A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man (25 page)

That worked for him.

“Are you ready?”

Mick shot up to a sitting position. She’d returned with a fresh and frosty bottle of bubbly and their glasses. He watched her place everything on top of the dresser, then turn her back to him, spreading her legs apart, locking her knees, and whipping her head around to smile at him over her shoulder.

Then, with Marvin Gaye being kind enough to provide the soundtrack for his second chance, Piper began to strip for him.

Mick swallowed hard. He grabbed the first little foo-foo satin pillow he could get his hands on—this one, ironically, was shaped like a giant breakfast sausage—and pressed it to his loins.

Piper’s hair went swinging across her bare back. She slowly twirled around, her pretty slim fingers working to loosen the laces on the thing she was wearing, all while her hips languidly swayed and circled. Unless Mick was hallucinating, the garment had opened enough that he could spy the barest hint of rosy pink nipple, hardening as it popped out into the air.

Suddenly, Piper stopped. “Would you prefer that I leave the stockings on?” she asked him.

Oh, she was a wayward minx, this one. Mick laughed. If he said,
“No, take the feckin’ things off so I can run my tongue up and down your shins,”
she’d think he was an animal. But if he said,
“Hell, yes, leave ’em on!”
—she might think he was a little twisted.

“You decide for now,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. “If I want something off, it’ll come off. Trust me.”

She thought that was funny, did she now? Piper tipped her head back and laughed, her nipples getting full access to the air-conditioning with the movement. Then she straightened, walked to the end of the bed, and leaned forward on her hands. It offered him a fascinating view down the front of her … whatever it was … and a closer look at her tight and flat lower belly, the tiny triangle of the thong, the pinch of the garter belt into her blushing thighs.

He hugged the giant breakfast sausage to his lap.

“I have a proposition for you,” she said, those deep green eyes looking up at him through thick black lashes.

“I can see that,” he said.

One corner of her lips twitched. “Here’s the deal—I’d like to be in charge. There are some things I want to experiment with, and I think I’d be less inhibited if I set the pace.”

“Less inhibited? What’s that gonna look like?”

Her smile spread. “Stay tuned, Dr. Malloy.” She straightened again, bringing her fingers back to the laces on her …

“Piper,” he said, sighing. “What the hell is that thing you’re wearing?”

Her face fell. “You don’t like it?”

“Oh, Jaysus and Mary, yes, I like it! I feckin’
love
it! I just can’t remember the name for it—my mind has gone completely blank because of how sexy you are.”

She giggled. “It’s a corset.”

“Ah! Of course!” Mick settled back down into the pillows, the sausage still strategically placed. He didn’t want to frighten the girl, after all. “So, uh, are you feeling uninhibited enough to take off the corset?”

“I believe I am,” she said, and she launched into the agonizingly sensual striptease that Mick knew would serve as the Continental Divide of his life—separating everything that had come before it from all that would come after.

*   *   *

She’d made him suffer terribly, and she felt a little guilty about it. For hours now she’d laved him with her tongue and stroked him with her hands and held him close and kissed him until he couldn’t breathe.

Piper looked at the poor man now, on the edge of coming again, and she sensed the basic unfairness of the whole proposition—she’d had four orgasms, and he’d had zero. Almost certain she’d met all the requirements of the First Sin, Piper decided it was time to move on.

She pulled her wet lips from his cock, so hot and swollen for so long now, and sat up on her haunches on the bed. The sudden movement caused one of her garters to snap loose. She noticed there was a run in the left leg of her stocking. Her breasts were decorated with hickeys.

Piper reached around her for a condom. The sound of the foil being unwrapped caused Mick to open one eye.

“Please, woman, this better not be another way to tease me. I’m not sure how much strength I have left.”

“No more teasing,” she said, handing Mick the condom and watching as he hoisted himself up from the bed on his muscled arms, his dark curls in disarray, his blue eyes glazed over.

He was such a beautiful man. She’d been studying his beauty for hours now, but the sight of him still took her breath away. His face had softened in arousal, contrasting with the hard contours of his flesh, bones, and tendons, the masculine tapering of his torso, and the dusting of springy black hair around his magnificent man parts.

