trying to talk her new husband into dancing with her. His first week at Royal, he’d been pleasantly surprised to find out his spitfire of an assistant was, like him, Jewish. He’d teased her he’d never known a Jew named Mary before and started calling her his pseudoshiksa. Mary, for all her endearing brusqueness, only ever called him “Boss.” J.P. stood with Rose Evely. Both J.P. and Evely had been happily married to their respective spouses for decades but nothing stopped J.P. from chivalrously flirting with any woman who had the patience to listen to his literary rambles. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at this miserable party. Why wasn’t he?
Once more he glanced down at his watch.
“I can save you, if you want,” came a voice from above him.
Zach spun around and looked up. Smiling down at him from over the top of the staircase was Nora Sutherlin.
“Save me?” He narrowed his eyes at her.
“From this party.” She crooked her index finger at him.
Zach’s better judgment warned him that climbing that staircase could be a very bad idea indeed. Yet his feet overruled his reason, and he mounted the steps and joined her on the platform at the top. He raised his eyebrow as he cast a disapproving gaze over her clothes. That morning at her house, she’d worn shapeless pajamas that concealed every part of her but her abundant personality. Now he saw on full display what his mind had before only imagined.
She wore red, of course. Scarlet red and not much of it. The dress stopped at the top of her thighs and started at the edge of her breasts. She had miraculous curves that the dramatic floor-length red jacket she wore over her dress did nothing to hide. Even worse, she wore black leather boots that laced all the way above her knees. Pirate boots and a roguish grin on a beautiful black-haired woman…for the first time in a long time Zach felt something other than numb.
“How do you know I want to be saved from this party, Miss Sutherlin?” Zach leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms.
“I’ve been watching you from my little crow’s nest here since the second you walked in. You’ve said maybe five words to four people, you’ve checked your watch three times in as many minutes, and you whispered something to J.P., which, guessing from the look on his face, was a death threat. You’re here against your will. I can get you out.”
Zach cocked a self-deprecating smile at her.
“Unfortunately, you’re right. I am here against my will. I have to wonder, however, why you’re here at all. Didn’t I give you homework?” he asked, remembering his rash decision this morning to give her one chance to impress him.
“You did. And I was a good girl and finished it. See?”
He tried and failed to look away as she reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to him. The paper was still warm from her skin.
“This is it?” he asked, seeing only three paragraphs on the page.
“Don’t judge a book by its mother. Just read.”
Zach glanced at her once more and wished he hadn’t. Every time he looked at her, he found something else to attract him. Her jacket had slipped down her arm and her pale sculpted shoulder peeked out. Sculpted? His petite little writer had some muscle to go along with her impressive curves. Tougher than she looked.
Remembering himself, Zach turned from her, tilted the page into a patch of light and read.
First she noticed his hips. The eyes might be the windows to the soul, but a man’s hips were his seat of power. She doubted he’d chosen those perfectly fitted jeans and that black T-shirt that belied the tautness of his stomach for the purpose of flattering his lower body, but he had and now she lost herself in the thought of caressing with her lips that exquisite hollow that lay between smooth skin and elegantly jutting hip bone.
She had to meet his eyes eventually. With reluctance she dragged her gaze to his face, as dignified and angular as the rest of him. Pale skin and dark Brutus-cut hair contrasted with eyes the color of ice. Glacial, she decided his eyes were—they spoke of hidden depths. A stark beauty, he was a man made to be admired by intelligent women.
Lean and tall but with the substantial mass of an athlete, he was utterly masculine. The world had fallen away in his presence and now that he was gone, she was left in the equally potent presence of his absence.
Zach read the words one more time trying all the while to ignore the annoyingly pleasant image of Nora Sutherlin caressing his naked hips with her mouth.
“I’ve noticed you usually shy away from long descriptive passages in your book,” he said.
“I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It’s not. If it’s a subgenre of anything, it’s horror.”
“Horror? Really?”
“Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear. You’re terrified of me, aren’t you?”
“Slightly,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
“A smart horror writer will never put too much detail in about the monster. The readers’ imaginations can conjure their own demons. In erotica you never want your main characters to be too physically specific. That way your readers can insert their own fantasies, their own fears. Erotica is a joint effort between writer and reader.”
“How so?” Zach asked, intrigued that Nora Sutherlin would have her own literary theories.
“Writing erotica is like fucking someone for the first time. You aren’t sure exactly what he wants yet so you try to give him everything he could possibly want. Everything and anything…” She enunciated the words like a cat stretching in sunlight. “You hit every nerve and eventually you’ll hit the nerve. Have I hit any nerves yet?”
Zach clenched his jaw. “Not any of them you were aiming for.”
“You don’t know what I was aiming for. So what do you think of the writing?”
“Could be better.” He refolded the page. “You use ‘was’ too much.”
“Rough draft,” she said unapologetically. She stared at him with dark, waiting eyes.
“The last line’s the strongest—‘the equally potent presence of his absence.’” Zach knew he should give the page back to her but for some reason he stuck it in his pocket. “It’s good.”
She gave him a slow, dangerous smile.
“It’s you.”
Zach only stared at her a moment before pulling the folded page back out.
“This is me?” he asked, his skin flushing.
“It is. Every last long, lean inch of you. I wrote it right after you left this morning. I was, needless to say, inspired by your visit.”
Swallowing hard, Zach unfolded the sheet again. Brutus-cut black hair…ice-colored eyes…jeans, black shirt… It was him.
“Excuse me,” Zach began, trying to regain control of this conversation, “but didn’t I repeatedly insult you this morning?”
“Your kvetching was very fetching. I like men who are mean to me. I trust them more.”
She tilted her head to the side and her unruly black hair fell over her forehead, veiling her green-black eyes.
“Forgive me. I might be speechless right now.”
“Your orders,” she said. “You told me to stop writing what I knew and start writing what I wanted to know. I want to know…you.”
She took a step closer and Zach’s heart dropped a few feet and landed somewhere in the vicinity of his groin.
“Who are you, Ms. Sutherlin?” he asked, not quite knowing what he meant by that question.
“I’m