the scent of honeysuckle—to meet Sadie Clarke, traveling photographer and unwitting architect of my current spiral.
It starts out fine—“Damn, babe, aren’t you fucking stunning?”—and it’s fun watching Ollie’s internal crisis while he drags potted plants around at Sadie’s direction and tries not to get caught checking me out.
I know what I look like and the effect it has on boys who’ve never been abruptly forced to question their own sexuality. It’s far from the first time I’ve witnessed the confusion of being caught by unexpected attraction. On another day, without Sadie’s cheerful chatter or the low thrum of anticipation over the coming encounter, I might be tempted to play.
But eventually, the moment of truth arrives, and I’m tucked into the cream-colored cushions of a vine-wrapped porch swing while Sadie covers my eyes with a white silk scarf and delivers an encouraging “be right back with your playdate.” Her footsteps fade into the echoing house, and the silence stretches in her wake, broken only by the susurrant whir of insects in the grass and the babble of birdsong. Summer sounds, incongruous alongside the mounting clamor of my pulse.
