Provocative

by Lisa Renee Jones

  Katie flushes with obvious embarrassment. “That’s inappropriate.”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” I say. “I’ll cash out now.”

  “It’s not necessary,” Katie assures me.

  “It’s really not a problem,” I say, looking at Laura. “Where’s the cashier?”

  “I can help you,” she says.

  I glance at Katie. “I’ll calm the beast in red for you.” I refocus on Faith. “I’ll be right back.”

  She nods and I motion to Laura, who leads me out of the room and through the gallery to an office, where a college-aged male clerk attends to my paperwork. I fill out a promissory note, with my banking information and connect him with my personal banker. “One last form,” the man says, shoving his heavy-rimmed glasses up his nose. “This indicates delivery location and instructions.”

  My mind goes to Faith and I fill out my information, but put a huge note at the bottom: Hold for guest viewing until Faith Winter’s display is discontinued. I hand the man the form and he glances at me. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Completely. Let your customers enjoy it.” Impatient to get back to Faith, I enter the gallery, the crowd thinned to almost nothing, and end up walking toward Katie.

  “Paperwork signed,” I say. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “Of course,” she says. “I’m sorry again.”

  “It’s really fine.”

  Her lips curve. “But you just want to get back to Faith. I know that energy you’re putting off. She’s in the Chris Merit display area.” She pats my arm and steps around me, but my feet stay planted.

  A muscle in my jaw starts ticking. What the hell kind of energy am I putting off? Damn it, this woman is way too far under my skin if I’m reading like a man who has a woman under his skin. I really do need to fuck her out of my system, and there is no better time than tonight.

  I start walking, crossing the gallery, and find an entire room dedicated to Chris, but the only person left inside is Faith. She’s standing in front of a painting I recognize as the Paris skyline, but if she senses I’m here, she doesn’t turn. I close the space between us and step to her side, my hand settling at her back, and touching this woman fires me up in ways something so simple should not fire me up.

  She glances over at me. “The lady in red didn’t attack you, did she?”

  I laugh. “No. The lady in red did not attack me.”

  “It’s an incredible painting,” she says. “Obviously special. Rebecca’s story touched me and I barely know it.”

  “It’s not an easy story to know,” I admit.

  She studies me a moment. “Not a nice guy, but he has a heart.”

  My lips curve. “I’m human despite my best efforts not to be.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Your secret’s safe with me.” Her lashes shut as if her words have hit a nerve, and she quickly turns away, changing the subject. “He’s incredible. I really can’t blame the lady in red for wanting the painting. And he has such supportive godparents.”

  “Spoken wistfully,” I observe, certain she’s still thinking of that conversation with Katie, and looking for revelations, I add, “People have secrets, Faith. It’s part of being human.”

  “My mother sure did.”

  I turn her to face me. “What kind of secrets, Faith?”

  “Her kind of secrets. Like you have secrets. Tiger.”

  “My enemies call me Tiger. You call me Nick.”

  “Why do I keep feeling like you’re the enemy?”

  “Why are you looking for an enemy?”

  “Why are we standing here talking when we agreed this was about sex and then goodbye? Because this, whatever it is, still doesn’t work for me.”

  “All right then,” I say. “Let’s go fuck.” I take her hand in mine and start walking, aware that she’s using sex as a distraction, another version of her emotional wall. Certain that her “hard limit” understanding means that she’s played the kind of sex games that makes sex an escape, not a commitment. One might say I’m perfect for this woman. Except that I’m not, because the naked truth awaits. I just have to reveal it.

  NICK.

  Not Tiger.

  Friend.

  Not an enemy.

