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He’d told himself that he was imagining things, that it was only his newfound awareness of his own masculinity that had changed his perception, but now he wasn’t so sure. And Jason had voiced the same suspicions.
Sighing through his nose, he shook his head to clear it. With one hand, he felt the key in his pocket and his stomach tightened into a hard ball of apprehension. What if he actually went into the Orion Hotel, took the elevator to the third floor, rapped hard on the door, and it was opened by a withered old woman without teeth? What if the damned door was opened by a man? A queer dressed up as a hooker? Oh, Jesus! What if this whole arrangement was a setup, the result of Jason’s twisted sense of humor?
He gritted his teeth and glanced behind him as he reached the Orion. No one seemed to have followed him and no one other than Jason would guess that he was here. Somehow he found strength in his anonymity as he lingered on the steps of the high-rise that jutted upward, washed by floodlights, white concrete slicing into a sky as black as obsidian.
Hesitating a fraction of a second, Zachary locked his jaw, squared his shoulders, threw open the hotel’s front door, and decided it was time he became a man.
3
The hotel corridor was empty, a long hallway of gold shag carpeting and metal doors painted to look like wood. The Orion had none of the charm of the Hotel Danvers, but Zach didn’t care. Swallowing back the urge to turn tail and run, Zachary let the stairwell door bang shut behind him and walked, heart knocking, toward room 307. To Sophia. His destiny.
Before he lost his already-faltering courage, he rapped sharply on the door and waited.
“It’s open,” a cool, feminine voice called through the metal.
Oh, Christ! Zach’s heart nearly stopped. He reached for the knob with clammy fingers and threw open the door.
The woman was lying with her back to him. Sprawled sensually across the bed, wearing only a black bra and a lacy black belt with long garters that dangled over a scanty pair of panties, she stretched. Zach could see the dimples above her smooth rump and long thighs and his mouth turned to sand. “You’re late,” she reprimanded gently.
Zach’s diaphragm slammed up against his lungs and he could barely breathe. Heat radiated from his groin.
Turning slowly, allowing him a glimpse of full breasts crushed into a bra several sizes too small, she smiled up at him with a come-hither look that evaporated when her gaze met his face.
“Who’re you?” she demanded. Her dark eyes shadowed with fear. “Get out!” She cast an anxious look around, as if searching for a weapon, or clothes to cover her body. “Get the fuck out!” She reached for a pink silk wrapper and started ramming her hands frantically down its sleeves.
“Jason sent me.”
She froze. “Like hell,” she muttered, her black eyes disbelieving. The robe still gaped enough so he had a view of the hollow between her breasts.
Zach’s throat closed in on itself and he prayed to God that his voice didn’t squeak. “He’s still at Dad’s party and—”
“Dad’s?”
“I’m his brother, Zachary.” He started to stick out his hand, knew it to be a mistake and wished he could just drop dead of a heart attack. She was a hooker, for God’s sake, a professional, and he was a bumbling, tongue-tied, green, virgin! She could probably smell it.
Suspicion lingered on her features. “You don’t look like him.”
The bane of Zach’s existence. “I know.” Still he didn’t move.
“Close the door.”
Zach kicked it closed but didn’t bother with the bolt.
Scooting closer to the headboard, trying to hold the robe closed over her skin, looking as if she might bolt for the door at any minute, she asked, “Why’d he send you?” She tossed a thick rope of coal-black hair off her face. “Jesus, you scared the living shit out of me.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Well, come in,” she ordered, obviously agitated.
Carefully, afraid she might jump up and run down the hall screaming rape, he walked across the orange carpet and eased himself onto the foot of the bed.
“Jason sent you?” she asked, reaching onto the nightstand for a crumpled pack of cigarettes propped against a half-finished drink. She shook out an unfiltered Pall Mall and her hands only trembled a little as she struck a match and lit up. “Why?”
“He, um, he had to stick around. Dad wanted him there.”
She arched a fine black brow as she drew on her cigarette again and finally lifted it from her lips. “But he didn’t want you?” she asked skeptically.
“Jason’s the oldest,” Zach said, as if it explained everything, which it did. Jason had been groomed from the day he was born to be heir to the Danvers fortune. Nothing had changed just because Witt had sired a second son.
