Maximum Exposure (8 page)

It would make photographing her much more interesting if she wasn’t worried about perfection. Should he decide to take the job. “Dustin wanted me to meet you.”

Her frown disappeared, replaced by a triumphant grin. “Then I was right. You are working for him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She gave a soft snort. “You might as well have.”

“I don’t talk about my work except with those paying me to do it. Not even to confirm or deny their identity for a friend. For all I know, you could be an enemy.”

“Of Dustin? That’s absurd.”

Finn reached for her elbow and guided her back to his side, out of the lane of gallery traffic. “You can draw any conclusions you want, but that’s all they’ll be. Your conclusions.”

“Fine,” she said, waving her free hand, begging the pardon of a woman whose shoulder she had swiped. “No more about you working for Dustin. I’ll go to the source.”

What was the deal? Why was she so intent on digging into Parks’s personal business? “Do what you’ve gotta do. As far as I’m concerned, the subject is closed.”

“I intend to. I can’t let it go as easily as you can. It’s not Dustin I’m worried about.”

“You couldn’t prove it by me. Or these last ten minutes of conversation,” he said, even as he recognized that this wasn’t about her being nosy or minding business that wasn’t her own. This was about something else, something that went deeper than wondering what her friend was up to.

She set her empty flute on the tray of a passing server, declined taking another, though Finn accepted the refill. With one hand in his pocket and one holding his drink, he was less likely to reach for Olivia again, because he found himself wanting to and that couldn’t be a good thing.

Yes, her skin was soft, and she smelled sugary sweet and edible and better than he remembered. He wasn’t here to feast or indulge any appetite but curiosity and his need for work. So what if he’d started to sweat the moment he’d seen her standing alone, her body language giving off vibes that said she was both approachable and aloof?

“I don’t know if I can explain so that you can understand.” Her statement brought him back to the present.

What was there to understand? “I’m not a complete dumb ass, Olivia. I get most things.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you were, or that you didn’t.” She smiled, sliding in front of him as they moved toward the next photograph.

This one depicted an African American woman kneeling in a garden of bloodred roses, her hands clasped as if she were praying, a pure white Persian sitting tall and proud in front of her, its head concealing her clit and her labia, but not her bush of black hair.

Finn studied the purposeful use of color, thinking how he might capture Olivia similarly—if he decided to take the job. If he could deal with the way she enjoyed showing off her body and not take it personally that she wasn’t saving herself for him.

“I don’t expect you to know much about Splash & Flambé, or even its reputation in Miami, but we are considered one of the places to shop for cutting-edge fashion as well as pieces that are original and unique.”

She stepped closer to consider the photograph he’d just admired, the light catching the shimmering and honeyed folds of her dress and shining right through the fabric. Until she moved just so into just the right light, he hadn’t realized the fabric was sheer, but it was.

He could see her breasts, the rings in her nipples, the gold chain dangling between that looped from both hoops to the third, where it pierced her navel. He forced his grip on the champagne flute to ease.

Slicing his palm on broken glass might work as a distraction, but he wasn’t some emo kid who dealt with his issues by slicing into his flesh and causing himself pain—though pain would sure take his mind and his dick off the other things he was feeling.

He’d seen the delicate jewelry before. Had taken pictures of her wearing it. Had printed out the photos and stared at them more often than he would ever admit. But there was something about the tease of seeing the way she wore it through the clothes she had on that stirred him more than the digital images possibly could.

“We have exclusive contracts with several area designers to showcase their work,” Olivia was saying while Finn adjusted the hem of his jacket to better hide his fly. “Doing so continues to bring in our discriminating clientele and gives the creators the sort of exposure other designers would kill for. Or if not kill, at least sabotage for or plagiarize for or, well, you get the picture.”

Whoa. Wait a minute.
“And that’s what you think I’ve been doing? Stealing designs?”

“Not you, no,” she conceded. “But perhaps that’s what the client who hired you is planning to do with the photographs you’ve taken while pretending to drink your lattes.”

If there was room in private investigating for sensitive feelings, he might be insulted by her roundabout accusation of theft. But there wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and on this at least he was man enough to set the record straight. “My taking pictures from the bistro has nothing to do with your business.”

