“It’s not that I don’t like sex—I like it a lot!” Anna asserted, worried her brother now thought she was some kind of prude. “Once I get in the bedroom, everything’s fine. I mean, it all works, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Danny said drily.
Anna swallowed a healthy mouthful of champagne in a big, stinging gulp. A warm buzz spread through her body—alcohol, and the seductive desire to bare all to her brother. She leaned urgently across the table.
“I want the kind of sex you see in the movies. I want someone to want me so badly he almost tears my clothes off. I’m sick of being colorless and boring and good,” she said in a rush. “I want to feel alive, to really know that I’m still here.”
To her surprise, she felt a tear roll down her cheek. Danny wiped it off with his thumb, then he reached for her hand and squeezed it again.
“It’s okay, you are still here, and you will be for a long time to come,” he said reassuringly.
She shook her head. “There are no guarantees, Danny.” She sniffed inelegantly.
Danny passed her a freshly laundered handkerchief and began drumming his hands on the tabletop, deep in thought.
“Okay, okay. Sex. Sexxxxx,” he mused, as though he was trying to come up with an idea for one of his advertising campaigns. “What we need to do is hook you up with a hot guy. Let me think. There’s Ned in accounting. He’s cute and single and straight, from what I hear. I could have him over for dinner at my place, set you guys up.”
Anna felt a dart of apprehension at the thought of a dinner date and all that it might lead to. “I’m not interested in getting into a relationship with anyone, Danny,” she said hastily.
“But I thought that’s what you were just saying?” he asked, clearly baffled. “Did we or did we not just have an entire conversation about you improving your love life?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to be tied down. I’ve just quit the law firm, I’ve got this new life. I don’t want to feel trapped right now,” she said, feeling pressured just at the thought of it. She wanted to be free. That was why she’d started up the limo service. She loved driving, and it meant she was outside all day. She was her own boss, and she was beholden to no one for anything. After carrying so much responsibility for so long, she didn’t want anyone relying on her, expecting anything of her. The very thought of it made her feel claustrophobic.
“Okay,” Danny said slowly. “Then I guess we need to get you a lover. Some red-hot stud who just wants you for your body. A couple of months of dirty-dog shagging and you’ll be all caught up.”
Anna sighed heavily. “See, this is the problem. I have no idea how to pick up a man, let alone a hot stud. My God, I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she said glumly. “You know that guy you saw me with before? This thing happened in the car between us earlier today, this eye thing. And there was a moment when I knew it was all on. And I let it go. I simply couldn’t go there.”
Maybe I am a prude, Anna thought wistfully. Maybe I should just resign myself to reading about other people’s passion in the pages of romance novels.
“Do you think I’ve had too many years of coloring in between the lines?” she asked. “Maybe I’m too rigid and stuck in my ways to change. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that I didn’t consider from every angle.”
“Anna, you’ve survived a major life crisis. Just because you didn’t throw yourself at the first decent-looking guy who came along doesn’t mean you’re frigid,” Danny reassured her.
“Marc Lewis is not ‘decent looking,’” Anna said. “He’s…molten. Pure sex. And I spent the whole time he was in the car coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t possibly hook up with him, if by some miracle he actually propositioned me. And then, when he did…I chickened out.”
Anna stared miserably at her empty champagne glass. Danny looked thoughtful for a moment.
“That’s very interesting,” he said.
“This is my tragic love life we’re talking about here, not some special on the National Geographic channel,” she moaned.
Danny just smiled smugly at her. “I want you to turn around in your seat and pretend you’re looking at that lamp over your left shoulder,” he said.
Perplexed, Anna stared at her brother but he just indicated that she should do as he’d instructed. Swiveling in her seat, she looked for the lamp shade Danny had mentioned. A dart of excitement raced through her belly when she saw Marc sitting beneath it, talking to a group of business-suited men at his table. She snatched her gaze away and twisted back to face her brother before Marc could notice her looking.
“Oh, boy,” she said breathlessly. “How long has he been here for?”
“A while. Boring holes in your back with those big bad eyes of his,” Danny admitted.
“Really? He’s been looking at me?” she squeaked.
“Only a lot. So here’s what we’re going to do—a little seduction 101. I want you to go to the bathroom, and on the way back you’re going to try and catch his eye. As soon as you’ve got his attention, give him a little smile, then come straight over and join me. I’ll tell you what he does.”
Anna flinched and shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Danny asked.
“Because. Then he’d know how I felt.”
Danny stared at her. “I think I’m beginning to see the problem,” he said.
“And he’s a client,” Anna said defensively. “And he’s an arrogant pig, too. I could never have sex with a man I didn’t like.”
“Arrogant pigs are great in bed. Trust me.”
“Danny, all he’s after is sex.”
“Which is so offensive when all you want to do is play tic-tac-toe with him,” Danny said wryly. “Just think about it for a second, Anna. Let yourself go there. You’re an adult, he’s an adult. You both want the same thing. What’s stopping you?”
Anna tried to do what Danny was suggesting, tried to push aside a lifetime’s conditioning to open herself up to a new experience.
