Intrepid, that’s what she was. Which, in his book, was another word for reckless.
A Plan B would have been nice right about now. Except he didn’t have one. He could just refuse to sign the contract, he supposed. Let Sarah look after the mess herself.
Adam opened his mouth to tell Lane the deal was off.
Then he saw her hands tighten again. Ah, so that was it. The tell. A sign of weakness. He looked up quickly, expecting to enjoy a moment of triumph. But something in her eyes pulled at him. Vulnerability, where he’d expected none. Surely he wasn’t imagining that glimmer of…what was it? Confusion…panic…distress…?
He stifled a curse. If he turned her down, what would she do? Give up? Mentally, he shook his head. No way. Lane Davis would do whatever it took to get the job done. And she’d find someone. Someone who would be only too delighted to make love to her for the prescribed two to four nights a week. He wouldn’t put it past her to write her name on the wall in the men’s toilet at the local pub if that’s what it took.
A strange sense of protectiveness clawed its way through his psyche. He looked at Lane again, trying to reject the feeling. Her lips were dauntingly calm, saying “I’m invincible,” but something in her eyes…
“Why are you doing this?” Adam asked.
She blinked. He saw her draw in a deep breath. He’d surprised her, had he? Good.
“The truth? It has been borne in on me that I don’t do this well. And I like to do things well.”
Adam was intrigued to see a blush work its way up from Lane’s neck to her cheekbones. “Borne in on you by…?”
“It doesn’t matter who. He was right about my lack of experience and he…shared that with others. With a great many others, in fact. So I don’t need another failure that someone might choose to share. I need to learn with someone who is bound by a confidentiality clause. Simple. A hired teacher. A good teacher.”
“So this is all because of some douchebag? That’s what he is, by the way, Lane. A douchebag.”
“Oh, I know that. Now, at least. But I’m sure he isn’t the only…douchebag…out there, so best to be prepared.”
Douchebag! That word did not just trip off her tongue.
“What if I can’t perform to your satisfaction?”
“We can terminate the arrangement. It’s all in the contract.” She looked him over, her eyes assessing. “But I don’t think it will come to that. You look like you’d be good at it.”
He felt his eyebrows shoot up. Astounding! “Thanks for the compliment.”
She was still blushing. He enjoyed that at least.
“Well,” she said, and cleared her throat. “Well. I—Well.”
Oh, he was certainly enjoying this part. Discomfiting her. Finally, a bit of joy in an otherwise ghastly evening.
Then he saw her snap out of that momentary incoherence. Back to cool, calm, collected. “It’s your alleged experience that makes you so valuable to me. That’s what I’m paying for. The right fee will usually get the commensurate skill level.”
Alleged? Adam felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise—a sure sign the famous Quinn temper was on the ascent. Good God! The look on her face. Frowning. Curious. A little uncertain. Was she wondering if he was going to be worth the outlay? Alleged. Alleged!
He half rose from his seat, longing to haul her uptight backside out of her chair and shake her. The thought that she’d still be giving him that look at the end of it, however, was deflating. He sat back and tried to calm down.
Found that he couldn’t quite manage it.
And made a decision.
Lane Davis was going to get what she was asking for, but on his terms. She wasn’t the only one who knew how to write a list. By God, he was going to draw up a lesson plan that would get her so hot and bothered she’d end up begging for him. He felt his jaw clench. His nostrils flare. Very caveman, but what the hell—he felt very caveman. “When do we start?” he asked, and could hear the quiet danger in his voice.
He saw an expression—something like fear—cross her face. Good, he thought savagely.
“You have to sign first.” Her voice was steady, but he saw her fingers tighten. “Both copies.”
He held out his hand and she gave him the contract with what he considered a fine show of bravado. It had to be bravado; he was scaring himself, for God’s sake. He flipped to the last page, scrawled his heavy black signature without even glancing at it—he was too busy looking at her with what he hoped was a dangerous, wolfish grin.
