“But you’ve never had a dog before. Not one that you personally spent time with and were responsible for.”
“By those criteria, I guess Ruckus is my first pet,” Arthur said.
Well, it wasn’t Gen’s place to criticize Arthur’s pet-owning skills. The dog was obviously healthy, groomed, and well-fed and wasn’t cowering as if he had ever been abused.
Ruckus was acting as if he hadn’t ever been disciplined, either, but that was a wholly different set of pet ownership skills.
HARRODS AND TRIUMPH
Gen looked out the side window of the Bentley while Pippa maneuvered it through the streets of London, slipping sedately through traffic until they pulled up at the freaking castle that was the Harrods of London department store in Knightsbridge.
Like Selfridges, Harrods was a city block reaching six-plus stories into the air. The department store was mammoth, almost twice as large as Selfridges, with over a million square feet of space to sell stuff. Plate glass windows lined the ground floor, each showcasing a tableau of things you could buy in there and topped by a green clamshell awning.
Gen emerged from the car and followed Arthur down the sidewalk. The first window that she walked by held a display of a dining room table covered with a delicate lace tablecloth and a teak box stuffed with an exclusive line of tea bags. Around the wooden box, crystal jars of jams and jellies, biscuits and cookies, and sugars from three different sources and five different continents glittered in the spotlights inside.
If she had eaten any of that sugary stuff, she would not have been able to even look at the next window display: designer clothes from Paris painted onto deathly skinny mannequins. Seriously, they were all bald and frail and alabaster white, and they all looked like they were going to die of some horrible bleaching wasting disease to fit into those luxurious couture dresses.
Luckily, Gen was in no danger of either starving to death or fitting into those luxurious couture dresses. Each one probably cost more than she would make her first year as a full-fledged barrister, anyway.
Wow, those mannequins were freaky. So emaciated. And bald. And bleached so blindingly white.
They walked in through Harrods main entrance into Ladurée, a perfect Parisian tea room restaurant where Gen and her mother used to come for high tea. The macaroon cookies were baked in every flavor and pastel tint under the sun. The cookie case looked like a pale, subdued sunset smeared into an oceanscape, and the room smelled like the roasted almonds that the cookies were made of.
Around them, the chandelier showered light on tiny, white-draped tables surrounded by red velvet-tufted chairs. Gen and her mother liked to sit away from the counters when they drank their tea out of the china cups.
She tried not to think about that. Her mascara wasn’t the waterproof kind.
Gen followed Arthur, pushing between people trotting among the little restaurants and grocery shops within the huge department store, kind of like the whole place was a huge Harrods mall with all the little Harrods stores inside crammed up against each other.
From there, she followed Arthur through the cheese shop, the pastry shop, past the oyster bar and sushi bar, all of it packed with people hustling among the towering displays of cheeses and boxed pastries and chocolates and the crowded counters. Everyone bustled through and toted their green bags stamped with Harrods in gold.
Everything in Harrods glimmered with gold: the walls, the counters, the ceilings, and especially the sphinxes.
So many sphinxes crouched throughout the store—those Egyptian statues with their lion’s paws and women’s heads, gilded flesh or faux stone finish and striped headpieces—that Gen wasn’t impressed so much as thinking that someone had a thing for sphinxes.
A really serious thing.
There had to be a word for that. Sphinxophilia? Sphinxosexual? Sphinxy-kinky?
She didn’t need to go any further down that line of thought.
Gen followed Arthur from the restaurants section into the perfumery, and the aromas of cheese and chocolate and fish rushed away from the onslaught of roses, spices, and vanilla.
Her eyes stung and watered from the fumes.
She followed Arthur’s broad back as he dodged through the people crowded between the counters, and they found the escalators going up.
They rode the escalators up just one floor and walked through racks and towers of panties and bras—my God, they must be in lingerie and this was where he was supposed to buy her expensive underwear that he was never going to see her in—to a small shop where all the shoes sported bright red soles.
