Evening Storm

by Anne Calhoun

  A common mistake. She smiled. “I don’t really design with an eye toward the sexuality of an outfit. I design so the woman experiences her own sexuality. If you were with a woman who wore it for herself, you’d know.”

  He let that linger in the summer air, drift with the traffic noise, the hum of air conditioners in the windows overhead. “Confidence is the sexiest thing ever,” he finally said. His voice was low and rough, barely audible over the traffic on the distant avenues.

  She stopped breathing. For a moment the city swamped her, the scent of tires and engine oil, the heat rising from the city’s infrastructure running underneath the streets, the ever-present faint hum of jackhammers, the taste of the beer warm and rich in her mouth. Was he wondering what it would be like for her to touch him? The thought left her dry-mouthed. Flustered, she tipped back the bottle of beer.

  “Once I saw you on your knees, it was all I could think about.”

  She froze, beer trickling into her mouth.

  “Fuck my fucking life,” he said, disgusted. “That came out wrong.”

  She laughed, spewing beer out her nose and all over the steps leading down to the sidewalk. Once she started laughing she couldn’t stop, in part because he had slapped his palm to his forehead and was rubbing it in chagrin while he muttered under his breath. She wiped her forearm inelegantly over her nose and mouth, and tried to get her face under control. “You didn’t mean that to sound the way that it sounded?”

  “Nope,” he said with false cheer, looking heavenward as if God himself could intervene.

  She shouldn’t ask this question, shouldn’t give in to the tension and attraction crackling between them, but he was so difficult to pin down. Average guy who walked in off the street, seducer, the wolf, and now a man with his foot in his mouth, and all of it sharing space with that shocking, sparking charisma, tightly leashed. It was so companionable to sit on the steps in this great, humming, thriving city and just talk to someone. Not just someone, to him.

  She really shouldn’t ask this question. Maybe he’d say something if she stayed silent, so she tipped back the beer bottle again, and this time managed to actually swallow the beer. Still quiet.

  “What did you mean?”

  He shifted on the stoop, then finished off his own beer. “I just meant . . . There was something about the line of your back as you bent to pin the hem. Except . . .” He paused again and she got the sense that he wasn’t a man who had trouble expressing what he felt, but rather that he didn’t do it often. No, Ryan Hamilton felt things very deeply, but for some reason he was reluctant to share what he felt. He drew a breath and looked down the street toward Seventh Avenue. “It wasn’t just the line of your back. It was the curve of your shoulders and the angle of your elbows, the way you pulled pins from the pincushion on your wrist. You were sitting back on your heels, and you were so competent at the task in front of you. You know who you are, what you’re doing, and why. It’s hot as hell.”

  Every cell in her body was quivering. Of course she’d been complimented before, on her work, on her designs, on her temper’s ability to make male designers cower, but never before had a compliment made her heart swoop in her chest.

  “Shit,” he said disgustedly. “That’s not what I meant, either. Of course you’re competent. Your designs are absolutely amazing, unlike anything I’ve seen, and trust me, I’ve seen a lot of lingerie. Mastery, is what I meant. Watching you was like watching a brilliant dancer. You had total control of the material, and your tools. And her,” he said with a wry smile. “Which is no mean feat. What exactly were you muttering under your breath while she was wandering around in the showroom?”

  “It loses something in the translation,” she said.

  “Liar.” She smiled at him and finished her beer but neither confirmed nor denied his spot-on assessment.

  He gave her the cocky grin again. “What would I have to do to get you to talk French to me?”

  The wolf was back. Simone wasn’t sure whether to feel disappointed or relieved. She could cope with the Ryan who played the role of the billionaire robber baron outfitting his latest mistress. The Ryan who massaged her hands and elbows and seduced her with words was an unfamiliar creature, and far more tempting. But this conversation only confirmed her initial assessment. This couldn’t happen again. Fortunately his question about talking in French gave her an out. She retreated to the safety of silly flirtation.

  “What is it with men and French accents or the French language?”

  The grin transformed into a squint. “Are you kidding me? You don’t have any idea how hot it is?”

  “Of course I don’t have any idea how hot it is,” she said. “I understand that other people find it arousing, but to me it’s just the way people talk.”

  “Yeah, that thing in the middle about it being arousing? That’s why.”

  She gave him a little nudge with her knee, then stood up and stretched.

  He continued below her. “If the French language makes you think of other things, like French kissing—”

  “Why doesn’t it make anyone think of the French horn? Or French fries?”

  “It makes me think of French letters,” he said.

  “I know what those are,” she said. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “The gutter is where I live,” he said as he got to his feet. Just like that the mood shifted, because his tone held not bitterness, but something else. Regret.

  “Most people automatically assume I live in the gutter because I design lingerie,” she said before she remembered she had misgivings about forming a closer connection with Ryan. “I must think about sex all the time. But I don’t. Sex isn’t the only thing that can happen when a man finds a woman irresistible.”

  He glanced away, as if discomfited. “Your process is missing a key component,” he said.