“That does put my mind at ease. Somewhat,” she admitted, turning so that the overhead spotlight shined strategically through her dress. She wasn’t wearing panties. And there was yet another part of her body that was pierced.

Finn looked away, staring at the room full of tits, which did nothing to rouse him compared to the image of that fourth gold ring nestled in a thatch of dark hair. He was beginning to wonder if he’d be able to walk out of here tonight.

“Then
somewhat
better be enough,” he told her, “because that’s all you’re going to get.”

“I guess all I can do is trust you,” she said, her face lighting up as she caught sight of Dustin making his way through the crowd to where they stood.

“Livia! Finn! Look at you two. You’ve already met.” Dustin cupped their heads with his long-fingered hands, kissed them both on the cheek—big, smacking welcoming kisses, which, Finn decided, were their host’s public and attention-grabbing greeting. “I was hoping to get you together, but not having to lift a finger to do so is a great surprise. And a relief. I cannot tell you how busy I am.”

Olivia smiled at the dramatic roll of the other man’s eyes. “Rest assured that all your business has paid off. We guinea pigs love the show.”

Finn snorted, giving up his empty flute to a hovering server and glancing around at what he could see of the gallery’s visitors mingling in and out of the various rooms. “Is that what we are? Guinea pigs?”

“Of course!” Dustin opened his arms, a wide embrace taking in the whole of the crowd. “I wouldn’t compare my friends to rodents, but the idea that you all are my test subjects does ring true.”

Finn supposed he could live with that, however…“You supply free food and drink, and bring us in to gawk at women’s breasts. I’m not sure how objective we’re going to be.”

Dustin turned and spoke to Olivia. “I see Mr. McLain is not an aficionado of the arts.”

“He’s a private investigator,” she responded, as if that explained his crude description of the exhibit, when what she was obviously doing was testing how Dustin would react.

Finn was curious himself. Would the other man give Olivia what she wanted or keep their involvement to himself?

“Yes, yes, I know,” Dustin hurried out with. “He’s been working for me.”

Olivia spared Finn a quick glance before turning her interest to Parks. “Why in the world would you need to hire a PI?”

Dustin drew in a deep breath and heaved it out again. “A matter of the heart, which I’ll explain to you later.”

This time when she looked at Finn, it was as if to ask, “What matter of the heart would bring him to my store?” Finn shook his head. He wasn’t saying a word.

Their exchange didn’t escape Dustin’s notice. “It is so weird, so complicated. And so unimportant. Unlike the two of you, getting along as well as you seem to be doing. Does this mean you’re going to work together?”

Olivia glanced from one man to the other, settling her curious gaze on Dustin. “That’s why you wanted us to meet? To work together?”

“Well, yes. Of course,” replied Dustin. “Why? Did you think I was matchmaking?”

Finn chuckled softly. Dustin obviously had no clue of the matchmaking Olivia had already done—she who was still in inquiry mode.

“Why would you want us to work together?” asked Olivia. “Is there some reason I need a private investigator? Is something going on with Splash & Flambé? Have you heard—”

“Livvy, sweetheart. I haven’t heard a thing.” Dustin wrapped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close. “What I had in mind was you hiring McLain here to take those photos we’ve been talking about.”

The photos of Olivia Hammond letting people look. The way she’d let him look down her blouse as she’d sat beside him, at her ass as she’d crossed the street from the bistro to her shop. The way she’d let him look through her office window when she’d stripped out of her top on his orders.

The way she’d let him and a table full of rowdy businessmen have a look along with their scotch and cigars. The way she was giving the gallery crowd more to look at now than the portraits hanging on the walls.

Finn glanced from the anticipation on Dustin’s face to Olivia’s expression of confusion, her features softened by her several flutes of champagne. Why not shortcut this whole process and tell her friend that his investigator had already seen her, uh, everything?

“Finn’s a PI, Dustin, not a photographer. At least not a professional photographer,” she said. “Not that I don’t trust your judgment. I’m just surprised you aren’t more insistent on hiring a pro.”

Now Finn was the one who was confused.

Olivia had approached him with the offer before Dustin had suggested that she do so. Was she hoping her question would raise valid doubt with the gallery owner, giving her a legitimate reason to balk? Had their clash of opinions at Cigar Paolo been more than a simple disagreement?