“Actually,” Piper whispered, “I think it’s time for fucking.”

His eyes popped wide.

“Do you want to fuck me, Mick?”

Apparently, he did, because Piper was tossed toward the end of the bed and in seconds Mick was all over her, his fingers laced in hers, his hips pressing her thighs wide apart, his lips smothering hers, all while he kept mumbling,
“Yes, yes, yes.”

The moment was upon her. The tip of his cock pushed into her. Since her body had been warmed up with Mick’s fingers and tongue for what had felt like
days
of foreplay, she was soaking wet for him. He slid into her with a moan of relief.

But was it his moan or hers?

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to Piper. Nothing but the sensation of his hard cock and his lips and the tingling she felt beginning yet again, this time from deeper within her body, flooding her, erasing all thought, all sense of order, normalcy, limits, lifting her higher …

She jolted, sharp pleasure striking into the core of her.

“That’s it, Piper,” Mick encouraged her, dragging his lips down her throat, over her collarbones, as she arched into him.

“Squeeze me. Come all over me. Bloody scream if you want to.”

So she did. And she felt Mick switch into overdrive, grabbing her ass in his hands and focusing all his body’s energy on getting deeper into her, faster, harder. She felt Mick’s big body shudder, clench tight as he called out her name, then slowly unwind.

Many long moments later, Mick chuckled into her ear. “There’s only one she-devil around here, and it’s you,” he said.

Even in her postsex stupor, Piper found the energy to smile.

*   *   *

Mick dragged his sorry arse into the museum Monday morning, arriving a good half hour late, floating in a Zen-like zone of sexual contentment, his bones liquified, his flesh slightly sore, and his mind stuck on one thing:

What the hell did Piper have planned for tonight?

He wasn’t complaining. On the contrary—he’d never had such a wild three-day sensual bonanza in his life, and he was already signed up for four additional installments. He just thanked God he was young, healthy, and in the best physical shape of his life, because anything less and he’d already be a dead man.

It started with Friday’s over-the-top seduction, which culminated in an all-night marathon of fiery sex. By the crack of dawn, Mick realized that Piper was a woman with a heretofore unexplored subterranean sexual landscape chock-full of surprises. It was going to be an interesting week.

Saturday brought an edible sexual orgy—cream and honey and chocolate-covered strawberries—dear God, there was sweet juice of every description running everywhere! Piper told him she simply wanted to give him an opportunity to take a big bite out of life, which was right about the time he sank his teeth into her arse and they fell off the bed laughing. He didn’t go hungry that day, that was certain. Thankfully, Piper had plenty of towels about the place.

And then yesterday, Sunday, Piper treated Mick to what she called his day of indulgence. She drew him a bubble bath and scrubbed his back and washed his hair. She wrapped him in a fancy silk robe she’d bought for him, and insisted on giving him a pedicure while he watched the Sox game on TV. He’d said no, of course. To the pedicure, not the game. Any normal man would’ve done the same. But after she pouted and sat on his lap, he gave in, and it wasn’t long before he was moaning out in pleasure, Piper’s strong fingers kneading the soles of his feet. It turned out his feet shared a direct neurological pathway with his crotch! Who knew?

And so now it was Monday morning, and though the staff meeting was set to start, all Mick wanted to do was cross his arms on his desk and collapse face-first.

There was a rapid tap-tapping on his open door, and Linc Northcutt appeared, in possession of a steaming cup of coffee and a smirk.

“Another long night planning the fund-raising campaign?” he asked, sitting down in the chair across the desk without being invited.

“Yeah,” Mick answered. “Ben Affleck has signed on to do the public service announcements for the Fall Gala.”

Linc snorted. “Right.”

Mick enjoyed this exchange. Linc was a jaded lad—a sad state of affairs for someone barely out of his twenties—and Mick almost felt it was his duty to shake him up a bit.

“Which reminds me.” Mick pretended to rifle through papers on his desk, though what he needed was right at his fingertips. “Would you call Affleck’s assistant and tell her we’ve had to change the studio taping time?” Mick held out a computer printout. “Her number and all the info is right here.”

