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Her heart thudded at her. Her pulse felt too hot and weighted, somehow, in her veins.
The rest of the room featured a giant mirror on the wall across from the X that she imagined could also take in the bed. There were a variety of different benches, many with interesting-looking additions, or better still, subtractions, that made her head spin. There was what looked like a padded massage table, if she ignored that the space beneath it was an actual cage. There was a hammock sort of thing slung from one of the beams, what looked like a hanging pull-up bar, and incongruously, high above, one of the biggest and most beautiful chandeliers she’d ever seen.
And for some reason, the sight of all these things made her breath go shallow.
If Rory wasn’t mistaken—and how could she be in the face of all this clear evidence?—this was aliteralden of iniquity. A red room of pain, as such places were sometimes known. Though this room was not red.
On the contrary, it didn’t scream outsexual deviantat all. If she squinted and pretended she couldn’t recognize the fetish equipment all over the place—all of which she and her high school friends had tittered over when they’d stolen their mother’s Fifty Shades books—it could have been an upscale, hipster coffeehouse.
And she told herself it was surprise and astonishment that was making her heart beat double time in her chest. While an unfamiliar sensation seemed to sink down into her belly, then deep between her legs. It was...warm.
Very, very warm.
Rory didn’t know what that was, since she’d concluded at some point in college that she was incapable of feeling such things. So intensely, anyway. In that area.
She rubbed a bit absently at her chest, where her heart was going mad. And sure, this place was a converted church, when she had always been a secular person—except here, now, she could have sworn she could hear a choir singing hosannas in the distance.
Maybe it had something to do with the way the light came into the stained glass, sending beams of color this way and that, like an invitation.
Rory drifted farther into the room, skirting the fascinating furniture as she went. All of which, she was happy to note on a purely professional level, looked even cleaner than the house. She stopped at the foot of the huge bed, swallowed hard at all the metalwork she could see in the four posters—not to mention the bolts in the floor—and decided to take a few pictures of the windows. The stained glass glory of it all.
It took her a few moments to figure out how to take a reasonable breath, and to start thinking of something clever she could post as a caption to hint at what this room was without actually giving anything away. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to risk getting in trouble with the mysterious owner, but deep down, there was a part of her that wanted to keep this private anyway.
And not because she was afraid of getting in trouble, but because there was something about thatwarmthand the way she felt like she might be glowing like the stained glass up above. Or that the choir she almost heard was singing inside her.
Breathing too hard still, she turned, wanting to see the rest of the room—
And Rory forgot about the room.
Because there was a man standing in the doorway.
“What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?” he asked in crisp French.
His voice was precise and something like polite, though it was also so chilly it made her flinch. Especially when she noticed that chill was matched by the frigid navy blue gaze leveled on her.
She could feel the thrust of it, everywhere.
She knew, even though she’d never met him before, that this was the mysterious owner of this place. The man who was too busy to ever interact with his cleaning service, which was fair enough. But he was also so unknowable that even after three months of cleaning his bedroom and bathroom, she knew absolutely nothing about him. Not even his name.
Not even what side of the bed he slept on.
She wanted to launch into a passionate defense of herself and how she happened to be here in this room, clearly breaking all the rules. Rory considered herself pretty fluent in excuses, after the past few years of what her father liked to callunfortunate aimlessness.
But when she opened her mouth, nothing came out.
It was him.
He was...forbidding.
He was tall and built like none of the men Rory tended to date. He was not willowy and slim, with tousled hair. He did not look as if he could wear a smaller size of trousers than she could. He looked like he was intimately acquainted with his own body and decidedly physical. There were lean muscles everywhere, and it was obvious that if he were to strip naked, he would look like the sort of glorious male sculpture that belonged in one of the museums here.
He looked as strict as he did beautiful. It was those eyes of his, so decidedly dark blue and cold, like the Atlantic in winter. And his mouth, set in a hard, firm line. His dark blond hair was close-cropped and only made him seem that much more masculine. That muchmore.There was obvious power and authority in him that he wore as easily as he did the dark trousers he had on and that leather jacket that whispered of near incalculable amounts of money, particularly because it did marvelous things for his wide shoulders.
Or maybe that was just his shoulders.
If asked, Rory could have given a dissertation on the kind of man she liked. A boyish-faced, agreeable poet sort. Wispy, nonthreatening men who wanted to sing her songs and tell her about their dreams.
That was not this man. At all.