  I still don’t know if “not an enemy” is true, and actually, he didn’t clarify our status outside of a name. Tiger is for his enemies. Nick is for me. Technically, that makes me a friend. But as we walk toward the main hall of the gallery, having already determined we’re both parked out back, him holding me close, with his arm at my waist, my bet is on me being neither friend nor enemy. I am simply a challenge to Nick Rogers. And he has proclaimed how much he enjoys a challenge. Once I move from challenge to conquest, he’ll be back in San Francisco where he lives and works, and I suspect I’ll be forgotten. And that works for me. It’s the reason I stopped pushing him away. I get my one night with him, lost in the fierce masculinity of a man who is so big, bold, and demanding, and he’s already proven that he will leave no room for anything else. No guilt, anger, or thought of the new revelations about my parents that just keep adding up every single day.

  Just Nick.

  Just passion.

  Just escape.

  Nick and I cross through the center of the gallery, thankfully without delay, the crowd no longer a crowd, using the back employee exit I’ve been granted access to, and other than a few people milling around with no interest in us, we are undeterred. We exit to the dimly lit parking lot, a cool breeze lifting my hair and then traveling straight up my dress. I shiver, and squeeze my thighs together, reminded not just that my wrap is in the car, but that Nick ripped away a crucial piece of my clothing.

  “Apparently, panties serve a purpose outside of looking pretty,” I murmur, hugging myself.

  He laughs, a deep, sexy sound, and suddenly that cold spot between my legs is hot. “It’s not funny,” I chide, shivering again, deeper this time.

  He halts our progress, and surprises me as he shrugs out of his tuxedo jacket. “This should help,” he says, wrapping it around me, but he doesn’t move away, his hands gripping the lapels as I had earlier, his big, broad, wonderful body crowding mine. The chilly air around us is suddenly as warm as that spot between my thighs. “Better?” he asks, his voice gravelly, sexy, the overhead light catching the warm heat in his blue eyes.

  “Yes,” I say, the intimacy of me wearing his jacket doing funny things to my stomach. I swallow hard. “Thank you. But I thought you weren’t a nice guy?”

  “I’m not a nice guy,” he says, his voice that hard steel I’ve already come to know from him. “But,” he adds his eyes lighting with what I would almost dare call mischief. “I am a very polite guy. Remember?”

  “Your bad manners are why my panties are in the trash and not in your pocket,” I say, finding his teasing rather charming, despite the way he tormented me in that bathroom.

  His full mouth, that I now know feels really good on my mouth and other parts of my body, curves. “As long as the panties are off, I’m a happy man.” He slides his arm around my shoulder, and turns us toward the cluster of ten or so random cars.

  “I’m on the right far row,” I say, and we quickly walk in that direction, while I dig my keys from my purse and unlock my car. Proving he’s polite all over again, he opens my door, which has me biting back curiosity about his mother, but if I ask questions, he’ll ask questions that I don’t want to answer.

  I step into the alcove created by the car and door, and when I turn to face Nick to determine our plan for travel, once again I’m trapped between this hot, hard man, and hard steel. But unlike last time, I don’t want to escape. I want to get lost in the way he smells, and the way he feels and… “Where are we going, Faith?” he asks.

  I wet my lips, jolted out of a fantasy that was headed toward him naked, and me enjoying the fact that he was naked. I’m now back to a hard reality: the decision between inviting him to my private space and personal sanctuary or dari
ng to go to his hotel, which isn’t much of a decision at all. “Small towns have wagging tongues,” I say. “And I really don’t need that right now, with all I have—I don’t need that.”

  “I’m in a private rental house,” he says, seeming to read my thoughts. “We can go there if you’re worried about your staff.”

  A private rental house should be a safe zone, but in that moment, I know I need the known of my home, to balance the unknowns, and the powerful force that is this man. “I own a house also close to the winery and I’m staying there this weekend. We can go there.”

  He considers me for several beats, a keen look in his eyes telling me he’s read my need for control, and I wait for him to insist he retain it all. Maybe he’ll push me too hard. Maybe this is a bad idea, but that isn’t what he does. Instead, he does the exact opposite. He arches a brow. “Interesting. I thought you’d pick my rental.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It fit your hard limit of one night.”

  “My space. My control.”

