Ishq Factors

by Suleikha Snyder

  The lights are hot. The room is stifling. Danny’s been photographing them for forty minutes. And, somehow, Akash makes it all disappear.

  The camera clicks. She doesn’t even offer it a teasing look. Not when there is so much to explore before her. A light trail of hair dusts Akash’s lower belly, leading her south. His breath hitches as she tugs his belt through the loops of his fashionable jeans. She wants to pull down his zipper, push the fall of his jeans wide. She’s tempted to expose him. Only to her. This is for me, Ishika could tell him. It’s okay.

  She doubts he even knew her name one hour ago. Perhaps he’s seen her face— everyone’s seen her face—but he would not know it without all the paint and promise. And now he’s learning how their bodies look together, how they fit. He’s learning…and teaching, too.

  His free hand closes over hers, between them, pressing her thumb against the button of his fly. The moment stretches into two, into three. Into Danny shouting, “Okay, friends, that’s a wrap!”

  They exhale as one, relief sinking their shoulders, bending their limbs. They do not step apart. No…they each tilt forward, waves crashing together, the tide rolling in. It only takes a few quick movements for Akash to fix her sari and blouse. It takes even less motion to press her lips to his throat. She tastes the ripple of his low laughter, and chases it with her own as they set his jeans and shirt to rights. Their photo shoot in reverse: two not-quite strangers dressing.

  “Hey.” There is a twinkle in his dark brown eyes when she finally looks up to meet them. “Want to get a coffee?”

  Ishika smiles. Not for the camera. Just for him. Just for herself. And she reaches for his hand, squeezing it tight. “Sure.”

  They are selling an illusion…but, at least tonight, he’s buying.

  Surrender With a Twist

  Las Vegas invariably made Anna want to do one of three things: blow all her cash at the blackjack table, check out that male strip show at the Excalibur, or hook up with a stranger. She’d only been here a day and she found herself doing a fourth thing: hiding.

  A well-dressed woman, with teased blond hair that looked like it belonged in 1985, stepped out from a limo. She was immediately flocked by autograph seekers with cell phone cameras. Anna didn’t have to be told who she was. She was already ducking behind a pillar and hoping that the reigning queen of Nights of Surrender wouldn’t see her. Desiree LeBeau played a massive bitch on TV and didn’t really have to stretch her acting muscles to do it. Not that she could stretch that many muscles at all, with all the Botox she’d had. Ugh. If Desi saw Anna, she wouldn’t hesitate to bring up Ty. Worse, she’d bring up Felicity and Ty. Being divorced for a year didn’t make that any easier.

  Anna made a run for it, bolting inside and hurrying past the roped off area where some very efficient looking Emmy staffers were doing checkins. It would just figure: She’d flown all the way from New York only to run into someone from one of the three remaining New York soap operas.

  She wanted to curse whomever booked her a room at the Las Vegas Hilton the same weekend as the Daytime Emmy Awards… which basically boiled down to cursing herself. Since their expense budget was nonexistent and the Hilton was one of the cheapest business-friendly options close to the Strip, she’d instructed her assistant to go with it. Sure, crazy events happened in Vegas hotels all the time — meeting a prospective liquor distributor last year, there had been a clown convention — but this really was beyond the pale. The Emmys? Oh, hell, no.

  Anna didn’t know what it said about her that the only thing more trauma-inducing than Bozo and a hundred of his best buddies was a hotel full of soap actors and people who made their living shoving their hand up a Muppet’s butt. Not that she was against daytime programming. Hell, she TiVoed The View and Days of our Lives. She just happened to be morally opposed to any events that meant her ex-husband was slated to be in the same confined space. Why hadn’t she checked her calendar and insisted this expansion meeting take place one week later?

  Because you’re desperate, Anna, the tiny voice in the back of her mind that sounded suspiciously like her mother reminded. Because you want to run into Tyler, added a voice that was more like her sister’s. You’d think that Abby hadn’t picked her side in the divorce, given how she always carried on about Anna harboring feelings for her ex. Not wanting to spend three thousand dollars removing the “property of Tyler St. Cloud” tattoo on her inner thigh did not mean Anna was still in love with the insensitive dolt. It just meant she didn’t want a laser surgery technician to see what an idiot she’d been at eighteen. She was clearly still an idiot at twenty-eight.

