Private Relations (9 page)

When Irene emerged from the change room, Kit thought she looked better than she’d imagined possible. It wasn’t simply the dress, it was the still dreamy expression. She seemed softer, sweeter and more approachable.

“What do you think?” Irene asked, spinning so the black skirt belled around her, sparkling in the light.

“You look like Cinderella’s sexy sister,” she said.

“Her aunt, maybe. Her older, fatter, slutty aunt.”

“Not in this dress,” Kit promised. “Older, more sophisticated aunt.”

“What did you have in mind for jewelry?” asked the sales clerk.

“I’ve got some big, chunky black beads.”

The young woman, after a brief glance at Kit, shook her head and ran to the costume jewelry counter, returning with a slim chain with crystals and matching earrings. Kit was going to really have to explain her
expense account after this. But then, knowing Piper, if she were here she’d be talking Irene into one of the faux fur stoles that cost more than an entire herd of skinned animals.

“We’ll take all of it,” said Kit. “Put it on my account, will you?”

“Sure, Kit.”

“It’s so expensive,” Irene gasped, staring at her reflection as though she was having trouble believing it.

“It looks fabulous on you, and part of a fantasy is looking the part.”

“Honey, you are so right.”

While the sales clerk wrapped and packaged everything, Kit said, “So, what do you want to do before dinner?”

“I want an in-room massage,” she said with so little hesitation Kit knew she’d already chosen it from the list of spa services.

“An excellent choice.” She glanced up. “May I recommend we add a manicure, pedicure and makeup and hair styling to that?”

Irene’s laugh was the sort that made you want to join in. Probably a real asset in her profession. “I like the way you think.”

“I’ll send somebody up. What do you want to do about dinner? Before the ballet in Amuse Bouche, our amazing restaurant? Or after the show?”

“After, I think. I might take a nap after my massage.”

“All right. There are four of us going to the ballet. I’ll send your escort to pick you up at your room at six, if that’s okay. We thought we’d have drinks in Erotique and then head to the ballet in the Hush limo.”

“Great.”

“If you want a snack to tide you over until after the ballet, our room service menu is quite extensive.”

“Are you kidding? I’m on a diet from this second until I sit down at the restaurant. If you have an anticellulite massage, book me that.”

Good. If Irene was busy all afternoon, then Kit had some time to run down to the spa and check on Peter. She also needed to organize dinner on the roof. The thought of her and Peter alone on the roof having a midnight supper sent a quick chill up her spine.

“What’s he like?” Irene’s voice interrupted a vision of her and Peter on the roof, and they were not eating dinner.

Kit turned to Irene. “Peter?”

“Is that his name? My Prince Charming?”

“Right. Sorry. I was thinking of something else. Your escort is named Giles. He’s British.”

“Sweet. Is he cute?”

“I’d say he’s more…” she thought of the lean face and the upright bearing. “More aristocratic-looking than cute.”

“Aristocratic? Wow. You took this whole Prince Charming thing pretty seriously, huh.”

“We really want to make this weekend memorable for you, Irene.”

“Yeah, so what is he really, this Giles? An out-of-work actor?”

She’d come so close to guessing the identity of the original escort that Kit breathed a sigh of relief to be able to deny that Giles was an actor. “He’s a businessman. I’ll let him tell you about himself when you meet him tonight.”

N
OTE ON
staff bulletin board:

Kit felt honor-bound, as his escort for the weekend, to check on Peter in the spa. Since not even Piper herself could waltz in on a client during a facial, Kit was deprived of the vision of Peter with his head wrapped in a towel, some kind of colored paste all over his face and cucumber rounds on his eyes.

But she could certainly use her imagination and picture him thus. Revenge was foolish, and she didn’t believe in something so negative and so centered on events from the past. She was human, though, so she pictured a pink mask—maybe strawberry, as Piper had suggested.

However, when she got to the spa, she got her reward. Peter and Giles were all done with their facials and were side by side having their pedicures.

“Hi, boys,” she said.

Peter’s face told the whole story when he looked up at her. He was mortified at having such a girlie proce
dure, but she was pretty sure there was a part of him that was loving the pampering.

“Isn’t the foot massage the best?” she asked brightly.

“You know, I’ve discovered there’s a spa room for two here,” he said, “I planned to be in it this afternoon. With you.”

Since he was so adorably annoyed and he looked so cute with his feet in the paraffin wax, she leaned forward and kissed him.

“Your skin looks radiant,” she whispered in his ear. “Really, you look years younger.”

“I’m going to get you for this,” he whispered back. “You know that, don’t you.”

She sent him a brief and, she hoped, enigmatic smile.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“How’s my princess?” Giles asked, seeming much more comfortable in the spa environment than poor Peter.

How to answer that? “She’s…well, she’s very nice. Good sense of humor.”

“Sounds like a troll,” Peter said.

“I wouldn’t have put it so crudely, dear boy. But that’s pretty much what I was thinking.”

“Of course she isn’t a troll. She’s a very nice woman and I want you both to behave tonight. Please. My job depends on it.”

