Instead he puts my clothing back to rights with careful determination. His expression remains grave even as his fingers brush my bare skin. Then he stands.
His shirt looks a little rumpled, his hair askew, but otherwise he doesn’t look like he just had sex. And he definitely doesn’t look like someone just came while sitting on his face.
“Come on,” he says, holding out his hand.
I narrow my eyes, untrusting. “Where are we going?”
“To my lair,” he says, his voice sardonic. “Where I’m going to have my way with you.”
When Christopher Bardot argues with me he’s attractive, but when he does this dry humor he’s downright irresistible. Somehow my cheeks are warm. “Haven’t you already done that?”
A dark gaze runs over my dress, leaving goose bumps in its wake. A heartbeat remains between my legs, an insistent throb where his cock has been. “Not nearly enough.”
“Lead the way,” I manage to say lightly, as if this is all a big joke. I have a lot of practice with that—pretending that life is a joke instead of tragic. “I’ve always wanted to see your lair.”
A light mist kisses my face when we step outside. My dress doesn’t warm me nearly as well as the jeans and T-shirt I usually wear. Cool night air slides up my legs, and I shiver in the black parking lot.
“Cold?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. The jacket that had been slung over his arm drapes over my shoulders suffusing me with the scent of earth and sex and something purely Christopher. It should probably repel me, but I find myself drawing the material tighter around me.
He takes my hand again as we cross the parking lot, and even in the black of night I can’t help feeling safe. It reminds me of sinking, sinking into the ocean. And Christopher diving in to save me. It created an unbreakable line between whatever neuron in my brain between him and safety. When I’m scared I think of him—and how he would protect me. When I’m happy I wish he were with me to experience it, too. If it were anyone else I would have called this feeling love, but I don’t understand how my heart can betray me with someone who so clearly doesn’t love me back.
We cross the slippery gravel of the library’s parking lot and a cracked street. Then we’re standing in front of a half-built building that looks like it was transplanted out of upscale downtown. Frosted windows do nothing to obscure the marble floors inside or the wide bank of elevators.
“Is this what your half of the library built?” I ask, to remind myself that he only wants to use me. For money. For sex. Sometimes those are the same things, anyways.
It doesn’t mean he has feelings for me.
“Construction has been underway since you left,” he says, in a matter-of-fact voice. “My share of the money is sitting in a bank account. What do you think I should spend it on?”
I think of the way the scaffolding seemed to tremble with the aftershocks of our orgasms. The way the building seems to breathe harder every day, struggling to stay upright. All that money to house books, because knowledge is the only thing that has a chance in hell of saving the west side. I look around at the dilapidated buildings on either side, the way they seem to slouch beside the monument to commercial success between them. “Books,” I say simply.
He gives me an enigmatic smile. “Maybe then I’ll finally learn.”
Sliding glass doors silently open as we approach. I raise my eyebrow. “You have it open.”
A nod toward a black sphere jutting from the metal frame. “Facial recognition.”
“That’s not a little big brother-ish?”
“Big brother is the government. This is a privately owned building, which means we can be as intrusive as we want. Do you have something to hide?”
“Everything,” I say. “Most of it from myself.”
He presses the button for an elevator, and the doors slide open. “After you,” he says, a wave of his arm gesturing me inside. It feels a little like a spider speaking to the fly, but I step inside the elevator and we’re both whisked higher and higher, the lighted buttons rising.
The doors open directly onto the roof, the concrete almost unearthly pristine white. Not enough rain or dirt or time has stained this place, its white floor and short walls and exposed silver pipes. This high it feels like the stars are dangling in front of me, like I can reach out and touch them with my forefinger.
“Oh my God,” I say, taking in the view of the city. “It’s lovely.” Downtown might as well be the next galaxy. And around us there are a hundred thousand pieces of debris orbiting the building. It seems impossible that we can ever get enough inertia to even leave, much less turn this place into a bustling center of commerce. It’s both beautiful and heartbreaking, a combination I’m all too familiar with.
“Yes,” he says, sounding distracted. “Lovely.”
When I glance at him he turns away from me. “Thought you might as well see what you’re fighting for.”
A lump forms in my throat. “You mean what I’m fighting against.”
I know that libraries help communities. That art can save lives. I believe in the power of them both, but looking at the wasteland that is the west side of Tanglewood it’s hard to believe that anything can help.
“Why did you decide to build here?”
“You know why. Cheap real estate. A monopoly on the market.”
Selfish reasons, but they don’t quite ring true. Not anymore. “Is that all?”
He points toward the library. From this angle the broken stained glass dome at the top looks like a gaping hole where the heart used to be. “You can see the cracks in the foundation from here. Look at the height of this side of the building. And then the other side.”
My heart thumps a scared little sound. “Only a little bit.”
“I’ve looked out the windows here for six months. I’ve seen the whole building shudder and shiver and end up one centimeter more uneven.”
“That’s why I have a construction crew. They’re going to fix it.”
“They’re not,” he says, sounding almost sad. “Nothing can fix the building.”
“But Sutton said—”
“Sutton Mayfair would risk your goddamn neck just to get back at me. Don’t believe a damn word he says to you. You need to be in a hard hat before you’re anywhere near that building. And I don’t see why you should be near it at all.”
“You don’t own the library anymore, and you never owned me. With that attitude no wonder you aren’t with someone. Women don’t like being ordered around.”
“You seemed to like it at the poker game,” he says, his voice low.
A flush climbs my cheeks. At the poker game I felt used in a decadent, purely sexual way—but the sex we had under the scaffold was different. It felt like I was the one using Christopher’s body, controlling him, breaking him like a beautiful stallion.
God, no wonder Sutton wanted Christopher. He knew what it could be like.
“Maybe I like ordering you around.” My voice comes out low and liquid, a form of seduction I didn’t know I was capable of until I see Christopher’s eyes darken. “Does a powerful woman turn you on?”