Leather Bound

by Shanna Germain

  Instead, I welcomed his lips against mine. The musky male scent of him, the heat of his mouth, the way he captured my lips greedily, all of it sent my head spinning in a million directions. Client, I thought. Potential client. Leather Bound. Job. Business. Not pleasure.

  But all of those mental moans of protest were overshadowed by that other, louder, fiercer voice in my head, which was not using words at all. It was urging me to lean into the kiss. To do far more than that. To put my hands in his hair, as I’d been aching to do. To pull away his tie, unbutton his shirt, run my palms across the width of his chest. And worse, oh so much worse.

  When he slipped his tongue between my lips, parting them, entering me, all thinking stopped. Sensation blossomed along every exposed part of my body, aching for his touch. I moaned, a low sound of want that was neither controllable nor comprehensible.

  At the sound, he cupped the back of my head with his hand, capturing me into the kiss. He bit my lip softly and I couldn’t help but release another sound, this one urgent and demanding.

  He laughed against me, the sound muffled against my lips. It was a delicious laugh, one that promised all kinds of things in the future. Pleasure. Maybe a little pain. Definitely more than a little power.

  Power. For some reason, the word brought me up short. Jesus. I was supposed to be in charge here. Of myself, if nothing else. I was the professional. Davian was my client.

  Despite my desire to do nothing ever again except continue to kiss this sexy man in my office, I put my hands flat on his chest, on his absolutely wonderful chest, and pushed myself away from his touch.

  He let me go without protest, his hand falling away from the back of my head. His eyes were deep and still, his expression unreadable. I couldn’t hear anything except my own soft, quick breaths and the thrum of want that ran through my body like a strummed guitar string.

  I knew I should say something, apologise maybe, but I didn’t know what to apologise for. And I truly didn’t want to.

  ‘You can get there from here,’ he said.

  Because I was thinking about kissing, about being kissed, about Davian putting his lips to mine again and prying my mouth open with the tip of his tongue, his comment only went as far as my lizard brain. The number of dirty, sexy things that flashed in my brain between the time he said that and the time I realised he’d moved back to talking about business was very, very high.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He cocked a grin at me. Loaded, I thought. Loaded and damn dangerous. But fine too.

  ‘That’s your first clue,’ he said. ‘You can get there from here.’

  I just stood there and stared at the fine form of him as he walked out the front door. As if daring one more thing to pop up and hit me with a surprise today.

  Nothing did. Maybe that in itself was the surprise.

  * * *

  As soon as he left, I retreated to my office and pulled out Clementine, gearing myself up for some serious sleuthing.

  Davian had said I could get to the Cat House from Leather Bound. So it had to be somewhere in the Sweet Spot. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a place big enough to house a strip club. I’d been up and down those streets a hundred times and had never seen any indication of it. And it certainly wasn’t new; there were a couple of strip clubs around, but I was pretty sure that none of them had closed down or changed ownership. And, thanks to Conrad’s nudging thumb, I’d joined the business owners’ association, so I mostly kept abreast of any new businesses.

  The internet gave me nothing. It was starting to hurt my ego that I was having such a bad search week. First Davian and his book. Now this.

  Well, when the internet didn’t give you what you wanted, it was time to turn to more traditional methods.

  I called Cream and asked for Stefan. It took only a few seconds for his Tennessee drawl to make its way to my ear.

  ‘Come and get some cream and sugar for your coffee, sugar,’ he purred.

  ‘Stefan, how did you know it was me?’

  ‘Who’s “me”?’ he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. ‘I always answer the phone like this.’ Still couldn’t tell.

  ‘It’s Janine, from Leather Bound.’

  ‘Jah-neen,’ he drawled. ‘Where in the hell have you been?’

  ‘I’m in your shop every morning, Stefan. Where the hell have you been?’

  Truly, I saw him almost every day, but he was usually entertaining other customers with some story that involved rapidly flying hands and his imitation New Jersey accent, so I often slipped in and out without saying hello.

  ‘Ah, you know me, darling. Always on the swoon.’

  ‘Truly,’ I said. My voice was droll, but I was already smiling. Stefan always makes me smile. It’s in his nature to make people feel good just by being around them, like helium or ice cream or something.

  ‘So, if you don’t want my cream – and take no offence at this, lovely, but I don’t really want to give it to you – why are you bringing me your voice on this infernal device instead of in person where I can feed you sugar and caffeine?’

  ‘I need some information.’

  He lowered his voice a notch, rolled into a deeper note. ‘Is this classified?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. Neither of us was serious, but this was a game we played from time to time. He liked to tease me for my book sleuthing, calling me Darling Nancy Drew. Or sometimes just Darling Nancy. Mostly, he liked to tell people that he was the caffeine assistant to the world’s most famous book sleuth.

  ‘Hit me, sugar,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Cat House?’

  His laugh. One of the things that I like best about people is their laughs. Stefan’s got a throaty chuckle that goes against everything else you know about him. It’s even throatier through the phone.

  ‘Only about seven bazillion of them, scattered across the entire southern US. Any one in particular? Because I’ve tried them all, except for, of course, the ones in Texas. You know how those wild wildebeests are.’

