HOT MEN: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by Ashlee Price

  “I like the city this time of year,” Langdon said casually.

  “You’ve been here before?” As it came spilling out of my mouth, I realized what a stupid question it was. Why did I ask that? I don’t get stupid around men, that’s not me.

  “Yeah,” Langdon said, seeming to pay it no attention, “I come and go about once a year, actually. Always on business, though, never really have a chance just to enjoy myself. You must love being able to take it all in.”

  Take it all in, I silently repeated. Was that a sexual reference, or am I just… obsessing on that?

  I heard the violin before we finally spotted the street musician, a stout little man bundled up, only his fingertips poking out from his cut gloves. The melody was another of those jaunty Christmas songs I never liked, ones that repeated the same musical phrases over and over again, which seemed to be all of them. Whether the sleigh bells were jing-jing-jingling or the twelve days of Christmas were being counted down yet again, the sing-song melodies droned endlessly on, working their way into my brain.

  But then the violinist transitioned seamlessly into a slower melody, more sweeping and every bit as memorable. The soft opening notes of Silent Night, instantly recognizable, had sweep and grandeur, and as the melody rose and fell, the notes that followed were ripe and round and filled with emotion and sentiment.

  I couldn’t help pulling myself a little closer to Langdon, even resting my head on his shoulder as the familiar tune played on, the violin rising up to high-pitched perfection and striking the notes longer, more vibrato, that last phrase gently cascading to the snow-caked ground.

  The crowd around him applauded, Langdon and I enthusiastically among them. I reached into my purse to pull out a ten and drop it in his violin case. Langdon looked at me with an impressed smile. “Alister must be paying you pretty well if you can throw yer money around like that.”

  I could think of only one thing to say: the truth.

  “Not really.”

  Langdon chuckled and pulled out his wallet, dropping a hundred dollar bill into the violin case. “Rippah!”

  We walked on, towards a pair of prostitutes walking down the sidewalk in the other direction. They wore fishnets and miniskirts and halter tops even out in the snow, and their brassy wigs were almost falling over their clown-painted faces. They looked Langdon over as we walked past.

  “Hey, fella,” one said, “you lookin’ fer a date?”

  “Already got one, ladies. Thanks.”

  I turned to Langdon, offended without even thinking about it. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not one of them, not anything like that! I’m here to drive you around, that’s it. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal,” Langdon said.

  Unfortunately, the two whores overheard. The second one turned back to address Langdon. “You heard the little prude, you’re wide open.”

  “Yeah,” her friend called back, “you ain’t datin’, you babysittin’!” The girls cackled with a mean, snickering laughter.

  I couldn’t resist stepping up to them, chin out, shoulders back. “Maybe you’d like to babysit my foot up your ass!”

  “Bring it, blondie!”

  Langdon stepped between us, easing me back. “Alright, you ladies have a pleasant evening.”

  “Come back once you put Peewee to bed!” They laughed as Langdon led me down the boulevard.

  “Crikey,” Langdon said, “you really are something special, that’s London to a brick!” He caught my glare and corrected himself, “Someone special.”

  I glanced back at the whores, who’d disappeared among the crowd. “I… I’m sorry about that. I don’t usually lose my temper, but… something about prostitutes really sets me off.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I mean, we all have to get by, and we all… compromise ourselves in one way or another. Men buy women gifts and meals and women loan them their bodies. None of us are strictly innocent. But to just offer nothing but sex for nothing but money, and to make it so cheap and ugly like that… I mean, we come down on men for the way they exploit women, but women like that are just exploitation in high heels.”

  “They’re being exploited too,” Langdon said, “by their pimps, their landlords, their drug dealers.”

  “Cry me a river. Women don’t want to be treated like whores, so we really shouldn’t become them.” After a few more steps in silence, I reflected, “I guess I just feel that beauty shouldn’t be exploited—either by those who desire it or by those who have it.”

  Langdon gave it some thought. “Amen to that, sistah.”

