“What’s going on with you? Did you meet a woman over there?”
“Stop deflecting. I’m serious. When did you know you wanted to take her to bed?”
Garrison breathed a sigh into the phone. “The day I met her.”
“Really?”
“Of course. You feel the same way about nearly every woman you end up dating.” If that’s what he wanted to call it. The unsaid words made both men laugh. One more than the other, obviously.
Garrison’s laughter trailed off. “If you haven’t met anybody over there, what’s going on? Did you accidentally drink the water?”
“I’m in France, not Nicaragua, Garrison.” Wolfe avoided the more important question.
“You never know what those French people are up to. First it’s snails, then before you know it, you’ll be stuck in one of their miniature bathrooms with something explosive like Bonaparte’s Revenge.”
Wolfe almost choked on his whiskey. “Right.”
A waiter, crisp in a white shirt, black slacks and a long apron, served the high table next to his. The table full of business people, most of them Canadian by the sound of it, clinked their glasses in a toast punctuated with a round of celebratory laughter once the waiter left.
“So what’s got you thinking and drinking at three o’clock in the afternoon?”
Wolfe didn’t bother denying he was at a bar. “Does a man need an excuse to enjoy his favorite whiskey?”
“Not every man needs an excuse, but you do.”
He dropped his head back with a slow sigh. “I didn’t used to be this predictable.”
Background sounds came from Garrison’s end of the call, the creak of leather, the tap of glass on wood as if he was having an appropriate drink of his own, probably coffee, at his desk. He didn’t say anything, just waited for Wolfe to break the silence.
Wolfe stroked the whiskey glass with his thumb. “You know what I’ve always thought about Nichelle, right?”
“That she’s too important to sleep with. Yes, I remember.”
“Well, today I might have had a slight change of heart.”
“She’s not that important to you anymore?” That was Garrison’s idea of funny.
“Keep it up, Kevin Hart.” He gripped his nearly empty whiskey glass. “Today, things got a little messy.”
“You slept with her?”
“You’re just making all the wrong guesses right now.”
“I know you want to sleep with her,” Garrison said. “I’m simply making the logical leap here. So, if I know you, something happened that made her more appealing than usual, and you’re fighting your typical pleasure-seeking impulses.”
“Something like that. I want her, you know I do. But now she knows, too.”
“What, she saw you staring at her shoes again?” Garrison knew that Wolfe had a thing for women in high heels. Especially Nichelle in high heels.
Years before, when Wolfe had the idea to bring Nichelle over to Kingston Consulting, he’d set up an appointment to meet with her. They communicated by phone and email for weeks before he saw her in person, all grown up, for the first time in nearly two years. She stepped into the restaurant where they’d agreed to meet for their business lunch, breath-stealing in black and white, an outfit that made her look like a fifties pinup model but that he later found out she thought of as business attire, some version of a uniform. The dress caught his eye first, but as his eyes went lower, he damned near swallowed his tongue. Her shoes, electric blue stilettos, fit her feet as if they were custom made, creating an elegant silhouette of the already beautiful contours of her feet.
His heart thudded loudly in time to her footsteps as she walked through the restaurant, attracting the stares of nearly everyone she passed. Nichelle looked as if she’d stepped straight out of his fantasies, deep burgundy lips, hourglass figure and shoes he immediately imagined her wearing in bed. His bed. He reined in his thoughts before they could go any further and had even managed, he hoped, to get through the meeting with his mind strictly on the business proposition he wanted to make her. Although it was hard, he kept his eyes firmly on her face for the entire two hours.
Yeah, Garrison knew all about that and had laughed at him, another one of his rare belly laughs, when Wolfe told him about the meeting a few days later.
“She definitely caught me looking,” Wolfe said. “But this time, she was looking, too.”
Garrison hummed a response that was all doubt. “Are you sure you weren’t having another one of those dreams again?”
Wolfe dropped his head back against the seat and groaned. “Oh, come on...”
He finished up the call the same time he finished his whiskey, urging Garrison to go back to whatever he had been doing while he tried to do a better job of not lusting after his business partner.
But nighttime came and tore all his resolutions to shreds.
A dream brought him right back to that moment in the room: Nichelle in the doorway with the phone in her hand. Her slender but curvaceous body in jeans and a high-collared white blouse that would have been virginal except for the fact that it was completely see through. In real life, he remembered that she had worn a black bra beneath the blouse and that it was more than the wisp of material it was in the dream. But reality and dream blurred, then the dream became what he wanted.
In the dream, her eyes flickered over him, warming his body, pumping blood rapidly through him, filling him with hard intention. But instead of leaving, she closed the door between their rooms and came closer. Wolfe began to shake. He dropped the underwear from his hand and watched her walk to him. The sinuous dance of her body across the carpeted space between them; the twitch of her hips beneath the thick fabric of the jeans; her slightly parted lips as she stared at his body, then finally, finally at his face.
She may have said something, the dream Nichelle. Or it may have been Wolfe’s desire to see those lips part, to hear her call his name. He turned and she touched his chest, tracing the line down the center of his body, down his belly that tightened hard from the light stroke of her fingers. Those fingers skated lower as she met his eyes and held them. His throat was too tight for him to swallow, his lungs incapable of holding or circulating enough air. She touched his intimate flesh.
“Nicki...”
He groaned her name while her hands clasped him, caressed the tip of him with her thumb. A flash of mischief crossed her face.
She sank to her knees in front of him. Her breath stroked him, then her mouth, then her tongue. Her fingernails dug painfully into his thighs, a counterpoint to the humid heaven of her mouth. She hummed her delight around him, and Wolfe exploded with pleasure. He woke up gasping, his belly wet with evidence of his release.
* * *
Nichelle was furious at herself. One look at Wolfe’s naked body, and she had reacted just like every other empty-headed woman who’d ever seen him, damned near leaping across the room on top of him. Women literally came on to him every day. To get laid, all he had to do was point a finger or nod his head.
And because of this, Wolfe dismissed those women as if they were nothing. He shared a night or three of physical gratification with them, sure. But at the end of it all, they were forgettable, and he could and often did replace them every few weeks. Nichelle didn’t want to be like that. Ever.
After the meeting with Favreau, she left to wander the city alone. Instead of going back to change into more suitable walking clothes, she attacked the city in her business blouse and skirt matched with her favorite sunshine-yellow heels.