Manwhore +1

  Chills down my arms, my legs, my feet.

  “So. Wine tasting,” I say.

  “A man shouldn’t let another man choose his wine,” is all he says.

  “Only make it?” I quip.

  He looks at me as if for the first time tonight. And then, he smiles. Full on, mega-watt, grab-on-to-your-panties-sweet-bitch smile.

  God.

  There’s no wine, no drug this powerful.

  His smile.

  We remain seated as we start the tasting.

  After the fourth wine, I notice that Sin makes a signal to a waiter, and soon, the waiter sets a blindfold over my place settings. “For the lady newcomer,” the waiter tells me with a little grin.

  I watch as Malcolm’s long, tanned fingers take the blindfold. He lifts it up and looks at me, a frank question in his green eyes.

  “May I?”

  Oh god. “I . . . um, sure.”

  He starts to lower the blindfold over my face. I’m not breathing when he covers my eyes with the velvet material. All the darkness in the world engulfs me. I hear the clink of glass, the sound of footsteps, of chairs. I catch my breath when warm, long, achingly familiar fingers guide my own to curl around the stem of a wineglass.

  Saint’s touch is so familiar to my body, I’m raging right now. All my systems on go.

  “Noel isn’t going to ever drop his issues with you, is he, Kyle?” a businessman sitting very close asks in a low voice, clearly meant not to be overheard.

  Saint is quiet beside me.

  Kyle.

  Is the guy addressing him?

  Saint’s thumb pauses on the back of mine until he’s sure I’m holding the glass on my own. His nearness is so disturbing and exciting it takes me a moment to get a good grip.

  “Ever going to address the rift between you two?” the voice speaks again.

  “No,” Malcolm answers. Then he whispers to me, “Smell it.”

  My senses fire up. All but my eyesight. Sin’s voice feathers down my spine as I scent the wineglass he still hasn’t released even though I’m holding it too. I can smell the soap on his hand. I can hear my heartbeat. My skin prickles as I drag in the scent and almost taste it.

  “Taste it,” he says, in my ear, and when he speaks again, his tone is different. Colder. “Whatever I had to say to my father, I said it long ago.”

  “But he blames you.” The man is still whispering, but Saint is not.

  “He can blame himself.”

  One more whisper from the businessman: “So is that why you’ve never tied yourself up to a woman? You suspect it’s going to be like father like son?”

  He lets out a long, rumbling laugh. “I’m not anything like him,” he murmurs dismissively.

  I’m quiet, trying to make sense of what I’m hearing, sipping the wine, when I feel Saint take the glass from me, whisper, “How was it?”

  Fuck. How was it indeed? Too curious for her own good, is the lady? “Fruity, I think. Dry.”

  I lick my lips and there’s a silence. Is it odd that my stomach feels warm when I feel, sense, his eyes on my lips as I lick them one more time?

  Then warm, gentle fingers on my hand as he gives me another glass. “Smell it again,” he tells me, the touch of his fingers lingering on mine. The tone holds a degree of warmth and command as well as curiosity.

  I lift it to my nose and sniff, the aroma opening my lungs somehow.

  “Now taste.”

  God, his voice is all man. All sensual. Pure Sin. He makes the command sound coaxing to the point you never consider not obeying.

  “His phantom corporations,” the man goes on, speaking words that sound important but that I have trouble registering in my dizzied mind, “all those overseas, hiding money, rumors of corporate espionage going on? Aren’t you concerned these snoops could be around M4?”

  “Nobody gets into M4 without a thorough screening. Procedures too lengthy to discuss here,” he says.

  Then Saint, to me, “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” I breathe.

  Saint speaking: “Catherine, we’ll order three cases of each so far . . .”

  I’m listening to everything but at the same time focused on this second wine. I’m loving the way it rolls down my throat, swirls in my mouth. Dry but sweet.

  “One more,” Saint coaxes quietly as he hands me a third. His whisper tickles my ear when he takes the glass from me. “What’s the lady’s verdict?”