They had arrived at the Christian Louboutin Shoe Boutique.
Arthur waved Gen forward into the store and lounged in a chair while a saleswoman measured Gen’s ticklish feet and discussed her options. They stood before the display, a carousel of hideously expensive shoes, and Gen stole a glance back at Arthur.
He was holding his phone clutched in his hand, the glowing screen slightly turned toward her, but he was also checking out her backside again. His gaze traveled from her ample bum in that too-tight skirt, down her legs to her clunky schoolmarm shoes, and back up. He lingered on her hair, curled in waves from her usual tight bun before Octavia had pulled out the pins.
He caught her watching him, and he smiled at her with that wolfish, predatory grin before he returned to whatever was on his phone.
Maybe he liked Gen’s legs. It wasn’t inconceivable that someone with odd, overstimulated taste might like her legs, even if it was just for their chubby novelty.
No, probably not. Her mother had often lamented Gen’s “cankles.” No one liked her legs.
Gen turned back to the shoes.
Astonishingly, the woman did have scarlet-soled Louboutins in Gen’s overly large size. Several pairs, in fact.
Gen was trying on another pair, chatting with the woman who had turned out to be so nice and marveling at how the clerk had managed to find shoes that fit Gen’s big, wide feet so perfectly, when she caught Arthur leering at her again.
Well, not leering, precisely. His steady observation of her legs and the shoes wasn’t creepy. His steely eyes just showed that he seemed very interested in the way she turned her ankles while she was trying on the shoes.
Those red soles must be flashing at him.
Gen stood and turned around, feeling the leather cupping her feet and Arthur’s gaze on her legs. The stiletto heels pushed her feet up farther than she was used to, but she managed.
When she turned back, Arthur was still casually slouched in the chair, his long legs crossed at his ankles, watching her.
He looked up her body, slowly raking her, until he looked into her eyes and said, almost off-handedly, “Those look good on you.”
She shook her head. “They’re too expensive.”
“I said, they look good on you.” He held a black credit card for the clerk but didn’t look away from Gen’s eyes. “She’ll wear them out.”
“I guess the court date is right after lunch,” she said.
The clerk smiled. “I’ll just put your old shoes in the box, honey. It’ll be fine.”
While they walked the few steps from the Louboutin store into the lingerie department, Gen said to Arthur, “I don’t like that Octavia essentially blackmailed you into buying this stuff for me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind it. It’s certainly a change of scenery for me, and you are keeping me out of trouble for the afternoon. That’s the whole point of this relationship charade, isn’t it?”
“Kind of looked like you were having fun,” she said.
One side of his mouth tipped up. “You have no idea.”
“Are you going to watch me try on the Myla bras, too?”
Oh, no.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to say that. I really didn’t. That was awful and unprofessional, and I’m your lawyer.”
Arthur was laughing a deep, good-natured chuckle. “I wasn’t aware that watching was an option.”
<
br /> “It’s not. It’s really not,” she back-pedaled.
He laughed again and set the green Harrods bag containing the shoebox on an end table beside an upholstered chair. “Then I’ll wait here on the perimeter.”
“I really shouldn’t let Hawkes pimp me out like this,” Gen fretted. Dressing so slutty anywhere, but especially at work, gave her the icky shivers, and she felt like she constantly needed to be ready to fight.
“But it isn’t for her titillation. It’s to manipulate a judge.”
“Does that make it better? Really?”
“Probably not.”
Another clerk found Gen wandering around, confused, among the piles and racks and stacked boxes of lingerie and whisked her off to a changing room. She found several sets that fit Gen perfectly and provided enough support for her double-D’s. However, she felt, ahem, freer, than she usually did in her more traditional bras. Her boobs jiggled more when she walked and swayed when she shrugged. Pale blue ribbons, not proper straps, went over her shoulders and were just visible through the too-tight white blouse.
