by Nikki Logan
‘There are worse things in this life than sharing a room with me,’ he joked. ‘Women have cage-fought for less.’
She threw him her most withering glare. He loved that one.
‘Seriously,’ he probed carefully. ‘Why are you so angry?’
She pressed her lips together. ‘Because it was shaping up to be a stupid situation and I’m not accustomed to doing stupid things.’
He snorted. ‘By contrast, I’m delighted to discover that you’re fallible.’ Way too pleased to be bothered at the thought of sharing a room. In fact, one tiny part of him was disappointed. The part that liked her best off-kilter.
She frowned at him. ‘I didn’t want you to think … It looked like …’
She fanned more furiously.
Oh … She didn’t want him to think she’d planned it that way. Accidentally on purpose. ‘You know you don’t have to come up with convoluted excuses to sleep with me, Shirley. I’m easy. Or haven’t you read the papers?’
She had roughly the same number of glares as smiles and he enjoyed them just as much.
‘Easy? Hardly.’
But she kept her distance, he noticed. He flopped down on one of the tiny beds.
Her startled face returned to him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Waiting for Immigration. We might as well save them some time and wait together.’
She grunted and set about transferring the contents of her suitcase into the stand-up locker in the austere room. He watched her crossing back and forth across the tiny space. Her movements were fluid, graceful. More dancing than walking. The items she was unpacking were mostly dark and plain. Not at all what he’d become used to her wearing.
‘What?’ she challenged on her third pass.
‘I was expecting something more … nautical.’ And how strange that he felt genuine disappointment at its absence. He’d grown used to her particular brand of fashion.
She straightened and turned. Considered him. ‘Not really practical at sea. Most of what I’ve brought is supremely suburban.’
He stared at her. ‘Does that mean no make-up?’
‘Pfff. Don’t be ridiculous.’
He tucked his hands behind his head. ‘What if I challenged you?’
She frowned. ‘To what?’
‘You challenged me to do the list on a budget. What if I challenge you to do it in civvies with no make-up?’
‘Why would you?’
He couldn’t think of a clever answer to that so he went for honest. ‘Because I got such a short glimpse of Shirley at Tim’s party. And because that way we’re both out of our comfort zones.’
And because I’m dying to know what colour your lips really are. He stared at them now, stained with dark lipstick, and imagined wiping it off with his thumb.
She stared him down. Thinking. ‘All right.’
He knew her too well to imagine she’d just capitulate. All they’d done since meeting was trade—insults, tasks, looks—this wasn’t going to be any different. ‘But …?’
‘I’ll ease up on the make-up while we’re on this trip if you’ll answer a question. Honestly.’
The keen glint of her eye should have been warning enough. But he was too dazzled by it to recognise it straight away. ‘Okay.’
‘What was your fascination with my mother?’
His gut tightened up immediately, the bad old days still not his favourite pre-dinner conversation. But he’d agreed to be honest. ‘She was a great teacher.’
Those eyes so very like her mother’s narrowed. ‘Every Saturday for three years?’
He stood. This conversation just didn’t feel right with him stretched out on the tiny bed. Shirley crossed her arms, taking the leggings she was still holding with her. They bunched across her torso.
‘She knew so much. She gave us one hundred per cent of her focus.’ Which was a bit rough when that left nothing for her daughter, he suddenly realised. But at the time he’d simply craved a motherly connection. Anyone’s mother would have done.
‘I didn’t have … access to my own mother. Spending time with yours was good for me. She helped keep me grounded. Her expectations. She set a high bar.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Shirley muttered, then cleared her throat and said, louder, ‘You were pretty cut up when she died.’
He had been. Everything he’d shoved way down deep to survive his mother’s death had come bubbling back up at Carol’s. Except he had found something to console him, eventually. A series of somethings: pills, women, alcohol, in that order. And they’d got him through that loss and out the other side. And then they’d propped him up well into the next decade. Until he’d gone cold turkey on all three a few years ago.
Saved his life.
‘Nothing compared to your loss, I imagine,’ he murmured.
She shut that line of conversation down with the not very subtle zip of her empty suitcase. ‘I always wondered where you’d gone for your knowledge fix after that.’
‘I didn’t. It was never about the knowledge for me.’ It was about having a mother figure in his empty life.
She glanced back up at him. ‘Then why do it?’
He shrugged. ‘I was good at it.’
She turned back. ‘I’m sure you were good at a lot of things.’
Not if you’d asked his father. Or his other lecturers. ‘Really? What else? Cutting up the athletics track? Musical accomplishment? Do you think a masterful maths mind lurks in here?’ He tapped his forehead.
‘Masterful enough to run a successful business. Even more successful recently.’
He stared at her, a warm realisation leaching through his body. She’d been checking up on him. ‘Someone else has been busy on Google, then.’
She stiffened, but ignored him. ‘I thought you walked away from your business for a reason.’
Her green eyes bored into him, towards the truth that lurked deep within. ‘I realised it was easier to change the business than myself.’ And who he’d become was so tightly enmeshed with what he did. He’d needed some healthy distance in order to untangle it all.