He reached for his own copy, and Lane cleared her throat again. “You understand about the RNA test for HIV, right? That you have to use—”
“Yes, yes, condoms for two weeks,” he said, cutting her off before she could even think of backing out. It was too late for that. “You’ll have the pill in hand by then, won’t you?”
“That’s already taken care of.”
“Somehow I knew that would be the case.” He smiled, though he wasn’t remotely amused. “Do you know you’re blushing?” He shook his head in exaggerated amazement. “I’m relieved to know something can get under your skin.”
Lane raised her chin and Adam couldn’t help feeling a flash of admiration. She had a goal and she was going to tackle it. Embarrassed, uncertain, almost certainly nervous—because how could she not be?—but she was going to do it. Amazing.
“I’m very conscious that this is an unusual proposition and that it is not going to be easy for either of us,” she said. “But if we keep things…well, businesslike, I’m sure we’ll get through it.”
“Ah, businesslike sex. Who wouldn’t want that?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I was under the impression you had more women flinging themselves at you than you could handle. Someone with a less desperate approach should be a welcome change. Certainly less exhausting.”
“Oh, a change, definitely. I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone like you. But less exhausting…?” He smiled his wolfish smile. “I don’t think so, Lane.”
Another clear of her throat. “While we’re on the subject of desperate women flinging themselves at you, I should reiterate the importance of the fidelity clause. In the interests of…of health, you understand.”
His smile widened, but didn’t warm. “Reiterate away. Wouldn’t want to catch anything after going to the trouble of a blood test.”
He shot his signature across the second copy of the contract then looked at her. “But we’d better get you up to speed pretty quickly.” No more smile. “A stud like me needs it pretty good and pretty regular.”
Chapter Two
Lane looked at the forlorn-looking smoked salmon on the now-stale rounds of rye bread and blushed. Smoked salmon! Thank God she hadn’t listened to her housemate Erica and put a bottle of champagne on ice, too! What would the look on Adam’s face have been if he’d caught sight of a champagne bottle? It was too awful to contemplate.
She stretched, as much to release tension as to ease the ache in her back after hunching over the contract all night.
Ah, well, the evening may not have been a success exactly, but it wasn’t a total failure, either.
Because he’d signed. That was all that was important for now.
Lane threw out the food and wiped down the glass tabletop then headed for her bedroom. Normally, preparation for bed involved a rapid undressing, a quick shower and vigorous towel-dry, moisturizer slapped on without looking, a scramble into pajamas and a dive under the covers.
But tonight, she was obsessed with her appearance. So she lingered, looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. At what Adam had seen. A tall, pale, pencil-thin woman. Oval face. Nondescript nose. A mouth that was neither too full nor too thin. Arctic blue eyes that looked a bit too village-of-the-damned for comfort. No laugh lines. Not one.
Lane quickly untied her hair and ruffled her fingers through it. The hair quality was quite nice—thick and shiny, hanging straight like a weighted curtain pas
t her shoulders. But the color! So unrelentingly red. She really should dye it, like her mother had suggested. But Erica’s horrified reaction when she’d asked what color would suit her best had stopped her.
Red: that’s the color that suits you, Erica had said. And I will give your mother a piece of my mind, the nastiest piece, if you change it. Think about that before you grab the L’Oreal, because it won’t be pretty.
Yeah, Lane thought, maybe she’d keep her hair red.
She retied it and her eyes moved on down, to her figure. Not that you could tell there was a figure under such a suit. She frowned as she unbuttoned her shirt two notches. The frown deepened. She removed her jacket and undid one more button. Tried a half-pout. And laughed suddenly. Beanpole meets Bride of Frankenstein. Maybe no pouting around Adam Quinn, then.
Ah, well. There were some women who oozed sex appeal and some who…well, who didn’t. And Lane had the sinking feeling that even if she dyed her hair midnight black and dressed herself in clear plastic wrap, she would still be in the “didn’t” camp.
