King's Passion (12 page)

The question worked as a mirror and she slowly lowered the lamp back onto the nightstand. “I'm sorry,” she said meekly. “I…overreacted.”

He nodded as a way of accepting the apology and took a tentative step toward her. “I apologize, too. I shouldn't have brought
him
up. That was tactless.”

“Yes. It was,” she agreed.

He grinned. “Does that mean that you accept my apology, too?”

She shrugged as her gaze lowered to the carpet.

“Wow. You're a real tough one, aren't you? You don't forgive easily.”

“Are you going to whip out a psychology degree, too?”

“I have one framed at the house, if you'd like to see it. It was a waste of fifty grand but it looks good on my bookcase.”

A smile cracked her face again. “Please tell me that you're joking.”

He took another step. “I have a business degree, too. That one came in handy.” When Victoria laughed, he used the moment to wrap his arms around her and pulled her into his embrace. Now that he had her, he was sure that he was halfway home. “Look. I don't want to fight. I thought that we were having a good time together.”

She shrugged as her gaze remained lowered. “It was… nice.”

Another laugh rumbled from his chest. “Just nice?”

“It was…” She fumbled around in her mind looking for another safe adjective. “Pleasurable.”

“Pleasurable? I see.” Eamon pulled his ego out of the trash bin and started taping it back together when it hit him what was really going on. “How would you rate me on a scale of one to ten? What would you give me?”

Her eyes were whirling around so fast that it was amazing that she managed to keep them in her head.

“I don't know. Maybe a…seven?”

It was a bald-faced lie and what made it so bad was that he knew it and she knew that he knew it. Instead of calling her on it, he pulled her even closer and announced, “Then we need to get back in bed if there's that much room for
improvement.” He moved his puckered lips in for a kiss, but she pressed her hands against his chest and pulled back.

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

Eamon finally reached for her chin and gently forced her to look up at him. “Look. I can't have you going around telling people that I'm just a seven. Do you know what something like that will do to my reputation?” He gave her his sly smile. “I think that I deserve the opportunity to improve my score.” He started peeling the sheet from her body. “It's only fair.”

The sheet fell to the floor and Eamon's erection tented his towel. “Damn. Let's do this.”

“Wait. Wait.”

She pressed her hand against his chest again and it took every ounce of strength she had to pull back. “Problem?”

“I just want to freshen up first,” she said, smiling. “It's not fair that you're the only one that smells like Ivory soap.”

“Doesn't matter. I kind of like you dirty.” He stole a quick kiss.

“No. Please. Just give me, like…ten minutes.”

Despite the fact that his need to have her was so strong that he was just seconds from dry-humping her leg, he smiled and released her. “Ten minutes. If you're not out by the eleventh minute, I'm coming in there to drag you out—soaking wet if I have to.”

“Deal.” As she turned to head for the bathroom, he playfully popped her on her lush ass.

Giggling, she hurried out of his reach and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

Once she was gone, another smile exploded across Eamon's face as he mimicked her. “‘It was just sex.'”
Never mind that those had been his words, too. He was already revising the sentence to add adjectives. “It was
good
sex. Better than good—it was
great
sex,” he muttered to himself. “Spectacular…explosive.”

Face it. You just don't like the fact that she beat you at your own game.
Eamon rolled his eyes at his smart-ass ego. “That wasn't it at all,” he argued back. “I just don't know where the hell she's coming up with that seven BS.” Hell, just because he didn't like a whole lot of strings attached didn't mean that she couldn't give an experience like last night its proper rating. Frankly, he was willing to give it double digits. “And she will, too, when I'm finally finished with her.”

He sat down on the bed and thought about striking a pose.
Too cheesy.
He sat up and looked around to see what he could do differently so that she'd be ready to jump his bones when she came out of the bathroom. While he was thinking, his stomach started to growl.

Damn. They never did get around to eating any real food last night. Eamon grabbed the phone and called room service. Maybe a hearty breakfast with a few roses was just the thing he needed to set the mood. When room service picked up, he ordered enough food to feed a football team.

