Oh, My! and convinced Violet to take a pen name that sounded a lot racier than her own: Raven French. Although Violet had been hesitant about that last, she’d conceded, and the combination had worked brilliantly. Its first week of sale, High Heels had debuted at number twenty-nine on the list and gone back for a second printing. Then it jumped another four places the following week. Now it was poised to enter the top fifteen and, having gone back to print for a third time, would doubtless climb higher still in the weeks to come.
Which was how Violet-Tandy-slash-Raven-French came to be sitting behind a table stacked with copies of her book at a packed bookstore on Michigan Avenue one sunny afternoon in October. And how she came to be staring into the most extraordinary pair of blue eyes she had ever seen that belonged to one of the most gorgeous men she had ever beheld. He was sitting in the back row and hadn’t taken those blue eyes off her once since seating himself. And his scrutiny, although not exactly unwelcome since he was, in case she hadn’t mentioned it, gorgeous, was beginning to make Violet feel a tad squirmy.
He was just so … intense. So … overwhelming. So … gorgeous. And God, so big. Even though he was sitting, he was head and shoulders taller than all of the women—taller than even the handful of men—who were present, and his shoulders completely eclipsed the chair back. His hair seemed even blacker than her own, but where she’d let hers grow past her shoulders, his was cut short by an expert’s hand. And those eyes. Pale, nearly translucent blue, startling in their clarity and framed by sweeping, dark lashes. Although it was Saturday, he was dressed in a dark suit, something else that made him stand out from the otherwise laid-back crowd.
Even Violet-slash-Raven wore a casual outfit, picked out by the publicist Rockcastle Books had assigned to her. Marie had advised the fashion-challenged Violet on every aspect of her authorial self. Today, she wore a pair of black trousers and three-quarter-sleeve black top with a deep V neckline, coupled with more-strap-than-shoe stilettos. All were, of course, from the finest couturiers, since Violet Tandy … ah, she meant Raven French … needed to look like the wildly successful author she was supposed to be.
Of course, Violet couldn’t afford the expensive labels Raven needed on the rather modest advance for her book. Fortunately, Marie had pointed her toward a boutique off Michigan Avenue that specialized in the short-term rental of haute couture and expensive jewelry for Chicago women who wanted to pretend they were members of the high society that was normally denied them.
For her outfit today, Violet … or, rather, Raven … had opted for clothes by Prada and shoes by Stuart Weitzman. To complement both, Marie had chosen a dazzling Ritani jewelry set—a pendant, earrings and bracelet fashioned of exquisite diamonds and amethysts that matched the eyes that had given Violet her nickname.
Her real name, regrettably, was Candy. Candy Tandy. It was only one of the indignities her mother had bestowed upon her before the final one of abandoning her at the age of three in a discount store with a note pinned to her Smurfette sweatshirt describing her as a problem child that no one would ever be able to love.
But that, along with everything else that had happened in the past twenty-nine years, was the past. These days, Violet thought only about the future. A future in her wisteria-laden house where she would take in strays of all kinds—canine, feline, equine, bovine, she didn’t care. She might even become a foster parent herself someday. But only if she could guarantee that the children in her care would stay in her care and never be shuttled from one place to another, as she’d been. They’d be able to make friends who wouldn’t be taken from them, the way hers had inevitably been, and they’d make emotional connections to other people that went beyond superficial, the way she’d never been able to do.
For some reason, that drew her attention back to the blue-eyed man in the back row. He was still staring at her. Intensely. Overwhelmingly. Gorgeously. He was in no way the kind of person Violet had expected would read her novel. In fact, he seemed more like the kind of person who might have shown up in the book as a character—perhaps one of her fictional heroine’s many fictional clients. Each was an amalgam of men Violet had modeled after the clients and patrons of her former places of employment. Rich men. Successful men. Powerful men. Men who cared more about their images, their reputations and their status in both business and society than anything else—anyone else.
Somehow she managed to tug her gaze free of the man in the back row and drive it across the other people who had come to hear her speak about her book before having their copies signed. Mostly female, these were her real readers. Women who were fascinated by the idea of sex for sale and by female protagonists who were in charge of their own sexuality. Who used their sexuality, the most powerful weapon they possessed, to get whatever they wanted. Who enjoyed no-strings-attached encounters with powerful men who paid exorbitant amounts of money to have women do things to them—and to do things to the women in return—that many would never even consider doing or having done to them during regular lovemaking with their usual partners.
Frankly, Violet wasn’t sure she got that. Not that she was so worldly in her own encounters. Certainly she’d had boyfriends from the time she was old enough to want one, and she’d lost her virginity when she was a teenager. But she’d never quite understood the fascination with sex that most people had. The men with whom she’d been involved hadn’t been all that special—or made her feel all that special. Which, she supposed, was why there hadn’t been all that many. The way she saw it, sex was a normal physical need, like eating or sleeping or bathing. Except needed a lot less often.
A college-aged woman who worked for the bookstore announced it was time to begin, bringing Violet’s attention to the matter at hand. Namely, the gorgeous, overwhelming man in the back row.
No! she immediately corrected herself. To the talk she was supposed to give to the gorgeous, overwhelming man in the back row.
No! she corrected herself again. To everyone who had come to buy her book today—she did a quick count, multiplying the number of seats across by the number of rows deep, adding another fifteen for the people standing and figured the total to be … carry the six, add the eight … around fifty-two—people who had come to buy her book today. Wow.
Ka-ching. She could smell the wisteria already.
She spoke for twenty minutes, having chosen as her topic the aforementioned philosophy of women in charge of their own sexuality and the appeal of having sex without the hindrance of emotion to muck things up. She followed up with the conundrum of how something so physical could even be tied to something so emotional—like love, of all things—in the first place.
She avoided talking about her own life experiences since, one, she was something of a private person in that regard and, two, she really didn’t think anyone would be interested in her poor-poor-pitiful-me background. Instead, she focused on the motivation, goals and journey of Roxanne, her book’s protagonist. She talked about how each of the men who became Roxanne’s clients symbolized some aspect of the human condition, and how her heroine’s submission to each represented another milestone in her personal growth.
Oh, God, she was good.
In fact, Violet … she meant Raven … had organized the book so that each chapter after the first—in which Roxanne was hired by a Chicago madam named Isabella, who herself personified society’s obsession with using sex to promote consumerism—was subtitled by the name of one of the character’s many clients. There was introverted Michael, who represented Roxanne’s need to let go of her inhibitions. And uncompromising William who showed her how following the rules wasn’t always a bad thing. Studious Nathaniel kindled her quest for knowledge, while carefree Jack helped her recognize her capacity to feel joy. And all of them—it went without saying—were lovers of Olympian caliber who gave Roxanne mind-blowing orgasms along the way.
The book culminated in the final chapter, Ethan. Ethan was the idealized notion of the perfect man, the one who fulfilled Roxanne in ways none of the others had managed alone, and who carried her to both sexual and emotional heights that. Well, that didn’t exist, quite frankly. Talk about a work of fiction. Ethan was ultra-masculine in every way, but could still respect a woman for all her strengths, desires and independence.
Yeah,