She would concede that some people considered her attractive, in a coolly patrician way. Sort of like Grace Kelly, she’d been told, but, sadly, without Grace’s secret smolder. Not even Erica’s determined artistry—and Erica was brilliant with makeup—had put the sex in Lane’s appeal.
She turned her back on the mirror, undressed quickly and got in the shower.
She might not have sex appeal in its natural form, but it was now in Adam Quinn’s hands to tease out of her whatever small kernels of sensuality were hidden inside her and find a way to make them pop.
And perhaps help put to rest the memory of her one sexual foray with her former colleague, DeWayne Callaghan, which had been such an utter disaster. Clothes half-on, half-off. Inept fumbling. Pain. Bleeding. A rushed two-minute-forty-second encounter—she’d counted every unpleasant second in her head—that had ended with DeWayne orgasming with a loud and somehow comical groan and collapsing on top of her; Lane, having gone nowhere near an orgasm, pinned beneath him.
Which was bad enough. Really, really, bad enough.
But when DeWayne had had the insensitivity to then put the experience on Facebook, giving her a score of 1.5 out of ten—well, that had been when Lane had come face-to-face with the meaning of mortification. His friends had obligingly shared it with their friends, and so on, and on, until it reached multi-friended Sarah Quinn, who had not only told Lane what was going on behind Lane’s back, but had also gone ballistic on DeWayne, threatening legal action and getting the whole mess taken down. But that hadn’t really helped because so many people already knew. Lane had walked around the office like a semi-smiling zombie, determined to ride out the disaster with her usual coolness, but had found she couldn’t handle it and had subsequently changed jobs.
It was so bloody unfair. Lane might be inexperienced, but even she knew sex was supposed to take longer than two minutes and forty seconds. Which meant DeWayne was at least half the problem in that encounter, and more likely three-quarters of the problem.
But—silver lining—leaving the consultancy and joining the bank had brought her into contact with David Bennett, corporate banking executive and hunk extraordinaire.
Which gave Lane a new goal, a new target, a man to try again with.
Lane thought about David as she ran the soap over her skin, which felt super-sensitive tonight. Blond, handsome, smart, a little rakish, divorced. David had made a few veiled suggestions that indicated he wouldn’t mind getting Lane into bed—and the only problem Lane could see with that was her own ineptitude.
She closed her eyes, remembering the unexpected encounter with David three weeks ago at the launch of an art exhibition the bank was sponsoring. When he’d seen her across the room, his eyes had narrowed speculatively. He’d made his way over to her, brushing off the approaches of an assortment of people—mostly women—en route.
“Are you into etchings?” he’d asked, with a decidedly wicked twinkle. “Because I have quite a collection.”
Lane had smiled and asked, “Are you an experienced collector?”
“Oh yes,” he’d said. “I’ve had years of experience.”
“And what catches your eye…I mean, when you want to add to your collection?”
“Nudes. Most definitely, nudes.”
“I’d love to see your nudes.” Lane—absolutely clueless.
David had laughed and leaned closer. “My suspicions are correct, then. There’s fire under the ice.” Then he’d touched her elbow—just her elbow—but it was clear he wanted to touch more.
And with just that touch, Lane had realized what she’d said, what he’d heard, that he’d liked the sexual banter she hadn’t even intended.
And she’d known she had a lot—a lot—to learn if she didn’t want to bore David to death in bed.
How had she let herself get to twenty-three years of age with only one sexual experience? She was a freak, an anachronism. All right, she’d been working like a dog throughout high school, then university, then at the consultancy—but others had worked just as hard and had still managed to experiment with sex along the way.
Well, since she’d skipped Sex 101, there was no option but to cram for the repeat exam. And so, the sex lesson plan had been born.
And tonight, it had been signed and sealed.
She hoped to God Adam Quinn worked fast, because in three months, she intended to be in bed with David Bennett, rocking his world. Sultry, skilled, seductive, knowing exactly how to touch him, and how to respond when he touched her.