‘Changed it to what? From what? It’s so hard to tell from your website.’
Why not? She’d find out eventually. It might as well come from him. ‘I did my Masters in Influence.’
Her snort was the least ladylike and most sexy he’d ever heard. This woman just didn’t care for the slightest pretension. ‘Did you make that up?’
‘No. It’s made me rich.’
‘You have some massive clients. That much I could tell.’
‘Clients who paid generously for a look into the hearts and minds of their future customers.’ She frowned and her eyes grew keen, and he remembered who he was also talking to: Shiloh. But—inexplicably—he also trusted her. ‘Their businesses revolve around knowing where to target likely customers and what will get their buy-in.’
She stared at him. ‘That’s …’
‘The word you’re looking for is “lucrative”.’ It wasn’t, but it was true.
‘Which doesn’t make it any more palatable.’
He tipped his head and granted her that. It was no more than he’d eventually come to think. The day he’d realised how closely all those ‘somethings’ that he consoled himself with were linked to his profession.
‘Show me.’
He looked up. ‘Show you what?’
‘How it works. On me.’
‘Oh Shirley, I don’t think you’re the same as everyone else. I wouldn’t begin to claim I understand how your mind works.’ Disappointment stained her already dark lips. He thought fast. ‘But I can show you how you did it to me.’
Show her how it was inherent in everyone—even the virtuous Shiloh. Bred into the human species.
She sat on the edge of the second bed and folded her hands on her lap. It was entirely demure and insanely provocative.
‘Influence is all about buy-in,’ he started. ‘Once you can get someone to say yes to something small they make a ment
al commitment to that thing and transitioning them to something bigger is more straightforward. If I want you to buy my car I get you to sit in it. If I want you to borrow money from me as an adult I give you a money box when you’re a child. If I want you to accept my faith I get you to accept something smaller from me first.’
Her eyes slowly rounded as he spoke.
She might as well know who she was dealing with. ‘You wanted me to do the list. You got me to let you into my house first.’
‘Actually, I let myself in.’
‘But I didn’t throw you out. In the exact moment I accepted your intrusion, I bought-into your quest. I gave you something small—my attention—then you incrementally asked for more.’ His eyes fell to her lips, which had parted softly. ‘A few hours of my time to do the dolphins. Then a commitment to spend a lot more of my time working out how to do it on the cheap. Then you triggered my natural competitiveness and got me to buy in even further. And now we’re sitting on a freighter getting ready to go to another country.’
‘All because you let me into your house?’ she breathed.
‘All because you got me to commit a tiny part of myself to this quest. And the moment I made the mental shift there was no turning back.’
‘I didn’t mean to do any of that.’ Heat rushed up her cheeks.
‘Yes, you did, you just didn’t name it. No one does.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve made my business out of naming it.’
Out of selling his soul. For top dollar.
She watched him steadily. Read him correctly. ‘So why do you still do it?’
The million-dollar question. The answer would be worth that if anyone could give it to him.
‘Because I can?’
‘Is that a good enough reason?’ she murmured. ‘Just because you can?’
‘And because someone else would if not me.’
‘Why don’t you just leave them to it?’
‘Because they won’t do it as well as me.’ He’d chosen that profession and he was good at it. The best. It was about the only validation he got these days.
Her curious green eyes dug deep. Trying to figure him out. There was more he could say, things that would only add to her confusion. But he didn’t because they would only smack of justification.
‘Anyway. That’s how it’s done. In life. In love. In everything.’
‘Not love—surely?’
‘Love isn’t special. Or different. You just have to find the in-point. Something small.’
‘That makes it sound very calculated.’
He shrugged. ‘What is seduction if not entirely calculated?’
‘We were talking about love, not seduction.’
‘What’s the difference?’ Then it hit him. ‘You don’t believe that love is something that just happens without effort?’
She frowned and colour pricked at her cheeks.
‘How can Shiloh operate on the sharp edge of the sword when it comes to every other aspect of contemporary life, yet still buy into the whole romantic love myth?’
‘You don’t believe in falling in love?’ she bristled.
‘That implies some kind of uncontrolled accident of fate. Love is a steady, intentional climb towards a goal.’
‘You speak from experience?’
‘I speak from centuries of experience.’ Other people’s experience. Myriad lives across time.
She lifted one brow. ‘And the centuries tell you that seduction and love are the same thing?’
‘They’re symbiotic. Seduction is the best part of love.’
‘Spoken like a true man,’ she grunted. ‘Somehow, I thought you’d be a devotee of the meeting of intellects being the purest form of love.’
He looked down on her. ‘You think Plato or Socrates didn’t consider mental sparring as a kind of seduction?’ She wanted to deny it—he could see it in her troubled expression.
‘Surely there has to be a physical attraction?’ she pressed.
‘It’s a bonus but not essential.’
Keen green eyes fixed on him and he could see her sharp brain taking hold exactly as it had at the dolphins. Her mind was engaged. Great, he could work with minds.
‘So how would you start a seduction of a complete stranger?’ she asked. ‘If I brought the question to Molon Labe as a business hurdle?’