  Anna kept her sunglasses on while she gave the red carpet a wide berth. A few Internet reporters were already scoping out their spots, but they wouldn’t know her on sight. As she headed towards the little sushi lounge adjacent to the casino, she really hoped nobody else from Nights of Surrender materialized. Years of cast Christmas parties and charity baseball games and Emmy bashes meant that she was a familiar face. Nowhere near as familiar as Tyler’s, of course.

  There was no point in denying it; Ty was gorgeous. Six feet three inches of dark-haired, blue-eyed, Australian hunk. He’d been dreamy at 20, when they’d both been working behind the bar at a 9th Avenue dive, and at 30 he was a serious contender for People’s Sexiest Man Alive. Anna had never gotten out of the bar business, and she still looked like the girl next door: straight black hair, brown eyes and a runner’s body. She was no match for the beauties that were going to be strutting around in D&G a couple of hours from now. She’d certainly been no match for Felicity Hawkins, who played Desi’s daughter and Tyler’s new leading lady. Ugh, she thought again. Method acting was highly overrated.

  With the red carpet arrivals into the theater imminent, the dark, womb-like lounge was empty. The lone bartender was texting or playing Angry Birds, and when she ordered an apple martini, he looked equal parts relieved and annoyed. Her first drink went down easy, and fast, and Angry Birds Boy slid her a second one on cue. He was about 22, cute, and definitely mad at the world. His disposition improved exponentially when she scribbled a 25 percent tip on her credit card slip, and he grinned at her before vanishing through the door to the kitchens. Maybe he was going to check out the action at the Benihana. He certainly didn’t seem to care if she robbed his station blind while he was gone.

  Anna slouched over her drink and checked her Blackberry. There was already a message from Jim, the promoter from Scottsdale, saying he was excited about her concept. Thank God something about today was actually going right. For a few minutes she drank in peace, listening to the muted jingling of the slot machines out on the floor and the occasional burst of laughter. The lounge was intimate and not all that inviting for anyone looking to party. Still, it was only a matter of time before someone walked in.

  Someone did, of course. Someone who felt familiar. Too familiar.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” It was a cosmic joke. Out of all the ridiculous places to hang out in the Hilton, he’d picked here? Not the Vince Neil cantina or the steakhouse? She didn’t have to watch his progress across the bar. Her spine stiffened even before she felt his breath on the back of her neck. Tyler St. Cloud owned every room he walked into. He’d left his stamp on every inch of their one bedroom co-op… and every inch of her body. Her senses knew he was near even before he said a word. Of course, he did have to talk.

  “Anna, what are you doing here? Come to see me win?”

  She studied the rapidly dwindling green liquid in her glass. “Please. You’re not even nominated, you son of a bitch.”

  He laughed, and it made her turn around despite every bit of intelligence screaming at her to resist. “You’re still paying attention. That’s encouraging.”

  He was still six-foot-three, still dark haired, and still blue-eyed. Not that she’d expected any of those things to change in the four months since she’d last seen him. “I wouldn’t encourage you if you were the last man on earth.”

  He s
hrugged, spreading his arms out like he was about to start a monologue. “Yet, here you are. Of all the sushi bars in all the world…”

  Her fingers tightened around the stem of her martini glass, ready to snap it in two. “Go to Hell, Tyler. Don’t you have a shindig to get ready for?”

  He looked so good in jeans and a white button-down that it really didn’t matter if he put on a tux or not. He’d own that carpet and the cameras.

  “Not nominated, not presenting,” he shrugged. “I could skip it if I wanted to, darlin’. Spend the right of the night with you, catching up.”

  “You’d skip the glitz to hang out with me waxing poetic about the ‘way we were’? Right. Don’t feed me a line, Ty.” Had his eyes always been so damn blue? She tried to swivel back to her drink, but he stopped her, sliding one leg between her knees.

  The damn blue eyes were suddenly black with intensity. “It’s not a line, Anna. No one could’ve written us a scene this fucking perfect. You think I expected to walk in here and see my wife?”