  I smile and go up in knots at the teasing in his voice.

  God, I can’t take it when he teases me. “It’s a little dry and earthy. The tastes really come alive with this.” I touch my fingers to the blindfold.

  “Hence the purpose of wearing it,” he explains.

  He takes it off me so gently that I hardly feel his fingers unwrap it from around the back of my head. There’s something quiet in the air between us as he lowers it. Like a secret. His eyes shine on me with intimate knowledge. Somehow, I can tell he likes the trust I placed in him just now.

  Trust.

  God, was this a test? He’s so beautiful and he was once a little bit obsessed with me and my windpipe swells with the force of the feelings he gives me.

  We smile at each other before he’s forced to return to the conversation. I lean against the back of my chair, relaxed and drowsy, other parts of me tense with awareness.

  “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” one of the men finally says.

  I watch Saint, this ever-changing mystery to me. I watch his mouth as he talks, quietly, to them about something, and I watch his mouth as he takes a drink. The mouth I haven’t kissed in so long. As he talks, I tune out and wonder if I could be that wine, that glass. He reaches out with this knowing male smile and lifts it to his lips again, glancing down at me quizzically.

  The lights from above hit his tanned face, the quiet melody providing the ambience. But no soothing background music can detract from the pulsing energy of this man beside me.

  He’s a complicated man.

  He never really mentions business, or anything about himself. He’s unselfish. Some men love to talk about themselves or brag—never him. He teases you instead, he baits and challenges you. And I know that when he’s quiet, and looks the calmest, that’s when you should be most scared.

  He is very calm and quiet beside me now.

  Like a nuclear weapon, charging.

  “Enough talk about my father. Rachel, would you like to go to the terrace?” he asks.

  I realize suddenly he was playing along with these men until this moment, when he firms his voice and snaps the door shut on their curiosities. He indulged them for a while, but he’s the most powerful man in the room, and he’ll indulge them no longer.

  When he stands and instructs the waiter to carry our wines outside, I stand and excuse myself from the men, taking a moment to head to the terrace to regroup before he joins me.

  “He has a temper.”

  Turning at the voice, I find a gray-eyed young man in a navy suit approaching me, speaking with a bit of a slur. “You don’t want to see him lose it and you definitely don’t want to make him lose it,” he says, coming over with a full glass of wine. “Only reason he can be so contained is if he gets it every time he wants. That’s all he wants a woman for. Lucky bastard.” He offers the wine to me.

  “I’m glad he’s found something that works,” I say noncommittally, shaking my head, declining the offer. But if Sin needs to work out something, I wish he’d work it out on me.

  “Try it,” he insists.

  “Oh no.”

  “Come on, try this one, it’s a ’seventy-three.” He hands me the glass, and as I take it, he moves around behind me.

  “Thanks, but pass,” I say, shaking my head as I try to set the wine down, but he’s already put his hands over my eyes.

  “Come on, indulge me,” he says in my ear.

  I sip a little, just to get him off my back, and say, “Good. I’m done now.”

  I notice, thro
ugh a slit in his fingers, a very broad, muscular chest in a white shirt suddenly blocking my line of vision, and the guy’s hands drop from my face as he croaks, “Mr. Saint. I was getting acquainted with . . . well, this young lady here. She seemed so lonely just now.”

  Green eyes look at me and something feels stuck in my windpipe. “Are you lonely?” he asks, as he studies me, and I swear I’ve never, ever, seen such a look of challenge and jealousy in Saint’s eyes.

  “No,” I whisper.

  Without looking at the other guy, he tells him, in a chillingly low voice, “You can go now.”

  The guy looks paralyzed. Saint looks at me with complete calm and gestures around the terrace. “How about we move over there?”

  As if expecting me to obey, he starts walking, and I follow him across the terrace. It’s more private here and a bright fireplace flares at the end. Still remembering the crestfallen look on the pale guy’s face when Saint dismissed him, I burst out laughing. “Sin!” I chide. “You were so mean. So intimidating. He didn’t do anything.”

