was good. This was progress. Maybe divorce was survivable after all, as the self-help books claimed. Samantha punched her pillow into a more comfortable shape, took in a deep breath and sighed out her relief, let herself drift off, brain minus the anxious tumble of questions and confusions.
Moments later, her bed became a jungle of tangled vines and crawling bugs and suffocating walls of trees. Johnny Orion, well-hung young stud indeed, dark-haired, sweat-sheened, ludicrously civilized in tight jeans and spotless white shirt, hacked his way through to her, eyes glowing red like a demon wolf, burning and clearing a path which widened and melted back until the bed was again a bed, sheets smooth and welcoming. But then he changed, morphed into another stranger who came to her and lay over her. Instead of weight and sweat, this man brought cleansing lightness, relief from the sticky jungle heat and confusion of overgrown vegetation. He lifted his head from her shoulder, cupped her unresisting face and touched her mouth with his…
The instant burn of sexual passion shot her awake. She reached down feverishly, pulled her nightgown up and touched herself until she arched and moaned and came alone in the dark.
She lay back, heart decelerating, breath slowing, stunned at how quickly her body had responded to the fantasy, and burst into laughter.
Hot damn.
Samantha Tyler, twenty-nine-year-old divorced mess-of-a-person, was ready for a Man To Do.
RICK GRINDLE, aka Johnny Orion, clasped his hands behind his head, and lay back on the couch, staring at the smooth white paint on his lakeside condominium ceiling. He yawned, flexed his biceps and rubbed his head absently, liking the prickly stubble feel of his shorn hair. She was thinking about him. Right now. He could tell.
He hadn’t been this taken with a woman on sight in a long time. Hadn’t been this intrigued or felt he would be this challenged in a long, long time. She’d come to Eisemann, Inc.—the lawyer sent to interview the bitch accusing him of sexual harassment, Tanya Banyon. He’d been in the reception area when she walked in. Even that first glimpse had hit him like a sexual storm surge. He’d taken a seat in an empty office with a view of the glass-walled conference room where she sat, pretending to be engrossed in his work, observing and ingesting her expressions and reactions, watching her write, listen, consult papers from a file.
Samantha Tyler. God what a sexy name. Everything about her was sexy. Her figure, her thick blond hair, her feminine power, her assertive body language. And sexiest of all was the sadness and hint of pain lurking in her blue eyes. That sadness gave him hope. Where there was emotional vulnerability, there was always a chance to get in.
She’d felt him watching her once, turned her head and their eyes had met. The jolt of chemistry shot straight down into his pants. He hadn’t reacted, made himself glance casually down at the bare desk in front of him, the anonymous indifferent stranger.
Rick lifted his head and resettled it into his hands. But his image had been planted, at very least in her subconscious. The chemical link would remain dormant in her brain until they met again and he chose to bring it to life, to work it to his advantage on this case and in his quest for Samantha’s…favors.
He grinned at the ceiling, feeling the familiar stirring in his groin when he thought of the thoroughly enjoyable work involved in readying a conquest. Seducing women was an art form, one he’d mastered over his forty-two years. But in the past year or so, the chase had gotten almost too easy. Within about ten minutes he could tell if he’d be successful or not. He’d developed a nearly unerring instinct so that he minimized rejection by avoiding women who’d be impossible to conquer. Tanya Banyon had been a totally uncharacteristic misread. But women like Samantha…seemingly invulnerable but with the gift of that chink. Those women were always the best and the sweetest to overcome, though it took careful planning and patience.
“Feeling women” he called them. The most passionate, the most adventurous. Women like Samantha, who tried to hide her strong sexuality—who probably did hide it from most people. But not from him. He could sense it in the way she walked, the graceful turn of her neck, the fullness of her mouth and the glimpse of passion in her eyes.
A mourning dove announced the hour by cooing its ghostly tune from the birdsong clock on his wall. 11:00 p.m. The bars would be full. Thinking about Samantha had made him horny. Maybe he should try to find another woman tonight. Give her Samantha’s cell number again, pretending it was his own, and tell her to call whenever she wanted him.
He pictured Samantha listening to the messages, wondering who he was, shocked, half-repelled, but definitely fascinated—maybe even turned-on. A woman like her couldn’t help but be fascinated. Who was this Johnny Orion? Why were so many women calling for more? Wouldn’t he be the perfect Man To Do?
He chuckled, got up from the couch, crossed his spacious book-filled, rug-strewn living room into the kitchen and opened the door of his state-of-the-art built-in refrigerator. Cold beer. Or perhaps a nice Beaujolais. Pâté. A baguette from Mon Pain. Strips of bright red pepper. No other women tonight. Tonight he’d sit here, get slowly stewed, maybe hack into her computer and see what else she revealed to her friends, or just think about her and how good it would be between them when he finally landed her.
“HOLD THAT.” JACK HUNTER took a step back and eyed the models critically. The tall brunette—Yvette was it?—stood stiffly, body oiled and bronzed, hair slicked down, wearing a glittering, chest-flattening thong bikini. In front of her, on a clear plastic seat that would not show up in the shoot, back pressed firmly to the tall model’s stomach, arms raised like armrests, sat another model, similarly attired. The overall effect, once the picture was done, would be of a female human piece of furniture.
Jack moved forward and carefully rearranged a wayward strand of the seated model’s hair. Vanessa he thought she was called. “Good. Hold that. No emotion. Stare straight.”
He moved behind the tripod set up with his Hasselblad camera, loaded with two-and-a-quarter-inch film and gazed down into the lens until the models became in the viewfinder what he wanted in his mind. Stiff. Wooden. Unemotional. Perfect. He pressed the shutter. Then again, jaw tight, adrenaline high.
Something about the way female bodies could be molded and manipulated to resemble household objects fascinated him. The ability to represent the inanimate with the living, to merge object and life, to cross the boundaries of function and form. This project was his baby. He didn’t need to do it. Commercial shoots gave him all the work he wanted. But photography for the sake of art instead of in homage to capitalism fed his soul in a way his regular job, no matter how satisfying, never could. The ultimate rebellion from pictures that glorified the mundane in order to seduce the consumer. Cereal as the next Messiah, cars that would change your life and social status, jewelry that would save your marriage.
This shoot was about simplicity, about something as complicated as a human being arranged into something as stark and serviceable as a chair. The contrast was irresistible.
He shot a few more frames, then adjusted the main light brighter, to make the shadows more harsh.
“Yvette.” He raised his head and frowned at the standing model. “Can you take the light out of your eyes? Make them dead. Like you’re blind, like you’re seeing nothing. Can you do that?”
The model unfocused her eyes into dull blank circles.
“Excellent. Almost done.” He bent his head back over his camera and snapped a few more shots, finished the roll and nodded. “Thanks. Good work.”
The women slumped out of their positions with sighs of relief and rolled necks and arms stiff from posing for so long.