  “Ex-wife,” she reminded. But he was right. It was straight out of a Nights episode: The hero walks into a random bar and sees his ex, what will he do? Meanwhile, in her wrinkled linen suit and bitterness, she didn’t fit. Like she’d stumbled in from a sitcom. That had always been their problem… even when they were just dumb kids trying to make it in New York City… the only place they’d fit had been in bed. “Ty, you’re too big. I can’t…” “Yes, you can, baby. You can take it all. Just trust me…”

  Anna had to curse herself again, because the memory flashed into her head in Technicolor and spread across her skin like a hot blush. Tyler, so close — too close — couldn’t miss her response. His knee rubbed against her thigh, scrunching up the skirt of her business suit. Property of Tyler St. Cloud.

  “Go away, Ty. I have plans,” she forced herself to say, fully aware that her body was saying something else entirely.

  “Let me guess: blowing all your money, seeing Thunder From Down Under, and fucking a stranger?” His eyebrows drew together, arrogant and adorable at once. “Has that ever worked out for you?”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” she snapped.

  “I know. We experienced most of them together.” Ty knew exactly what to say. Exactly how to touch her. His fingers were under the hem of her skirt now, stroking her inner thigh… skating all the way up to where the cursive script declared she was his. She wanted to shove him. No, she wanted to yank him closer. He ducked his head and whispered hot and low against her ear. “Rewrite your plans, Anna. Blow me, let me strip for you… let me be your stranger.”

  It sounded like a bum deal… except that Ty knew how much she’d loved sucking him off. She’d gone to her knees for him in clubs, airplane bathrooms, at the last Emmys in New York and the one after that in L.A. She’d loved knowing he was helpless to do anything but pull at her hair and beg her to let him come. Sometimes it was all it took to get her off, too. Her breath came out in a ragged shot. “Y-you’re a stranger alright, Tyler. I don’t know you at all.”

  He grasped her face in his free hand while his other continued its seductive journey. “That’s horseshit. You’ve always known me. You’re the only one who’s really known me,” he swore. “You’ve gotta believe me. Felicity was a mistake.”

  “So is this.” But instead of pushing him away, she leaned into him, bracing her hands on his shoulders as he worked his hand past the elastic of her panties. “You’re going to end up blind item-ed: ‘What daytime hunk was canoodling in public?’“

  “Fuck ‘em. I don’t care, Anna,” he growled. He’d been in the States a long time, but when he was frustrated his accent came in thick. “Anner,” he called her now, sinking knuckle-deep into her wet heat. “They can all bloody watch me.”

  As if Ty had willed it into being, the punk kid bartender reappeared from the back… and promptly stalled in his tracks, all big-eyed and stunned. Anna knew she should say something, make Ty stop, but this felt too good. It felt too right. The bar was chest high. Surely it hid exactly what Ty was doing to her. Leaving her face, her muted moans, and Ty’s victorious “fuck yeah” as the only giveaway.

  We can’t do this, she thought. We shouldn’t. But another part of her was thinking that if Angry Birds Boy didn’t like the floorshow, he could call hotel security. They could kick her out, and her whole problem of being stuck in a confined space with soap stars would be solved. Making her remaining problem this. Her ex-husband’s hand in between her legs, his gorgeous blue eyes daring her to resist him.

  “Ty… this is crazy. You’re crazy.”

  “The show put us up at the Wynn. It’s either here or your suite, Anna.”

  Here, cried a voice that wasn’t her mother and wasn’t Abby. It was the voice that only belonged in her bedroom, saying things like “please” and “yes” and “harder.” Anna gave into it just long enough to come. Just long enough to ride Ty’s palm and muffle her gasps against his throat. He tasted like salt and oranges. Like a reckless Sunday afternoon in a hotel lounge with an audience of one. She was still shaking, still catching her breath, as Ty swung her off the barstool and grabbed her purse. “Upstairs,” she whispered, blushing as she caught the bartender’s gaze over his shoulder. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  ***

  During the ride up to Anna’s suite, stuck in the elevator with a couple of tourists fresh from the pool and a few writers from General Hospital, it was all Tyler could do to keep from touching her again. He could smell her on his skin, still taste her, and he wanted to shove her against the wall, hike up her prim little skirt and show everybody who she belonged to. Who she’d always belonged to.

