TURN ME ON

by Kristin Hardy

  "Come on, you going to do it or not? I've got to make a big decision about a headset, here."

  Stef eyed him. "If I do this, you'll owe me big-time."

  "Yeah, right." Kev grinned. "You know what they say—the way to get what you want is by helping the person in a position to say yes get what they want."

  "And I want not to be sitting next to you." Stef glanced up just in time to see Sabrina edge down the far aisle of the wide-body jet, all glossy dark hair and ripe red lips. The stewardess said something to her in passing as they edged past each other and Sabrina's laugh rang out, rich and open.

  Before he knew he was going to do it, he was unbuckling his seat belt and stepping out into the aisle.

  * * *

  "What did you want to cover about the shoot?" Sabrina asked, reaching for her computer case. Hiding behind work seemed like the best strategy. She felt a bit as though she were exposed with no skin to protect her. He knew things about her, personal things that she'd have preferred to keep safely hidden.

  And she couldn't stop thinking of the way it had felt to be gathered against him.

  "We can get to that later," Stef said, laying a hand on hers to stop her. "How are you feeling?"

  Heat flared up into her and she jerked her hand away. "Fine. No problem. Um, about the other night. She hesitated. "I don't usually sit in the dark and get maudlin. You were really nice."

  "Don't sound so surprised."

  It almost slipped under her guard, the flash of humor that set her up for that blast of connection. If she gave in to it, who knew what would happen. Like melting ice on a river, the dislike that had helped her keep him at a distance had thinned, putting her in danger of being swept away. Talk, she thought, bring it back to an easy level.

  "Well, we spent the other night yapping about me. Let's talk about you for a change. Once you get finished sullying your reputation working on a sex doc, what happens then? Do you have anything planned? You know, another significant, thought-provoking intellectual extravaganza?"

  He gave her an amused stare. "I take that to mean that you're not overwhelmed by my work?"

  "On the contrary, I've heard very good things about your films."

  "But you've never seen one."

  She rolled her eyes. "Take it personally, why don't you? Look, there are a lot of documentaries that I skip. I'm more into the light stuff. Documentary as entertainment rather than education."

  "Some of us like to think they can be both."

  "Sure. I'm just a bit more interested in fun than in what's good for me."

  "Nice to know that some things about you haven't changed," he said, but without bite.

  "Tell you what, if we get this project in on budget, I'll watch one of your docs. Maybe the next one. What's it on?"

  "Greece during World War II."

  She blinked and tried to muster some enthusiasm. "Oh, military stuff. Uncle Gus is into that."

  He shook his head. "The underground. You hear lots about what went on in France and Denmark, and even in Germany, but you never hear what went on in Greece. My grandfather was part of it."

  "He must have had some great stories."

  "I never met him. He was lost during the war."

  That stopped her for a moment. "What happened?"

  "Nobody knows. My grandmother had gotten pregnant with my mother just about the time the Germans took over in Greece. Things got ugly pretty quick, I guess." He glanced over as the stewardesses moved up the aisle with the drinks cart. "My grandfather moved heaven and earth to get her and my uncle Stavros over to the U.S. Her family was already over here. He promised he'd follow a month or two later, but he never did."

  "Did she ever hear from him?"

  "A few letters for a month or two, and then nothing. By then, Greece was in such chaos that there was no way she could track him down. After the war, she waited to hear from him, but she never did."

  It seemed unbearable to her. "What about the neighbors, friends, didn't they know anything?"

  "All anyone knew was that he had joined the underground." Stef gave a humorless smile. "It wasn't a particularly healthy hobby."

  "He was just gone?"

  "People had a way of disappearing during the war. Maybe it was during some activity, or maybe the Germans found him out."

  "Your grandmother must have been devastated," Sabrina murmured.

  Stef nodded, his eyes sober. "I think it's always haunted her. If there's any one thing I want to do, it's to get over there and find some trace of him, some bit of information that will tell her what happened. The doc just gives me an excuse to poke around."

  "And a record."

