Leather Bound
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the man had turned around to stand behind the woman with his hands on her shoulders. Now that he was inside the halo of light, I could see him more clearly. Those hands. That build. And most of all, those impossibly coloured eyes.
It was Davian. And I could have sworn he was looking right at me.
* * *
Now grateful that I was still mostly clothed, I tumbled out of the tiny room as fast as my orgasm-wracked body would let me, breathing heavily, feeling confused and off-balance. The only thing I knew for certain was that I needed to get out of L&L before he saw me.
So much for my respite, for my chance to hide away and recover. Whatever moments of peace I’d experienced mid-orgasm slipped away as I hurried outside and then down the sidewalk, feeling incredibly exposed by the late-afternoon light.
It wasn’t until I was on the street, blocks from L&L and at the very edge of the Sweet Spot, that I let myself stop and breathe and think. I clung to the wall with one hand, panting, trying to wrap my mind around everything.
OK, so it couldn’t really have been Davian, right? That was just too much of a coincidence. That was just too … weird.
And even if it was, there was no way he could have seen me inside the room. L&L was known for its discretion, for its customer safety and privacy. If they said a window was one-way, I believed them.
Why then had it seemed like he’d seen me somehow? Why had it seemed like he’d looked right at me at my moment of orgasm? It was a fever dream born of lust, I was sure. My oversexed mind had cooked up the image of him to add to my pleasure. That’s all it was.
I walked home, still tumbling everything over in my brain. What a day it had been. First Kyle. Then Davian. Then … whatever that was at L&L. People said bad things happened in threes. I wondered if that was true about really weird things as well. I hoped so. If it was true, at least it would mean all the odd things that were going to happen to me were over for a while.
Kyle, thankfully, wasn’t at my place, although there were a number of voice messages from him on my cell when I pulled it out of my pocket. I didn’t listen to them. I promised myself I’d call him in the morning, when I was feeling less Alice in Wonderlandish.
A hot bath. Some food. And sleep. Those were the things I needed, and in that order.
As it turned out, I didn’t make it to either of the first two. To my complete and utter surprise, I got as far as undressing, and then crawled under the covers and slept. Tomorrow is another day.
Just call me Scarlett O’Hara, I thought, as I lost myself in dreamland.
CHAPTER 4
I kept my promise to Lily. I wasn’t late to Leather Bound the next morning. I even hauled my ass out of bed early enough to stop at Cream for coffee. I saw Stefan in the corner, but he was captured by an overly enthusiastic customer, so I left him to his fate and headed to Leather Bound, armed with a caramel mocha for me and a cinnamon latte for Lily. I smelled like Christmas, all wrapped up with a coffee bow.
I’d slept fine, but I’d dreamed of sex all night long. Some of it was sex with Kyle and Davian, sometimes both of them at once. Sometimes the woman in the shirtdress was there, and sometimes Lily and sometimes even one or two of my exes. But mostly it seemed I’d dreamed of having sex with a faceless stranger, who then kept turning into Davian or a Davian lookalike. I was never sure.
Lily hadn’t arrived at Leather Bound by the time I got there, so I set her coffee on the counter, hoping it wouldn’t get too cold, and spent some time giving Webster chin scratches and breakfast before I headed back to my office.
I needed to tackle two things this morning.
One, call Kyle.
OK, wait, three things.
One, figure out what I was going to say to Kyle.
Two, call Kyle.
Three, research Mister Cavanaugh and find out as much as I could about the mysterious man and his equally mysterious book. Yes, I’d turned him down, but I supposed I was like Lily in that way: once something caught my interest, especially something as shiny and intriguing as this, I didn’t let it go easily. Not to mention that I thought I saw him cutting the buttons off a hot girl at the sex store. Yesterday he’d responded to Lily’s comment about L&L with a knowing smirk. ‘I know the place,’ he’d said. If it really was him I’d seen, then he certainly did.
But first, I should decide what to do about Kyle. Second, I should call him.
So I sat down at my beloved desk and got ready to do a little research. Because clearly the best way to do the thing you don’t want to do is to tackle something else instead.
I popped open my laptop and give a couple of light strokes over her keyboard for good luck. Lily says she’s ancient and just needs to be put down, but she’s seen me through a lot of thick and thin, and I get her upgraded every couple of years. She might not even have any original parts by now, but she works like a charm. Mostly.
‘Come on, Clementine,’ I whispered. ‘Gimme something good.’
The internet is everyone’s friend when it comes to finding information, whether you’re trying to find rare books or stalk strangers. But the truth is that most people don’t know how to use it properly, or they find a bit of surface information and figure that’s good enough. My skill is digging deeper, poking into all the little corners of the web to find the hidden books and the dirt that most people don’t even notice.
I figured it would take me five minutes, maybe ten, to find out everything the world knew about Davian Cavanaugh and his non-existent book.
Turns out I was wrong.
I was still digging when Lily showed up twenty minutes later, just in time to open Leather Bound, and I hadn’t found a thing. Not a single mention. These days almost everyone on the internet leaves a trail of some sort, even if it’s accidental. In fact, it’s near impossible to not have at least something about you. Especially with a name like Davian Cavanaugh. If you’re alive in the world with a name that unusual, then the internet knows about it.
Except that it didn’t seem to.
Which meant that he’d either given me a fake name, which was seeming more and more like a possibility, or was a super secret spy. If he was a super secret spy, I was definitely changing my mind and taking him as a client. And I was definitely fucking him.
But I was betting more on the former.
Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.
‘Hey, thanks for the coffee.’ Lily poked her head in, holding up the drink I’d brought her. As always, she was impeccable, right down to her swingy skirt and her purple toenails peeking out of a pair of black sandals. It was way too damn cold for that. I was in a long wraparound dress, striped tights, and black boots and I was still freezing.
She looked me over. ‘No sex this morning, I see.’
‘No sex,’ I said. ‘Thanks for finishing up yesterday. How did it go?’
‘Steady.’ She draped herself in the theatre chair with a tired ‘oof’. ‘I’m glad we’re almost at the weekend.’
We close Leather Bound on Mondays and Tuesdays, which gives us a sort of weekend without killing our business too much. Our only other option was to hire employees, which got all kinds of crazy and expensive. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m slightly anal and slightly OCD and I’m not about to turn the store over to a bunch of people I don’t know.
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