  Anna. Here, of all places. Tyler couldn’t wrap his brain around it. Christ, it was unbelievable, but here she was standing beside him, pretending to watch the floors go by. She looked amazing. Like she hadn’t aged a day since he first met her. Like it hadn’t been months since the last time he saw her. And not five minutes ago, he’d gotten her off with some stupid voyeuristic kid watching. She was so ready, so open, and they hadn’t even kissed yet. He knew her mouth would still be spectacular. Soft and smart and spicy. No screen kisses had ever stood up to the way she gave him her tongue. She’d given him everything, and he’d wasted it. But Ty wasn’t going to waste a single moment now.

  Award show be damned. He hadn’t wanted to fly out to Vegas with Desi, Felicity and the others. He preferred spending his Sundays watching rugby, to be honest. But now, with Anna so close, brushing up against his side every so often, the 20th floor of the Hilton couldn’t come soon enough. Neither could he. When the doors opened, he practically carried her out of the lift and down the hall.

  “Ty, for God’s sake, you can put me down. I know how to walk.” She elbowed him in the ribs, too, but that was the sum total of her resistance. She melted into him like butter, her hair wrapping around his neck and her leg rubbing against his. Her voice was husky with need, and if he had to place bets — which he very well could, given that there was a casino downstairs — he’d say she hadn’t been with anyone else since him. How could she, when his name was still etched on her skin?

  Anna had always been the strong one, the independent one, knowing what she wanted from her career from the very beginning. When he’d still been answering every casting call his agent sent his way, she’d been putting together a business plan for the bar she wanted to open. She was so in charge. But in bed with him, she’d happily handed him the keys and let him drive.

  Tonight, she had the key. And they were barely over the threshold with the door locked safely behind them when she murmured, “Okay, Ty. Strip.”

  No muss, no fuss. She’d been promised a little thunder from his down under and she wanted it now. She hadn’t changed a bit. Laughter exploded out of him like a cannonball. “What, you’re not even going to pay the admission price? I’m hurt.”

  “Isn’t that what I did downstairs?” Her perfect black eyebrows arched up in amusement. He wanted to
lick them. To lick all of her. “Or do you want me to shell out for the two drink minimum, too?” She glanced down, making it absolutely clear what she would knock back a shot of.

  He was already hard, but that just made him harder, until he was chafing against his boxer briefs, feeling every ridge on his zipper fly. He couldn’t have scripted this moment any better. Anna, who got him hard with a look, with a promise, was the best scene partner he’d ever had. He just had to show her.

  He started with his shirt burtons, going slow as he backed her further into the room. She urged him on, his own personal director. Her big, brown eyes telling him just how slow to go, her sighs telling him she liked it when he touched himself.

  He was the one who’d gotten her all obsessed with that idiotic Australian strip show at the Excalibur. He was just egotistical enough to think that the only reason she wanted to see a bunch of boys from Brisbane parade around in leather was because she missed him.

  “I didn’t,” she murmured when he said it aloud. “I didn’t miss you at all, and when I realized the goddamn Emmys were here, it was the last place I wanted to be.” But she was rubbing her throat, fiddling with her jacket like it was itchy. When she shrugged it off and it joined his shirt on the floor, he knew she was lying.

  “I think you hoped you would see me, Anna.” Tyler moved towards her, unbuttoning his jeans and undoing the fly. “I think you knew exactly what you’d find when you got here. Who books a room at the Hilton when you could have the Bellagio or the Mirage?”

  She made a face — a scowling, frowning, beautiful face. “That’s funny. I feel like I’m seeing a mirage right now. It looks like the boy I married.” Then she reached for him, hooking one hand around the back of his neck and tugging him to her. Finally, said a voice in the back of his mind as she kissed him. It was fierce, sloppy and abso-fucking-lutely perfect. She tasted like apples, cheap vodka and the girl who’d given him one wild weekend in Rio when he turned 25.