If Arthur had been sitting on the chair in the corner of the dressing room, the one beside the mirror, when she put the lingerie on her naked skin, would he have smiled? Would his silvery eyes have watched her, dipping to look at her body?
Probably not.
Well, Judge Roberts would probably appreciate her effort. She hoped that he appreciated it enough.
At the cash register, Gen was just pulling out her wallet to pay for the ridiculously expensive bra and matching panties, but the clerk waved her away. “The gentleman already took care of it.”
“But I should—”
The clerk smiled at her. “I couldn’t argue with him.”
Arthur had probably smiled at the clerk and flirted with her, and the woman literally hadn’t been able to say no. Or maybe he had just held out that magic, black credit card of his that salespeople and waiters liked so much. “Yeah. I guess not.”
She went over to where Arthur was tapping on his phone, texting something. The little Harrods bag holding her old underwear swung from her fingers. “Ready for lunch?”
“Of course.” He looked up.
His silvery eyes found her face first, and he smiled at her, but his gaze followed her hair flowing over her shoulders and wandered to her chest. His eyes traced the blue ribbons that showed through her blouse and dipped down to the generous swells of her breasts that were rounder, softer, than when she had been wearing her normal, restrictive bra.
His lips parted, just slightly, and the usual sharpness of his gaze became fuzzy.
Because Gen was standing so close to where he was sitting, when Arthur looked up at her, she saw the dark pupils in his silvery eyes expand.
When he spoke, his voice was lower, huskier. “Let’s have lunch. I seem to have worked up quite an appetite.” He stood.
In her new, very high Louboutin heels, Gen was just a fraction of an inch shorter than he was, but he was still taller. He looked straight into her eyes, back and forth between them, and smiled.
Gen said, “All right.”
The store’s air-conditioned atmosphere must have dried out her throat because her voice sounded choked, too.
After a quick lunch in one of the restaurants tucked away on an upper floor, Arthur mentioned, “Why don’t you pick out a dress, while we’re here? There is an event tomorrow night.”
“I can wear that red dress again.”
“From what little I understand about these things, no, you can’t wear something twice. You’ll have clients there. I can have Graham meet us here for a consultation, or you can pick something and he can alter it. He has your measurements, right?”
Gen picked out a long, black dress, with Arthur pretending not to watch her again. His gray eyes seemed to turn smoky when he looked at her in a few of the gowns, especially the more form-fitting ones. The black one that she decided on clung to her curves and pushed up her boobs far more than she would have worn otherwise, but she had always preferred sparkly tents and tarps, as her mother had called them, when she had been forced to go to a party.
After lunch, Arthur and Pippa drove Gen back to her office, where Octavia Hawkes approved of the shoes and lingerie.
Court went swimmingly.
Octavia Hawkes presented their case succinctly and jiggled when she giggled, twice. She had Gen cross-examine a witness, walking slowly in front of the judge’s bench and turning while Judge Roberts leered down her blouse from his perched bench.
They won the case.
Because of course, they did.
To celebrate, after Gen had changed back into her pantsuit and they were roundly congratulated at chamber’s high tea at four-thirty, Octavia Hawkes took Gen out for supper with several other senior barristers, all of whom smiled indulgently at her.
Octavia mentioned, seemingly in passing, “Gen here is doing splendidly with the Finch-Hatten case. She’s been posing as Lord Severn’s girlfriend, you remember, to keep an eye on him. He hasn’t been in trouble for over a week.”
That wasn’t quite true, but it soon would be.
One of the senior barristers, David Trent, shifted his bulk toward her. “Yes, we heard that you were taking one for the proverbial team.”
Gen laughed. “Only proverbially, I assure you. In the literal sense, I’m not taking one for this team or any other.”
David laughed, his belly bouncing with mirth. “That would be above and beyond the call of duty, wouldn’t it?”
“I should think so, especially when I can use my wily barrister skills to talk him into keeping out of trouble.”
