Duncan tapped his pen impatiently. “There’s nothing romantic about it. It’s for magic and fantasy freaks.”
“You don’t think rescuing a princess is romantic?”
“That isn’t the point,” he snapped. “What can you do with the clues?” He leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands, waiting.
She blinked. “You want me to write something on the spot?”
He nodded. Nell pulled off her glasses and polished them. It was easier to look him in the face when he was blurry. “What type of poetry?” she asked, in her most professorial tone. “Early, mid, or late medieval? Renaissance? Classical antiquity? Homer, or Catullus? Chaucer? Spenser? Sidney? Heroic couplets, like Pope? Or something more, say, Miltonian?” She put her glasses back on, blinking as his fierce, hawklike face came back into focus. Whew. Potent.
He scowled. “How the hell would I know? I don’t know anything about poetry. That’s why you’re here.”
“You don’t have to know anything,” Nell said. “The more clues you give me, the quicker I can structure the piece. I’ll just choose a style arbitrarily for now. A Shakespearean sonnet, for instance.”
He nodded. “Fine. Whatever. Go for it.”
He passed her a notebook and a pen. Nell scribbled down the list of elements: vial, scrying pool, dagger, labyrinth, enchanted princess.
She swiveled her chair so he was out of her line of vision, and let the magic happen. The world and Duncan Burke disappeared as she submerged herself into a state of inward concentration.
Twenty minutes later she turned back. “Take a look.”
He reached for the notebook. “Finished already? Just like that?”
“It’s a familiar exercise. I make my students do it all the time. The best way to study a poet’s style is from the inside out.”
He read the page she’d passed him, looked at her for a long moment, read it again, pen tapping ceaselessly against the keyboard.
“You want the job?” he asked.
The seductively pretty waitress had the wiles of an Arab street merchant when it came to bargaining. Duncan escorted her grimly to the door after finally agreeing to pay far more than he’d anticipated. She had a high opinion of how much her time and skill were worth. He admired that in a person, if it was backed up by content. Which it was, in her case. She was good. High-quality production, under pressure, while he watched. That was the kind of focused, high-octane energy he liked to infuse into his projects. It was expensive, but it was worth it.
Except for one little thing. Since lunch, he’d been considering asking the cute Sunset Grill waitress out, and this heated fantasy had made his afternoon brighter than it had been for a long time. Now his succulent waitress had morphed into a key employee.
That scenario was no longer feasible. And that sucked.
Derek had the poor judgment to approach him at that moment, his eyes goggling wildly. “So, Duncan, did you hire her, or what?”
“Derek,” Duncan said with deceptive calm, “remember when I told you to put the printouts in my office into the recycling bin?”
“Uh,” Derek mumbled uncomfortably.
“Put the phones on voice mail, Derek, and do it. Now.”
Derek scurried away. Duncan scowled out the window. What the hell was his sloe-eyed waitress doing being a poetry professor, anyhow? How fucking improbable was that? She’d ignored him while she was writing her piece, giving him the perfect opportunity to study the sensual shape of her full lips. He’d wanted to tug on one of those fuzzy dark ringlets, watch it spring back up into shape. Her pinup-girl curviness made his hands clench with the urge to handle her.
It had been a very long time. He’d gotten good at sublimating the need for sex. Dealing with women was so exhausting. The constant shrill demands, the fuckups he didn’t comprehend or even remember having committed. The constant demands for him to reveal feelings he didn’t feel. Talk of love that always gave him acid stomach. Their endless, perennial need to know “where this relationship is going.”
Which was usually straight to hell.
He didn’t have the stomach to lie to them. He just couldn’t pretend. He got the urge for sex as often as the next guy, but he’d learned to shove it under the rug. Exercise, hard work, cold showers, and as a last resort, his own right hand. But every now and then, it reared up, tossed the rug aside, and bit him in the ass. Hard.
That was his problem, he thought. Today in the restaurant, when she provoked him, the urge had surged. A wild beast, rattling the bars of his cage. His dick had been hard on and off all afternoon.
He grabbed his jacket. He needed air. He had more business to attend to, but the business never ended. He could keep himself busy until midnight or beyond, and usually did. But not tonight.
Maybe he’d go knock around a punching bag in the gym. He’d already spent two hours there that morning, from five to seven, but he needed to unload some excess energy before he did something extremely stupid.
He ground his teeth going down in the elevator. He had a personal code. Don’t fuck the employees was high on the list of key rules. He might as well just shoot himself in the head right off the bat rather than pull a stunt like that. He’d save himself a lot of time and trouble.
He’d been working out the perfect scenario in his head before she walked in with her goddamn four-page résumé. A secret affair with a woman too young to be seriously husband hunting. A nubile girl who would be content with nights of pounding sex, not a whole lot of conversation, some costly gifts from time to time. Someone who had no connection with his family, professional or social life. No one would meet her, or know about her. She would meet no one. She’d be all his.
A few nights a week, a car service would bring her to his condo, where he would rip her clothes off and make her come screaming until she’d forgotten her own name. Then, coffee and a croissant, and the car service would take her away again. He could shower and get back to work. Refreshed and restored.
He loved sex, under carefully controlled conditions, with no repercussions, no regrets. Hard conditions to create.
So much for his scenario. This poetry professor was not that girl. Twenty-nine was plenty old enough to be husband hungry, and it was clear that she was complicated, demanding, too smart for her own good.
This one would not be content to be a fuck buddy. She’d want to converse. She would insist on connecting with him, on levels that he didn’t even know existed. The idea made his head ache. He preferred to know in advance what he would eat for lunch. Much less did he want uncertainty when it came to sex.
The evening air was cool; the street was wet with rain. Traffic blared from the downtown avenues. He picked a direction at random as his internal monologue droned on. It wouldn’t be much of an issue, he lectured himself. She’d be working much more closely with his younger brother than with him. Bruce. The charming, flirtatious womanizer. They’d scheduled a meeting with Bruce the following evening to discuss the project. Bruce was going to lick his chops when he saw her.
That thought, unaccountably, irritated the living shit out of him.
He rounded the corner onto Eighth Avenue, stopped, and retreated into the shadow of a restaurant awning. Nell stood at the curb just a few yards away, arm lifted high as she tried to flag down a cab. It swept on by. The river of yellow cabs were all taken. She kept trying. After each attempt, she looked around at all the people who passed her.
He was good at reading body language in a glance. He’d served for years as an NSA field agent abroad, gathering intelligence. He recognized all the tiny indicators of stress that her body betrayed.
She was afraid of something.
Curiosity burned inside him. What could a girl like her possibly have to be afraid of? An asshole ex? That was a classic.
He could rip the fucker’s throat out for her, if she wanted him to.
The thought took him by surprise. It had sneaked up on him while he stared at the way that button strained ever so slightly over the swell of her tits. How sooty and long her lashes were. The fey upward tilt to her eyes, her brows. Hers was not a glossy magazine sort of pretty, and that was fine. He’d never gone for the hollow-cheeked, toothpick-legs look. He liked a nice round ass, that deep inward curve at her waist that cried out for the grip of his hands. That Mediterranean milkmaid look: creamy skin, rosy cheeks, bouncing tits. Dimpled knees.