He was so ready for the next round that he felt like a six-year-old trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve. While he had a few more minutes on his hands, he started thinking about some of the questions that had popped into his head while he watched her sleep. Like how long was she planning to stay in town? Did she have any plans tonight? Of course, that meant leaving Quentin in charge of the club for another night. That might be risky. Right now he was just hoping the place hadn't been burned to the ground.

But if he could wrangle another night with Victoria
tonight, maybe he could introduce her to a few more things—nothing too out there. Maybe some warm body oil or silk scarves. That imagery pumped a little more blood to his erection. If he had been a wolf, he would be howling right now.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Wow. That was fast.” He stood up from the bed and went to answer the door. “You guys really believe in fast service,” he said as he opened the door. However, there wasn't a waiter standing on the other side. His memory kicked in and he recognized the face that had walked in on him and Victoria in his office yesterday, only there were two of them. “Oh. Hello, ladies,” he greeted.

The women's mouths sagged open simultaneously, but then they took another glance at the number on the door to the suite.

“Is…Victoria here?” one of the twins asked.

“Actually, she's in the shower.”

That answer made the twins' eyes triple in size, and was followed by a slow eyeroll down his body.

Belatedly, he remembered his erection and dropped his hands to cover himself. “Ah. Sorry about that.”

From his left, he just barely made out this blur of color, next thing he knew it was rushing headlong toward them like a Tasmanian devil. The door was slammed in the twins' faces, and Victoria was plastered against the back of the door. Once again, her eyes were angry and her chest was heaving like crazy.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Uh…answering the door?” He half expected a buzzer to go off, alerting him that he'd given the wrong answer.

“Why in the hell would you do that? This isn't
your
room. It's not up to you to put all my business out on Front Street. Did it occur to you that maybe I don't want or need
someone to see you in here dressed like that? They might get the wrong impression.”

Both brows sprung to the center of his forehead. “And what
wrong
impression would that be? That we spent the entire night playing strip poker?” He settled his hands on his hips, exposing his erection again.

“Oh, God.” Victoria slapped a hand against her forehead. “Look at you. Does that damn thing ever go down?”

“Keep talking and we'll see.”

It was her turn to jab her hands against her hips. “I'm serious.”

“I don't know what you are. I can't tell if I'm in the middle of a real argument or a slapstick comedy.”

Victoria bolted away from the door, moaning continuously, “Oh, God.” Then suddenly, “You've got to get out of here.”

“What?”

She stomped over to him and grabbed him by the arm. “You heard me. I want you out.”

“You've got to be kidding me. I just thought that it was room service,” he protested as she pushed and shoved him forward.

“I don't care. Out!” She opened the door.

“But I thought that we were—”

“No! Out! It's over!”

Before he could seriously plant his feet still, Victoria rammed everything she had in her body against his back and propelled him across the threshold.

Eamon was shocked to find himself standing in the hallway, he quickly turned back toward the door, only to have it slam in his face.
What in the hell just happened?
He saw something move off to his right and he turned his head to see the twins still standing there with their eyes
and mouths in the same position as when the door had been slammed in their faces.

Ignoring the fact that he was half-naked, he jutted a thumb toward the door. “Is she usually this grumpy in the mornings?”

Q
uentin sighed as he unbuttoned his jacket and made himself more comfortable. “My man should've counted his lucky stars right then and there and hit the road. If I could see that she was trouble, then any player worth his salt should've seen it, too.”

“You didn't like Ms. Gregory?” Dr. Turner asked.

He bobbed his shoulders. “I liked her all right. She's definitely a beautiful woman. No doubt. But she was the type of woman who played for keeps, whether she knew it or not. She didn't strike me as someone you could just bed and walk away from. She's the type that puts invisible hooks in you while she's scratching your back.”

Dr. Turner snickered.

Quentin glanced over his right shoulder and smiled. “Know a lot about that, do you?”

“We're not talking about me, Mr. Hinton.”

“I thought that we already established that you were going to call me Quentin?”

A light twinkled in the doctor's eyes. “All right.
Quentin.
So what was it about this Victoria that you found so threatening?”

