Pearl (The Pearl Series) (3 page)

“France is a great country,” I began. “Beautiful. Just beautiful. Fine wine, great cuisine, incredible landscape—we really do have a rich culture. But when it comes to opportunity, especially for small businesses, it’s not so easy there.”

“You own a small company? What do you do?”

Interesting. This woman has no idea who I am
.
Refreshing. She won’t be after my money—she doesn’t have an agenda. Good.

“That’s why I was at that conference,” I explained.

I expanded a bit, gave her the usual blab about ‘giving back,’ and how I liked to share a few tricks of the trade with others.

“And you?” I asked, wondering what the hell this unlikely sexpot was doing at an I.T. conference. She so didn’t look the type. “What were
you
doing there?”

She flushed a little, slid down into her chair as if she wanted to disappear and shifted her gaze to her feet. She looked acutely embarrassed. Maybe she had a very boring job, I reasoned, and didn’t want to spoil the mood. I dropped the subject. So we brought the conversation back to me again, and she
had
heard of HookedUp
,
after all. Of course she had. Who hadn’t? Everyone and his cousin hooked up with HookedUp, even married couples. But Pearl didn’t seem particularly impressed by me, even when I let it slip that I was the CEO.

“So when you’re not working or zipping about in your beautiful classic cars, or hanging out with Rex, what do you do to relax?”

“I rock-climb,” I replied, already having planned in my head that rock climbing would be the perfect first date for us. Not too ‘date-like,’ not typical—she’d go for it.

“Oh yeah? I swim. Nearly every day. It’s what keeps me sane.”

Ah, so that accounts for her tight peachy ass and sculpted legs.
We discussed the benefit of sports—how it was good for one’s mental state of mind as well as keeping your body fit. This woman had me intrigued. I was getting more than a hard-on talking to her. She made me laugh. She was bright, opinionated. Had read the classics, loved dogs and sure, I couldn’t deny it, she had a body like a pin-up and the face of an angel. Besides, with all her straw-sucking, I knew what was going through her mind. She wanted to see me with my shirt off. Yes, damn it, I could tell. She couldn’t take her eyes off my chest. She even licked her luscious lips while she was ogling me, and then said—her eyes all baby-doll…all come-and-fuck-me-now:

“I tried rock climbing once. I was terrified but I could really understand the attraction to the sport.”

On the word,
attraction
, I swear to God, she looked at my chest, then my groin, and back again to my chest before she finally fastened her gaze on my face. Oh yeah, believe me, I knew what was going on in Pearl’s mind. Her smart attire, educated voice and expensive handbag didn’t fool me. Still, her come-on would have been imperceptible to an un-trained eye—not slutty, not over-flirtatious…just a split second of wanton lust on her part, which I bet she thought I hadn’t clocked onto.

But…Miss Pearl Robinson, daughter of hippies, lover of dogs, quasi-vegetarian temptress….I had your number.

I knew everything there was to know—instinctively.

I wanted her quirky ass and I was going to have it. And everything that went with it, too. All of it. I was going to put my mark on that peachy butt.

I presumed I had her all worked out. Clever me.

Little did I know that I was dead wrong.

"Things weren’t going to be quite so simple."

2

S
o there we were chatting about this and that, still drinking our coffees, lingering over them, trying to make our drinks last, because neither of us wanted our tête-à-tête to end.

During the conversation that followed, it struck me that Pearl was damaged goods. But it was too late.
I was invested.
I invited her rock climbing—feeling smug about all the things I was going to do to her, picturing her having multiple orgasms as I fucked her senseless in several different ways. How I’d take her to a hotel the night before, we’d have passionate sex, and by the next day, she probably wouldn’t even want to go rock climbing anyway, because let’s face it, when she told me she’d once been, she was obviously lying.

“Would it seem too forward to invite you to come with me for the weekend?” I suggested.

Her eyes lit up,
at first,
“Not at all!” she said with enthusiasm. But suddenly, she froze.
Froze.
She was like a beautiful flower closing its petals. I saw horror flash across her face. She was even eyeing the front door as if she planned to make a dash for it. Why? She was stunning, had a great body (so must have felt confident in that department), fancied the pants off me, obviously wasn’t playing the hard-to-get-I’m-so-virtuous game, so why was she freaking out about us spending the night together?

I read her expression: she was terrified of sex.

“Don’t worry, Pearl. I can arrange for us to have separate bedrooms,” I said.

But it only made things worse: she looked even more panicked; her face paled, her mouth fell open. She mumbled—her disappointment deeper than a well, “Yes, of course. Separate bedrooms.”

I understood, then and there, that she wanted me, but would be too traumatized for anything more than a peck on the cheek.

How did I know all this at the tender age of twenty-five? I won’t go into it now, but trust me, I know women. I’ve been intimate with the female species—because they
are
a ‘species’ unto their own—since the age of fourteen, when I lost my virginity to a friend of my sister’s, a ‘colleague’ of hers. Women have always revealed to me their deepest secrets, fears, loves and passions. How many women have I ‘known’ in my life? I lost count a long, long time ago. Because I started young, by the time I was college age, I really was
au fait
with the physical and physiological machinations of the female sex. Not that I went to college. Not for long, anyway. I was too busy plotting to take over the world, shut in my man cave. Coding. Being a nerd. Designing HookedUp
.
But as most people know, nerds get their revenge. One day I’d be a rich man, I told myself.