Linc narrowed his eyes and slowly reached for the document, like the paper would bite him. Mick watched his gaze light up and his fingers begin to tremble. Then Linc’s eyes got huge. “Absolutely!” he said. “No problem. Right away.” As he ran from the office, Mick reminded him to shut the door on the way out.

Ten minutes later, Linc was back, shaking Mick from a dead sleep and inquiring whether he planned to attend the staff meeting. Mick got up. He went to the conference room. He sat down. And it wasn’t five minutes into the meeting that Mick glanced across the table to see Piper staring off into the distance, a half smile on her face, and a nice-sized love bite on her neck. He sent her a text message. Almost immediately, she adjusted her collar and smiled his way.

Later, Mick thought about how funny it was that he and Piper had already fallen into a routine at work. Round about half past three every afternoon, he’d stop by her workroom to see if she’d like to grab a cup of tea in the museum café. Today was no different. He took the elevator to the basement and knocked on her door. No answer. He opened it a crack. “Piper?”

Nothing.

And then he remembered—she’d mentioned having an outside meeting until at least six
P.M.
, something to do with additional artifacts for the Ophelia Harrington exhibit, though based on the overflowing contents of the workroom, Mick couldn’t imagine what she might still need.

He decided to leave her a note. He’d make it sweet and just a little suggestive, something that would make her smile and think of him.

He sat down at her desk. He reached for a pen. Something caught his eye. A stack of paper stuck out from the center desk drawer, and a fluorescent yellow Post-it had been slapped to the top page. On it was scrawled this sentence:
“Does Mick like it standing up?”

“What the—”

He pulled the drawer fully open and removed a hefty stack of what looked like photocopied historical documents.

It took him a few seconds to adjust to the fainter, highly stylized cursive. But when he did, these were the first words he read:
“I clung to him as he thrust deeply into me, my hands buried in his thick hair, my feet crossed behind his back, the hard oak of the door behind mine.”

Mick’s whole body began to buzz. He flipped through the pages madly, attempting to reason, understand, land on some kind of alternate explanation for what he was seeing. But there was none.

Diaries? Sexually explicit diaries? Ophelia Harrington’s sexually explicit diaries? And Ophelia was a—

Mick jolted upright.

No feckin’ way
.

He read more. Then more.

He began to perspire. He checked the clock on the workroom wall. It was four
P.M.
He’d been sitting there a half hour. He had two hours before Piper got back, but he couldn’t risk cutting it that close. He had to have everything back in her desk drawer by five. Obviously, there was no way he could risk copying the documents on site—no one knew about this for a reason, and he planned to keep it that way.

He clutched the papers to his chest. As he waited for the elevator, it started to sink in. Ophelia Harrington was a courtesan, and her diaries included details of her own erotic awakening, which, obviously, Piper had been using to seduce
him
.

He took the elevator up to the lobby, thinking that there was nothing wrong with that. Not really. Not
technically
. So what if Piper had been inspired by a two-hundred-year-old pornographic diary? Clearly, she thought she needed a gimmick to attract his attention.

Ah, Piper. Baby.

He arrived at his destination two blocks from the museum. He tossed his credit card on the Sir Speedy counter, unclipped the pages, and began the self-serve copier’s autofeed feature. With the heartbeatlike pace of the copy machine in the background, Mick rubbed his face with his hands. He shook his head.

Piper was using another woman’s adventure to create her own. She’d become a fearless seductress because she thought that’s what it would take to get his attention, and it had worked. The thought of that nearly broke his heart.

Suddenly, Mick felt a chill. The hairs on his arms rose in alarm. He spun around but saw no one paying him any mind. Then the copier ground to a halt. It beeped. It was jammed.

“Excuse me,” Mick said to the kid behind the counter. “I could use a hand.” Nearly five minutes later, the nice young man had fixed the copier, tossed the problem page into the trash, and got Mick running again. “Thanks,” Mick said, handing him a couple bucks.

As Mick watched page after page stack up, he realized these diaries weren’t just a guide to inspired sex. Piper was installing an exhibit about this woman, yet she was hiding the punch line in her desk drawer. What the hell was she up to? What was she thinking?