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“Itisa club,” Jenny said, as if she’d caught him out. “I’ve always wanted to spend time in an illicit sex club, populated entirely by deviance.”
“I hate to ruin the fantasy, but this club is more for business connections, entrepreneurial fantasies and high profile meetings that need to remain strictly private. There are deviant sex clubs out there, and there’s sex here, too, but not of the public variety. The club provides rooms for weary travelers, and doesn’t much care who fills them.”
“That’s a lot less fun.”
“The truth about highflyers is that most of them are boring,” Dylan said. “Because the reason they’re highflyers is that they work themselves half to death.”
“And here I thought the point of making shedloads of cash was to fling it about indiscriminately, laughing all the while.”
And years ago, Dylan would have let that go. This morning, even. But everything was different now.
“The difference is whether or not you’ve worked for said shedloads.”
He expected Jenny to stiffen, but her expression only turned rueful. “Unlike me, you mean.”
“Not everyone is born rich.”
“And not everyone born rich is automatically evil,” Jenny replied. She squeezed his hand as she held it. “Something you’re going to have to come to terms with should you create a new generation some day. Will they grow up pampered and spoilt? Or will they learn they have a responsibility to do what others can’t?”
He found his thumb moving back and forth over the back of her hand. “You don’t make money at what you do, do you?”
“Of course not. I’m a career volunteer. It’s what makes swanning off to Australia on a whim possible.”
She peered past him into one of the salons off the hall, where a scrum of finance types were boozing it up like they were down at the local, except what they were quaffing would qualify as a mortgage payment in some places. All she did was smile, but Dylan was suddenly uncomfortable. He’d been there once, in the first flush of his first million. And the notion that Jenny might have looked at him then ashewas looking at the pack of them made something twist inside.
“That’s the trouble with money,” he said darkly. “If you’ve never had a lack of it and don’t understand what a gift that is, you don’t cherish it. You grow complacent.” He nodded toward the pack of idiots, but pulled her along past their room. “And you find yourself using it to help yourself feel things you wouldn’t otherwise.” Like entertaining the wrong women for years because the right one was permanently out of reach. But he remembered himself. “Like leaping out of planes, which the lot of them like to do on the weekends. Regularly. But no one’s a thrill junkie if they can feel things on their own. They wouldn’t need it.”
Jenny was looking up at him again as they walked, that rueful expression turning to something more pointed. “Have you already become bored? So quickly?”
“I don’t believe in boredom,” Dylan told her, growling it out as if she was hitting hard into the very heart of him. “That’s one more privilege I never had.”
“You seek thrills for the hell of it, then.”
She wasn’t quite frowning at him, but there was a challenging light in her eyes. And Dylan didn’t want to debate class differences with the one person who had always treated him as if there weren’t any. As if he was grand as he was, always and forever.
And she was going to leave him, soon. He didn’t want to tell her that she was his model for how a very wealthy person ought to behave, because he didn’t want to admit how much he thought about her, felt about her, changed himself for her. Start discussing one part of it and who knew where he’d end up?
Jenny never hid her wealth, but she never flaunted it, either. She gave back quietly, without fanfare. And she was unfailingly kind. He fell short of these things daily, but she was always there as a goal. He was good at goals.
But then, there were other, more attainable goals tonight. He could work on being a better version of himself in all the lonely years ahead of him.
Dylan stopped at the next door they passed, seeing the discreet green light that indicated it was empty. He coded them in, then leaned back against the door when he closed it. And locked it.
“Does that mean you don’t feel anything?” she was asking, paying no attention to what he was doing as she walked into the lounge area, then turned back to him. “And, crucial follow-up question, if you can’t feel anything, are you really the best tutor when it comes to sex?”
“Jenny.”
“I’m no expert myself, but I did think it had a lot to do with sensation,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Feeling. All those things you just said—”
“There’s only one thrill I’m after,” Dylan told her.
He hauled her into his arms, where she belonged, and he got his mouth on hers once more.
And this time, in private.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IFJENNYHADever had the slightest idea that kissing could be like this, her whole life would be different.
