The Stranger Just One Night Part 1(42)

“You do want that, don’t you, Kasie?” He says, his voice keeping the same steady volume—the tenure low, insistent, confident. “You want me to touch you right here, in full daylight so that everyone in that bistro only a stone’s throw away would see you. You want the audience. You want me to pull off the mask in front of everyone.”

“I can’t get on the boat,” I say, but now it’s my voice that’s getting weaker. He has no right to say these things to me . . . and I have no right to want them.

But the fantasies are tiptoeing into my consciousness. On the desk in front of my team, on the couch in front of his friends . . . walking through a casino wearing a Herve Leger dress, everyone looking at me, seeing me as the woman I’m not supposed to be.

“Come aboard,” he says, softer, kinder. “Nothing will happen that you don’t want to happen. Remember, all you have to do is say no.”

Hadn’t I said no? Hadn’t I said I can’t get on the boat? Wasn’t can’t the same as no?

But it wasn’t. Can’t spoke to what I was capable of doing and what I wasn’t. No wasn’t about capabilities; it was about desire.

I had no desire to say no.

Carefully, I find my way onto the boat.

He meets me, kisses me innocently on the cheek, but his hand slips between us and I gasp as he applies a slight pressure to the one spot that will always give me away.

“I didn’t come for that,” I say, stepping away.

“No, you came to work.” He walks over to a bottle of sauvignon blanc that’s been chilling in a bucket. “You would never come here just because you want me to touch you again, although you do. You wouldn’t come just because you feel alive when you’re with me. You wouldn’t come because I’m the only one you can be your true self with. But for work? Yes, for work you’ll always come.”

He pours a glass of the white wine and offers it to me. The drink reminds me of Dave. I shake my head.

“I’m not my true self when I’m with you. I don’t know who I am.”

“That’s the problem,” he says, taking the wine for himself. It’s the first thing he hasn’t tried to push on me since I arrived. “You don’t know who you are. You even had me describe you to you last time we met and you still can’t figure it out. Normally that would be enough to make me lose interest. Self-awareness is sexy. Delusions are not.”

The sun is at my back and yet I reach into my bag and pull out my sunglasses. I sense that I’m going to need as many layers of protection as possible. “You think I’m delusional?”

“At times. It doesn’t suit you.”

“If it’s such a turnoff, maybe you should back the fuck off.”

Robert Dade bursts into laughter. It’s an easy laugh with just a touch of opulence. It softens my edges and makes me want to step toward him rather than away.

“Like I said, I would. But the thing is,” and with this it’s he who takes a step forward, “the woman who you really are . . . the one who you keep so tightly under wraps, the woman who is only allowed out when she is touched a certain way, made to feel certain things . . . that woman is so damn compelling . . . I can’t seem to turn away.”

Turn around and leave. Tell him that the engagement has been announced.

But I don’t say a word. My voice was carried off with the wind.

“I want that woman,” he says again, taking another step. “And not just in the bedroom. I want to know what she’s like over a candlelight dinner. I want to see her on the beach. I want to know what it would feel like to walk beside her talking about the thoughts you never let her share.”

“I’m getting married.”

“To a man you don’t love.”

“He’s the man I want.”

“What a seductive little liar you are.”

I lift my chin and strike him with a defiant glare. A flash of respect . . . I see it in his eyes . . . but then maybe it’s always there. Respect for me in those hazel eyes of his . . . but then it’s not for me. It’s for this woman he thinks I’m hiding from him. A woman I don’t want to be.

“I want Dave Beasley.”

“Do you?” His voice is gentle now but it’s impossible to miss the hint of sarcasm. “What exactly do you want him to do to you?”

“Don’t be crude.”

“Do you want him to keep you in line?”

I don’t answer. Robert is very close now. If he takes one more step forward, we’ll be touching.

But he doesn’t. Instead he circles me the same way he did in that Venetian hotel room.