  We walked a bit further up and a mime stepped out from between two buildings. Wearing the classic white face and black beret, he started in with the glass wall routine. Langdon just stared hard at the mime, their faces only inches apart. The mime froze, then dropped the act and scurried back into the shadows.

  Langdon turned to me. “For you it’s hookers. For me it’s mimes. Something about them really sets me off.”

  “I understand that.”

  We walked on, the winter chill inspiring me to cuddle even closer to Langdon. At least that was the excuse I was going with. We walked by an art gallery, appropriately entitled Abstractions.

  Langdon and I stopped, glancing at the shapeless masses in the window that seemed to be passing for sculpture. He asked, “Shall we?”

  “Just to get out of the cold,” I said.

  We stepped inside the white-painted gallery. The counter, the statue bases, everything was white, including the patrons.

  The artwork was all post-modern and abstract; geometric shapes in primary colors, misshaped blobs that looked like the contents of a lava lamp frozen in time. Langdon looked around, his face twitching with confusion and disgust as he glanced at the little cards with the titles and prices.

  We stopped at one shiny ceramic shape and Langdon read the card. “The Dawn of Man.” He looked the statue over—it had a heavy round base sloping up to a narrower spherical shape at the top—and rendered his verdict. “Looks more like the shite of man.” I broke out in a little chuckle I couldn’t stifle. “All this stuff stinks, roight? Aht gallery? This place oughta be called a faht gallery!”

  “Excuse me.” Langdon and I turned to see a tall, lean man in a black tuxedo. He had a thick unkempt beard and his long hair was tied up in a man-bun. “I’m the creator of this piece.”

  Langdon took another look at the card. “You’re… Hellacious P.?”

  “That’s right, and I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

  Langdon chuckled as he looked around. “Yer right about that, mate! I haven’t got a clue what any of this crap is about. Five grand for this glob of goo? Not a Buckley’s chance!”

  “It’s art,” the artist said, his voice quivering with righteous indignation as other patrons began to gather around them. “It doesn’t need me to explain it to you. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

  “I hope not,” Langdon said, once again glancing around the gallery. “Where are the ducks and the mountains? Where are the naked ladies? You think of yourselves as artists? This fake cubism crap was a trick Picasso did just for fun! Wound up changing the art world on a whim! It wasn’t meant to be art, it was meant to be satire! And you’re just the kind of people he was laughing at! And he was right!”

  A very lovely young woman stepped up through the crowd, long chestnut hair falling over her creamy shoulders. “Excuse me, but I think it’s time you…” But she looked at Langdon and her words trailed off. “Are… are you Langford Cane?”

  “Langdon,” he corrected her with a smile. He extended his hand. “One and the same.”

  “Oh, well…” Her attitude had already changed, and she let him take her hand with demure sexuality. “Melanie Lloyd, Mr. Cane. If there’s anything I can do—”

  But the artist said to her, “What’re you kissing his ass for? He’s one of them!”

  “Now now, Hal, Mr. Cane and his… his guest are a
lways welcome here.”

  “Then I’m leaving.” Hellacious P. grabbed his sculpture and tried to shove his way through the crowd, but he slipped and the sculpture fell out of his arms to crash to the white polished floor. Shards of shattered ceramic flew across the floor, their red acrylic paint standing out like blood against the white tile.

  In the echo of the crash, the room went silent. Hellacious P. turned to Langdon, fury in his eyes. “You made me do that.”

  Langdon just put up his hands, palms flat, to calm the man. But it was the pretty gallery owner who turned to the artist.

  “That wasn’t his fault, Hal.”

  The other artists and patrons shook their heads and backed away. Hal was left standing alone with his beard and his man-bun and little else. He looked around in an increasing panic, then turned and ran out of the gallery.

  Melanie said to Langdon, “I’m so sorry about that, Mr. Cane. You know how artists can be.”

  “Sure I do,” Langdon said with a friendly shrug. Then he looked puzzled and glanced out the door. “But what’s his excuse?”