Frowning, Q shifted in the chaise. “I don't think that threatening is the right word.”

“No?” She sounded surprised. “Victoria didn't
threaten
your newly formed boys' club?”

Silence.

“That is why you started hanging around your cousins, isn't it? To be around like-minded men—men who'd taken a vow of eternal bachelorhood, too?”

Silence.

Across the room, the image of Alyssa with her head angled to the side appeared. “Aren't you going to answer her?” the imaginary Alyssa asked.

Quentin clenched his jaw and rolled his eyes.
Why am I putting myself through this?
“Yeah…maybe,” he finally answered. “I guess I can admit that. Two weeks after their explosive introduction, I thought maybe I'd been wrong. Eamon threw himself into work and Victoria went back to New York…”

Two weeks later…

L
ife seemed like it was getting back to normal. For the first time since her disastrous wedding, there wasn't a peep on Page Six of the
New York Post
about the jilted billionaire bride or her runaway groom. Surprised, relieved and even a little suspicious about the welcome change of events, Victoria paged through the newspaper to double check her good fortune.

In the days since she'd returned from Las Vegas, she spent little or no time thinking about her ex-fiancé and just about all of her waking hours wondering what and even who Eamon was doing. C'mon. Here was a man who owned a string of strip clubs, after all. Clearly anyone who was in Vegas was bound to lose their appreciation for clothing as well as their common sense. That was the
latest excuse she told herself to explain her behavior in Sin City.

Hours after she had landed in New York with her twin cousins in tow grinning like Cheshire cats, she was actually starting to think that there was something seriously wrong with her. But after researching her symptoms on the web and practically every women's magazine she could find, she concluded that her body was just suffering from sexual withdrawal. It was silly, she knew, but she found several articles to support her theory. Now after two weeks of daydreaming and night-dreaming about the things Eamon had done to her body, she was either going to have to enroll in masturbation rehab or some frequent-flyer program so that she could get a weekly or monthly fix in Las Vegas. And that largely depended on whether Eamon wanted anything to do with her again, given how she'd treated him the last time.

There was a third option, Victoria decided. She could try to exercise Eamon out of her system. This was also the most logical solution. So she signed up for a five-thirty a.m. boot camp–like training session that she'd taken before and worked out with such a vengeance that it even stunned her trainer. After kick squats, front and reverse lunges and side-plank hip lifts, she ended each class looking like a sweaty mess.

A few of the regulars gave her odd looks, surprised at how much her endurance had increased.

“I like that hustle,” her trainer praised as she headed toward the showers.

Victoria smiled. But the truth was, she still had enough energy to do another four-mile run. Maybe her plan to exercise Eamon out of her system wasn't working. On Friday of the second post-Vegas week, she caught sight of a group of women headed toward the workout rooms. It
was probably their clothes that caught her attention. They seemed a little more flirty-slash-risqué than the usual gray-sweats types that hung around this particular gym.

It was her curiosity that made her backtrack and then follow the women to their class. To her surprise the workout room was equipped with a dozen silver poles. In front of the class was this cute, perky Dominican woman with a head full of micro-braids and a booty so thick she could put Nicki Minaj to shame.

“Ah. We have a new member with us today.” The woman beamed and then rushed over to Victoria.

“Oh, no,” Victoria said, shaking her head. “I just want to watch, to check it out. I've already worked out this morning.”

“Awww. Are you sure?” she asked, cocking her head and dramatically curling her lips downward. “We would love to have you. Wouldn't we, ladies?”

The small eight-woman group readily agreed.

“Maybe next time. I just want to see what you ladies do in the class. Can I just watch?”

“Why, sure, you can.” She thrust out her hand. “By the way, I'm Carmelina. I used to be a professional dancer. I still work out at Sapphire in New York part-time and before that at The Dollhouse in Atlanta.”

Victoria's ears perked up. “You used to work at The Dollhouse?”

Her eyes widened. “Yeah. Truth be known, that was one of my best gigs before me and my husband moved out here. The King brothers were the best. Oh! I better get this class started. Welcome and I hope you eventually decide to join us.” With that, she turned and headed back to the front of the class.