  His hand slides to my hip and he pulls me to him, his hips aligned with mine, my hand settling over his heart, and I am surprised to find it thundering beneath my palm. “Sweetheart,” he says. “I’m going to demand control, because that’s who I am and what I need. I can read you on this, just like you do me.”

  He’s right. I do. Because I’m drawn to men with his type of appetites. Because apparently, that’s who I am. “I do know that about you. But ultimately, I have control. I say yes or no.”

  “As it should be,” he says. “But I’m going to make sure you don’t want to say no and that you never forget me for all the right reasons. That’s a promise.” He covers my hand where it rests on his chest and lifts my wrist to his lips, caressing the delicate skin before pressing my hand to his face, as if he’s getting me used to touching him. But he leans into the touch as if he craves it, and then he kisses my palm, and I swear, it affects me. It’s tender, and sensual, and probably the sexiest thing anyone has ever done to me, and I am not without experience, but he affects me. Intensely, deeply.

  With obvious reluctance, he releases me and takes a step backward, his hand on my door. “I’m two rows over I’ll pull around to follow you. I’m in a—”

  “—black custom BMW,” I supply, letting him know that yes, I was watching him at the window before I slip back inside the car, fully intending to, for once, leave him with a revelation as he did me today. But I should have known Nick Rogers would not leave his curiosity piqued without resolution.

  He squats down next to me. “You were at the window.”

  “Yes,” I confirm, turning to look at him. “How did you know I was there?”

  “I felt you watching me.” He lowers his voice to a deep rasp. “Like I can feel you now, Faith, and I’m not even touching you.” And once again, like this morning, with a bombshell statement, he is gone, doing to me what I failed to do to him moments before. He’s already standing, the door shutting, and without question, as he’s intended, I am left in a sea of simple words that are not simple at all. And this time I do not have hours and a paintbrush to try to make sense of the way this man so easily affects me, the way my heart is thundering in my chest at this very moment.

  He can feel me without touching me. I can feel him without touching him. I think back to my past, to the relationship that gave me the hard limits, and a turbulent, addictive, completely wrong for me relationship. Was it like this and I just can’t remember? I don’t think so, and yet it was passionate. It was intense. But it wasn’t this. And yet this isn’t romance. It’s sex. I mean, my God, we almost had sex in the bathroom. So, what makes Nick Rogers, different? And I still can’t get by that sense of something darker than just our passion between us, that battle of friend vs enemy that should have scared me away. Earlier today, it would have.

  Headlights now burn behind me, telling me that I am out of time, with no answers, and accepting this is how it must be, unless I plan to go panty-less and unsatisfied, which I don’t. I quickly turn on my car. Or I try. The engine clicks but doesn’t come to life. I try again. “No,” I whisper. “No. No. No.” The lights flickered when I unlocked the door. The battery isn’t dead. I try again with the same result. The headlights behind me shift, and Nick pulls in beside me. I try the ignition again, but the car doesn’t start. There’s a knock on my window and I sigh, caving to my enviable circumstances.

  I open my door and Nick rounds it, once again, squatting beside me. “Has this ever happened before?”

  “No,” I say, “but I hate to admit this because it’s completely irresponsible, which is not who I am, but I can’t remember the last time I took it in for maintenance. And it’s a BMW. They’re high maintenance.”

  “Yes, they are,” he says, and to my surprise he doesn’t make me feel more stupid than I already feel. “But they handle the San Francisco hills and the Sonoma cuts and curves like no other car. We’ll get it towed and fixed in the morning. Let’s take my car.”

  In the morning.

  The inference being that he’s not planning on leaving tonight, but that rattles me far less than him feeling me without touching me. But right now, I need to deal with my car. “Yes,” I say. “That works.” I rotate to get out of the car, and he snags my fingers, and then my waist, to help me stand, and suddenly I’m flush against him, his hands at my waist.