And I was right.

So by the time I was the grand old age of twenty, I’d played the field so much that all I wanted was a safe, stable relationship with a normal girl. I ended up in the arms of someone less than stable and swore I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. But here I was again, being drawn to somebody with
issues. Major issues,
I suspected.

And that somebody was Pearl Robinson.

I was a rich, powerful man used to getting what I wanted. And ironically, I wanted her.

So I suggested I’d pick her up the following day. No hotel. I’d play it safe.

“Actually, I know another place that we can go rock climbing closer to the city. It’s only ninety miles upstate—we can drive there early and come back late, all in one day. What do you say?”

“Great,” she answered. And I saw both relief and regret flicker in her blue eyes.

I wouldn’t fuck her, after all. I’d wait. Bide my time. Because something told me that this woman hadn’t been fucked properly for a very long while. Maybe never.

Most guys like the chase. They love it when girls spurn them and play hard to get. I guess they have something to prove to themselves, like going hunting. But I don’t operate that way. I don’t want a woman to be with me because of my own powers of persuasion, or because I’ve ‘bulldozed’ her into it. I’m not the bulldozing type. I don’t want to tread over anyone’s sensibilities, least of all a female’s. You know how children and dogs can be? Curious but wary? You can’t force them. Let them come to you, I say. Pique their interest. Don’t be overbearing or over-possessive. It makes for a good story in a romance novel (I know, my mother devours them, one a day), but in reality, a woman wants a man to be a man, not some insecure wreck wondering where she is every second, or having a jealous fit if her top’s too revealing. A woman desires a
confident
man—that’s another thing I’ve learned over the years from listening to their woes: be confident.

And if you aren’t feeling that way?

Fake it.

Besides, I believe in love at first sight, or at least,
lust
at first sight. If the magic isn’t there for both parties within the first twenty seconds of meeting each other, you can be sure it never will be. Of course, many people would disagree with that, but for me, I’ve found this to be true. With Pearl that connection was there. Has it ever been there before or since? No, never. Not in that twenty-second kind of way.

I didn’t let Pearl know how I felt. Another rule: Don’t scare a woman off by being too keen or pushy. Because if she succumbs to you, you’ll never know if it’s because she genuinely loves you or because you’ve worn her down. There are a lot of worn-down women out there. They think it’s easier to give in. Some men are foolish enough to mistake that for lust, or even love.

Also, I’m French. Pride is in my DNA. I can’t help it. So when Pearl made it obvious that she had second thoughts about spending the night with me, I held back.

Our rock climbing date was interesting, to say the least. I picked her up at 7 am from her Upper East Side apartment, and we drove upstate to the Shawangunk Mountains. During the car ride, I knew I was giving her double messages but I couldn’t help myself. One minute I was talking about falling in love with my Corvette because of the LeMans blue, adding, “Same color as your eyes,” and the next I was acting like a strict Victorian father, telling her how certain types of sex play didn’t do it for me—namely whipping. (Fantasy is one thing, reality is another. Seriously, what woman wants to be physically hurt?) Pearl was confused. I was confused. How the hell did the conversation veer off in that direction? Was it normal for two people to talk about sex on a first date? Talk about it, but not do it? I didn’t think so, but nothing was normal about the pair of us. We were two misfits trying to slot our jiggled bits of puzzle into the right place, hoping that somehow, at least
our
pieces would fit together.

When I alluded to her LeMans blue eyes, she replied,
“My
eyes? You should talk with your tiger-green eyes set off against your dark hair.”

At that point, on Date One, I wasn’t quite sure what Pearl’s deal was. What kind of Life Cards she’d been dealt. So far, I had learned that her hippy, surfer father abandoned her family when Pearl was young and he now lived in Hawaii. She told me that her mother died of cancer—they’d been very close. And her gay brother, Anthony (who sounded like a jerk, reading between the lines), lived in San Francisco with his boyfriend, Bruce. All this I gleaned, and yet I felt I was no closer to knowing why there was a shadow of fear in her eyes, a shimmer of benign mistrust.

Men. They can be pigs. I know, I’ve heard women complain about them all my life. Besides, there had been no truer hog than my father. On one of his bad days, he was a monster.

I contemplated Pearl’s past. What man/men had hurt her? (Because, let’s face it, it usually is a man). I studied her quietly all day. While she was climbing, she was brave and very focused. Even though she had never been rock climbing before, she embraced that rock-face with gusto. I got to enjoy great views of her slender legs doing their stuff, her nimble fingers hooking into tiny crevices, her glorious ass in all sorts of uncompromising positions. I heard myself calling her
chérie
and that’s when I knew that I must have wanted to date her seriously. Chérie? I had never called
anyone
that before, not even my ex fiancée, Laura.

“You’ve passed the second test,” I teased on the drive back home. My 1968 Corvette was humming away beautifully, and I didn’t want Pearl to fall asleep. I saw exhaustion in her eyes after such a long, physical day. Her golden legs were stretched out, scratched by the rocks; there were little bloody nicks all over her limbs. I liked that. I may not have fucked her yet, or even kissed her, but I felt I’d made my mark on her. Yes, just like the bulldozer guys, I was guilty. Even on Date One, I wanted others to know that Pearl Robinson was mine.