  They were standing on the stoop, him on the step below her, so their faces were aligned. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at his mouth. He smelled like summer and beer and warm skin. That particular scent rose from the open collar of his shirt, where his pulse beat at the base of his throat.

  “Let me tell you about it,” he said, his voice low yet light, almost teasing. “You should know what happens when a woman wears your designs, when the confidence you give her gets her the experience she wants.”

  She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to kiss him, to set her mouth to his and taste him, to feel that sweet electric moment when his tongue touched hers. She wanted to take off his clothes and explore his skin, the different but no less potent beauty of the male body that was hers to command. She wanted to breathe in the air he had exhaled, take him deep inside herself in every way possible. Her body was growing slick and tight with desire, little flickers of want snapping under her skin. Based on the way he was looking at her mouth, he wanted the same thing.

  A split second before she gave in to the temptation to lean forward, he stepped down one more step, then to the sidewalk. She inhaled shakily and tried to deny the regret deep in her belly.

  “Think of me as a research assistant,” he said. He’d shoved his hands into his pockets; they balled into fists, as if to resist touching her. “Doing field work, so to speak. Reporting my findings.”

  “You’re a cad,” she said.

  “Who says cad anymore?” he shot back, but he didn’t deny it. He shrugged. “Besides, you don’t know if any of that was true. I could have made it all up.”

  “Were you making it up?”

  He laughed; the sound startled, but his gaze was sharp. To her surprise, he stepped up on the stair again. Her heart gave a wild leap, because the look in his eyes went beyond playful seduction to predatory. He leaned close, and his breath whispered against her cheek and ear. “It doesn’t matter. You weren’t imagining her.”

  His lips grazed her cheekbone as he drew back, the kiss the hei
ght of proper, Continental sophistication for two parting acquaintances, but the faint pressure sent heat spiking through her. “Don’t,” she said involuntarily.

  “I know,” he said, and she could see that he did. She knew well enough to avoid his type, and he . . . he wanted something she would surrender reluctantly. “I shouldn’t. I won’t. But that doesn’t change how much I want to.”

  This time she stepped back, her foot precariously positioned on the step above her, putting some much needed distance between them. He was bad news in every possible way, a wolf in pursuit of prey—money, women, success, status—and while she respected his drive, she knew better than to get drawn into his world.

  He retreated to the sidewalk again, taking a single step backward without looking and somehow managing to transform giving ground into a challenge.

  “See you around, Simone,” he said. Hands still in his pockets, he turned and set off down the street.

  She closed her eyes. “Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, et tous les saints qui veillent sur nous,” she whispered, because he’d discerned the truth: through the whole story she’d imagined not the supermodel, but herself.

  When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

  Her first mistake, she decided while she was negotiating terms with her Chantilly lace supplier, was letting him touch her.

  Her second mistake, she decided while she and Lorrie shoved and tugged the four-poster bed to a better position under the windows, was letting him tell that story. The whole story.

  Her third mistake, the worst mistake, she decided when she crawled into bed at the end of a week without seeing him, was laughing at him. With him. He looked younger, happier, more alive when he laughed at himself.

  Maybe he wouldn’t come back.

  She set him aside and focused on her work.

  She didn’t see him for several long, hot weeks, during which his irresistibility should have faded into nothing but a memory. It didn’t, because Ryan Hamilton’s cream-smooth voice and skill as a storyteller wreaked havoc with her, body and soul. Before he started telling her about his night with Jade, she’d not thought about the consequences of listening to him, but afterward she couldn’t erase the images from her mind. Therefore even though she was fully occupied with helping a client on a busy Saturday afternoon, Simone knew the exact moment Ryan walked into Irresistible. A frisson ran over her nape, and the resulting electric spark made her heart skitter in her chest. It took her a moment to realize that the energy in the room had changed. A hush fell in the showroom, the kind that happened every so often when the people in a crowded room all stopped talking at once, but when conversation resumed, the energy was different. It was the agitated hum of a group of people pretending everything was normal when something shocking had actually happened.

  She quickly glanced over her shoulder. As she expected, she saw Ryan, but the woman he was standing next to was the one generating the beehivelike buzz in the room.

  “I believe that’s Daria Russell,” the woman she was helping said under her breath.

  “I believe you’re right,” she replied.

  Daria Russell, an actress in her midthirties, had labored in the obscurity of character roles and theater until breaking out via a gritty role on a cable series. Since then she had become the darling of Hollywood. She had incredible range, a deft hand with comedy, and the ability to take an audience through a character’s emotional journey using subtle shifts of shoulders or spine, and her expressive green eyes. She had an odd face, not characteristically beautiful, but enlivened by an uncommon intelligence and sensitivity that made her absolutely striking and very watchable. In a single glance Simone took in her untidy chestnut hair, her lack of makeup, and the way Ryan lowered his ear to her mouth the better to catch whatever observation she was making about Simone’s showroom.

  He wasn’t wearing the Bluetooth headset today, she noticed. Jade had had to demand that he take the earpiece out of his ear, but Daria had all of his attention. Simone noticed two things simultaneously: Ryan was blatantly avoiding her eye, and she was jealous.