  His voice is calm, but his expression is all steel. “He touched you,” he says simply.

  “Whaaat?” A disbelieving laugh leaves me.

  He faces me fully, frowning in curiosity as he leans against a stone wall and crosses his arms. “I remember that laugh.” He looks at my smile with a sober expression, and his eyes grow dark. My laugh fades.

  I hear myself whisper, “I guess I don’t laugh all that much anymore.”

  A silence. He’s still looking at my lips as though waiting for them to smile again. “That’s a pity,” he murmurs. He lifts his finger and traces my lips, corner to corner. “I do like that laugh.”

  I look at him, breathless.

  I’ve never had a vice until him. His aroma hits my senses, making my mouth water. He’s my only vice. My only longing.

  This longing, I bet he can see it in my eyes as he drops his hand. My smile is gone, but the feeling of his touch remains on my lips.

  We stand here, and though I want and crave, we stand looking at each other like strangers.

  As if you never knew his arms, and how they held you; his lips and how they pressed onto yours . . . always the corner of your lips first.

  A breeze hits me, and I know that I have never hurt like this, or had so many regrets. I know that I might not be okay until the first part he touched forgets what it was like to feel his fingertips. But will I ever? I feel like his fingertip just branded my lips for another eternity.

  A woman comes over to greet him. He clenches his jaw as if the interruption frustrates him.

  “You stunningly beautiful man,” the woman gushes with a manicured hand fluttering up his hard chest. “I tell everyone I know you’re the only man who looks as stunning in his passport picture as he does in real life. Let’s do Monte Carlo again!”

  She leaves and I find myself smiling in amusement. “Is that where you’ve been traveling?”

  He shrugs disinterestedly. “Among other places, yes.”

  “But not with Callan and Tahoe?”

  “They had business. I traveled with other friends.”

  “Socialites? And . . . playboys who have nothing to do?”

  “People who wanted to get away for a while.”

  Away far from me, I think sadly. I kick a leaf from the terrace floor and realize that somewhere during the night, my braid came undone. Now I try to keep my hair from flapping around me and tilt my head to study his face. “It felt like you didn’t even want to come back to Chicago.”

  He’s studying me with equal intensity, watching me fail to catch the flying wisps of my hair. “Nothing to come back to in Chicago.”

  “M4,” I tell him.

  He reaches out to seize most of my flapping hair in one fist and holds it in control against my nape. “M4’s a big boy. I’ve taught it to stand on its own two feet without me.” He smirks. “At least for a little while.”

  But you didn’t teach me how to survive the storm that is you, I think as I reach up and use both my hands to keep my hair still.

  When he eases back and drops his hand, I shiver with the breeze—the loss of his body heat cooling me too fast.

  “Cold?” he murmurs.

  I shake my head—because it’s so much colder in Chicago in winter—but he heads to the end of the terrace, where there’s a pile of blankets.

  I wrap my arms around myself and sit down on a couch near the fireplace and I try not to look at him like I have nothing else to do. Then I try not to look at the couple kissing on the other corner of the terrace. They’re making out by the railing. It’s not a full-on juvenile make-out but rather a long adult kiss that seems to go on and on and on.

  I shiver and tighten my arms around myself. Malcolm brings a blanket and hands it over, silently looking at me.

  He’s standing there, beautiful beyond the imagination. He oozes power and class, sophistication. He oozes testosterone and every woman inside has noticed him—even the ones here with other men. I notice that too. My stomach squeezes unhappily at that. I drop my gaze and I see his shoes as he lowers himself down next to me.

  “You all right?” he asks me, pulling the blanket over me.

  I shake my head, then nod, then want to groan when I realize maybe the wine is bubbling a little too high into my brain.

  When he stretches his legs out, before I can think better of it, I lift the blanket. “Here, it’s cold,” I say, scooting to make room for him.

  He grabs me by the waist and slides me next to him so he doesn’t have to move, then he lets go and leans back and doesn’t seem cold at all, the blanket idle by his waist as he sips wine and studies its contents.

