Getting It Right!

With an expression of extreme curiosity Claudette gave him an odd look, then turned on her heel and walked out. Less than thirty seconds later she returned with April in tow, ushered her into the room, then with another blatantly interested look, once again made a reluctant exit.

If he’d had any manners at all, Ben would have stood when she came in, but for some reason his legs had turned to lead. Only years of pretending to be indifferent kept his mouth from breaking into a wide grin and fortunately the careless smile he’d mastered slid easily into place. Words momentarily failed him—he had absolutely no idea what to say—but in the end, he settled for a weak, “Er…This is a surprise.”

April’s small hand tightened around her purse strap and she cast an uneasy look around his office. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all.” He finally found his feet and gestured toward a chair. “Please. Come sit.”

Clad in a brown cable-knit sweater that ably hugged her curves and a pair of tailored cream wool slacks, April traveled the short distance to one of the walnut demi-marquise chairs that flanked his antique desk. Her mink curls were loose and tousled and the sting from the cold wind had colored her cheeks. A pair of diamond studs winked from her delicate lobes and the matching pendant lay nestled between her breasts, suspended from a fine gold chain. He caught the crisp scent of winter and the smallest whiff of jasmine as she settled into her seat.

As always, she looked chic, polished and approachable, a combination one didn’t always see among those who were accustomed to money. Now that he moved within her circle, he could appreciate the difference.

She glanced around his office, her keen gaze inspecting a few of his more accomplished frames. “Beautiful work,” she said softly. She gestured toward a sepia print behind his credenza. “Isn’t that the staircase in the old Belle Fontaine mansion?”

Ben nodded. “It is.”

In fact, it had been featured in Southern Living last month. He started to tell her, but managed to just stop himself. He didn’t have to validate his work, dammit—it spoke for itself.

Regardless, old habits died hard and while she’d never intentionally made him feel like the parasite poaching a living off her family the way her mother had, Ben nevertheless had a hard time shaking the need to showcase his own successes. Successes which had been hard-won, self-motivated and earned without so much as a favor from the Wilson family.

He’d take care of himself, by God. He’d be damned before he’d ever take a handout or become, as Morgana Wilson had so eloquently put it all those years ago, another man’s whore. To this day he couldn’t decide what was worse—learning that his father was gay, or realizing that the quiet gentle man he’d loved and respected had simply been too weak to support his family.

A prick of guilt for the uncharitable assessment surfaced, but Ben determinedly shook it off, squashed the happy memories that arose. As an adult he could appreciate another person’s sexual orientation—he wasn’t ashamed of his father for being gay. Unnerved? Yes. But not ashamed. He even understood that Vietnam had changed him—could process, sort and compartmentalize every rational argument for the reasons his father had returned to American soil a little less stable than when he’d left.

But the one thing that Ben couldn’t rationalize away, the one thing he couldn’t let go of or forgive was the second-class citizenship his father had foisted upon his family by moving onto his lover’s property. It cheapened his father and thereby, as far as he was concerned, lessened Ben’s own value.

Since the moment he moved out of his father’s house, Ben had set the standard for his self-worth and, while he missed his dad, being around him was a painful reminder of a past he could no longer be proud of. It was simply easier to avoid him. He didn’t have to worry about avoiding his mother. She’d cut and run shortly after he’d asked her if Morgana’s accusations were true. He hadn’t heard from her since. God, he hated this, hated thinking about any of it.

“So,” Ben said expectantly, both equally eager and reluctant to get this over with. “What can I do for you?”

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU CAN DO for me, but what you can do to me, April thought, silently agonizing over making the decision to come here.

What the hell had she been thinking? Why in God’s name had she let Frankie talk her into this ridiculous plan? Yes, she desperately needed an orgasm, and yes, if there was any man capable of doing it for her on the planet, then it was the one sitting in front of her. Sweet mercy, but he was gorgeous. Every bit as perfect—and then some—as what she remembered. If Ben Hayes was sexy in the smoky low light of a semicrowded pub, it was nothing compared to the hot-factor he emitted in the natural morning luminance of his own element.

