A lot.
Wordlessly, he handed her the T-shirt and bra she’d discarded. Rory clutched them to her, covering herself, but not trying to wrestle her clothes back on. Not quite yet. Not when her arms felt like noodles and she was desperately afraid that her knees might give out, or her pants might fall down, or any combination thereof.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do now. Praise him? Thank him?
Cry?
Rory tried to pull herself together, which was hard to do under all that dark navy regard.
She’d never felt so naked in her life, and she understood the piercing irony of that, given how often she posted seemingly accidental scantily clad photos of herself on the internet because she knew her followers loved it when she did.
And she didn’t know if what she felt then was shame—or where that curl of heat was directed, maybe. At all the skin she had shown, with no inkling of how she could feel? Or the fact that it had taken a stranger to show her—despite all her protestations about her feminism and her sexuality and what she owned and what she didn’t, and all the long, involved conversations she’d had about this or that identity—that she didn’t know her own body at all.
That she never had.
As if it was more his than hers.
But something in that triggered her temper, and she was glad.
Fiercely, wildly, almost giddily glad.
“Let me guess,” she said, with all the carelessness she could muster for what she really wanted. “This is where you tell me that it’s my turn, and you make me suck your cock.”
But this was Conrad. He was confounding.
So perhaps she should have known that all he would do was laugh.
At her.
Again.
“I don’t know what makes you imagine that you could possibly have earned that kind of privilege,” he said, all that rich amusement in his voice. “You certainly haven’t.”
She scoffed, temper getting the better of her. “What do you mean? Who thinks it’s a privilege to blow you?”
He only smiled, darkly, and she flushed. And even though it seemed impossible to her, Rory had absolutely no doubt that when he talked to her of lists and begging, he meant every word.
She believed it against her will.
Inside this body that still felt like his.
“Well, I’m willing to do whatever,” she said, still gripping her shirt to her chest, not sure if she was trying to clear a debt. If she thought she was supposed to. Or stranger yet, actually wanted nothing more than to take him deep in her mouth. “In return for...this.”
“A tempting invitation, I’m sure,” he said dryly, sounding insultingly uninterested. “Regretfully, I must pass. Put on your clothes, Rory. Pick up your things. And then go. And the next time you have sex with one of your little puppies, remember. You’re supposed to come. That’s the whole point. Accept no substitutes.”
And to her astonishment, he actually walked away.
“Wait...” she began.
He didn’t even turn around. He only made what she assumed was a kind of backward shooing gesture with one hand, and walked off toward the living area of his sprawling house.
“If you’re still here in five minutes,” he said, in that same maddeningly calm way of his, “I will either bodily remove you or call the police. Neither will be fun for you. If I were you, Rory, I’d go now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO WEEKS LATER, Rory faced her latest date outside a café on the Left Bank, where they’d had a long dinner and drink during which she’d felt...nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Trouble was, she could no longer remember if she’d ever felt anything on these dates of hers. Was this a new thing, now that she knew what she could feel? Or had it always been like this and she just hadn’t known any better?
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to mine?” he asked in the charmingly accented English she’d been enjoying all evening, flashing his dimples at her from beneath his floppy hair. “I’ve a bottle of wine I’d love to share with you, Rory.”
The dimples were why she’d gone on a date with him in the first place. And the way he said her name, rolling the first R so it almost sounded like Lori, had seemed almost unbearably cute when she’d offered it to him like a ripe peach outside the Musée D’Orsay. He was from northern Italy, was in graduate school of some kind or another in Paris—he had told her all about it at great length, but she’d