Beautiful Stranger (5 page)

Christ, she was hot.

When I looked back up, her eyes had grown to roughly the size of dinner plates. Honestly, the woman had the most enormous brown eyes. If they were any bigger, she’d be a lemur.

She grabbed my arm, pulling me down a hallway, her fitted knee-high boots clacking on the stone tiles.

“Lovely to see you again so soon,
Sara
.”

“How did you find me?” she whispered.

“A friend of a friend.” I waved my hand dismissively and looked her over. Her bangs were swept to the side and held
in place by a tiny red clip, which matched her full crimson lips. She looked like she had stepped right out of some sixties photo shoot. “
Sara
is quite a lovely name, you know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I should have guessed you’re a psychopath.”

I laughed. “Not quite.”

A young woman walked by, ducking her head and muttering a timid, “Good afternoon, Miss Dillon,” before scampering away.

And we have a last name. Thank you, terrified intern!

“Aaah, Sara Dillon,” I crowed. “Perhaps we could continue this conversation in a more private location?”

She looked around and dropped her voice. “I’m not having sex with you in my office, if that’s what you’re here for.”

Oh, she was fantastic. “I actually just came by to welcome you properly to New York. But I suppose I could just do that out here . . .”

“You have two minutes,” she said, turning on her heel and moving toward her office.

We turned corner after corner, finally reaching another smaller reception area lined in windows overlooking the city skyline. A young man sitting at a circular desk looked up at us as we passed.

“I’ll be in my office, George,” she said over her shoulder. “No interruptions, please.”

With the door closed behind us, she turned to face me. “Two minutes.”

“If pressed, I
could
get you off in two minutes.” I stepped forward, reaching out to brush my thumb along her hip. “But I think we both know that you’d like me to take longer.”

“Two minutes to explain why you’re here,” she clarified, her voice shaking slightly. “And how you found me.”

“Well,” I began, “I met this woman on Saturday. Fucked her against a wall, in fact. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. She was extraordinary. Beautiful, funny, sexy as hell. But she didn’t give me her name, and she left me with nothing but her knickers. That could hardly even be considered a trail of breadcrumbs.” I closed the distance between us, tucking her hair behind her ear and running my nose along the side of her jaw. “And when I came this morning, touching myself while thinking about how she felt, I still didn’t know what name to say.”

Clearing her throat, Sara pushed me away, moving to the other side of her desk. “That doesn’t explain how you found me,” she said, cheeks flushed.

I’d seen her under the strobe lights, head thrown back and eyes closed, but I wanted to see her bare, with the sunlight streaming in through her office windows. I wanted to know exactly how far that blush would spread down her body.

I dropped the teasing bit a little. This Sara was so starkly different from the flirtatious Chicago transplant I’d met at the bar. “I happened to see you at lunch yesterday with Ben. We go way back. I simply put two and two together and hoped I’d see you again.”

“You told
Bennett
about Saturday?” she hissed, and the flush I’d been admiring drained from her face.

“God, no. I assure you, I don’t have a death wish. I just asked for your number. He refused.”

Her shoulders relaxed the smallest bit. “Okay.”

“Look, it’s a coincidence that I saw you, and I’m coming off a bit strong by being here, but I did want to see Ben regardless. If you ever want to have dinner . . .” I dropped my card on her desk and turned to leave.

“The video,” she said abruptly. “What did you do with it?”

I turned back, and the urge to tease her became almost unbearable. But the longer I took to answer, the more panicked she appeared.

Finally she broke. “Did you put it on YouTube or PornTube or whatever sites people use?”

I burst out laughing, unable to keep it in. “What?”

“Just please tell me you didn’t.”

“God, of course not! I’ll admit I’ve watched it approximately seven hundred thousand times. But, no, I would never
share
it.”

She looked down at her hands in front of her, picking at her fingernail. “Could I see it?”

What was that in her voice? Curiosity? Something more?