To her enormous surprise, Giles took her hand and kissed it. “You may depend on me.”

How did he do that? How did a man wearing nothing but a terry cloth robe and with his feet in plastic bags of wax manage to sound like a knight on a white charger?

“You aren’t really a prince, are you?” she asked.

He laughed softly. “Lord, no. I’ve played polo once
or twice against HRH. That’s as close to royalty as I’m likely to come.” He glanced from one to the other of their astonished faces. “Younger son, you see.”

“Pardon?” asked Kit, who didn’t see at all.

“My elder brother inherited the title.”

“Title?” Peter asked, looking for a moment as though the rest of him were going to turn to paraffin wax.

“My father was an earl. It’s a hereditary title, of course.”

“So you just missed a title?”

“By about four years. I’m afraid I’m just an
Honorable.
The family still hangs on to the estate, but that belongs to my brother now. I’m a commoner.”

“You’re an Honorable. You’ve never told me that before.”

“It never came up. Besides, only intolerable snobs go about boasting of titles and so on. I hope I’ve got more sense.”

“You are so perfect,” Kit said, beaming and leaning forward to give Giles a kiss on the cheek.

“No, really,” he said, looking bashful. “Happy to oblige.”

“Are you coming in for a treatment?” Peter asked, glancing hopefully toward the spa room for two.

“I don’t have time. I’ve got a few details to see to and then I have to dress for the ballet. Oh, and Giles, your date Irene has requested dinner after the ballet. I’ve booked one of the best tables in Amuse Bouche.”

“Excellent. I’ll enjoy trying the restaurant.”

“See you later, then.”

“I’ll collect my date and we’ll meet you in the bar, then. About six?”

“Wonderful.” She waved goodbye to the two men and left.

P
ETER WATCHED
K
IT
leave and thought he might have run after her had his feet not been currently sealed in bags of wax that squished between his toes and felt as ridiculous as he no doubt appeared.

Giles was looking at him with tolerant amusement, clearly much more at ease in this shrine to all things girlie than he could ever be. Okay, so they weren’t the only men in the place, but it was a pretty small percentage of men to women. Take out the gay guys and he figured the number was maybe one.

Him.

The pedicurist removed the first bag of wax from his foot and just as she was easing his toes out, they heard a scream.

Peter jerked in his pink leather pedicure chair. The pedicurist didn’t even glance up. “What was that?” he asked.

“A Brazilian,” the woman said.

“Excitable people, South Americans,” he said to Giles.

His old friend chuckled softly. “I think she means the woman who screeched is getting a Brazilian bikini wax.”

Peter blanched. He’d heard of them; okay, he’d seen his fair share and he was quite a fan, but he really, really didn’t want to think of one being performed quite so near him.

“That’s right,” the woman now applying some sort of goopy cream to his feet said. “We do a lot of waxing.” She glanced up and gave them both a professional smile. “For men, too.”

“What?” Peter instinctively put a hand over his privates. He thought he might have made a run for it if his feet weren’t so slippery he’d be flat on his ass on that
marble floor in a second. Or on his back with a couple of herniated disks. “Men get that?”

A chorus of chuckles met his horrified exclamation. “No. Not the Brazilian. Mostly for men we wax the back.”

Giles’s pedicurist nodded. “And the shoulders.”

“Sometimes the butt.”

“Got it,” he said, a little louder than he meant to. “Thanks.”

“I’m looking forward to this evening,” Giles said, in an obvious ploy to change the subject.

Peter was only too happy to help him do it. “Are you? You sure helped Kit out of a jam. And me. She would have spent all day trying to nail some guy down if it weren’t for you.”

“She takes her job seriously. I like that about her.”

“Yeah. She does.”

“She’s beautiful, too. Difficult not to like that in a woman.”

“You really think she’s beautiful?”

“Gorgeous. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“How’s the campaign going?”

“Campaign?”

Giles mouthed, so the busy pedicurists wouldn’t hear him, “To win her back.”

How was it going? Well, they’d had spectacular sex. That was good. She had left right after. Not so good. He’d thought his plan for the day had been a stroke of brilliance, but she’d seen right through his ploy and ended up making a fool of him, sticking him in the pedicure zone with Giles when he wanted to be in the Treatments for Two room with her.

“Hard to say,” he said at last. “I’ve made some progress but there’s still a way to go.”

“Mmm. And not a great deal of time.”

Peter blinked. He hadn’t thought of his plan to win back Kit in those terms, but Giles was right. After this weekend, she was under no obligation to see him again. He had less than twenty-four hours to get her—if not back, then at least willing to keep seeing him.

What the hell was he doing having his toenails buffed?

Disengaging his feet from the woman working on them, he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t have time for this.”

“But I’m almost done. I only buffed one foot.”

“Really, Peter. You’ll look barely civilized.”

“I’ll have to trust you to keep my secrets,” he said, and sped away to change.

K
IT’S CELL PHONE
rang.

“Hi, Kit. It’s Janice.”

Her heart sank. What more could possibly go wrong? “What’s up?” she asked, her smile as firm and her tone as upbeat as ever.

“Your contest winner is looking for you.”

