Maximum Exposure (2 page)

But if he wasn’t careful, as in eyes in the back, top, and bottom of his head careful, he was going to blow a yearlong investment of highly trained talent and government resources because of a distraction with ash-blond hair, long, limber legs, and infallible gaydar.

Jodi Fontaine had pegged him as straight the first time they’d met. She’d come into Flambé a month ago with her boss, Dustin Parks.

The gallery owner was a good friend and customer of Livia’s. She refused to offer any items for sale in the boutique without first passing them under his critical eye—or so the story went.

The way Roman saw things, Livia’s “friend” wasn’t as concerned with the success of her business as he was with being the first in South Beach to wear her designer finds.

Still, he seemed a nice enough guy, a little too nice to
Roland
at times, and it wasn’t Roman’s business how Ms. Hammond conducted hers—except that her having Dustin vet her new stock had brought Jodi into his crosshairs and put him in hers.

That fateful day, while Parks and Livia had checked out and chewed over a bounty of just arrived pieces, Roman—as Roland—had hovered and flitted and acted the fool.

He hadn’t paid much attention to Jodi, but his acting chops had not gone unnoticed by her. She’d pulled him aside to give Livia and Dustin their space.

Since Roman didn’t give a true shit about the designers, the clothes, or customer service, his Roland persona had protested only enough to make it look good, then left with the younger woman and Livia’s blessing.

He’d thought he could grill Dustin’s assistant on what she might know about Tomás Bebé, who—unbeknownst to the rest of the store’s employees—delivered more than special orders to the boutique’s back door.

Once Jodi had manhandled
Roland
out of the boutique and down the block to the bookstore, she ordered them both vanilla lattes and cornered his ass on one of the sofas.

And then she’d told him to give up the gay, because Paris Hilton was a better actor than he would ever be—and because Jodi worked in an art gallery with an 80 percent gay clientele and knew without a doubt that her carnal knowledge of men could wax the floor with his.

He’d tried not to laugh but had ended up spitting hot, foamy milk all over her lap. The easiest thing to do then would’ve been to unload the truth, haul her up to straddle his thighs, and expand her carnal knowledge database.

But his act had convinced the people he most needed to be convinced for twelve months, and so he’d feigned distress, grabbed a stack of napkins, and blotted at the mess.

She’d been wearing straight-legged black pants that revealed little of her shape, but when she’d parted her thighs to give him access to the spill, it had taken a chunk out of his big, bad control not to stroke her there, between her legs, and watch her blue eyes catch fire.

She’d known it, had been unable to hide the thrill of outing him, even though he hadn’t admitted a thing. That moment had been when their battle of wills had begun, and goddamn, if it hadn’t turned into an all-out war.

Now he jumped when she called, because that was in Roland Green’s nature, but it was Roman Greyle waiting for the end of this operation so he could take the leggy blond distraction to bed.

He found her in the bookstore’s low-traffic history section. She sat curled into the corner of a cushy two-seat sectional, a book opened on her lap, her very ample cleavage showing in her neckline’s low V.

She’d figured fairly early that he was a breast man, and Roland or not, he’d had a hell of a time keeping his eyes off her spectacular rack.

He breathed deeply of paper and ink and fresh brewed coffee, and as he sat, he also breathed deeply of her. She always smelled like sunshine, a day on the beach. He thought of fucking her beneath a cloudless blue sky, in the rain, with stars reflected in her eyes.

Oh yeah.

He’d been wearing Roland’s pants way too long.

He reached over, lifted the book far enough to see the word
erotica
on the cover.
Christ.
The last thing he needed was to think about her settled in and reading about sex, her heart racing, skin heated, her panties damp. Her tits about to fall out of her blouse…

And then she made things worse, leaning toward him, the arm holding her book on her knees and plumping her breasts into her neckline, the fabric grazing one dark nipple, the upper half of one taut areola completely exposed.

She knew exactly what she was doing, working to get the sort of rise out of him that would prove her right and prove him hetero, horny, and intent on jumping her bones.

Considering he was sweating like a pig in a race and in dire need of adjusting his pants, that proof wouldn’t be long in coming.

And she knew that, too. “Can we make this fast, Jodi? I don’t have time—”

“Time for what?” She cut him off sweetly. “Coffee with a friend?”