Creamy plaster walls, detailed oak molding and hardwood floors, heavy antiques dressed in rich fabrics and silky fringe, and beautiful framed artwork—his own, of course—rounded out a room that bespoke moneyed New Orleans style, mysterious, seductive and alluring. Seated behind a beautiful inlaid mahogany twin-pedestal desk, Ben looked every bit as mysterious, seductive and alluring as the city he called home. Even the sensual curve of his wicked mouth echoed the Big Easy’s dark charm.

His almost-black hair was tousled, pushed carelessly away from his face and guarded golden eyes studied her with a calmness that was as arousing as it was unsettling. April let go of a shaky breath.

Quite honestly, she hadn’t thought past coming here. If she had, she knew she would have never made the journey to his office, would have never found the nerve to cross his threshold. The question was, where the hell was she going to find the nerve to ask for his help? Or should she even ask for that matter? As Frankie had so keenly pointed out last week, he’d been staring a hole through her for months, silently seducing her with those mesmerizing heavy-lidded eyes. She smothered a snort. Short of marking his territory by peeing on her bar stool, he couldn’t have possibly made his interest any more plain. And yet, here he sat, seemingly bemused by her presence.

Irritation surfaced and galvanized her. He wanted her, too, dammit. She needed to remember that. Rather than diving right into the heart of the matter, though, she decided to try a few pleasantries first. “Before we get to what you can do for me, tell me how you’ve been. I’ve seen you at the pub, but we haven’t had a chance to talk.”

A tactful lie. They could have talked at any time, if either one of them had made the move and, given the way they’d parted, she firmly believed he was the one who should have taken that step. It was a courtesy he owed her. After all, he’d broken her heart.

The small rebuke hit home, evidenced by the knowing twinkle in that too-perceptive gaze. Something about that familiar hint of humor made April marginally relax. She recognized this Ben. She’d known him. And she’d loved him with all the innocence held in her tender, teenage heart.

“You’re always with your posse,” he said, shrugging lazily. “I didn’t want to intrude.”

She chuckled. “My posse?”

“Yeah.” He lifted a pen from his desk and tapped it thoughtfully upon the leather surface. “You know. Your Chicks In Charge friends.”

So he’d kept up with her then, April thought, ridiculously heartened by that insightful little tidbit. “They wouldn’t have minded.”

His gaze caught and held hers. “I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

April nodded and moved on to another topic. “So…how’s your dad doing?”

A shadow moved across his face and for a split second, he became unnaturally still. On guard, she realized, intrigued. He tossed the pen aside. “Fine, I suppose,” he said, watching her closely. “I haven’t spoken with him recently. How’s yours?”

“The same.” She shifted and looked away. “I, uh…I haven’t spoken to my father recently, either.”

But not for lack of trying, she didn’t add. Most of her calls were avoided and rarely returned. A part of her longed to confide in Ben, to tell him about accidentally outing her father, but the time for that had passed. They hadn’t shared a secret in years. Odd that sharing her body with him would come easier, but…c’est la vie.

Ben let go a pent-up breath. “Look, April, is that what you came here for? To talk about our fathers? Because if it is, I can tell you that I don’t—”

Impatient with herself, April squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head. “It’s not. I—”

He blinked, seemingly surprised. “It’s not?”

“No,” she said.

He bit the corner of his lip, looking curiously relieved. “Then why did you come? Why are you here?”

Here it was, she thought. Truth or consequences time. She’d never been one to mince words, yet summoning the wherewithal to have this conversation with Ben was proving exceedingly difficult. She’d known it would be, but…Aw, hell. The fact was, she wasn’t accustomed to asking men to sleep with her. Ordinarily, it was the other way around. They came to her. Furthermore, if she wanted someone, she’d never had to tell them. A loaded glance, a secret smile, an innocent yet promising touch.

Body language. Not the English language.

She hesitated, looked up and saw him waiting expectantly. Her heart began to pound. She couldn’t believe she was going to do this, that she was actually going to ask him to have sex with her.

But she was.

Desperation had prodded other women to do worse, she told herself. And she was desperate.