  ‘Stefan, sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  That laugh again. Making me laugh too. Introvert is me, but the people I like? I really, really like. I’d keep them around me for ever if I could.

  ‘Me neither, sugar, me neither,’ he said. ‘But I’m serious now. Tell me what you need.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a place actually called the Cat House, somewhere in the Sweet Spot?’

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said. Not as if he needed information, but as if he liked drawing it from me.

  I told him what I knew. Which wasn’t very much. That I was looking for the Cat House, which was something like a strip club, and that I had to go there.

  ‘A moment,’ he said.

  The phone clicked in my ear. Not a hang-up, but a set-down, probably on a counter somewhere. Through the line I could hear the steam of the espresso machine and the clank of cups. A couple of voices talking and laughing. Typical background noises of a coffee shop. It was oddly comforting for not actually being there. More businesses should have this as their on-hold music.

  Very soon, he was back. ‘Sorry. Eleven times a day I tell that woman the perfect shot is exactly twenty-one seconds long and every day she flibbergibbits it up.’ For as long as I’d known him, Stefan had complained endlessly about his employees. Also for as long as I’d known him, Stefan had had the exact same employees. They were good at what they did. Which, I got the feeling, entailed handling coffee and handling Stefan in equal, loving measures.

  ‘First, tell me how you know about this place and why,’ he said.

  ‘I have tickets.’ I waved them in the air as if he could see them on the phone, and then was glad no one could see me do that.

  ‘You … have tickets.’ He mulled this over for so long in silence I would have thought he had hung up, except I could still hear the sounds of coffee being made in the background. ‘Pray tell, how did that happen?’

&n
bsp; ‘It’s a very long story,’ I said.

  ‘And one that I’m sure I’m going to hear very soon.’ It wasn’t a question. It was a very sweet, very Southern form of blackmail.

  ‘You are?’ I agreed hesitantly. ‘But where exactly is it?’ I had so many questions, but that seemed like the one I needed an answer to first and foremost.

  ‘Promise me you’ll come and have some coffee before you go and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Bring that boy of yours, the cute blond one.’

  ‘I’m –’ I was about to say ‘– planning to come there tomorrow anyway and the cute blond one is not really very happy with me,’ but Stefan cut me off.

  ‘OK, I’m going away now to save the coffee shop from –’ here his voice raised, clearly not meant for me ‘– the scoundrels and bandits who are running it into the ground, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Stefan.’

  ‘Love, thank me with something besides words.’ Which pretty much meant, ‘Promise to come in and spend some time with me when you don’t actually need me for something.’

  I hung up, and felt slightly better for having a plan. Tomorrow, work all day, go to Cream to meet with Kyle, talk to Stefan while I was there, go to strip club … no, wait … find strip club, then go to strip club, then discover whatever it was Davian was sending me there to find out by talking to some chick named Kitty.

  What a horrible plan.

  * * *

  Any week that starts off like this week did is just bound to keep getting weirder. And that’s pretty much what happened.

  The next morning, a regular brought his first-edition book back, citing that it had stains. Which it did. Because it was a first-edition book and about a million people had owned it before him. Then I mixed up the shipping time on someone else’s book, so it didn’t arrive when I said it would. Lily was cranky because her date had gone badly. I had Kyle and Davian and some chick called Kitty on my mind.

  All in all, it was one of those days.

  By the time I got home, I was stressed, on edge and later than I would have liked. I had less than twenty minutes to dress and get to Cream to meet Kyle. Hopefully I could figure out what I was going to say to him before I got there. You know how you have those conversations in your head and everything sounds fantastic? Well, I hadn’t had a single one of those yet. So far I’d been alternating between ‘You know I really like you, but marriage isn’t something I’m interested in’ and ‘Can’t we just have sex?’ Neither of which was even close to what I really wanted to say and both of which just sounded stupid.

  I also wanted to get to the show at the Cat House early so I could have some time to scope the whole thing out. Maybe, in retrospect, it wasn’t a great idea to go with Kyle, either way. I was supposed to be doing research, supposed to be paying attention and, I don’t know, getting some woman I didn’t know to talk to me about a man I barely knew. But Davian had given me two tickets.

  Ugh. What had I got myself into? Some days I longed to be a person in a novel instead of a person in the real world. They always said smart, funny things. And didn’t run away from the man who loved them. OK, maybe that wasn’t true all the time, but they usually had it figured out by the end. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to figure it out.

  Either way, I needed to be out of my work clothes and into something with a little more oomph. Standing in front of my closet, I hemmed and hawed over what to wear. Sexy? Slutty? Did I even own something that qualified as either of those?

  I’m bad at the dressing, have I mentioned? I wished suddenly and fiercely that I’d had Lil come home with me. She’d be sprawled on the bed right now, chomping the grape-flavoured gum she loved so much, but that I wouldn’t allow in the store because it made all the pages smell like grape for ever. She’d be directing me on exactly what to wear, and not to wear. ‘That one makes your ass look scrumptious,’ she’d say. Or ‘No, no, no, no. Not those. Hell no.’