I moved around the desk to stand behind her. She was still tense but she leaned back against me, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. I pulled my phone from my jacket and found the video, pressing play and holding it up for her to see.

With the volume up, the beat of the music played from the small speakers. She appeared on the screen, dancing with her arms above her head, and just like the first time I watched it in person, I felt myself begin to harden.

“That right there,” I said against her neck, “is when you wondered whether I’d notice your dress hitching up. In’t it?” I pressed my hips against her backside, leaving no question as to what she was doing to me.

I set my phone on the desk in front of her, placing my hand on her waist. “And there,” I said, nodding to the video again. She picked up my phone and looked at it more closely. “The way you looked at me over your shoulder, that’s my favorite part. That look on your face, it’s like you’re dancing just for me.”

“Oh God,” she whispered. I hoped she was remembering what it felt like, what it was like to have me watch her.

And then she picked up my hand and moved it slowly to the hem of her dress, which she lifted to her hip. Her skin was smooth beneath my palm, and I slipped my hand to her stomach, the muscles of her abdomen quivering under my touch.

“
Were
you dancing for me?” I asked, needing the reminder.

She nodded, pushing my hand lower. Christ, this woman was a tangle of contradictions.

“What else did you think about?” I asked. “Did you think about my face between your thighs, and my mouth?”

She nodded again, biting her lip.

“I wanted to touch you,” I said, my hand moving down beneath her underwear. “Just like this.”

Her body bowed beneath me, curving against my own to bend over the desk. “I want to feel how wet you are,” I said, my breath ragged, my voice low and rough. “How wet you are knowing that I came this morning while watching you.”

My fingers slipped lower.

She gasped.

“Are you watching?” I asked, pushing a single finger inside. She nodded and I slipped in a second, my thumb moving in circles over her clit. “You’re so fucking
wet
,” I said, my teeth dragging along her shoulder.

“We . . . shouldn’t do this here,” she said.

And still, she pushed farther into my hand. All around my steady rhythm, I could feel her begin to tighten, her breath coming out in tiny, sharp pants.

With a guilty wince, I removed my hand and turned her to face me. She looked practically drugged, eyelids heavy, lips parted.

“And unfortunately my two minutes are up.”

I kissed her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and then each of her eyelids when she closed her eyes. And then I took my phone out of her hand and walked out of her office.

A stranger took video of me dancing.

And then he found where I worked—because apparently he’s buddies with
my boss
—and I asked him to show me the video.

Following that, I made him put his hands in my
underwear
—again, but this time in my new
office
—and proved to both of us how much the idea of him touching himself while watching the video turned me on.

“Oh, dear God.”

“That’s the tenth time you’ve said that in the past fifteen minutes, Sara. Come out here and spill.” My assistant, George, leaned against the doorway. “Unless it’s so scandalous I need to come in there and close your door.”

“It’s nothing. I’m just . . .” I straightened the pens in a cup on my desk, tapped some papers into alignment. “Nothing.”

He curved his lips into a skeptical smile. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Really. It’s a huge, gigantic, regrettable nothing.”

George walked into my office and collapsed in the chair across from my desk. “Did this Nothing happen at Chloe’s engagement party on Saturday?”

“Possibly.”

“And was it of the Male Nothing variety?”

“Potentially.”

“Was the Male Nothing the slice of Max Stella that was just in your office?”

“What? No!” I lied without blinking. I’d high-five myself later for that bit of unexpected smoothness. George was right the first time: I was a terrible liar. But apparently my shame over the Public Wall Sex Situation was enough to tap into as-yet-unknown skills. “And how do you know who Max Stella is?”

George made careful study of local, hot men, but seeing as how he arrived only a week before I did—a New Yorker for all of thirteen days—I didn’t think even he could work that fast.

“Let me ask you,” he began, “what was the first thing you did when you arrived and had settled into your apartment?”

“Found the closest sources of wine and cupcakes,” I said. “Obviously.”

He laughed. “Obviously. But because my goal is not to be an old plump spinster, what
I
do is check out the scene. Where are the fun places to eat—dance—party?”