Her smile killed him. Just killed him with its invitation, so innocent, so soft. Her lips were lightly glossed, the color a seashell pink. Her eyes were the pale blue of the sky at high noon.

“I don’t see any coffee,” he said, glancing away from her face to the low table in front of the sectional. He was not going to look at her again.

Not at her mouth. Not at her cleavage. Not at her legs or her eyes or her hair, which he’d imagined draped over his chest.

“I was waiting for you before I ordered us anything,” she said, shifting her position, the fabric of her top shifting with her and leaving less of her chest exposed.

Roman wanted to slump back and sigh with relief, but he was still Roland, and it was as good a reason as any for making an escape.
Why had he come here? Why hadn’t he said no when she called?
So he said, “Enjoy your book and your invisible coffee, Jodi. I’m going back to work before Livia sends out a pack of hounds and they chew the heels out of these shoes I paid a small fortune for.”

“Wait.” Jodi reached out, her hand settling on his forearm, above his wrist, before he was able to move. Her fingers were cool and determined.

He stared at their contrasting skin colors, wordless, wondering if her obsession with exposing him was a game or if she was really into him, into who she thought he was, who she wanted him to be. “I’m waiting.”

She let him go, closed the book and placed it on the table, and scooted to perch on the very edge of the seat cushion. “Dustin is premiering a new exhibit this weekend but is opening the gallery on Thursday for an invitation-only showing.”

He glanced at his watch, a grounding. He supposed he should be reacting with some sort of emotion besides the curiosity he was feeling, the anticipation of waiting for her to go on, the need that was becoming a fever.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

He bit down on the image of coming with her, inside of her, all over her, and chirped, “Like a date? An escort? What exactly are you asking here, Jodi? You know I’m not interested in seeing you that way.”

She got to her feet, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and glared down. “I don’t believe you’re who you say you are, but I can deal with you having your reasons for this farce. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

“That’s what you want? To be friends?” he asked, getting to his feet, towering over her.

He was aggravated, frustrated, aroused. All of it unprofessional, out of line. Yet knowing that, admitting that, he was still fighting the devil to keep a lid on acting on what he felt.

She shook her head, strands of her hair catching on her eyelashes. She reached up, freed them, and told him quite boldly, “What I want is to crawl beneath your clothes and into your skin. But you’ve made it clear that’s never going to happen. So, yes. I would rather be friends than be nothing. And as a friend, I would like very much if you would come with me to the showing.”

He didn’t know why. He honestly couldn’t understand why. They weren’t friends. They’d run into each other at the store, and once at a party Livia had thrown. The only thing they had between them as a bond was the gay thing: his insistence that he was, hers that he wasn’t.

Not for a minute did he trust that she had no motive for the invitation other than the friendship she claimed. That didn’t stop him from ignoring his training, his experience, his discipline, his control, and picturing her naked, on her hands and knees, crawling toward him.

“I guess I can meet you there.”

“Great,” she said, leaning into him and brushing a kiss to the corner of his mouth, grazing his cheek, smelling so damn good. “Come at eight. I’ll be waiting.”

She left him standing there, wondering what the hell he was doing. And why he was making it so easy for her, giving her the very ammunition she needed to win.

Not wanting to draw attention to the fact that the place had been left unsecured, since it gave him a view of both Olivia Hammond’s and Roland Green’s movements, Finn grabbed the rest of his gear from the lockbox in his Jeep, made the climb up the stairs a second time, and closed the door behind him.

He knew that the window above the bistro was treated with a tint that made seeing him from the street—or from the second floor opposite—impossible.

Unless he made a lot of noise or tripped over his own feet, crashing through the glass and bouncing off the striped awning to the concrete below, and unless the owners or managers kicked him out for trespassing, he could use this space and surveil to his heart’s content.

The space was warm, but not too, though the air was definitely stale. He’d have to consider some cleanup, maybe a fan, he mused, after flipping a light switch and finding the electricity on, if he was going to spend much time here. That much he wouldn’t know until he had a chance to see for himself what this vantage point allowed.

First things first, however. He adjusted the settings on his camera, grabbed his cell phone from his waistband and Olivia’s card from his pocket, took a deep breath, called himself crazy, and dialed.

