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Ten
Arlie stood in the shower’s scalding spray, letting the water beat down on her shoulders. While it leached a measure of the tension from her body, it couldn’t wash away Samuel Kane. Even now, the feeling of him lived just under her skin, easily summoned to the surface with a single errant thought.
She had been stupid today. So, incredibly, stupid.
Martine had captured at least a few usable pictures, she was sure of it. But she’d never walked out on a shoot.
Walked?Let’s be honest. She had run. Fled all the way to her room where she had stayed, periodically checking her cell phone in expectation of a What the actual fuck is wrong with you? call/text from Samuel.
It never came.
If only she’d been so lucky where Taegan was concerned. Even now she could see the words of her message crawl across the backs of her eyelids like so many spiders as she dug her hands into her wet, soapy hair.
Tomorrow, 9:00 pm. Coyote Bar. Private room. Highly recommend you bring materials for discussion.
Once upon a time, Arlie had been ordinary. Boring.
A person with good credit and a nice apartment overlooking Fairmount Park. A person with regular dentist checkups. A clean driving record. Nothing to hide. No one to fear.
Thinking back to the precise moment when her life had run off the rails, she forced herself to confront a particularly uncomfortable question.
Had she known?
Had she known, when she’d accepted Hugh Morris’s invite for a private dinner, how this would ultimately end up?
How, over oysters three ways, in trying to solve her immediate problems, she’d create much longer lasting ones?
Inadvertent disclosure.
Such a banal sounding term for a mistake with the power to dismantle her life as she’d known it. One conversation about her researching food styling trends on social media for a new project at Gastronomie, and a chain reaction of disaster had been set in motion. A sharp rap on her door startled her out of her misery. She’d propped it open with the door latch in the event that the room service she ordered arrived before she finished boiling herself alive.
“Just a minute!” she called, twisting off the shower.
Opening the shower door, she dried herself off and slid into one of the complimentary plush robes, gathering the long skein of her hair and squeezing the water out of it with a towel before draping it over her shoulder.
Good enough for food delivery. She exited the bathroom in a cloud of steam and pulled open the propped door.
Samuel Kane appeared in the gap.
Only he didn’t look like Samuel Kane.
He looked like wrath in a suit. Jaw set, muscles flexing, the mouth a thin, grim, line. Eyes blazing emerald above chiseled cheekbones. The cords on his neck rising like taut ropes.
“Oh,” she said dumbly. “Hi.”
A sinking feeling of self-consciousness further heated her already shower-warmed skin as he stared at her. His nostrils flared as he looked from her hair to her face, to the downy white bathrobe.
“Do you want to come in?” she added when he made no reply.
She stepped aside to grant him entry, catching the subtle scent of him as he moved past her into the entryway.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
Arlie’s heart sank into her guts. There were too many answers to this question. And too many questions he didn’t even know to ask.
“Tell you what?” she asked, opting for the safest path.
Coward.
Samuel stepped closer, her white robe reflected in his glacier-green eyes. “About my father. About what he said to you this morning.”
The relief was so complete and acute it actually made her dizzy. She pressed a palm against the wall to steady herself. All at once, the entryway seemed far too small to contain them.
“Our families have a lot of shared history,” Arlie said. “Not all of it good.”
“He had no right—”
“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, knowing it was a weak and deliberate dodge. She didn’t want to talk about this. Not with him. “It’s absolutely mandatory that you surrender your tie and suit jacket for this conversation. I’m entirely underdressed and frankly feeling a little vulnerable about it.”
Samuel walked into the well-appointed sitting area, shrugged off his suit jacket and laid it across the chaise longue. They snagged gazes as he gripped the knot of his tie, loosening it with small deliberate strokes. Finally, and with a tantalizing precision, he slid the tie from his neck, casting it off across his discarded jacket.
“Better?” he asked.
On a different night, in a different universe, it would have ended there.
But for reasons she could neither explain nor ignore, Arlie padded barefoot across the space between them.
“Almost.” Lifting her hands to his neck, she undid the button closest to his collar. Then another. And another.
To her great surprise and delight, Samuel wore no T-shirt underneath.