Problem was, all her life she’d believed that the only thing that made it okay to want to sleep with a man was the fact that you were lining him up for the long haul—sex came with commitment in her book, always had. But she’d just ruled out a relationship, hadn’t she?
The leaden weight returned to her belly as she considered the possibility of entering into a long-term relationship. No, definitely no commitment. So it was an affair or nothing. The question was, could she go there?
Having a relationship with someone just for sex—it was such a revolutionary, decadent, amazing concept. She couldn’t quite get her head around it. No strings. No thoughts of tomorrow. No commitment. Just sex. Lots of it. In interesting positions, and exotic places. With a man like Marc, who oozed arrogance and power and heat.
Thinking about it made her squirm in her seat.
“I’m a gay man, and not completely tuned into Radio Woman, but I’m going to read that little wriggle as a good sign,” Danny said.
For a second Anna allowed herself to indulge the fantasy that she could be the kind of woman who would take what Marc was offering and make hay while the sun shone. She could just stand up, sashay across to his table, then lean down and whisper in his ear. Something like, “Let’s skip dinner, and go straight to dessert.”
And then he would—
But her brain refused to go there. She couldn’t imagine what he would do next, because she’d never been in a situation like that in her life. She’d never said anything so blatant to a man, let alone a man as experienced and knowing as Marc so obviously was.
Sighing heavily, she shook her head. “It’s a great theory, Danny, but not for me. I’m just not cut out for that kind of thing,” she said. “I think I should concentrate on the skydiving and the motorbike riding.”
“Let me get this straight—you’d rather throw yourself out of a plane than let a man know you want to have sex with him?” Danny asked
lightly.
“That seems to sum it up,” Anna said. She felt a little sick inside. She was disappointed in herself, she realized. Checking her watch, she pushed back her chair and stood. “We’d better go in.”
Danny followed her as she headed for the door. Drawing alongside her and taking her arm, he leaned across to whisper in her ear.
“Can’t take his eyes off you, darling. Think about it, at least.”
And despite everything that she’d just said, Anna felt an illicit thrill race up her spine.
SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that once she’d involved Danny he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He let her stew until the following Thursday, then turned up on her doorstep just after nine o’clock.
She was in her pyjamas, and she stared at him and then double-checked the time.
“Don’t you normally go to the movies with Dad on Thursdays?” she asked, stepping aside to let him into her apartment.
“Early show,” Danny said dismissively as he breezed past her. “I’ve brought you some inspiration.”
He held up a shopping bag and moved to her kitchen table. “You’re my new project,” he said as he unpacked the bag. “I’m going to turn you into a vixen if it kills me.”
“What if I don’t want to be a vixen?” Anna challenged, wrapping her arms around her torso. She’d had plenty of time to fully and completely regret being so frank with her brother that night. What mad impulse had made her bare her soul to him? Like he needed to know his sister was a hard-up, sex-starved neurotic on a self-help mission.
“Too late, you already wrote it on your ‘things to do before I die’ list. You’re committed.”
He held up a DVD. “Top Gun. Tom Cruise with his shirt off. Val Kilmer with his shirt off. Anthony Edwards with his shirt off. If that’s not enough to get you going, I don’t know what is. Plus there’s that great love scene with Tom and Kelly McGillis.”
“You are the straightest gay man I know,” she said as she accepted the proffered DVD.
“I can appreciate good work. I’m a connoisseur.” He held up a blank-labeled CD. “Music to inspire and motivate. Danny’s special mix—Nina Simone, Sade, Tone-Loc—”
“Tone-Loc? How is a rapper supposed to inspire me?”
“‘Wild Thing.’ Tone-Loc has some very wise things to say about doing the wild thing.” He slapped the CD into her hand.
“This is all really lovely, Danny, but it doesn’t change anything. Except perhaps for making me even more frustrated than I already am,” she said, eyeing the pictures of buff bodies on the back of the Top Gun DVD.
“Exactly. Frustration leads to desperation. Desperation leads to desperate measures…like calling Marc Lewis up and asking him out.”
She rolled her eyes. “Never going to happen. The man would eat me alive.”
“With a bit of luck,” Danny said, winking.
Even though she was a grown, adult woman, Anna blushed from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair. “Danny!”
“Yes?” he responded, the picture of innocence.
She shook her head. “You’re hopeless.”
Danny spent the rest of the evening expounding on his theory on casual sex.
“If you had a sore shoulder, you’d get a massage, right?”
“Sure.”
“And if you had a toothache you’d go to the dentist, yeah?”
“I have a bad feeling about where this is going.”
“I’m just saying that if you have an itch, and you’re not in a relationship, what’s wrong with finding someone to scratch it? It’s just human nature to want to have sex. What’s the big deal?”
She didn’t have a ready answer for him. She’d been thinking about this a lot since their conversation in the bar. She didn’t object to casual sex on moral grounds. If two consenting adults wanted to go for it, who was she to have an opinion? But she struggled to imagine herself being that intimate with a complete stranger, then getting up, putting her clothes on and walking out the door to never see them again.
When she said as much to Danny, he slapped his palm to his forehead.