  The room chuckled and we enjoyed some complimentary wine and conversation before hitting the streets again. We made it two blocks down before a flashing neon sign reading Narcissus twenty feet over our heads grabbed Langdon’s attention.

  “What’s this?”

  “Dance club, I think.”

  “Let’s find out for sure.”

  The place was dark but shot with bolts of colored lights, some blinking and some sweeping across the room like searchlights. The music was loud, almost ear-bleeding, and the pounding beat of a synthetic bass drum drove the stirring and swirling bodies on the dance floor.

  Langdon led me into the gyrating crowd. He began dancing, and he did so with amazing fluidity. As his lean waist swung to the beat, his broad chest drew my eyes to his long and muscled arms, casual at his sides, hands large and ready and happily idle, at least for the time being.

  Langdon’s long legs were splayed just enough to give him a strong footing, and my eyes were unable to resist following the length of his powerful thighs up to his crotch, bulging with his manhood. The more he swung those hips, the harder I found it to resist.

  And his weren’t the only ones. All around us men and women danced with each other, with themselves. A cloud of sensuality hung over the dance floor; perfume and cologne, hair spray and stale cigarettes. Young, desirable women sloped their shoulders, arching them up in cooing sexuality, asses out, hips cocked, legs apart as they waggled their hips, bucking them forward in a wanton invitation which nobody could miss, much less resist.

  My own body was quick to become entranced by the driving rhythm, the overflowing sexuality all around us. The music felt like it was wriggling its way into my body, my tissues, the beat synching up to the rhythm of my own heart. The synthetic snare snapped out the steady alternative to create the driving dance code we all instantly tuned in to. Keyboard pads filled the empty pockets, rattling percussive strikes punctuating a lone female voice droning in a voice half-sung, half-spoken: “This is now, this is now, this… is… now…”

  My hips swung and my arms reached up to frame my head with my forearms over the top of my blonde hair. My breasts were proudly pushed forward. My body felt like the flame of some invisible candle, hot and getting hotter with every twitch, every flinch.

  Langdon’s eyes were fixed on me. All his attention was directed at my body, my mind, my soul. I gyrated closer to him, and one of his legs was suddenly between both of mine. I ground my hips as my body seemed to be pulled magnetically toward his. The attraction was undeniable and irresistible. My hips ground down on his strong thigh, my dress hitched up, my crotch getting damp as his thigh proxied for some gargantuan cock, and I felt like I was making love to it right there in public, in front of everybody. But one look around told me that everyone there was engaged in their own public sex. It was a bacchanal with dozens of people who were only a few scraps of clothing, only a social stigma or two away from engaging in a full-on Roman orgy that would have made Caligula blush.

  Is this really me, dancing and slutting it up like this, so animalistic and primal? This isn’t me.

  But it was me, more of myself than I’d realized even existed. There was more to me than I’d known, and Langdon was the key to bringing it all out. Once it came out, who I’d be or what I’d be capable of remained to be seen, and even thinking about it sent shivers down my spine.

  And other places.

  Chapter 5

  I threw myself at Langdon. After all that dancing, his amazing charisma, not to mention the dream I already knew was more of a premonition, a premonition that was about to be fulfilled, I just couldn’t wait.

  And he knew it.

  So when he peeled my arms away from his powerful shoulders, he had me a bit confused. I thought he wanted me as much as I wanted him, and I’d never come across a man who was less than eager to keep kissing and grinding and getting ready.

  But Langdon had other things in mind. He eased me back and away from him. I asked, “What is it, what’s wrong?”

  “Shshshhshsh,” he reassured me, “nothing’s wrong, Sheryl. Everything is just right.” He looked me over with a hungry smile that sent shivers through my body. “Just right… so right.”

  I very nearly melted when he said that.

  “Take off your clothes,” he continued, his voice low and devilish, with more than a hint of mischief. But this was no schoolboy request for a peek at womanhood in full bloom.

  This was a command.