Victoria slowly stepped back to a corner of the room and watched.

Carmelina punched a few buttons and the room suddenly came alive with a few hard-hitting hip-hop beats. The women immediately launched into warm-up exercises.

Fifteen minutes later, Victoria was bored and was ready to head out, but that was exactly when things started to get more interesting. Though she kept a straight face, she was intrigued by the teasing and suggestive moves.

“Pace yourselves, ladies,” Carmelina shouted. “Slow and easy. The keys to seduction are slow and graceful moves.”

Victoria paid close attention to how the women exaggerated every move. As if on cue, the women reached for the poles, slowly dancing around it at first then leaning and stretching their legs up. They each performed one basic swing, followed by a few complicated twirls.

“Okay, ladies. Let's do the slap and tickle,” the instructor yelled. “Turn your back to your man. Keep your legs straight and then
sloooowly
bend forward, look back, smile innocently and then stroke and lightly tap your bottom.”

It was clear that all the girls were enjoying themselves while Victoria was taking notes. They went back to swinging around the pole, easily holding their body weight while upside down with their legs in a full split.

Victoria was sold and anxious to try out the moves. Until she had been to The Dollhouse, she had never given much thought to the athleticism required for the profession. The muscle control alone fascinated her. Seeing firsthand what was involved in the dance, she didn't understand why it wasn't an Olympic sport.

Her practiced stoicism melted away as her rapt attention caught Carmelina's eye. “Are you sure that you wouldn't like to give this a try? It's a lot of fun!” Just then, Carmelina flipped her body up, supporting herself with just the strength of her calves.

Victoria remembered the move from one of the dancers in Eamon's club. “All right,” she said and walked toward a vacant pole. “I'll try it.”

The other women paused to give her a round of applause.

Despite her sudden wave of shyness, her competitive nature wouldn't let her change her mind.

“Have you had
any
experience working with a stripper pole?” Carmelina asked in her the same chipper voice.

Victoria shook her head.

“Don't worry, we'll all work together to get you up to speed.”

Forty-five minutes later, Victoria was sore in places only her gynecologist should know about. Strangely enough, she was invigorated by the end of the class and promised herself, as well as the group, that she was now their newest member.

 

Victoria kept her weekly Monday lunch with her cousins at The Garden in the Four Seasons Hotel. Dressed to the nines in a sea-green Prada dress and silver Christian Louboutins, she followed the hostess as she navigated around the marble floor and acacia trees to her usual table. To her surprise, her cousins had actually beaten her there. That had to be some kind of miracle. Her cousins were always late.

“Hello, girls.” Victoria smiled and then took a few seconds to exchange their customary kisses on both cheeks. “I can't believe you two are already here.”

“Three weeks without our Monday red snapper should be a crime,” Grace said.

Victoria smiled.

“Are you okay?” Iris said. “We noticed that you were walking a little funny when you came in.”

“Oh. It's nothing. I enrolled in a new class at the gym that's kicking my butt.”

The girls nodded and then looked at each other.

“Sooooo,”
Grace started. “When are we going to talk about
him?
”

“Oh, God,” Victoria moaned. “Please don't ruin my lunch before I even get a chance to taste it. If I never hear the name Marcus Henderson again, it will be too soon.”

The twins shared another look and Victoria caught the exchange over the edge of her menu. “Enough. Spit it out.”

“Well,” Iris said. “We weren't talking about Marcus.”

Victoria settled back in her chair. “Oh.” She supposed that two weeks was a pretty good record.

Grace leaned in over the table. “Yes.
‘Oh.'
We've been dying to hear about the naked strip club owner you had holed up in your hotel suite.”

“Yes. The sexy-as-hell Eamon King.”

“What? You two hired a private investigator?”

“Please. There's this wonderful thing called Google.” Iris smiled. “So give up the deets. How long have you two been doing the nasty?”

“The nasty?”

“I'm trying to keep it PC. Now stop stalling.”