“To meet all of the men,” I added.

He acknowledged this with a wink. “
All
of the men. I find out everything I can, and in so doing, I also find out about the Who’s Who of the city.” He leaned forward and gave me a wide, bright smile. “In this city, Max Stella is a Who.”

“A
who
? How?”

He laughed. “He’s a Page Six darling. City of London import a few years back. Brilliant VC mastermind, always fucking some hot celebrity or trust fund princess. Different flavor of arm candy every week. La la la.”

Great. I’d managed to select the same slutty publicity hound make and model as my previous boyfriend. But here, not only was Max a well-known womanizer, he was a high-profile venture capitalist, whom I would no doubt cross paths with time and again for work. And who had video of me dancing like a stripper while I imagined his head between my legs.

I groaned again. “Oh, dear God.”

“Calm down. You look like you’re about to pass out. Have you had lunch?”

“No.”

“Look. You’re way ahead here. We only have four contracts that require any kind of attention and if what Henry told me about you is true, I’m guessing you’ve combed through them a hundred times already. Chloe hasn’t even received any furniture for her office, her assistant
isn’t even in New York yet, and Bennett’s only chewed out three people today. Clearly, nothing is on fire here that requires your attention. There’s plenty of time for you to slow down and get some food.”

I took a deep breath, smiling gratefully at him. “Henry trained you well.”

George had been hired as Henry Ryan’s assistant at Ryan Media after I finished my business degree and left for a big commercial firm. When Bennett called to offer me the Director of Finance position in the new branch, Henry emailed, telling me that if I did join the New York offices, he was going to make sure Bennett assigned me George, who was dying to relocate.

George smiled back and gave me a sweet little salute. “Henry told me you were impossible to replace and to not even try. I had something to prove.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Oh, girl, I know,” he said. “And I consider it part of my assistant duties to ensure you know where to go to have fun. Cupcakes, wine, or
otherwise.
”

My mind immediately went to the image of the club on Saturday, packed with people and vibrating with the volume of music, voices, feet pounding. Again, Max’s face flashed through my thoughts, the sound he made when he came, the sheer size of him in front of me, pressing me to the wall, lifting me, and gliding in and out.

I pressed my face into my hands. Now that I knew
who he was, and he wanted to see me again? I was screwed.

George stood up, walked around to my side of the desk, and pulled me up by my arm. “Right. Go, get some food. I’ll pull the Agent Provocateur contracts and you can deal with them when you’re back. Breathe, Sara.”

Grudgingly, I went and grabbed my purse from my closet. George was right. Aside from the celebration with the girls two nights ago, and the sleepless nights I’d spent unpacking my new home, I’d spent a majority of my time at the office, trying to get everything up and running. Much of the three floors we rented in the shining glass and steel midtown building was still empty, and without the rest of my department or the marketing team here yet, we couldn’t do our thing: the world’s best media campaigns.

Chloe had stayed on at Ryan Media when I left, taking over several accounts in Marketing with Bennett. But it was her brilliant work on the enormous Papadakis campaign that had catapulted the company into overdrive, and it had quickly become clear that a New York branch would be needed to handle some of these larger accounts. Bennett, Henry, and Elliott Ryan had spent two weeks in the city to find the perfect office space, and then it was all under way: Ryan Media Group would have another home in midtown.

Michigan Avenue in Chicago was bustling, but it had nothing on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. I felt buried by an endless grid of streets, hulking masses of architecture, and the constant people, traffic, and noise. Horns blared around me, and the longer I stood still, the more the sound of the city grew deafening. Did I go left or right to find the hidden little Chinese place Bennett liked? What was it called—Something Garden? I stood, struggling to get my bearings, while a stream of businessmen and women parted around me like water around a rock sitting dumbly in a river.

But just as I reached for my phone to text Chloe, I saw a familiar tall shape duck into a doorway across the street. I looked up at the name on the tiny storefront: H
UNAN
G
ARDEN.