  I reached up and pulled the spaghetti straps off my bare shoulders, letting my silk dress fall to the hotel room floor at my feet. My breasts were bare, nipples already hard, my crotch dewy under my panties, which I let drop down my legs to gather around my ankles. I stepped out of my clothes and kicked them away, standing in front of a man I’d only met that day.

  What am I doing? I had to ask myself. I don’t do this kind of thing. This isn’t me, this isn’t Sheryl Francis.

  Langdon slowly unbuttoned his shirt as he walked around me, circling closer to me as he dropped it to the floor and unbuckled his pants.

  “I knew you were special the moment I saw you,” he said, that accent softening with his words and his sentiment, a lower volume calming the twang and bravado and revealing the inner strength, the man peering out from behind the mask. “I could tell you were waiting for something… someone.”

  I nodded but said nothing, feeling exposed and vulnerable. I raised my arms over my naked breasts, but Langdon said, “No, don’t do that, don’t hide yourself from me. That’s not what you want, that’s not what either of us wants.” I let my arms sink to my sides. “Don’t be bashful, Sheryl, don’t be ashamed. You’ve nothing to be bashful or ashamed of. You’re beautiful, Sheryl, you’re gorgeous. Know that, and let the world know that you know it.” I could feel my back straighten, shoulders back, breasts forward and proud. “You’ve been hiding for too long,” Langdon went on, “hiding behind your work, hiding behind your dreams.”

  I nodded as Langdon came full circle to stand naked in front of me. “There’s nowhere to hide now, Sheryl, and nothing to hide from.” Reading his cue, I wordlessly accepted his offer, my arms and lips reaching out for him. But Langdon held one hand out to stop me, his flattened palm all that was necessary. “Not yet, baby, no no. There’s no rush, my little angel. No rush. You keep your arms at your sides, yeah?” I nodded, standing still as he leaned in.

  He brought his face close enough to the nape of my neck to kiss it, to dig in and indulge the way most men would. But not Langdon. He let his long hair tickle my flesh with the promise of a kiss, his breath warm against the goose bumps rising on my skin. But no kiss came, no contact. His hands reached up as if to cradle my breasts, give them the hard squeeze they were craving. Even my nipples reached out in a hunger they’d never known, a tiny unheard chorus crying out for contact.

  Instead, Langdon’s hands simply hovered over my breasts, a
nd when I heaved my chest forward to force a touch he pulled his hands away. I gasped a bit, my lips pursed and ready for his kiss.

  Langdon was teasing me, enjoying the effect it was having on my body and my mind. It was as if he was reading both, decoding the messages I’d spent my whole life unable to respond to. He took a deep breath and then exhaled, his breath hot against my flesh. He moved with incredible grace, fulfilling every promise of his dance-floor mastery. His face and hands seemed to trace over every part of my naked body, scanning me, committing every inch to memory. He was so fixed on me, his attention so intense that I could feel it piercing my facade and rattling my bones as my blood suddenly ran hot.

  Please, I wanted to say, please take me, Langdon, take me now!

  But another part of me emerged from the shadows, urging me to hold my tongue, to allow this man to do as he pleased. I knew it would please me too. It was already pleasing me. I’d never been so turned on by not being touched, without prodding hands and aggressive desire, either a man’s or my own.

  But things were changing fast. I could already see that. And they’d go on changing, and so would I.

  I didn’t want him to grab me up and ravish me. I didn’t want his touch, as much as I could hardly live without it. The suspense of not touching him, of him being so close and so strong and so ready and still holding back, the hunger ringing through my every tissue, was its own kind of lovemaking, as bone rattling and soul shaking as any other.

  My orgasm began to stir, but that stubborn creature wasn’t about to be drawn finally into the glorious sunlight without a struggle.

  And at that moment I was more than ready to struggle all night.

  But Langdon was doing the thinking for both of us, and he was keeping his strength in reserve. We both knew that. This wasn’t the time for an explosive eruption of masculinity and dominance, but a slow coaxing of something bigger than the two of them, bigger than the whole world. All the same, Langdon couldn’t go on hovering around me forever, as much as I was ready to stand there and take it.