  "If I find anything, it will be his memorial," he said simply.

  "Have you done much groundwork?"

  "I went over a year or two ago, before I started work on my last film. I've pulled permits from a distance."

  "You know that Gus is Greek, don't you? He's got some cousin who's in the government. He could probably call in a favor for you."

  Stef's teeth gleamed. "Why do you think I agreed to work on your project?"

  "Oh." Suddenly, it all made sense.

  His gaze snared hers, and suddenly her system jolted. "I don't do anything without a reason, Sabrina. Remember that."

  Oh, didn't she know it. "Speaking of which, why don't you tell me what was so important that you traded places with Kelly?"

  "Let's see," he said blandly as the stewardess stopped with the drinks cart. "Do you want apple juice or ginger ale?"

  * * *

  10

  « ^ »

  "So when was the last time you came?" Annika Tudor, one of the founding partners of Candy, asked bluntly.

  Sabrina blinked.

  They sat in the vodka bar of the Two Sixty-Nine hotel in Manhattan. The walls curved up around them to encircle a recess in the ceiling that glowed with cobalt-blue light. Frosted glass sconces sprang up out of crumpled, honeycombed steel on the wall. The table in front of them shone clear and smooth.

  Jazz played over the sound system, but the soles of their feet vibrated with the bass line of the music playing in Soma, the hotel's main bar that lay just below them. This night, Soma was the host of Candy, the monthly roving, private sex party that had become the talk of underground New York.

  "I'm serious. When was the last time you came?" Annika demanded, pushing back her spill of blond hair.

  "Actually, what you really should ask is when was the last time you came with someone besides yourself in the room," corrected Annika's business partner, Erin Belling.

  Sabrina gave a quick shake of her head. "Wait a minute. Who's interviewing who, here?"

  "You wanted to know why we started Candy," Annika said. "That's why. I mean, here we are supposedly reaping the benefits of the sexual revolution that our mothers fought for in the sixties, and it just started to seem like fewer and fewer of my girlfriends were having orgasms. Somehow, we were becoming decoupled from our sexuality."

  "Uh-oh, she's going into her degree-in-human-sexuality shtick," said Erin. "The reality was that we realized that what we all wanted was a place we could be as sexy as we wanted without being judged, a place we could let loose and let go of the politics and just get … hot," she finished, trailing her fingers down the front of the leather bustier she wore. "We put the word out and set up an application to find members with the right mind-set."

  "And what's that?"

  "We want a club where if it feels good to you to tear your top off and dance naked, then you do it and no one cares."

  "Except to egg you on," Annika added slyly.

  "Any men allowed?"

  "Of course. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun without them," purred Erin, staring at Mike, their young gaffer. "A guy can get in so long as he's with a member."

  "And they are?"

  "Women only. It sets the right tone. We figure they're probably not going to bring some guy who's uncool. We want guys who'll let loose and play, just not guys who'll go
pawing members who don't want it."

  "Now, members pawing guests, well, that's okay," Annika laughed. "Tonight's theme is Summer Strip-athon, though God only knows what else you'll see when we get going."

  "Anni," Erin whined, "it's ten-thirty. I want to go where the good times are."

  Annika rose. "We'll find you some members outside the door to interview. Come on, it's time to introduce you to Candy."

  Sabrina stood and smoothed her skirt down her hips. She glanced up to see Stef watching her. Oh, that was no way to start out a night shoot, giving her looks that sent her pulse skittering. Especially a night shoot like this one.

  Taking a deep breath, Sabrina gathered up her notes. Calm, she thought, professional. "Are you ready for this?" she asked Stef. In his checkerboard-patterned rayon shirt and black jeans, he looked more like a club patron than someone there to direct a film. On the other hand, she figured he'd blend in.

  "Lead the way."

  Kev and the rest of the crew scrambled to break down their equipment. With just a shoulder-mounted camera and minimal lights, they were ready to go.

  "So when was the last time you had an orgasm?" Kev asked with a wink as he passed Kelly.

  "Five minutes ago in the bathroom."