“D’oh! I’m not suggesting you suddenly turn into Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Just live a little. Have a fling with an unsuitable man. You’ll love it!”
Then Danny slid a manila folder across the table toward her.
“He’s thirty-five, separated from his wife of ten years just six months ago. Mover and shaker in the IT industry thanks to some ground-breaking software he launched ten years ago, millionaire at thirty, hot, hot for you and just waiting for your phone call.”
She stared at a newspaper photograph of Marc leaving a charity movie premiere on the weekend. He was wearing a dark suit, and he looked tall and powerful and predatory.
“I can’t believe you researched him,” she said lamely. He’d been married. Technically, was still married. But in her experience, people who’d been separated for six months had no intention of getting back together. She wondered if that accounted for the cynical gleam in his eye.
“You’re a novice. I’m just doing the groundwork so you know what you’re getting into.”
“I’m not getting into anything. Good God, Danny—I feel like you’re trying to pimp me out!”
As soon as she said it, she knew she’d hurt him. His face went blank and he reached for the folder.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize. I thought this was what you wanted, that all you needed was a little push.”
She watched as he stacked all his offerings together, ready to put them back into the carrier bag. What was she really afraid of here? Rejection? Getting in over her head? Her own desires? What did she have to lose, after all?
Nothing. She had absolutely nothing to lose—except her inhibitions and her stodgy old viewpoint. What it came down to was one thing: did she really want to change her life or not?
She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Brutal honesty time—she found Marc Lewis sensationally attractive. There, it was out. She’d thought it, even if she hadn’t said it out loud.
“Maybe you could leave the DVD. And the CD. And…the folder,” she said slowly.
Danny flashed her a big smile. “I knew it!”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Danny. Except that I’ll be climbing the walls if I actually watch this DVD.”
He laughed at her lame joke, and later, after he’d left, she stared at the photograph of Marc for a good five minutes.
What would he be like in bed? There was so much heat in those dark eyes of his, so much strength coiled in his lean body. She wondered if he put as much focus and attention into making love as he did into his business. What would it be like to have his body poised above hers, all his hardness pressed against her softness?
Belatedly she became aware that she was panting. Sitting alone in her kitchen on a Thursday night, panting over a black-and-white picture of an arrogant entrepreneur. She took a cold shower, put on another pair of freshly laundered cotton pyjamas and finally fell asleep, no thanks to Danny’s bag of inspiration.
The next day, she stared at Marc’s name on her daily call sheet. It was almost as if she’d conjured him out of the ether with her X-rated fantasies. And now she was going to come face-to-face with him again this afternoon.
It doesn’t mean anything, her lawyer self rationalized. He’s a client. He gets in the car, you drive him to wherever he wants to go, he gets out, it’s over. No biggie.
Except that she knew that the whole trip she’d be thinking about what Danny had said to her, and about those moments of forbidden fantasy when she’d imagined what it would be like to make love to a man like Marc, and whether she had the courage to do anything about it now that she was being given a second chance.
IN BUSINESS, there were bad days, and then there were Bad Days. At around four o’clock Marc decided he was definitely having one of the latter. Nothing had gone to plan. Important contracts had gone missing with a courier, he couldn’t get his U.S. manager on the phone, the accountants had turned up
more irregularities while going through due diligence on the Sum Systems accounts and an unavoidable holdup at his lunchtime meeting meant he’d been running half an hour behind time for the rest of the day.
Now he felt the dull throb of a headache starting as he and Gary exited his corporate headquarters and headed for the waiting car.
“…I think we should drop it. That’s my advice,” Gary said as they slid into the back of the black Mercedes.
“I’m not backing off from this deal, Gary,” he said, frustration making the words clipped and terse.
Veteran campaigner that he was, Gary didn’t bat an eyelid at Marc’s tone.
“That audit is pulling up big black holes at Sum. Has it ever occurred to you that the reason they were so keen to share the obvious bad stuff was to stop you from finding the really, really bad stuff that they’d hidden?”
“Read my lips—I am not backing off. I want that new data platform,” Marc said. “It’ll save us twelve months of development, and we can get our new database software out before Christmas.”
“But at what price?” Gary asked bluntly.
“That’s my decision, not yours,” Marc said, irritation getting the better of him.
Gary sank back into his seat, lips firmly pressed together, and Marc felt a stab of guilt. He hadn’t been the easiest man to manage since Tara’s betrayal. He sighed heavily and glanced out the window as the car raced past the thick steel crossbeams of the Harbour Bridge. He didn’t like being the kind of boss that everyone tiptoed around, but there was no doubting the fact that that was the man he’d become recently. He had to get a grip on the frustration and anger that seemed to be growing inside him day by day. He wasn’t an angry man, usually. In fact, he used to be kind of a fun guy. His firm had the reputation of being a good employer, a great place to work. He prided himself on his corporate culture.
The truth was, he was letting his disappointment and hurt over the breakdown of his marriage leak into the other parts of his life. He knew it, but he just couldn’t seem to control it. He felt so baffled and ripped off and angry. Hadn’t he been a good husband? Hadn’t he given Tara everything she ever wanted? Hadn’t he been loyal and faithful?
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