“Which one?”

“Peter.”

“But he’s in the spa.”

“Not anymore. He asked you to drop by his suite. He said it’s urgent.”

She let out a huff of exasperation. “Any idea what the emergency is?”

“No.”

“I really don’t have time—”

“Anything he wants. That’s your rule with these guys, remember?”

Janice was right, which only annoyed her all the more. Peter was a manipulative weasel, but there was nothing she could do about it. Until noon tomorrow.

Checkout had never sounded so good.

“I’ll be right there. Thanks Janice.”

“No problem. Um, you did say anything he wants, right?”

“Within reason, my budget and the law, yes.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

What on earth?

Kit left her office, giving Eartha Kitty a final snuggle. The cat, who was pouting around the offices in Piper’s absence, had greeted her as if she were an entire tub of catnip, so Kit hadn’t accomplished much. In truth, she was basically hiding out, anyway.

But not anymore.

“Sorry, baby. I have to go babysit an overgrown spoiled brat.”

She took the time to brush her hair and teeth and freshen her lip gloss before making her way to Peter’s suite. She wasn’t primping for him, she told herself. She always tried to look her best in front of the guests.

Once more, she found herself knocking on the door to Peter’s suite. The last time she’d done this, she’d been wearing the black dress and the sexy black underwear. She shivered slightly as images of last night played around her mind the way Eartha Kitty had circled her ankles earlier.

Think about something else.

She tried, and an image of Peter in the chair getting a pedicure took hold. Good, this was good. Peter in a Hush robe.

Naked under the robe.

Shut up!

Try again. But before she could think of anything that didn’t somehow involve Peter being naked, he was opening the door.

He was still in his robe and a pair of spa slippers, which meant that underneath the robe he was still…

Naked.

“Oh,” she said, as images and desires and memories crowded her. “I can wait until you’re dressed.”

“No,” he said. “Come in.”

She did, walking in gingerly.

“Oh,” she said again.

The big, gorgeous bath was bubbling away, and there was the heavenly smell of scented candles in the air. It wasn’t dark outside, but Peter had turned off all the lights in the suite and lit the candles anyway, so they glowed as though the tub sported a halo.

Fresh ice was in the ice bucket, and the champagne was as ready to pop as she was.

“I thought we’d get ready for the ballet together,” he said.

“But my things are all—”

“They’re all in here.”

“What?”

“Janice, the general manager, took care of it for me.”

“Janice? But—” She stopped. Of course, that must be what Janice had meant about giving in to all Peter’s requests. Okay, so technically, having her clothes and makeup and things moved to his suite was within in her budget and it wasn’t illegal. But was it reasonable?

She glanced at Peter who was watching her as though he knew exactly what was going through her head.

“Remember,” he said softly, “anything I want.”

She could grab her things and walk out that door right now, and they both knew it.

Or she could sink into that bath—one of her greatest weaknesses, as Peter well knew.

“Come on, it will do you good. Get some of the tension out of your shoulders. I’ll even massage them for you, since you missed your spa appointment today.”

She looked at him with her brows raised. “You brought me here to massage my shoulders?”

The grin didn’t quite make it to his mouth, but it sure as hell was putting devil lights in his eyes. “Among other things.”

Then he moved closer. “Come on. I was a good sport about spending my spa date with Giles. How about you giving me a break?”

It was pretty tough to argue when the bubbling tub called to her insistently, and a tiny crack came from the direction of the ice bucket, as though the champagne was begging to be opened, and oh, yeah, under his robe Peter was…

He kissed her and then grinned.

“What?”

“You brushed your teeth.”

“I—”

“Hope you were thinking of kissing me when you were freshening up. I was so anxious to get you alone I only got one foot buffed.”

She marched over to the hook on the wall and took down one of the luxury robes, then headed for the bathroom.

“Hey,” Peter said, “where are you going?”

“I’m getting changed.”

“You can do that out here.”

“I don’t think so.” She sent him a wicked smile. “Striptease was last night.”

It was crazy and dangerous to play these kind of games with Peter, her inner voice tried to tell her as she stripped off her clothes in the bathroom.

But she was in no danger. Maybe a couple of years ago, spending a no-strings, sexy weekend with him would have been impossible, but she’d grown up a lot. She was tougher, smarter and very much her own woman. She played games now that she hadn’t even heard about back in her college days.

Hell, you didn’t survive the Manhattan singles life if you weren’t a tough, smart, independent games player.

Her toiletry bag was sitting on the counter, and no doubt her dress and accessories were neatly hanging in one of the closets. She scooped her hair out of the collar of the robe, dug out a hair clip from her bag and fastened her hair in a sloppy bun, then belted the robe around her naked and frankly eager body and headed back into the main room.

Her date was just easing the cork out of the champagne with a quiet
pop.
He poured wine into two flutes with the Hush logo stamped on them and waited for her to reach him.

She held out a hand but he shook his head, his gaze holding hers. “I’ll pass it to you when you’re in the bath,” he said.

“Fine,” she agreed, and unbelted the robe, then shrugged it from her shoulders so it tumbled to the floor.