  He did a double take. "Really?"

  "I've always been coupled to my sexuality, Cooper."

  "I bet," he said admiringly.

  * * *

  "Welcome to Candy," said a blonde at the door in a shiny leopard-print bikini and gold chains, handing Sabrina a Tootsie Pop. She licked her lips and pressed a sticker on Stef's shirt that read Ask Me If I Talk Dirty. "You come and see me if you get bored, sugar," she said with a giggle.

  Sabrina stepped down the short hall leading into the club and took a deep breath of pleasure as exhilaration surged through her. God, she loved a wild night out, she thought, and from the sound of it—and the looks of it—Candy redefined the word. Already, she could feel it slipping into her system—the madness, the excitement.

  Music pulsed as hot spotlights shone down from above, illuminating sweaty bodies dancing in the swirl of color. The bar was a slash of blue light below, with a glowing wall of liquor behind. Whirls of neon embedded in the floor sent up halos of light.

  At a glance, it looked like a typical stylish, elite Manhattan night spot.

  Until you noticed that most of the women were topless. Until you saw the woman rubbing a vibrator against the mons of a dancer while a man caressed her. Until you heard the feverish auction for the guy stripping in the corner.

  Oh yeah, just your typical club … with baskets of condoms scattered around like bowls of peanuts.

  On a giant video screen spread across one wall, a woman leaned back and gasped as a man licked her bare breast, sliding his fingers down to the line of hair between her legs. Sprawled in chairs staring up at the film were individuals, couples and a few shifting blobs of bodies and bare skin.

  She moistened her suddenly dry lips.

  "Hot enough for you?" Stef murmured in Sabrina's ear. A man walking by bumped into her, sending her back against Stef, and his hands came up around her bare shoulders. "Careful, it could be dangerous in here."

  Dangerous was hardly the word, Sabrina thought, struggling to get her breath. Lethal was more like it. Sex. It was everywhere she looked. Sex. It was part and parcel of every thought she had about Stef. Sex.

  It was taking over.

  Ten feet away, on a Plexiglas cube, a Candy girl and a man stood behind a dancer, slowly pulling the woman's dress up, running their hands over the exposed skin. "Candy isn't about labels and classifications," Sabrina remembered Annika saying. "Candy is just about people feeling free to do whatever turns them on for a night."

  She could see how it could happen—how a person could watch for a few hours, absorb the frenzy and then find herself doing things she'd never dreamed of, stripping off her shirt and begging for a lap dance from a half-naked stranger.

  Or begging for sex from the man she'd sworn she'd never want again.

  "We've got our stuff back here," Stef murmured to her, pulling her over to a side wall. He leaned so close to be heard over the music that she felt the brush of his lips against her ear. A sudden shiver of arousal ran through her and she stared at him abruptly, stunned.

  Stef locked eyes with her for a moment; then he blinked and shook his head. "How do you want to do this?"

  Sabrina gathered her scattered wits. "Rove and get as much as you can. Definitely get footage of the cube dancers, especially with people stripping and touching. Shoot over from that corner where you can see the film and the people in front of it. And I'd swear I just saw someone on the dance floor doing herself. Keep an eye out for that. God, we're going to get some amazing footage here, especially with all those interviews we did with people in the line."

  "Got it. Mike," he barked. "Go get the rails."

  "Hold on," Sabrina said, touching Mike's shoulder before turning to Stef. "What are you doing?"

  "Sending him out for a dolly and a dolly track."

  "No," she said, trying to ignore the woman who'd climbed on the bar to strip off her top as her audience stuffed dollar bills in her lacy bikini bottoms. "I want you to shoot it raw. I want you two feet from the woman on that bar and I want to see the sweat roll down her body."

  "We're not trying to make a porn flick."

  "It isn't sleazy—these are just women feeling good about themselves." The lights flashed, the music throbbed and she began to sway to the beat unconsciously. "It's okay, better than okay. We'll set the motivation with some of the stuff we got from Erin and Annika, maybe add the interview with the girl who worked for the IT company. People won't see it as sleazy, they'll see it as empowering."

