The Fifth Favor (11 page)

Intrigued, Billie braced an arm against the back of the sofa and peered at his face.

This was the man she’d wanted to meet that first interview at Avalon, and now she 58

The Fifth Favor

understood why he stayed so carefully hidden away. “So you didn’t deny the rumors?

They didn’t bother you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never given a damn what people say or think. I know what I am, and I don’t need people to tell me. As for Luke, he was uninhibited, passionate in all his relationships. He cared for his friends and lovers with equal fervor. The truth is, I didn’t even know he slept with men by choice until this past year. Sure, he’d done it occasionally for extra cash, for drugs. But then it became apparent that he preferred men over women, and when he claimed to have feelings for me, I brushed it off.

“The night before he died, he came to me, beaten up, stoned, scraping the bottom. I took care of him, just like always. Cleaned him up. That’s when he swore to those feelings, and I knew he was serious.” He closed his eyes. “The ugly truth is, I wasn’t comfortable with it. I couldn’t accept it.”

“But you couldn’t have been surprised,” she said gently.

“He was my best friend. I wasn’t truly surprised, just…unprepared for the intensity of it. We had an argument about it. I left for work angry—with him for manipulating me, with myself for feeling guilty. When I got home, the police were here and Luke was a corpse on the sidewalk.”

Abruptly he sat up and shoved his hands through his hair, ruffling it like a raven’s feathers. “If I’m really honest with myself, I know I was only part of his problem. So much was wrong in his life. He started coming to work with bruises. I figured he was being abused, maybe by a lover, but he shut me out. And Azure didn’t want the outside world brought into Avalon. She turned a blind eye.”

“Did you tell all this to the police?”

“Of course. They have Luke’s address book, but nothing in it points to his lovers’

identities. He was careless in every aspect of his life except when it came to protecting his sexual partners. In that one way, he was painfully discreet.”

His wry tone countered the despair in his eyes. “So Luke dies, chooses my balcony to leap from, leaves no note that they can find. And who do the authorities look at? Me.

The only person who gave a damn about him. The only one who…”

He shook his head and pressed his fingertips against his brow. “I feel like I’ve been dragged to hell and back. Like I’m being punished for caring about him. What they can’t see is that I didn’t care enough. I could have gone beyond Azure and contacted the authorities with my concerns when I saw someone was physically hurting him, when I saw how bad his drug abuse had gotten. But I didn’t, and the next thing I knew, Luke was dead.”

Sympathy tightened Billie’s throat. Her instincts told her he was innocent, racked with guilt and grief on top of insult and indignation at being suspected, but the stoniness in his demeanor proclaimed nothing would comfort him.

“Will Azure vouch for your innocence during the investigation?”

A rueful smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “She doesn’t need to. Like I said, I have an alibi for that night. I was working.”

59

Shelby Reed

Relief, followed by a surge of irrational jealousy, clenched her stomach. “Well, good,” she said firmly. “Then it’s over for you.”

His black gaze shifted back to hers. “But it isn’t. During questioning I had to break the confidentiality clause in my Avalon contract, and the investigators on this case have all the integrity of a watering can. The client I was with…hell. Everyone suffers on this one. My days at Avalon are numbered.”

Billie waited for him to say more. When he only looked at her in silence, she said, “I won’t put any of this into the article. I’ll respect your privacy, Adrian.”

“I’m past caring what you do with this information,” he retorted. “Tell it all.

Nothing’s sacred in this world. If you want to know more, I’ll tell you. No, I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.”

The drop in his tone shivered along her nerves, and she stiffened. “What?”

“I want to show you what I do.” He slid a hand along the back of the sofa and inched toward her. “I want you to know why women pay for me.”

Billie recovered just in time to flatten a palm against his chest. “Adrian, no.”

He paused. “I’m sorry—
no
?”

“Right. That’s what I said.” She swallowed and felt like a child bypassing a jar labeled
Free Candy
.

Beneath her hand his heart thundered, his cool words belying the frantic rhythm that matched her own pulse. “Our track record is beginning to worry me.”

The dry comment brought a reluctant smile to her lips. “You don’t hear ‘no’ very often, do you?”