  The move was easy and natural . . . and Saint looks so calm right now. But I’m floored. He wants me near?

  Holding the blanket a little higher with one hand, I watch him drink his wine out of the corner of my eye.

  I think of all those long dreams I had, only to wake up alone in bed. Needing. Needing him. And now my shoulder touches his. I sit helpless. I should move away but I’m stealing this touch and I can’t stop myself.

  He reaches out to grab a new wine from a passing waiter.

  “Do you want to take a break upstairs or do you want to stay here for a while?” he asks me, his tone casual, but his deep stare is somehow not the least bit casual.

  “I’m enjoying the terrace very much right now.”

  He smiles. And god, that smile.

  “Do you want to try this one? It’s a cabernet, ’sixty-eight.” He offers the wine to me.

  “I’m heading into the woozy department, so maybe not,” I admit.

  “Just a taste?” He watches me with those eyes full of mischief and dips his thumb into his glass. I watch as he lifts it. My heart stops when he rubs my lips with it and at the wet caress, desire drizzles over every corner of me, every shadowed place.

  “What are you doing?” I ask breathlessly.

  “Something I shouldn’t,” he husks out, his eyes dark and somber but with a devilish glint.

  Holding my breath, I part my lips and suckle a little. His eyes darken even more, and my body contracts when the taste of him—Sin, the only guy I’ve ever wanted, ever cared for—reaches me. Opening up my every memory, my every need.

  His voice like silken oak, he whispers, “One more, Rachel?”

  We’re playing with fire and we both know it. I can see the devil in his eyes and I can feel the heat that’s going to turn me to cinders and I can’t stop it; I won’t stop it. I nod, but then, when a little fear screams at me that he’s going to hurt me, I say, to protect myself, “Just one.”

  This time when he dips his thumb into the wine and brings it up, I suck it delicately, not wanting him to know how much I crave his taste more than anything.

  I give it just a tiny suck, as if I’m only interested in the wine slipping down my tongue. But it’s his thumb, square, clean, familiar, that I want to bite into, that I want to kiss, taste, make love to. The
re’s a moan in my throat, trapped there. A need inside me, trapped there. A love inside me, so very trapped there he might never get to know how much, how very much I’ve come to love him.

  Watching me for a moment in disappointment, as though he wanted me to latch on to his thumb longer, he sticks it into his mouth and sucks the rest with one pull. Then he whispers at me, “This one’s sweeter than the rest.”

  “I . . . yes.”

  There’s a silence after this is done. He’s looking at me with a bit of amusement and a strange yearning I’ve never seen in his eyes and I’m flustered to death.

  My voice is thick when I can finally manage to speak. “What those men said . . . about your father.”

  “They were business associates of my mother’s. They know my father.” His lips curl sardonically, and his eyes shutter until there’s no more of the fleeting tenderness I just saw. “Don’t worry. I don’t associate with friends of his.”

  He brings out his phone. Changing topics.

  “Remember this picture?” he asks and turns the screen to me.

  I’m both ashamed and excited at the discovery as I peer closer to see. “You still have it.”

  With the click of a button, he’s showing me a picture of me on his yacht, The Toy. I was staring out at the water the first time I was there, thinking of . . . well, how endless the water looked. And wondering why I was so distraught over watching some floozies feed him grapes and hearing about all the fun he’d had at an after-party I was never invited to.

  There it is—that picture of me, my profile pensive as I stare out at the lake. “You were supposed to erase it!” I accuse.

  “I erased the one I showed you. I took two.”

  “Two, not four?”

  His smile appears, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His eyes, instead, look endlessly deep and thoughtful. Then he clicks and there’s another one of me. I’m sitting on a street bench with a magazine on my lap. The magazine. In which I published the article about him. I’m staring down at it with a look of such loss—as if I lost my whole world that day and all I had left was that single magazine with his picture on it.

  I don’t understand where he got it but I’m surprised, embarrassed, and in my heart, so very sad that that picture—that moment—exists at all. “Where did you get it?”