“I have a question,” was the first thing out of his mouth once she answered the phone.

She didn’t respond right away. Either he’d taken her aback, or she couldn’t place his voice. It had to be the latter. He doubted Olivia Hammond could be taken aback by anyone or anything.

He thought about clearing up the creepy anonymity, but then she said, “I didn’t think you’d wait till tomorrow, but I thought you might give it more than an hour.”

He was intrigued. Sue him. “This isn’t about the drinks thing. I wanted to ask you something else.”

He put his cell on speaker phone, set it on the window ledge, and did his best to be quiet as he reached for his camera. He found and framed her, focused, watched as she swiveled her chair side to side.

He wouldn’t be able to see her much longer. The sun was creeping higher in the sky, and already there was a glare smearing the east side of the window. But that was okay.

This was nothing more than a fact-gathering mission. He’d be much more interested in seeing if she left the lights on in her office after dark.

She got to her feet, crossed the office, and closed the door. On her way back, she asked him, “What do you want to know?”

He waited until she’d circled the desk. She didn’t sit, but stood behind her chair. “What you said today. That you let people look.”

“What about it?”

“Did you mean look? Or watch?” he asked and clicked the shutter.

He could see only her profile, but at the sound of her picture being taken, she turned to face him, and so he took it again.

“What exactly is it you’re asking?”

She knew what he was asking. She wasn’t a stupid woman. And he was pretty sure she wasn’t being purposefully obtuse but was instead buying time.

He watched as she switched her own handset to speaker and set the phone on her desk. She then shrugged out of the unstructured jacket she wore over her low-cut top and draped it over her chair.

That was when he noticed that the top wasn’t only low-cut, it was a halter, and it bared her entire back, along with a lot of her breast on the side. He swallowed, found his voice, focused, and took another shot.

“Looking,” he said. “That’s what you do in a museum. Or an art gallery. You find a piece you really like, and you study it. Analyze it. Get a feel for what it does to you.”

She laughed softly. “I hope you didn’t just call me a piece.”

He clicked the shutter, captured her smile. “Watching is more about action. You watch a baseball game. A tennis match. You pretty much look at golf, but you watch a jet take off, or the sun rise.”

“Are you sure you don’t look at the sun?”

“You never look at the sun. It’s bad for your eyes. But you definitely watch it come up.” He knew because he’d done it umpty dozen times before deciding which beach house to buy.

“You do that often?”

“Oh yeah. I watch the change of colors, like a year’s worth of seasons passing in the blink of an eye. I watch the clouds and what their shadows do to the water. And, yeah, I watch the water most of all. The ripples when the air is calm. The whitecaps it kicks up when it’s mad.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this sunrise thing. Are you a poet or a romantic or just a fisherman?”

He zoomed in closer. “Mostly I’m a guy working on his beach house.”

“I don’t believe that’s mostly it. Not for a minute.”

“You picked me up on the street, remember? Me? Random guy? You don’t even know my name, do you, Olivia Hammond?”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

And that was all she said. She didn’t ask what it was. Neither did she pretend as if she was going to answer his question. She just let the airtime fill with the sounds of their breathing, her fingers tapping the frame of her chair, the
shuck-shing
of the camera’s shutter as he caught her again.

“Let me ask you something else.”

“You’re welcome to,” she said, “but I did tell you that I’d give you everything you need to know tomorrow.”

He lifted a knee to better stabilize his equipment for his next shot. “This thing you do. Do you ever take orders?”

Shuck-shing.

She turned to face the window, slowly walked to stand directly in front of the large glass panes.

Shuck-shing.

She searched the street below, her gaze crawling through the bistro’s tables, moving on before coming back and coming up. The window shielded him with its reflective tint, but he knew she knew he was there.

Shuck-shing.

“Is there something you’d like me to do?”

He nodded because he couldn’t find his voice, and because the air in the empty room had grown not only still but stifling. “I want you to let your hair all the way down.”

Staring straight toward him, she reached for the clip without any hesitation. A sassy smirk pulled at her mouth before she bent at the waist, shook out her hair, straightened, and tossed it back to fall like a lion’s mane over her shoulders, wild and untamed and free.

Then she asked, “Is that all?” and he decided he might as well go for broke, so he answered, “No. Untie your top at the waist.”