“I can’t remember the last time.”

“Don’t get me wrong…I find you incredibly attractive,” she said, knowing honesty was her only defense with a man who made his living by peeling away female inhibitions. “What woman wouldn’t be aroused by you?”

“What woman would follow me home, two miles on foot in the dark? You’re not just any woman, Ms. Cort, although you work damn hard at blending in with your tailored, conservative persona. You’d like people to think that wildness right under your surface is tightly reined. But it’s not. It radiates from you in waves.”

“Thank you, I think.” Her voice trembled.

“It’s not a compliment. I’m not a nice person.” His hand cupped her jaw, his thumb brushing her cheek. Then his palm slid down to her neck, and the slight pressure he applied snagged her breath in her throat. “You’re awfully trusting to assume I’m telling you the truth about Lucien.”

She swallowed. “I pride myself on my ability to read people. And what purpose would it serve to lie to me?”

“Maybe I do it for sport.” He slid closer, his provocative scent following him like an errant shadow. “Look around you, Billie. We’re alone. What would stop me from wrapping my hands around your lovely neck?”

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The Fifth Favor

Billie’s pulse went wild. Fear laced with excitement made it hard to speak, but she straightened her spine and returned his piercing stare. “I’m going on instinct with you, Adrian. I don’t think you pushed your friend off that balcony, and I don’t think you’d hurt me.”

His black eyes narrowed, then his lashes dropped like a privacy shade, shuttering his emotions. “I wouldn’t hurt you. I’d pleasure you, if you’d let me.” His fingertips slid into the valley between her breasts, gently stroking, gently promising. “Will you let me?”

Billie closed her eyes and heat flooded her face, prickling her skin, pooling between her thighs. So many months without a man’s touch, and this man had a touch a woman could only dream of. “I won’t have sex with you.”

“It’s not required.” A somnolent mask dropped over his features as he caught the top button of her blouse between two fingers and unfastened it. “I can touch you right here on this sofa, in a million different ways. Taste you. Take you to heaven and back again. I’m offering you the ultimate research for your article, Billie. You can say you don’t want what I have to give, but I’ll know you’re lying.”

Desire, hot and heavy, seeped through her veins, her limbs, fed by the certainty that she’d run out of reasons to say no.

“Why are you doing this?” Her breath came in broken rushes as she eyed the way he caressed the second button on her blouse. “I already know what you can do. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

He left her collar gaping and shifted toward her in increments, as though she might flee if he moved too abruptly. When he had her cornered against the arm of the sofa, he twined a hand in her hair and tugged her head back, his mouth hovering an inch above hers. Gone was the smooth, silky-toned son of Avalon. In his place dwelled a man barely in control of his emotions.

“Maybe I need this.” The fierce words rushed between her lips, flavored with sudden desperation. “Maybe I need it with you, right here, tonight. You’re so damn innocent, Billie. It sets me on fire.”

Oh, God
.

“And what if I say no again?” she whispered, even as she fumbled for a handful of his T-shirt and tugged it free from his jeans. “That I don’t want you?”

“You’re a lousy liar. Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”

“I don’t know,” she lied, then turned her mouth against his palm and kissed it.

With gratitude for all the ecstasy he would bring her in a few short moments, with sympathy for the turmoil within him that he could only mollify in this one way.

A single swipe of her tongue against his skin left his salty, clean taste imprinted on her memory. She wanted to taste all of him, his solemn, beautiful lips, the curve of his neck, the muscled planes of his body. The power of his arousal beneath her tongue.

61

Shelby Reed

He was a stranger, an alien creature, impossible to reach or understand. And still she wanted to try. “Tell me what you need.”

“This,” he whispered, watching her lips move against his palm. “Just this.” He rose over her, pinning her against the cushions, and stroked her hair with a tenderness that seemed misplaced among the sultry sensations it awakened in her.

“Do your clients pleasure you?” she asked hoarsely, her head tilting and following his fingers as they massaged her neck.

