still-damp penis was tender from the rough fucking. Though it was painful, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. His body was alive with feeling, right down to the bottoms of his naked feet on the cool, polished wood of the steps. He liked this new awareness of his body, this new sensation of having a body for a reason other than carrying his brain around town. To please Regan, that’s what his body was for—his fingers, his tongue, his hands, his lips and his cock and come—all for her. And what he’d just done to her to please her…
He couldn’t believe that had been him in her bedroom. In this place, in this private little world of theirs in The Pearl, no one could see him or mock him or judge him or laugh at him. No one but Regan. Regan, the woman whom he wanted to see him, to mock him, to judge him, to laugh at him. He would have to thank Charlie down the road for his bad decisions. Some good had finally come of them.
The penthouse was dark and quiet. When he found the door to Regan’s office, he switched on her desk lamp to see where they’d left their abandoned bottle of wine.
A heavy art book lay on the floor next to one of the bookshelves. It was open, having landed on its spine. Had he knocked it off earlier? He bent to pick it up, but stopped, when he saw it had fallen open to a painting.
His peace, his contentment, his afterglow…it all evaporated in an instant.
“Are you hungry, Brat? I can call—” Regan was standing in the doorway to her office. She had slipped on her kimono and followed him down. She looked at the book on the floor, then back at him kneeling beside it. “Were you reading? You were supposed to be getting—”
“I turned on the light, and found this book on the floor open to this page.”
Regan stepped into the office and bent down to pick up the book. She drew her hand back, gasping, as if the book had burned her.
“Arthur.” Not Brat. Arthur.
The book lay open to a full-color, full-page reproduction of a Mary Cassatt painting, a painting of a beautiful woman sitting in a box at the opera. Beautiful hair, beautiful gown.
Beautiful pearl necklace. That was the name of the painting—Woman with a Pearl Necklace.
“Is this a joke?” she asked. “It’s not very funny.”
“I was about to ask you the same question,” he said, but he could already tell she hadn’t left it out for him as some sort of prank or mind game. The confusion in her eyes was too real. Either she was scared to her bones or she was an actress worthy of both a BAFTA and an Oscar.
“Was someone watching us?” Her voice was low, scared and her eyes were wide, clouded with grey fear. “Someone had to have been watching us. How else would they know…”
How else would they know Arthur had, moments earlier, given Regan a very special “pearl necklace” of his very own?
Arthur scooped up the book. It was heavy. Too heavy to simply flutter off a shelf. He closed the book and handed it to Regan.
“Call hotel security,” he said. “I’ll look around.”
Heart racing, Arthur left her in the office and began a sweep of the penthouse. Regan had money, jewelry, expensive artworks. And hotels weren’t known for their air-tight security, what with half the staff having keys to get into every room. But if someone had broken in while they’d been upstairs, why taunt them? Unless it was personal…
His first stop was the galley kitchen, where he picked up a knife. No one in the kitchen or the butler’s pantry. No one in the bathroom downstairs. No one in the sitting room or dining room. He returned to her bedroom, where he snagged his clothes—no one there either.
What if they were overreacting? Books fell off shelves all the time, of course. Not by themselves, but he could have bumped it when he was talking to Charlie. He’d had a little wine by then. But for the book to land open to a painting of a woman in a pearl necklace? It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Arthur started for the French doors to the garden terrace, determined to search every corner of the penthouse.
“No,” Regan said. She’d come into the sitting room. “Don’t go out there. Security’s on their way up.”
He hesitated. He was certain if someone was still here, they would