He folded his arms and pretended to consider it. He didn’t need to. This stuff came so naturally to him after all this time. In fact, even before that, human nature had always been so very obvious to him. The links between people, their motivations and drivers. It had taken him years to realise the rest of the world was more or less oblivious to that.
‘You have to start with the ultimate goal. Do you want to feel desired? Get married? Be loved?’ He locked his eyes on hers. ‘Or do you just want to scratch that itch that burns like fire-ants under your skin?’
She swallowed hard, but her pupils grew bigger. ‘Let’s keep this tasteful. Let’s say married.’
So Shirley Marr blushed like a schoolgirl at the thought of sharing a room with him and wanted to be desired and loved but wasn’t saying so.
Interesting.
He thought about it for a few moments, for effect. ‘Marriage is a commitment. So your first step is to find a way to get a man to commit to the idea of commitment itself.’
‘How?’
He searched the air for ideas. A hundred came to him immediately. ‘Start a project together. Travel. Buy a puppy. Put a vegetable patch in. Get him to give you a space for your toothbrush at his place. Anything that requires him to lock a part of himself into something.’
The dark hair mounded on her head tipped as she considered that.
‘Once he’s made the mental shift towards commitment, then it’s just a series of incremental rises until he’s totally on-board with the idea of a permanent commitment.’
She stared at him. ‘No wonder you’re so cynical. If that’s what you believe people do.’
‘I’m not saying it’s conscious, necessarily.’
‘Surely being aware of it means it wouldn’t work?’
He laughed. ‘You wanted me to commit to the list and I did. Knowing what was happening didn’t stop it from working.’
She chewed her lip. Suddenly two hundred per cent of his focus centred there.
‘A demonstration, perhaps?’ he murmured.
Her eyes darkened and widened within their kohl smudges as she stared up at him warily.
‘I find myself very interested in the shape and taste of your lips,’ he said theatrically. ‘And I’m declaring that to you so you’re aware of the direction of my thoughts and so you can plan to resist when the moment comes.’
And because success will be so much more satisfying that way.
He reached down and pulled her to her feet. She rose to stand before him.
Shirley had to push extra-hard to get words past her suddenly tight chest. ‘This is hypothetical, I assume?’ Hayden’s smile reminded her of the Huntsman-wolf in Red Riding Hood. All the better to eat you with …
‘If that makes you feel better about your chances of resisting,’ he said.
He pulled her a little closer. Closed his arms around her, hot and strong. Her heart went berserk. ‘So the question is, Shirley … knowing what I’m doing and knowing what my goal is—’ he breathed down on her ‘—are you any less inclined to let me kiss you?’
She licked her lips. Struggled for air. ‘You’re assuming you already have my buy-in?’
Hayden blinked, slow, confident. That caused Shirley’s own lids to follow suit, growing heavier. She tried to glance away to break the contact.
‘A kiss is the touching of flesh on flesh. You started to buy into me touching you months ago … the first time you let my glance rest on your porcelain skin. Then later, when you let my fingers graze your hair. Then take your hand. Even now … my eyes are roaming where my lips cannot and you’re allowing it.’
Sure enough, his veiled gaze browsed her mouth and ma
de it part in breathless anticipation. She forced it closed.
‘And now, even knowing what I plan to do and why, you’re still in my arms. I think I’d call that buy-in.’
‘Pretty clever,’ she breathed, desperate to preserve some dignity. ‘Assuming it’s going to be any kind of kiss at all.’
His teeth flashed white and dangerous. ‘And there it is. Full commitment.’
He took her weight on his arm and leaned her back into it, his mouth pressing down confidently onto hers, sliding against it, still half-smiling in his victory. She held firm against the heavenly feel and smell of him so close, refusing to give in.
She would have loved to stand, unmoved, in his hold. To let him kiss her senseless and then to emerge untouched. Indifferent.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Not in this lifetime.
The moment she resisted, holding her own—barely—against the breathless spin of her mind, he upped the ante. Plying her with the technique that must have unzipped many a skirt in its time. His mouth glided over hers, alternating pressure, his tongue teasing the firm line she maintained where her lips met. His flesh blazing against hers. Her head spun wildly.
He pulled back a little, breathed words against her flaming skin, and something about the shift of colour in his eyes told her he wasn’t playing a game any more. ‘I’m going to kiss that dark gloss off until I reveal what’s underneath it.’
A sudden erotic lance speared way down deep inside. He set to work doing just that, pressing himself more fully into her, binding them close and kissing the living daylights out of her. Her fingers, pressed against his chest to stop him getting closer, curled, of their own accord, into the fabric of his shirt. Her feet, which she’d positioned to help her push against Hayden, subtly shifted weight so that she leaned more fully into him.
Into his kiss.
Her head, which should have been screaming resistance, swam uselessly in the wash of scent and sensation pumping off the human hormone holding her up.
And her mouth opened.
Instantly he was in, his triumph punctuated by the thrusts of his tongue and the heaving breaths they both stole between kisses. Her whole body flamed with desire and she speared her fingers up into his hair, keeping him close. He backed her up against the wall.