David’s smile turned from mildly scandalized to thoroughly amused. “That’s the type of skills we need at Serle’s Court, keeping the clients in line but not crossing the line.” He winked at her. “Your pupillage seems to be going well.”
She smiled back at him. “I hope so.”
“Yes, winning the Finch-Hatten case would look quite well for you when we discuss tenancy,” David said, “and it would look quite well for Hawkes for her silk application. When is that decision coming down?”
Octavia smiled at Gen. “Applications open on February sixteenth, just about two weeks from now.”
Winning Arthur’s case was important for all of them.
SECOND PARTY
The next evening, Gen was again sitting in the back seat of the car with Arthur while Pippa drove them to another party. The black dress had indeed been altered to perfection in the meantime so that it fit snugly over the cast iron underwear that Graham had bought for her. It flattered her curves so well that Gen was just fine with not being able to breathe. She hoped she didn’t pass out from lack of oxygen.
Sitting beside her in the back seat, Arthur said, “Shall we polish you up before the party?”
“All right,” Gen said as if she were not concerned at all about that.
“First,” his voice was quiet and calm, “when someone says, ‘How do you do,’ you should reply with the same phrase and only that. It’s merely a pleasantry and acknowledgment of the introduction.”
“Seems kind of unfriendly not to talk,” Gen said. “Seems like they’re trying to start a conversation.”
“It’s British. It doesn’t have to be friendly. It may lead to other conversations later, if both parties are so inclined.”
“All right.”
“Be pleasant and reserved. Be amused but not excitable. Don’t try to be friendly, merely open to friendliness if the conversation turns that way.”
Gen fretted. “A lot of things in the law chambers are starting to make sense.”
He leaned in. “Look, you’re a lovely person. Let them discover that. Don’t give it away.”
Gen set her fists on her wide hips, which was not easy to do around the seat belt strapping her in. “How would you know that I’m a lovely person? All I’ve done is hitched a ride on your coattails to fancy dress parties, spent your money on clothes for myself, and tried t
o repress your chosen lifestyle because it’s convenient for my job.”
Arthur laughed. “You told me to get a more experienced barrister though it risked your career—”
Gen snorted. “I was drunk that night.”
“—and my dog likes you. He’s an excellent judge of character. The one time my brother, Christopher, showed up at my apartment, Ruckus tried to chew his foot off at the ankle.”
“Oh, no. What did you do?”
“Pulled him off and fed him pepperoni in the kitchen. It wasn’t a deep bite. Hardly any blood.”
“You didn’t, really.”
“Absolutely. It occurs to me that Ruckus would make an excellent watch dog, given half a chance.”
“God, think of the liability if he actually hurt someone.”
“Spoken like a true barrister.”
“You can’t let him bite people. You can’t even let him snarl or growl, for that matter, or jump up on people or slobber all over them like he was doing.”
“Indeed,” Arthur said.
She should have known that he was egging her on. “He has to heel when you’re walking, behave in public, sit down, and repress all those bouncy instincts of his.”
“Yes,” Arthur said, “exactly. When in public, one must sit down and be well-behaved. Don’t growl or jump up and slobber all over people.”
Gen lowered one of her eyebrows at him. “That was convenient.”
“Just a happy accident, I assure you. So, while we’re at the party, heel.”
“Fine,” she said, pretending to be put out, but quite honestly, it was an apt metaphor.
That night’s party was at someone’s apartment, and it was, as Arthur said, “A small gathering to celebrate someone-or-other’s daughter’s engagement, the fourth reception of its kind for the bride-to-be and a small one for people who might not attend something large and public.”
Gen stood beside Arthur as they rode a glass elevator up to the top of another posh apartment building. She was wearing the Louboutin shoes again. Arthur must have noticed that she was taller than usual because when she stood beside him in the elevator and the city lights fell away below them, he straightened, measuring her with his eyes, and smiled. He still had a few inches on her, but she was north of six feet in those stiletto heels.
Stiff Drink: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #1 Page 16