21

“Ask you what?”
“What my idea of foreplay is?”
Cadence shifts in the leather armchair and crosses her legs. “This should be good,” she murmurs, gesturing to me with her champagne glass. “Go ahead. Wow me.”
“Oh, I would,” I promise. “But in the meantime, I’d start with kissing you.”
Her gaze drops to my lips. I take that as encouragement. “I’d start slow, let my mouth get to know yours. Soft, gentle. No tongue. Until I could feel you relax. Until you wanted more.”
Her mouth falls open just a bit. “How could you tell I wanted more?” Cadence’s voice is low, hesitant.
“Your hands would start to wander, maybe fingers in my hair, pressing the back of my neck. Your hips would arch against me. Then I’d add some tongue.” I close my lips and run my finger along the slit a few times.
Cadence watches me.
I slip my finger in my mouth for a moment before drawing it across my jaw and down my neck. “I really like kissing,” I continue. “It’s so intimate, so much more than simple fucking. That can be fun too, but when you want to impress with foreplay, kissing should play a big part in it.”
Did she just swallow? “What else?”
“Depends where we are. If I’m fortunate enough to be on a bed, I’ll start running my hands along her body. If we’re sitting, I’ll pull her into my lap, maybe to the side with her legs over mine, or I’ll get her to straddle me.” I rub my thighs, picturing Cadence perched on my lap. I’d pull her close, grip that ass with both hands…
“Straddle,” she echoes.
I place both hands on my thighs, close to my cock but not touching. “So she can feel how much I want her.”
That was a swallow. “And then?”
I pause as I finish my champagne. “You seem very interested.”
“For comparison purposes only,” she says quickly, throwing her hair back.
Is Cadence interested? I know I can talk a good game, and yes, sound as sexy as fuck, but I can’t tell with her. I’m an open-book, wear-my-heart-on-my-sleeve type of guy, but Cadence? She’s closed up tight.
I push away the question of what else might be tight. “If you’re comparing, I bet I’d come out on top.” I lean forward so she can hear my whisper. “But only if you want me that way. I’m good for any way.”
Cadence presses her lips together and leans back. “You lost me there.”
“Too obvious?”
“Just a little.” But she smiles, the right side of those lips hitching up higher than the left. It’s a nice break from the perfection.
And most would say Cadence is perfect in appearance. But looking closer, really studying, I can see the slight imperfections.
Her nose is just a bit crooked, those freckles—while I think they’re each a little beauty, some women do what they can to cover them up—sprinkle across the nose, more on the right side than left, and her ears are unusually large.
It’s good to focus on her ears instead of staring at her mouth. Because that is perfection—wide, pale pink, slight curve up with an upper lip fuller than the bottom.
I don’t want to start on her body because… wow. Just wow.
And now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that body dance.

Cadence

“Do you use the plane often?” I don’t want Max to keep talking about foreplay—I’ve already got the images of his kisses branded on my brain. He would be such a good kisser, as long as he could give as good as he says he can.
If he can… and that mouth can move like it should…

I don’t remember the last time I kissed a man, kissed him so that I lost control of what and where and why not.
I never lose control.
“Only when I want to impress someone,” Max says with a grin. “Don’t want to talk about kissing anymore?”
No. I did not.
I slept with men for money. Before that, I took off my clothes and let them grope me in the private rooms. Men didn’t want me because of the way I kissed.
But I wonder what I’ve been missing. When I was younger—pre-Spider’s Den—I had kissed boys.
I’d like to know what it would be like to kiss a man.
Sometimes I look at a man, watch his mouth as he speaks, and think about what it would be like to kiss him. The books I read—those suggested by Malcolm’s book club—describe the first kiss with so much detail and heat, that how can I not think about what I’m missing?
Listening to Max, watching how his lips form the words—I know I’m missing something.
“What was the best kiss you’ve ever had?” Max presses.
He needs to stop talking because all I can see is his mouth slotting over mine, moving in a way that would make me need to kiss him back.
I’ve never needed to be kissed before.
I glance down at my empty champagne flute, debating. Do I want to get into this? If Max is trying to seduce me, like I suspect he is, he should know the truth, as harsh as it might be to hear.
It might stop this talk about kissing.
“I don’t do a lot of kissing,” I tell him.
Max studies me. “No, I can imagine not. That would make it too personal.”
“I don’t do personal.”
“How did you get into… your line of work?”
“When men first started slipping me an extra fifty in the private rooms for a hand-job, or a hundred to bend me over the chair, I thought it was a good deal. Then I figured out I was worth a lot more.” I can hear my voice say the words, know I sound unemotional, that I don’t care, but the truth is that I’m fighting to keep it all inside, bundled up in a ball.
I’ll tell the basics to anyone brave enough to ask, but there are some things I won’t go into detail about. And I was one of the lucky ones. I started selling myself, made a lot of money, and got out. I moved on and took what I learned to help others.
But there are things, things that happened with clients, that I never want to mention because then I would have to remember.
“How much more?” Max taps his fingernail against the champagne flute.
“Five hundred for an hour, and I would get fed. It was easy to make the jump from simply taking off my clothes for money. No one fed me when I was dancing.”
An expression that I can’t read flashes across Max’s face. “Five hundred? That’s… and what did they get for that price?”
“Whatever they wanted.” My voice is cold, and harsh. I don’t hide where I’ve come from, but I don’t go broadcasting it either.
“And you?” Max asks. “What did you get?”