She turned off the shower, quickly dried herself and got ready for bed—no more recourse to the mirror because that wasn’t helping her self-confidence. With any luck, three months of sex would alter her at some molecular level, and some mysterious essence of desirability would emit from her pores.
She laughed so suddenly it came out as a snort. Yeah, she wasn’t putting money on that happening!
She slid under the quilt, determined to think about David looking at her with longing three months from now.
“Let’s go to bed,” she whispered to her make-believe David.
She sat bolt upright as butterflies swooped through her stomach.
Because David’s wasn’t the face she saw when she whispered that. David’s hair wasn’t black and tough-guy short. David’s eyes weren’t dark as night. David Bennett wasn’t Adam Quinn.
Lane ran a trembling hand over her belly.
* * *
“You what?” Sarah Quinn demanded, after a full thirty seconds of shocked silence.
“I signed on,” Adam repeated, sinking tiredly into his favorite green leather armchair with a freshly poured single malt scotch—his favorite remedy in a crisis—within easy reach on the table beside him. A nice, antique, wooden table.
Sarah slid into the armchair on the other side of the table.
More silence.
At any other time, Adam would have been amused to see his sister in such a rare state. But not tonight, when he longed to have his study to himself to brood in peace.
“One job. You had one job!” Sarah said at last.
Adam tossed back the full two fingers of his neat scotch and glared at his sister. “If it were that easy,” he drawled, “you could have talked her out of it yourself when she first broached the subject.”
Sarah grimaced. “I tried. Erica tried. No luck. She’s not an easy person to dissuade.”
“One thing I’ve always admired about you is your genius for understatement.” Adam poured more whisky into his cut crystal tumbler. “And who’s Erica?”
“Lane’s housemate. Erica’s a flight attendant.”
“Ah, a flight attendant. Now you’re talking.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Yeah, forget it—and forget any lesbian fantasies while you’re at it, you pervert. They’ve known each other since they were kids. And Erica has a boyfriend, Jeremy, so she won’t be switching sides. And she certainly doesn’t need to hire anyone
for sex. She could write her own blog on the topic.”
“In your league, then.”
“And yours, if it comes to that, smart ass!”
“So how did Lane miss out on the action?”
“She’s…different from us. And I don’t mean because of her career path. She’s just so…driven. And responsible. Very critical of herself. And no, it wasn’t a case of all the economics students at uni being sexless geeks and all the PR people being flaky tarts. I had one or two hot affairs with the economics guys, let me tell you!”
Adam put a hand over his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me.”
Sarah laughed. “Well, you’ll be having your own hot economist affair so maybe we can compare stories down the track. But anyway, Erica reckons Lane has a mommy dearest complex. You know, desperate to make her mother proud all her life, but that horrible woman deliberately won’t ever admit that Lane’s done anything well. All her mother’s attention is focused on Lane’s brother, Brad, who is the biggest no-hoper you’ll ever meet. But Lane keeps trying, and failing. The problem is, with all the trying and the endless demoralization of failing, Lane hasn’t had the time or confidence to fool around on the side.” She sighed. “And of course, when she finally got around to it—”
“The douchebag, I know.” Adam cut in. “And the mother thing is all very sad and tortured and psychoanalysis-worthy, but to actually draw up a contract and pay someone…?”
“Maybe our lives would have been easier if our parents had done something sensible like this,” Sarah said.
Their parents’ divorce, and subsequent revolving door of stepparents, was the reason Adam avoided commitment at all costs. No need to voluntarily invite that sort of chaos and heartbreak into his life.
“You know,” Sarah continued, “go the fee-for-service route instead of doing the multiple marriage thing just to make getting the hots for someone new respectable.”
“In Lane’s case, ‘the hots’ is not really apt phrasing.” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “Brr.”
“Ha ha ha.”
“Anyway, contractual sex just isn’t normal.” He shook his head. “Nope, I just don’t get it.”
The Contract Page 2