Eighteen months.

Eighteen miserable, horribly unsatisfied months of unrelenting sexual agony. Frankie was right. If Ben couldn’t pull an orgasm from her apparently comatose libido, then nobody could. She’d simply have to resign herself to a lifetime of sexual dysfunction. The idea was so abhorrent she had to smother a maniacal laugh. Hell, she’d probably go crazy. Turn into a cat-loving, batty old shrew who screamed at little children and collected empty butter tubs and bottle caps. She glanced nervously at him again.

“April?” he prodded. Concern had replaced expectation, pricking her conscience. “Is something wrong?”

She smothered a snort. “You could say that,” she said, determined to go through with this. She pulled in a bracing breath, then let it go with a door-die whoosh. “I’ve got a personal problem…and I think you can help.”

“A personal problem,” he repeated.

“Yes,” she managed to whisper over the litany of Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! screaming in her head.

He hesitated for a moment. “Er, what sort of personal problem?”

“An intimate sort of problem,” she confided with evidently just enough misery for him to make the connection.

A fleeting flash of surprise registered before he masked it with a less-jolted expression. In a nanosecond, though, a predatory gleam flared in his golden gaze and she suddenly felt as if she’d been caught between the crosshairs—his. “Of a sexual nature then?”

“Yes.” She licked her suddenly dry lips and cleared her throat. Tried to look calm though she felt as though her intestines were going through the spin cycle. “For the past year and a half, I’ve been unable to—That is to say, I haven’t—I can’t—”

“Come?”

April nodded again. He could have said “reach orgasm” or “climax”—the more clinical term, she supposed—but “come” would work. “That sums it up nicely, yes,” she replied.

Ben leaned back in his seat and bit his bottom lip, presumably to keep from smiling, the wretch. There was absolutely nothing funny about her condition. He regarded her with droll, brooding humor, his eyes a compelling combination of smoky arousal and intrigue. April lifted her chin and resisted the pressing urge to squirm.

“And you think that I can help you?” he asked in an infuriatingly calm voice. “Is that why you’re here?”

“It is.”

“Because you think that I can make you—”

“I do,” she interrupted before he could finish, then resisted the urge to grin. “Provided your skill is in keeping with your reputation, that is,” she added wryly.

Ben chuckled. “My reputation?”

April poked her tongue in her cheek, felt her lips quiver with a smile. “That’s right. By all accounts—and I’ve heard many—you’re quite a lover. You’ve even got a nickname. Haven’t you heard it?” she asked innocently.

Ben leaned forward, let his elbows rest on his desk and steepled his fingers together. “A nickname?”

“Yep.” She paused, purposely torturing him. “The Vagina Whisperer,” she shared dramatically. “Supposedly, you can make even the most reluctant kitty purr.”

Ben’s eyes widened, then he cracked up. “You have got to be kidding me.”

I wish I were, April thought. Hearing about Ben’s particular abilities, his legendary sexual prowess over the years had been a source of pain for her. To this day the idea of him touching another woman made her belly flip in a nauseated roll.

April had never been the jealous type. She’d always been secure enough in her own ability to attract and keep the opposite sex that she’d honestly never let jealousy get to her. Naturally she’d felt a twinge of it now and again—she’d hardly be human, otherwise—but frankly, she’d never been invested enough in another relationship to warrant jealousy.

And yet the mere thought of Ben with someone else made her heartsick and absolutely wretched.

An unhappy truth lurked in that realization, but April determinedly refused to look for it. She’d mine her feelings later. Right now she had more pressing needs to take care of. Like eliminating the someone elses from Ben’s bed and planting herself there instead.

“I’m not kidding,” April finally told him. “That’s why I’m here. Given the situation, I need someone with your particular brand of expertise to, er…remedy the situation. In exchange, I’ll build you a Web site.”

She felt ridiculous saying it—bartering her body for Web services, of all things—but it made it feel like more of a business proposition than a personal favor. Twisted reasoning, she knew, but it was the best she could do. If he could fix her—if he could give her the joy of a toe-curling, back-clawing, tingling tornadic orgasm—she’d gladly exchange services for services. He was good at sex. She was good at Web design. Different areas of expertise, but she’d work with what she had. It was better than feeling beholden.