“Paid. Five hundred dollars. More, if they wanted me to be… creative.”
I wait for his gaze to fall away, for the respect and admiration to change into disgust. I’ve only made the mistake once of admitting such things to a man who didn’t already know. He had potential, and then when he found out…
I never spoke to him again. He walked out, and left me sitting at a bar with a hefty tab. He said he was sure I could pay for it… one way or another.
My lips tighten into a line. Why am I talking about this? Max knows all about me already. He’ll be turned off soon enough.

“But were you satisfied?” he demands.
I make a noise in my throat. When men paid for sex, they didn’t care if you were satisfied. Never expect it, and make sure you have your own way to get off—with them, or when you get home. Clients want a scene and they want you not to cry.
That’s what I told the new girls who came to work for E.
I meet Max’s gaze straight on. “I faked. Always. I never once let a man who paid for me have the satisfaction of making me come.”
“That’s a shame,” Max says. “If I was with a woman like you, even if I paid money for the opportunity, I would do everything in my power to make you come, and come, and come again.”
His voice drops, grows husky as he says the words. I have trouble swallowing because I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to have Maximilian Stonee between my legs.
I can have him if I want—right now, even. I can slip my pants off, sit here across from him with my legs open and wait for him to use his fingers.
I can do whatever I want with him.
We stare at each other, each waiting for the other to make the move.
“I think I’m going to kiss you sometime this weekend,” Max announces.
I do my best to ignore the thrill that courses through me. “Oh, you think so, do you?”
“I do. I’ve wanted to see how you taste from the first moment I saw you.”
Taste. He wants to taste me. He wants to kiss me.
It takes a lot to mask my expression so that Max doesn’t know what that does to me.
What he does to me, because I don’t understand it. How is he able to make me feel… things?
“When you were drunk and wouldn’t get out of the elevator?” I ask in a cool voice.
Something crosses his face. “Before that.”
“When you watched me in the restaurant?”
“I guess you can say I’ve got a crush. I’m infatuated with you. A smitten kitten.” He seems so proud of that fact, like it's something to brag about. Maximilian Stonee has a crush on Cadence Quiler. That isn’t anything to be proud of.
“From watching me eat?” I ask in a skeptical voice.
“You’re a very sexy eater.”
That’s when I know. “You’ve seen me dance, haven’t you?”
Max closes his eyes and I don’t know how I want him to respond. Would I rather him lie, and have that hanging between us, or tell me the truth and live with the embarrassment? “I was nineteen,” he says in a quiet voice. “A few of my father’s friends thought they should take me out for my birthday. We went to the Spider’s Den.”
I close my eyes and wait for the humiliation to wash over me.
Only it never comes. “How old are you?” I ask.
“I turned thirty-four two months ago.”

It doesn’t take long for me to do the math. “That would have been one of the first shows I’d ever done,” I admit with a humourless laugh. “You should have waited. I got a lot better.”
“You were amazing already. The pole…”
“I was so frightened,” I confess in a low voice. Why am I telling him this? Why am I telling him anything? But I keep talking, like Maximilian is a person who cares about things like if I’m afraid or upset or in pain.
The little voice inside me suggests maybe he does. I always tell that little voice to fuck right off, but for once, I’m listening.

“They gave me at least four shots of tequila,” I tell him. “But it didn’t do a thing. I was so tense—Paolo yelled at me before I went on, told me to loosen up or I’d look… He even offered to fuck me, thought it would relax me.”
“But when I saw you—”
“It all melted away when I got on stage. I knew what to do, and how to do it. I had them eating out of my hand. It was… a rush.”
“How did you start?”
I take a deep breath because this is the last thing I ever want to talk about.
And it’s usually the last thing anyone asks me. People assume I was a stripper because I wanted to show off my body. That I love sex. They never want to know about the person behind the breasts and beautiful body. The package that makes men so excited that they will pay exorbitant amounts to be seen with me, to show me off as arm candy. More to fuck me.
That’s all it is—fucking. Sex. It’s nothing about love, and most of the time I’m able to somehow transport out of my body so it’s not even me they’re inside.
“I danced, did gymnastics. After my mother died, my stepfather lost interest in being a parent to me. He was good with my half-brother and sister—thank god—but didn’t think much of me. I couldn’t blame him. I got a little wild, ran around with a bad crowd, drinking too much, the odd drug. I wasn’t much for school, always mouthing off—”
“He was your father,” Max says in a tight voice.
“Stepfather. He liked to remind me that he had no biological connection to me.”
“But he… he married your mother. He was the father of your brother and sister.”
I hold up a hand to stop his rant. “It was a long time ago. He…” I can’t tell him about Noelle and Christian or I’ll start to cry and this True Confessions is getting bad enough. “I left when I was sixteen. I spent an… an interesting year until the owner of Spider’s Den happened to see me goofing off in a park and offered me a job on the spot.”
“You were underage.”
“He didn’t care. But when I bought the club, and every other one I own, I made sure there’s no one under nineteen working there. I really cleaned them up.”
“Good for you.”
I shrug. “So that’s the story of how I became a dancer. Exotic dancer. Stripper—whatever you want to call it.”
“I call it fascinating.”
“It’s just a story.”
“But it’s your story, and I think everything about you is fascinating.” He grins, eyes creasing. “Crushing on you, remember?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m sure you can find a more suitable person to crush on.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Or is this just another way to piss off your daddy?” It was a nasty comment and I threw all my contempt behind it.
Only because I suspect I’m crushing on Max too, and the thought scares the hell out of me.
“I’m going to forget you said that,” he says in a mild voice.
“Why would you do that?”
“I think you know why. Can I kiss you?”