  Lorrie approached her, all but quivering with excitement. “May I . . . ?”

  “Be my guest,” Simone said, and was quite pleased with her level tone. She gave her entire attention to the client she had been helping, collecting a variety of one-piece lace body suits, then escorted her to a dressing room, but when she emerged, the tension in the room was palpable. People had their phones out, and while they weren’t obviously pointing them in Daria’s direction, attempts to capture an image of this A-list actress shopping for sexy underwear weren’t far off. Lorrie was flustered to the point of wringing her hands, but Ryan raised his hand to catch Simone’s attention, then beckoned her over.

  Simone crossed the showroom floor. “Pardon me, Miss Russell, but perhaps you and your companion would prefer a more personal shopping experience?”

  The woman looked relieved. “Yes, thank you very much,” she said.

  Simone held out her hand toward the workroom, indicating that Daria and Ryan should precede her. She didn’t miss the way Ryan put his hand at the small of Daria’s back, and positioned himself so he stood between most of the other shoppers and the actress. He looked strained, Simone noted, although she wasn’t sure why. Was it because he brought another woman to her showroom after their conversation on the stoop? He certainly seemed to welcome the publicity, so it couldn’t be the threat of pictures posted to Twitter or Instagram. Another wave of jealousy bubbled in her gut. For a single second, she acknowledged that she was irritated Ryan hadn’t contacted her, then let it go. Tried to let it go.

  Lorrie opened the door for Daria. She swept through, and Ryan held back for a split second. “Thanks,” he said to Simone.

  “It’s nothing, sir,” she said

  He stopped her from entering the workroom by shifting his weight ever so slightly to block her progress to the door. To anyone watching from the showroom, it would look like Ryan was laying down some version of That was unacceptable. Miss Russell requires . . . , but Simone knew better. The sheer nearness of his face to hers, the fact that he turned his shoulders and torso to bodily block her progress made her breath halt in her throat.

  “Sir?” he said. His voice was flat, not teasing.

  She didn’t back down, simply lifted her chin, met his gaze head-on, and said, “That is my customary way of addressing a client.”

  He looked down, then back up at her through his lashes. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Actually, it’s not what you think. Miss Russell,” she said as she turned her shoulders to brush past Ryan, “how can I help you today?”

  “First of all, thanks for getting me out of there. It’s not that I’m not grateful for all the attention, but I’ve been in five different showrooms today and it’s starting to stress me out a little.”

  “Of course,” Simone said. “Can I get you something to drink? Some water, or perhaps a cup of tea?”

  “Water would be lovely,” Daria said.

  “And for you, sir?” Definitely still irritated over something she shouldn’t be, over a man she shouldn’t want.

  “Water’s fine,” Ryan said.

  She got Daria settled in one of the chairs in front of the three-way mirror, and gave her a Pellegrino. After the actress had opened the bottle, swallowed a couple sips of water, and visibly exhaled the tension from her shoulders, Simone sat down a respectful distance away and said, “How can I help you, so you can go home and relax?”

  “I’m going to a gala event at MoMA tonight. We both are,” she said, nodding at Ryan with a smile. “I finally found a gown, but none of the undergarments fit quite right. You came highly recommended.”

  “I’ll certainly do my best,” Simone said. “Do you have the gown with you, or is it being altered?”

  “No, they just finished fitting it,” Daria said. “I was supposed
to wear this gown to an event I’m going to later in the month, but this invitation came unexpectedly, so I asked the designer to hurry up and finish it. I promised I’d wear something different for the next one.” She gave a little laugh. “I shouldn’t sound so ungrateful. I remember when I could go months without anyone inviting me to anything, and when I was invited, I shopped the sales in the thrift shops on the Lower East Side.”

  “I’ve found some quite good bargains down there,” Simone said. She actually liked this woman. She didn’t want to like her, because Simone could see Ryan settling down with a woman composed and self-aware, but like her she did. “If I could see the gown, perhaps? I’ll send my assistant to get it.”

  Ryan held up his mobile. “I’ve already texted the driver.”

  Simone rose. “Excuse me for just a moment,” she said, and went back into the showroom. Lorrie hustled down the stairs and returned with a dressmaker’s bag held high to keep it from dragging on the floor. “I’ll take that,” Simone said with a smile.

  “The driver said he was double-parked, so he was going to move the car, and to text when he needs him,” Lorrie added, and left.

  Simone carried the dress through to the workroom, hung it on a hook by the three-way mirror, and arranged a folding screen to give Daria a measure of privacy while she changed into it. Daria declined an offer of help, and disappeared behind the screen.

  Lorrie poked her head into the workroom. “There’s a delivery for you.”

  “I’m not expecting a delivery,” Simone said.

  “It’s a bike messenger,” Lorrie said, and closed the door behind her.

  Ignoring Ryan, Simone stood at the edge of the three-way mirror. “Ms. Russell, excuse me for a moment, but I need to take a delivery.”

  “Not a problem,” Daria said from behind the screen. Simone heard the whoosh of denim against skin as she took off her jeans.