He’d seen the knot when she’d leaned forward. That knot and the one at her nape. Big loose knots with long, dangling sashes of the paisley-print fabric in golds and browns and the red of dried chilies.

This time her hesitation was brief, but it was there, and he started to tell her never mind, he’d been kidding. But he hadn’t been, and he was still of the very same mind of wanting to see her body unclothed.

She turned, showed him her back, and held the two ends of the tie out to the side. She shook her hips, a quick little shimmy, then spun slowly to face him—the only thing between her tits and his impatience one more knot.

He didn’t count the one gnawing in his gut.

“Seen enough?” she asked, her voice sounding strained, though the distortion could easily have been the rush of blood from his head.

“No,” he said, and then he waited, the single word needing no explanation.

He watched her lips part, the tip of her tongue appear against her teeth. Watched the motion of her hands and wrists and elbows as she lifted her arms.

He pulled back from the viewfinder only long enough to mop his forehead with his sleeve, soaking the T-shirt’s worn cotton, which then stuck to his shoulder like gum.

It seemed to take her longer with this knot than it had with the other. He didn’t know if she was teasing him or if she wasn’t sure this was something she wanted to do. That she wanted him to look at. That she wanted him to see, to watch. He couldn’t know, because he didn’t know her. All he had to go on were her words from earlier today.

He started to let her off the hook. He wasn’t pressuring her, but he didn’t want her to feel that he was. Or that their having drinks tomorrow or her hiring him for his photography skills had anything to do with what came next.

But then she pulled the ties free, and he couldn’t say anything at all. His mouth went dry. His fingers froze on the camera. She held the loose fabric in front of her body, waved it like a matador waving his cape at a bull, and then let it go. Just released it there where she held it pinched between her fingers and thumbs.

Her nipples were pierced; that was the first thing he noticed, the tiny gold hoops and the nearly invisible gold chain connected to each and threaded through the matching one piercing her navel. Her skirt rode low on her hips, exposing the softly feminine swell of her abdomen and the precious metal.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “You’re not the first man I’ve rendered speechless.”

She looked like she belonged in a harem, his harem, the bronze of her skin setting off the expensive sheen of the jewelry she wore, the cascade of her spun-sugar hair caressing her shoulders, her breasts plump and heavy with centers the color of toffee.

His mouth that had been cotton balls in the Sahara was now Niagara Falls. And when she twisted one finger around the chain and tugged, lifting both nipples to beg, he had to adjust his crouching position to ease the stress on his cock.

He shifted, tugged at his fly, the camera swinging away from the window. “Shit.”

There was Roland Green on the sidewalk, to the left of the boutique, having it out with a lean and mean-looking Latino. They were arguing, gesturing in each other’s faces, and ignoring the curious stares and wide berth given them by shoppers passing by.

Finn caught it all, continued to shoot as a Hispanic woman came out of Splash & Flambé and stepped between them, pushing Green back and grabbing the other man’s wrists.

Green waved them both off as if he’d had enough, then disappeared inside. The couple continued to talk, calmer now, Finn sticking to them with the resolve of sand on sunscreen-slick skin.

The man turned his head away; the woman lured him back, reaching for the necklace she wore as if using what looked to Finn to be letters to make a point. The man refused to be mollified, waving toward the door, urgent, before spinning away and leaving the woman standing alone.

Finn followed the man until he was out of sight, turned back in time to see the door to the boutique easing closed behind the woman, who’d returned inside…the boutique…the woman. “Shit.”

He swept the camera up the front of the building, to the second floor. His view was now blocked by tightly drawn blinds. He grabbed for his phone to take it off speaker, found the call had ended three minutes ago.

He flipped it closed, banged it against his head. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Part of him felt like calling her back, explaining that he’d only been doing his job, the one he’d been hired to do, the one that was going to buy the new roof for his beach house, maybe the shutters for his windows as well.

But he didn’t want to give her such a lame-sounding excuse over the phone. He’d do better to save it and deliver it in person tomorrow night. Because he would see her tomorrow night. He was not going to take no for an answer.

After what she’d just shown him—and he wasn’t talking about the skin—he was more interested than ever in finding out exactly who Olivia Hammond was. And what, besides her body, she was trying to get people to see.