  I missed those days of our friendship, those days when we did everything together, with a sudden fierceness that ripped through me more strongly than it should have. When had we lost that? I couldn’t remember. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d felt like I’d lost her until the question had popped into my head just now. It had been recently, surely. Sometime after we’d opened the store. Was it when Kyle and I had got more serious? Whatever that meant. Or something else? And now I needed her, needed to hear her tell me everything was OK, that I’d make all the right choices, and she wasn’t here. Which was my own damn fault.

  What would Lil do? I thought stupidly, staring at my closet.

  A little red dress caught my eye as I scanned the fabrics. Red dress, black stockings, black boots, my hair up in a bun with some long earrings. I could do that. And it wouldn’t look out of place no matter what the event was like. I hoped.

  I dressed quickly, throwing a scarf around my neck for good measure. Despite my hemming and hawing, I would almost be on time to meet Kyle. That meant Kyle first, then talk to Stefan, then Cat House. Or WC. Whatever it was.

  On the way out the door, I grabbed the tickets. OK, things were looking better. Stop being a coward and face Kyle. Get through tonight. Learn some things about my new client. Good. I could do this.

  I opened the door and practically fell over Kyle, who was on his knees on my welcome mat.

  CHAPTER 6

  OK, ‘practically fell over’ isn’t quite the truth. I actually did fall over him. Because I am a klutz. A cute klutz, if the rumours are to be believed, but still a total and complete klutz. I tried to stop myself, and if he’d been standing up, it would have been easy. He was tall enough that he would have taken my weight, even at my breakneck speed, and we would have wobbled, but not fallen.

  But he was kneeling to pull his phone out of his bag and I didn’t see him until way too late. My legs went bent-knee right into him. The tickets flew out of my hand to flutter down the hall, and I did the most awkward and unsexy air-flying routine ever invented. I’m pretty sure everyone within a mile got a flash of my underwear.

  At least I’d worn something sexy. Which also meant something that covered far too little.

  I tried to sigh and all I could do was utter a little half-squeak.

  ‘Janine. Holy – are you –? What the hell? I’m so sorry.’

  Kyle was clearly as confused as I was, and maybe as out of breath. He’d scrambled up from his kneeling position to loom over me. From my floor-sprawled position, he was like a really tall, skinny giant holding down one big paw.

  I gently waved his hand away for the time being. I looked like a fool, but I wasn’t going anywhere just yet. My ankle throbbed like I’d just fallen off of a pair of high heels, some part of my head had thunked against something with a sound loud enough that I could still hear it somewhere inside my teeth, and I was pretty sure an elephant was sitting on my chest.

  I’m not that tall; why does a fall from my own height end up with me so banged up?

  ‘What?’ I was trying to get my words out through my gasps of breath. ‘Are you. Doing here?’

  ‘Um.’ Kyle looked as confused as I felt.

  ‘We were supposed to meet at Cream,’ I said. The air was coming easier now and my head didn’t actually hurt where I’d bonked it. Only my ankle continued to whine about being twisted. It was the same ankle I’d broken when I was in college, during a particularly stupid bike-riding incident that we won’t talk about, but this time the pain wasn’t nearly as bad. Hopefully, I’d just pulled one of my usual dumb moves and hadn’t actually broken anything.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  I nodded, but didn’t get up.

  Kyle, clearly realising that I wasn’t going to get up anytime soon, plopped himself down beside me.

  For the first time I really looked at him. I mean, other than the look of ‘Holy crap, what’s he doing there, I’m falling on him.’ He was dressed in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, topped with a grey suit jacket. His blond hair was brushed back so that
it fell in long strands across his forehead. I always forgot how beautiful his eyes were, green like perfectly ripe olives.

  And, at the moment, they were very very confused olives.

  ‘I thought you said to meet you at your house at seven,’ he said. ‘I’m a little early, because we hadn’t talked and …’ He stopped, shaking his head. I knew him well enough to know that meant he was trying not to get upset. My heart did a little tug of guilt and sadness.

  ‘Not my house,’ I said. ‘The Cat House. Cat.’ As though that made it so much clearer for him. Considering I’d never even heard of the Cat House until today. And hadn’t actually said the Cat House on the phone.

  ‘You wanted me to meet you at the Cat House?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but I thought you might come with me. Wait. You know the Cat House? How?’ Because even though Stefan had been keeping a tight lid on it while we’d talked, I’d heard the surprise in his voice when I asked after the Cat House, and something beyond surprise when I said I had tickets. So why wasn’t Kyle looking confused?

  ‘I –’ he started.

  ‘Wait.’ We were still sprawled on the ground. I rotated my ankle and was rewarded with nothing more than a small blip of pain. Awesome. ‘Help me up first?’ I asked.

  He took my hands in his and pulled me up. I took a tentative step on my aching ankle, and found it held me surprisingly well.

  ‘Inside,’ I said at his inquisitive look.

  The door was still open, of course. It wasn’t like I’d found the time to lock it, or even shut it, between leaving and making my flying leap-fall over Kyle.

  I wanted to talk about the Cat House, about why everyone seemed to know about it but me, about what he was doing there, and about a million other things. But what I didn’t want to talk about was probably the very thing that Kyle did want to talk about.