“If that’s what they want. You pleasure me, Billie. The sight of you. The sound of your voice. I want to hear it all sorts of ways. Laughing. Whispering. Moaning. Crying out.” He caught her mouth in a lush, hungry kiss, and there was nothing sweet or grateful about it this time. Erotic delight arrowed through her with each sleek thrust of his tongue between her lips, a sultry promise of what he would do to her if she let him.

She wouldn’t survive it. His mouth was hot, wet, ravenous on hers. His fingers enclosed her breast through her blouse, where its tip tightened beneath his cupping caress. He leaned down and bit her gently through lace and silk, tugged and sucked and worried her nipple with his teeth until her back arched off the cushions and a helpless sound of delight escaped her throat.

“Oh, yes.” She reached to embrace him, to touch his dark, silky hair, but he caught her wrists in one strong hand and anchored them above her head.

His eyes, as black as liquid night, stripped her naked before he cupped her other breast and drew its tip into his mouth through her clothing. An electric current ran from her breast to the wet, wanting place between her legs, so that every tug of his mouth echoed down low, as though his lips touched her there too.

When he lifted his head, her blouse was damp, her nipples hard and aching. Her chest rose and fell in small, rapid waves as his gaze lingered there on the results of his seduction.

“Adrian…” She struggled to find the words to express her desires, knowing he had heard it all, wishing there was a way to make it sound new and honest and real to his ears. “Will you take off your shirt? I want to look at you.”

He released her hands and stood. While she watched, breathless, he crossed his arms in front of him, caught the hem of his T-shirt and drew it up and over his head.

Instantly Billie’s throat constricted with the need that surged through her body.

Naked to the waist, every muscle taut, he was sculpted like the Kouros statue in the whirlpool tub at Avalon. A work of art. Sleek, hard, contemporary art. Pleasure for the senses.

Without moving his gaze from her face, he slid a hand down to his straining fly and stroked himself through the denim. “What else?”

“Your jeans.”

He released the first button. “Tell me something.”

“What?” It came out a croak. She cleared her throat. “What?”

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The Fifth Favor

“When was the last time you had sex?”

“Six months ago.” It felt like a century. Another lifetime. The Billie Cort of last March would never have dreamed she’d be lying here, panties soaked with desire, watching Adrian strip while her pulse crashed in her ears.

He stepped on the heel of his left tennis shoe, withdrew his foot, then did the same with the right. “Was it making love? Or fucking?”

The harsh term pierced her pleasured haze. She forced herself to picture Ted’s face, to recall the touch of his fingers on her skin…too fast, too rough and impatient. The memory left her empty. “I thought it was making love. But maybe it wasn’t.”

“And did you…” One last button, and his jeans gaped open. “Have an orgasm?”

Oh, God
. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He was naked beneath the jeans, hard and big. He would fill her hands, her mouth, her body.

She tore her gaze away from the faded fly of his Levi’s, from his straining penis and the seductive play of his fingers over its tip. “When was the last time
you
had sex, Adrian?”

“A few nights ago. Love had nothing to do with it. I gave my client two thousand dollars worth of orgasms.”

“And what about you? Did you…?”

“It was inconsequential, and had nothing to do with her.” His lashes lowered.

“Right now I can’t remember what an orgasm feels like.”

Billie said nothing, just watched the shift of emotions darken his brow. Anger, confusion, sadness. Then his features smoothed over, replaced by a mask of poised command and hotter intent. In a moment, if he wanted to claim her, he would. With his hands, his mouth. He would fulfill fantasies she didn’t even know she had.

The sensations zinging through her were foreign, misplaced, frightening. She was glad he hadn’t found true pleasure with his last client, as though she had some sort of claim to him now that she’d broken down his walls of privacy.

He peeled off his socks and set them aside with his tennis shoes, then straightened again. “When was the last time a man made you come with his tongue?”

A threat. A promise. She felt like she could climax simply from the touch of his gaze on her body. “A long time ago.”

His chest was smooth, carved from stone, his nipples hard and brown like the rest of him. His erection, a powerful, formidable presence, pushed free from the confines of his jeans. His hand closed around it, stroked it fully now, base to straining head. Billie had never seen a man touch himself, and the erotic sight of it tore the breath from her lungs.