“I'm not stalling.” Victoria tried to play it cool. “There's nothing to get worked up about. There's nothing to tell.”

“Yeah. Right. And for future reference, there's no need to lie to us.
You just wanted to spend the night alone.
” Grace rolled her eyes. “You must've thought you really pulled one over on us. We're not oblivious to the need for an emergency booty call. Hell, I make them at least once a month.”

“Once a month?” Iris said. “Please, you're in the minor leagues. I rotate some creepers on a weekly basis.”

“Creepers?”

“Yeah. You know. Men you never introduce to your friends. You just creep around with under the cover of night. The booty-call role.”

The twins giggled.

“Eamon was not a booty call.”

The look her cousins gave her all but said
sell your BS somewhere else.

“Look. Not everything is what it looks like.”

“Well,” Grace said. “It
looked
like you had a naked man in your suite. The same man I caught you trying to have
relations
with in the office of his strip club.”

“Relations?”

“PC. Remember?”

“Yeah. Well. It's not a strip club, either. It's a gentlemen's club.”

“You say tomato and I say tomahto,” Grace challenged. “And you're still dodging, by the way. So come out with it.”

The two leaned forward together and planted their elbows onto the table.

“I told you there're no deets. It's nothing.”

“Did you sleep with him or not?” Iris asked.

The direct question made it impossible for Victoria to continue dancing around the truth. “A little bit.”

Her cousins screamed.

Shocked, Victoria leaped over the table and slapped her hands over their mouths. “Have you two lost your minds? Look where you are.”

The twins still wiggled in their chairs and stamped their feet.

“I can't believe you two are acting like children.” She kept her hand over their mouths until she was sure that they were going to behave.

“Actually, we've been talking, and we think that it's great that you've finally let your hair down. It's
waaaay
past time for you to let go of some of that control.”

Victoria frowned. “You two have been talking?”

“Well, it's just that you're always
sooooo
…”

“I'm always so what?”

“Honesty?” Iris said, timidly.

She definitely didn't like the sound of that. “Please.”

“Well…” She looked over at her mirror image. “You're always so…
stuck-up.
”

The statement hung over the table.

“Sorry,” Iris finally added. “We love you though.”

Victoria struggled not to let her shock and irritation show on her face. “I resent that.”

“Resent it all you want,” Grace said, less tactfully. “You just can't deny it.”

This whole sexual-intervention-slash-tough-love therapy was starting to work Victoria's last nerve, but clearly her cousins weren't finished.

“C'mon. You have to know that you're a control freak, right?” Grace said. “Everything has its place. Every person fits neatly in a certain column. There's only black and white—no shades of gray. And while I'm on this honesty tear, you chose Marcus to be your husband before
you
asked him out on a date.”

“That's true,” Iris co-signed.

“And that was
after
one of your famous spreadsheet analyses of his character, his financial upside potential, a credit check and a criminal background check. Poor Marcus didn't stand a chance. He probably just choked.”

Heat flushed Victoria's face. “Poor
Marcus?
You're taking
his
side after what he's done to me? Is that what I'm hearing?”

Finally Grace held up her hands and conceded. “All
right, maybe that was a poor choice of words—but my point remains the same. I actually love the idea of you easing off the brakes a bit. You're a successful investment banker in your own right. You balance an insanely cluttered social life with charities and supporting the arts. Now it's time for you to focus on your personal life. But you need someone who's going to help loosen you up.”

“Yeah. And Marcus wasn't it,” Iris testified.

“Definitely. Now, take someone like Eamon King…”

“Wow,” Iris said. “Now, there was some serious heat being generated between the two of you.
Big time.
”

“Me and Eamon?”

The twins nodded.

Victoria wanted to dismiss their observations…but couldn't. “Anyway. Eamon is all wrong.”

“Why, because he owns a string of strip clubs?” Iris challenged.

“No. And they're gentlemen's clubs,” she reminded them again. “Plus he owns a couple of restaurants.”

Grace frowned. “Please tell me that you haven't started another one of those damn spreadsheets.”

Victoria refused to answer.

“Good Lord.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Somebody save us from Microsoft Excel.”