Ben studied her, then after a prolonged moment, scrawled something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Seven o’clock,” he said.

She frowned, looked at the piece of paper he’d handed her and discovered an address. His address, she realized belatedly. She glanced up with what she expected was an embarrassingly hopeful gaze. “Is this a yes, then? You’ll help me.”

The corner of his sexy mouth quirked up into a sinfully promising smile, one that told her he planned to help her until her eyes rolled back in her head and she sang every note of the Hallelujah chorus. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s definitely a yes.”

2

BEN LACED HIS FINGERS behind his head, leaned back in his chair and let a huge sigh balloon from his lungs as April closed his office door.

Sweet mother of God.

That had to be one of the most bizarre encounters he’d ever experienced in his life. In fact, he was still having trouble believing it. There were so many intriguing elements to their strange conversation that he had a hard time deciding where to start.

Eighteen months without an orgasm? Ironically, her climax had left town about the same time he’d started showing up at the Blue Monkey, Ben noted absently. And The Vagina Whisperer? Another silent chuckle bubbled up his throat. Still stunned, he didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended. Ah, hell. Who was he kidding? He was damned flattered. After all, that nickname and what it implied was evidently what had brought April Wilson to his doorstep.

Looking for a sexual cure, no less.

From him.

When he’d been systematically running through every available woman in Louisiana trying to get her out of his head?

Suffering from a severe case of shock, he passed a hand over his face and laughed again. Had anyone told him when he’d rolled out of bed this morning and made his usual trek to the office that April would show up and ask him—ask him— to have sex with her, he would have never believed it. Instead, he would have told them to ditch the hallucinogenic drugs and seek professional help. Things like this just didn’t happen to him. He’d always had to make his own luck.

Given the thin-lipped expression she’d adopted when the irony had all but gotten the better of him and he’d nearly laughed, Ben knew that his initial response—apart from shock—had annoyed the hell out of her. Not that he could blame her really. It couldn’t have been easy to make the decision to seek his help, and frankly, he admired her for being both mature and blunt. That, in and of itself, was wholly refreshing. No games, no guesswork. She could have just as easily made a play for him—which, given his recent behavior at the Blue Monkey, she knew he’d accept—and kept her motives to herself.

But she hadn’t.

Instead, in a ballsy no-bullshit move, she’d leveled with him and suggested a mutually beneficial deal. And a deal was good—it leveled the playing field and encouraged emotional boundaries. Furthermore, he’d put off the effort and minutia involved with pulling together the necessary content for a proper Web page because, in truth, he hadn’t found anyone whose work he admired as much as he did April’s.

Her page was the perfect combination of professionalism and whimsy, gave the visitors and prospective clients an organized, aesthetic glimpse into who she was and what she could accomplish. She was damned good at what she did, Ben thought. She had an uncanny ability to interpret a theme and make that come together in a graphics format for her clients. She, too, was an artist. She merely worked in a different medium.

Ben paused considering. If April hadn’t had an orgasm in eighteen months—eighteen mind-boggling months—then there had to be one helluva reason. Something more than just a string of subpar lovers. Hell, even a premature ejaculator knew how to work his fingers. A grin tugged the edge of his mouth.

Or at the very least, she did.

He couldn’t see her spending eighteen months in the equivalent of sexual purgatory without trying to tend to her own needs. Ben felt a smile tug at his lips. Not little Miss I-can-do-it-myself, he thought. That would be completely out of character. Her mother might have been a bona fide—quite frankly disturbed—bitch, but April could thank her for that my-way-or-the-highway attitude, if nothing else.

Thwarting her control freak of a mother had made April one of the most self-sufficient, stubborn and determined women he’d ever known. That trait, coupled with her inherent goodness—and the goodness she could detect in even the most undeserving people—her wicked sense of humor, a sure sense of herself and an innate sexuality that oozed from every pore, made her one of the most interesting, compelling women he’d ever been around.

Simply put, she charmed him. She always had.