  And while moments before he’d held me captive with words, with the idea of touching him, now it’s the way he feels when he touches me. The way I can’t breathe unless he’s breathing with me when we’re this close. “I’m going to go inside and tell them we’re leaving your car,” he says, warmth in his voice.

  “There you go being polite again,” I accuse.

  “I guess my mother raised me right after all,” he says, stroking a wayward strand of hair from my forehead, and not only do I barely contain a shiver, I barely contain my desire to ask a question about his mother, which he doesn’t give me time to ask anyway. “Come,” he says, or rather orders, which is, I’ve decided, as natural to him as is that need for control we just talked about, and I don’t mind. It’s actually sexy when done at the right time and place by a man who knows that time and place, which is preferably while naked. And we’re both already mentally undressed.

  In a few steps, and moments, I’m sliding inside his BMW, its soft cream colored leather encasing me while that earthy scent of the man himself surrounds me. “I’ll be right back,” Nick says, shutting the door, and I inhale that alluring scent of him again, and pull my seatbelt into place, the sound of soft music stirring curiosity in me. Turning up the volume, I find it’s classical music, which I know well. Somehow it fits Nick.

  The driver’s door opens and he joins me, and I swear the man has this energy that consumes the very air around him. And me. He consumes me. Suddenly, the car is smaller, more intimate and I am warmer, my heart is beating faster. “That was fast,” I say.

  “A guard just showed up and made that easy on me,” he explains. “He’s letting Katie know the situation.” He reaches for the gear shift, but pauses, seeming to listen or think, before casting me a sideways look. “You found my music, I hear.”

  “I did,” I say. “Symphony No. 5. I know it well. It suits you.”

  “Don’t let that fool you,” he says, starting the engine and backing out of the parking spot before placing us in gear. “I’d just as easily have Kid Rock or Keith Urban on the radio. It depends on my mood and where my head is at the time.”

  “And tonight it was classical, why?” I ask, casting him a curious look.

  “It’s a work state of mind,” he says. “When I’m prepping for court, opening and closing statements in particular, words distract me, but music helps me set the tone in my mind.”

  “Are you working on opening or closing statements now?”

  “Actually, in this case,” he says, driving us through the narrow path connecting the gallery to the winery, “it’s deposition prep for next week. I
f you do them right, and I do, you convince the enemy that you’re going to win in court, and they make a deal out of court.”

  “There is that word again,” I say, my gaze scanning the Wickerman’s castle as we turn toward the exit.

  “What word?” Nick asks, pulling us onto the highway.

  “Enemy,” I say. “I don’t like it, but I guess for you, that’s not a word, but a rule of life. You always have a new enemy, right?”

  “In most cases,” he says. “I have opponents.”

  “You said enemy.”

  “In this case, enemy applies. I used to work with the opposing counsel back in LA. We co-chaired an insider trader case for one of the biggest clients in the firm.”

  “And what happened to make him an enemy?”

  “I like to win,” he says, “but I do it the right way. With my brains. He likes to win as well. By playing dirty.”

  “And you never play dirty? They do say you’ll rip someone’s throat out if they cross you.”

  “If someone hires me to do a job, my job is to win. Not to feel sorry for the person coming after my client, or even the person aligned with the person coming after my client. My client needs to know that if he or she is with me, he or she is protected.”

  “And what if the witness is pulled into the case without wanting to be pulled into the case?” I ask. “Are you still that cold-hearted to that witness?”

  “Yes,” he says with zero hesitation, even doubling down. “Absolutely. Because I didn’t pull that person into the case. The person attacking my client did, and my client has the right to protect themselves. And believe me, if you were the one needing that protection, you’d be glad I was the one on your side.”

  “That sounds vicious.”

  “It is vicious and I’m unapologetic about it. But there’s a difference between being a cold-hearted asshole, and breaking the law. And the man I call an enemy broke laws to obtain evidence which could have gotten us both disbarred.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was forced to throw out what would have been good evidence if obtained legally and find another way to win.”