  "Is that how you see it?"

  It wasn't a conscious decision, but instinct that had her stepping forward to meet him, nose to nose. "I see it as sexy as hell. Don't you?"

  * * *

  Her eyes challenged him, and drew him in, witchy dark and hot. All he wanted to do was obey the urge drumming through his veins, the compulsion for her that had become nearly impossible to ignore. It took all of his control, and it took time, to step back. "You want sex, we'll give you sex." Wrong answer. Like a powder flash, the image exploded in his mind—Sabrina, hot and urgent, against and wrapped around him on the Plexiglas cube.

  It would have been a lot easier to concentrate on filming if Sabrina hadn't been dressed like one of the patrons in a short, short skirt and tight cropped top. She was trying to set up a rapport with her interview subjects, she insisted.

  Whatever it was, it was working. He'd thought men were the ones who were supposed to be all about sex. Who knew that women were so ready to talk about it and to get out there and let loose? Sex was something that belonged between two people, he'd always thought. He still did, but there was something disturbingly arousing about the naked desire all around them, in the feverish brightness of Sabrina's eyes that told him it was getting to her, too.

  They watched, they filmed and Stef thanked his lucky stars for Kev. His camera was good enough that they didn't even need the lights most of the time, making it easy to move fluidly around the room. If Sabrina wanted the sweat rolling down the breast of a dancer and onto the tongue of the man licking it, she'd have it.

  And God, what he wouldn't risk to have her.

  Stef stared out over the scene from the upper balcony. The pulse of the music vibrated up through the floor and into his body; the pulse of desire pounded harder. All that she'd been to him paled in the face of who she was now. If anything, the memory of holding her in his arms on her deck had made her more real to him, had made the arousal that much stronger when it returned.

  He watched her pace around the room, moving smoothly to the beat. He wondered if he'd always be able to pick her out of a crowd. He wondered at the fact that, once again, with nearly naked women all around her, she and she alone captured his attention. And he wondered, how he wondered, what it would feel like
to have her clenched around him again, hot and tight and shuddering as she came.

  "I'm getting some great shots," Kev said. "Mind if we stay up here for a while?"

  "Sure," Stef murmured. Without making a conscious decision, he began walking down the stairs, heading toward Sabrina. In the flow of the traffic coming up the stairs, in the press of bodies, he lost sight of her.

  Tension and something more primal—something like possessiveness—tightened his body. He looked toward the dance floor, where half-naked couples danced on the cubes. He looked toward the bar, where a man stripped slowly for a clutch of cheering women. And he glanced over to find Sabrina standing stock-still in the shadows under the balcony, staring across the room at the woman who sat on the table, her legs wrapped around a man who pumped his way into her, his naked buttocks gleaming.

  Sabrina stood there, tense and absorbed, every fiber of her caught up in the scene. Then, in a jolt as strong as physical contact, he felt her gaze move to him. When they walked toward each other, he registered it as surely as a touch.

  He could tell himself afterward that he'd only wanted to talk with her. He could tell himself that he'd meant it to take only a minute.

  But as their lips met in the deep shadows, he knew he'd be lying.

  It was primal, atavistic, more animal than human. The music drummed in his head like some tribal chant. Avid and greedy, her mouth tore at his self-control. This time, finally, there was no holding back. They dove into the kiss, met and clashed, in a frenzy fueled by need too long denied. Sabrina licked at his neck and bit on his collarbone, pressing herself against him even as he filled his arms with her tight, hot curves.

  On the dance floor, one of the guys stripped off his jeans with a flourish, and a woman wearing a see-through skirt over garters—and nothing else—reached out to pull down his boxers, before winding herself around him.

  The image only made Stef more aware of Sabrina, of the feel of her breast in his hand, the tease of her lips.

  "Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like, Stef?" she whispered feverishly, reaching down for his zipper. "Don't you wonder how it would be to watch it, to feel it, to move with it? I do," she breathed. "I do and I want you. Now."