And knowing her the way he did, he was damned certain that she’d only considered asking for his help as a last-ditch effort to put an arc back into her evidently flatlined libido. He’d be willing to bet his left nut that she’d tried everything else, and when those options had failed, she’d decided to come to him.

Call him an opportunistic bastard, but he was glad.

And where others had failed, Ben thought with a slow smile, he would not.

The Vagina Whisperer rumor notwithstanding, he knew how to please a woman. As with anything, the desire to perform combined with the old “practice makes perfect” adage could turn even the most mediocre man or woman into a competent partner, but in Ben’s opinion good lovers were born, not made.

Being a good lover involved more than knowing how to find a G-spot or administer the perfect kiss. A good lover had the inherent ability to seduce the mind, understood that planning a seduction went well beyond the traditional candles, wine and roses. Attention to detail, investing time, learning to listen, essentially picking up on her signals until a man knew her well enough to morph into her fantasy.

Most men had a tendency to rush the attraction, to hit the high spots for a mediocre payoff, when maybe just a few more days of patient consideration—priming, if you will—could result in a coupling so combustible the sheets all but set fire.

That was the kind of sex he specialized in.

He didn’t waste his time with “dumbed down” sex. When he did it, he did it right. Clearly, April had been getting the dumbed-down variety for so long that her poor, confused libido had finally said “screw it” and gone into voluntary hibernation. That, or it had merely rebelled, waiting for the right guy to come along. Whatever the reason, she needed him, and simply knowing that made several organs swell, both north and south of his zipper.

Without warning, her plump, pouty mouth materialized too readily in his mind’s eye and he felt a flame of heat lick his groin. God, he couldn’t wait to kiss her again. Couldn’t wait to push his tongue into the warm cavern of her mouth, taste the addictive combination of hot spice and sweet innocence and something else, something far more wonderful and bittersweet than either of the previously mentioned two—the flavor of being wanted.

Truly wanted.

Ben was accustomed to being desired, to being the object of a woman’s lust. A come-hither smile, a bed-me look. Frankly, he got them all the time. He’d been blessed with decent good looks and a hefty dose of sex appeal. He couldn’t deny it and wasn’t above capitalizing on it when the urge struck. Which was often. He was a man, after all, and there was nothing politically correct about baser needs, the drive to procreate. He liked sex and didn’t intend to apologize for it. But there was a huge difference between being desired and being wanted.

Desired—which was admittedly nice—was commonplace. But wanted was rare.

Wanted implied a familiarity, a longing despite flaws and imperfections. Wanted meant I’ll take you warts and all. Ben swallowed. Wanted was just a hair shy of love, and the only time he’d ever felt that sort of connection—that sort of unconditional yearning—was with April.

She’d wanted him.

To know that she merely desired him now was a bit depressing, but when it came to her, he’d settle for whatever he could get. A bark of dry laughter erupted from his throat.

He’d willingly—gladly—be her whore.

Guess that didn’t make him much different from his father after all, Ben thought as his lips twisted with bitter humor at the unwelcome insight.

Speaking of which, that raised another question. Did she know that her dad and his had become roommates? He’d wrongly assumed that had been the reason for her visit, and yet other than one awkward moment when she’d asked about his father, nothing else had been said about them. He’d sensed some tension, but if she’d known about their respective sires making the move to cohabit, she would have said something. Odd, then, that she hadn’t.

He stilled. Surely to God she knew Marcus was gay, Ben thought, struck by the notion. He paused, mulling it over. Yeah, he scoffed. She had to know. How could she not know? Her parents had divorced years ago. He snorted. But considering who Marcus was married to, that argument wouldn’t necessarily hold water.

April’s unfortunate father could have cited any number of reasons for his belated departure from Morgana’s evil side. Honestly, he didn’t think he’d ever known another woman he disliked more. She was a cold, heartless, manipulative harpy and—

His mental tirade abruptly stopped and a slow dawning smile slid across his face.

—and she’d undoubtedly shit when she found out about April, Ben realized, unable to suppress the burst of vindictive glee that expanded in his chest.