If she wanted him to walk, all she had to do was say so. Finn had no intention of staying where he wasn’t wanted. In fact, he was pretty sure he heard his beach house calling his name…

“On this, you can trust me. My judgment, my instincts.” Dustin let his gaze drift between Olivia and Finn. “You need someone who isn’t going to try and stage the shots, someone who can capture you in medias res. Someone with whom you have chemistry, because really. A photographer who doesn’t appreciate what you do will never get the shots we want, no matter how impressive his portfolio and résumé.”

Chemistry.
There was that word again.
Chemistry and appreciation.

“I need to circulate, so you two talk. Finn, Livia will explain what I’ve been working on her for ages to do, and you can decide if the project interests you. Though as fantastically as you two are getting along, I can’t imagine anything less. Don’t disappoint me.”

“We’ll do our best not to,” said Finn. He shook the other man’s hand, and Olivia kissed him good-bye.

Dustin barely had time to turn and engage another patron in conversation before Finn reached for Olivia’s elbow and spun her into his space. “What the hell was that? Why did you act like you and I hadn’t already talked at length about you hiring me as your photographer?”

She felt like a schoolgirl with her first physical crush, like a virgin bride on her wedding night.

What was wrong with her?

If her seduction backfired, it would hardly be the end of the world. There were dozens of men she could choose from to replace Roland Green. He wasn’t so special….

But he was, she admitted, closing the door to her office, flipping the wall switch that set the small lamp on her desk to dim. And then she turned to face him.

He stood between her desk and the door, his back to her, his hands in his pockets causing the sides of his coat to flare. His shoulders were as broad as a football player’s, his hips and waist narrow. He was quite tall—she was sure at least two inches over six feet.

She’d thought so many times about the fit of their bodies; his powerful thighs closing around hers; his belly, hard and flat, spread on top of hers; his chest so broad as he crushed her into the bed.

When she let out a breathless moan, he took a step forward, then, head down, pivoted to face her. “This isn’t real, you know. Anything that happens here. It means nothing. It’s not who I am.”

“What are you saying?” she asked, because the words he’d spoken were the last ones she wanted to hear.

He came closer, one step, then another, his hands still in his pockets, but now his head was high, his chin up, his eyes looking straight into hers. “I’m saying that you can’t expect anything from me.”

“I don’t.” She never had. He’d made it clear that she shouldn’t. “I want; I desire; I need. But I don’t expect.”

“Then we’re agreed.”

“Agreed?”

“This goes no further than this room.” His eyes shimmered, the whites bright, the dark irises nearly glowing. “We don’t talk about it. Ever. For all intents and purposes, tonight didn’t happen.”

“What didn’t happen?” she asked breathlessly, because nothing had, and she wasn’t sure anything would.

For all she knew, she was the only one talking about sex. His comments had been so cryptically vague, they could be about identity theft. “The exhibit? Me telling you about Dustin? What?”

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. “None of that. Only this.”

It took him an eternity to reach her. An endless and forever moment she spent waiting and counting the steps he took. Six. There were only six. It felt like six hundred, six thousand.

But then he was there, and she could see the fabric of his shirt strain with the force of his breathing. The cool blue cotton delineated his pectoral muscles, his nipples there in the center of both.

She wanted to unbutton him, to bare him, and found her fingers shaking when she touched him. He’d rejected her so often. So when this time he didn’t, when he let her have her way, she swore to take her time and savor even the act of exposing his body.

While she slipped one button, then another through their holes, widening the strip of dark skin visible between the shirt’s slowly parting plackets, he reached up and got rid of his tie, stuffing it into his pocket.

She smiled at his impatience but kept her gaze on her task, fearing she’d lose what discipline she’d so far maintained if she looked him in the eye.

“I don’t want you to regret this,” she said, tugging the shirt’s tails from his pants. “Or to hate either of us tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer, not verbally. But he did groan, and he let his head fall back, and she knew he would swallow what he felt before he put it into words that would hurt her.

She would have to live with that. To get from him what she wanted, needed, desired, craved, she would have to do more than give a lip-service agreement to the terms he’d so clearly laid out. That meant she’d have to make sure what came next was unforgettable.

