“As if any woman would want to walk away… from me.” His lips curled up in a smirk. “Anyway, that wasn’t bad for a first time,” he complimented the best he could. “You could use a little work on your rhyming, but overall pretty good.”
“Thanks. I don’t think anyone else cared for it much.”
“Well, it was a bit… pretentious, maybe?”
Apparently being a woman and talking about it was pretentious. “I did warn you that spoken poetry wasn’t my thing.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Opening his legs, he pulled her chair closer between his knees, then lowered his hand to her thigh. Sam squirmed away, but his grip followed. “The spoken word doesn’t come easy for everyone. You’ll get there.” He looked at her pitiably as if Sam were a child nursing a boo-boo.
By now another bard had bumbled his way on stage. The crowd heckled as he loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves, sweat pooling in circles under his armpits. Sam covered her ears as the noise grew.
Thomas glanced around the raucous lounge. “So… do you want to get out of here?”
With the noise pounding in her temples, Sam exhaled an easy “yes,” never having been asked this kind of question by this kind of man before. How could she know what he had planned?
They barely made it out before the foretelling lyrics resonated from the man on stage:
“You will be mine, whether you like it or not.
Sweet and spicy, cold and hot.
Fight against your will, you will not…”
When Thomas placed a possessive hold under Sam’s elbow and towed her out of the club into the silent night, a most unholy night, she realized too late what she had gotten herself into.
Chapter 17
“I work at Women’s House Magazine,” Sam told Thomas over wine on the leather sofa in his home office, which was bigger than Sam’s entire home. And it had taken a breakdown of Sam’s morals to get here. But finally Part 1 of Sam’s plan was coming to fruition.
They had started their conversation in the formal living room where an original Picasso hung on one wall and a taxidermy zebra’s head hung on another. After a glass of $5-a-bottle Blue Nun, cheap enough that even Sam could have afforded it, Thomas wasted no time asserting they relocate to his bedroom suite. But Sam, prudent enough to pace her drinking, still had her wits about her and instead suggested a tour of the estate. Thomas hadn’t been as committed to pacing his own gulps, so he affably agreed, lumbering room by room through the mansion until Sam had lost her sense of direction.
When they landed in front of his padlocked office, Sam knew she needed to get inside. When a peal of thunder shook the walls, she knew she needed to do it quickly if she were to get home before the storm hit. Miss Posey’s makeshift weather instruments had been accurate after all.
If Thomas kept any confidential business documents at home, they would be somewhere secure, behind lock and key. But getting Thomas to focus on anything but her chest, or her rear, was difficult, so she offered another refill for him and a top-off for her, then begged for a glimpse of Thomas’s workspace.
Sam’s suggestion of “give me a closeup of your office desk,” seemed to do the trick, as Thomas’s brain instantly fantasized about things he could do to her—or more likely her do to him—on that desk. So he pulled from his pants pocket a keychain with a single key dangling from an ivory sculpted C, unlocked the door, and inside they went.
Sam didn’t feel good about what she was about to do, immoral even, but there was not much choice as Thomas grew touchier and sloppier every minute. After he had emptied his wineglass for the umpteenth time—Sam had lost count after the third refill—he was too horny to keep his paws off, and too drunk to hear her insistent no.
So Sam did the unthinkable. She executed Part 2 of the plan.
With a sleight of hand and a dash of kava root, Sam handed Thomas his spiked drink. Nothing dangerous; just a little nudge toward Sleepytown. Partly to calm his hungry urges for her flesh, and partly to knock him the heck out. Within minutes he had drowsily flopped onto the sofa, eyelids heavy and breathing slow, and Sam took the break from his groping to observe the room.
Full of every type of medical journal and pharmacology book, his office library held few—if any—works of fiction or literary entertainment. It was no wonder the man was clueless when it came to poetry and romance. He had nothing to compare his to, when his limited literary diet consisted of the chemical compound of penicillin or symptoms of gonorrhea.
“You work at Women’s House Magazine? No kidding,” he slurred. “And what are you again—a typist?”
She grinned stiffly. She had already told him twice that she was a writer, but like most men she knew—Raul being the exception—they rarely found anything she said worth listening to.
“No, I’m an advice columnist, remember?”
He frowned. “I didn’t think that magazine employed female columnists…”
“I happen to be the first.”
“Interesting. What kind of advice do you give your readers?” He wasn’t too drowsy to give Sam’s waist a squeeze. “Cooking and housekeeping and… womanly duties?”
“Something like that,” Sam said, gaze wandering. There had to be evidence she could use against him somewhere in this room of locked secrets. “But with a more feminist slant.”