She settled both palms in the center of his chest, feeling the drumbeat of his heart beneath his skin. He was smooth, taut, hot, and she slid her hands up to his shoulders, pushing away both his shirt and his jacket. He helped her along by shrugging out of them, grabbing them before they hit the floor, and tossing them onto the closest chair.

And then he came closer, his body blocking the lamp’s feeble light, creating a shadow that covered her like a blanket of him. She shuddered, did so again when he found his way to the buttons of the blazer she wore. She looked down, watching his fingers work through them with no hesitation at all.

He opened the two sides of the blazer slowly, exposing her body beneath an inch at a time. He knew already what he’d find her wearing, and she sensed the anticipation of discovery in each of his shallow breaths. She wasn’t having an easy time of breathing herself.

A part of her wanted to close her eyes and give up everything but feeling, but knowing this was all she’d ever have of him, she was determined to bank all possible memories. And so when he pushed her blazer down her arms, imprisoning her, she caught her lip and waited.

“Christ. You’re gorgeous. I knew you would be, but…” He shook his head as if she was the first woman he’d seen in ages, then rubbed his thumbs—just his thumbs—over the surface of her nipples and watched them pucker and pout. “Christ. Jodi.”

“I’m all yours,” she told him. “Anything you want.”

He made a sound, a low, guttural noise that could have been either pleasure or pain. “Girl, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly. And I mean every word.”
Girl.
She loved the way he said “girl.” She tilted her head, raised her chin, watched the play of light through the window’s shutters on the opposite wall, wondered why the stripes looked like a prison cell’s bars. “Please. Don’t hold back.”

He groaned again, a deep, roaring cry of surrender as he lowered his head, plumped the flesh of her breasts together, and feasted on both, nipping at her skin, sucking hard on her nipples, teasing her areolae with first the tip and then the flat of his tongue.

He pinched, and she wanted more. He bit, and she grew wet. He nuzzled his face deep between her breasts, and it was all she could do not to reach for her clit and finish what he’d started. But she couldn’t move, her arms pinned at her sides, still caught in her blazer.

And so she gave herself up.

He moved lower, his lips and tongue leaving a wet trail down her belly, in and around her navel, to the top of her garter belt and the skin bared beneath. He nuzzled his nose in her closely clipped bush, and she heard what she thought was a growl.

“You make me so hungry,” he mumbled.

“Then why don’t you open your mouth and eat me?”

This time he chuckled, then started out by kissing her: the crease of her hip, the skin of her thigh, the swell of her belly between her pussy and her garter belt. And then he kissed her clit. A light, breathy brush of his lips before moving lower and doing the same. Teasing her, teething her gently, drawing her flesh into his mouth with a soft sucking pressure that he slowly increased, pulling hard, harder, tugging at her until she was nothing but a wreck of tingling, fiery nerves.

She tried to shrug out of the blazer, to free her arms so she could guide his head, hold his shoulders, feel his skin and his muscles beneath her hands, but he wouldn’t let her move. He kept her pinned to the door, lapping at her now, his tongue sliding through her folds, dipping inside her, circling her clit, his lips finally locking around it as he pushed two fingers into her pussy’s core.

She clenched tightly around him, pulled him deeper inside, pumped against his hand while swallowing the sounds straining to escape her throat. She was not the silent type, and the things he was doing down there with his tongue and his teeth, and, oh, fuck, with his fingers and now with his thumbs, spreading her open, exposing her, rubbing and licking, driving into her with a deep, steady stroke.

Her juices ran down her thighs. She was sticky, and he drank her up, and all she could think about were his big, broad hands and his fingers stroking her, in and out, and in and out, and she was sweating, melting, wound so unbearably tight, and so, so close. She thought she would die of the pleasure before she came. And then he moved his head away, and she just plain thought she would die.

She looked down, found him looking up, his eyes deviously bright as he moved his fingers, making love to her as he would with his cock, a teasing insertion, an agonizing withdrawal, repeating the motion until he had her where he wanted her, dependent on him, aching for him, needing him.

He gave a slow, sultry nod, as if giving her permission, and if she’d had anything remaining that resembled control, she would have laughed at realizing the truth. This man was not unfamiliar with women. In fact, he knew them quite well.

And when she saw in his eyes a shared flicker of amusement, she let everything go and came in his hands like she had never come in her life.