“You’re going to teach me?”
His voice went deep and husky. “Absolutely. As soon as we have some privacy.”
I retrieved my hand, jammed Mona into first gear, and peeled rubber.
We picked an upper-class hotel in Manhattan, valeted Mona into a parking garage with rates so high it had to be run by the Mafia. I wondered how much ransom we were going to have to pay Guido to get her back. We strolled into the high-class marble and mahogany lobby brazenly unconcerned by our lack of luggage.
“Wow,” I said, and looked around appreciatively. “Sweet.” It had that old-rich ambiance that most places try to create with knockoff antiques and reproduction rugs, but as I trailed my fingers over a mahogany side table I could feel the depth of history in it, stretching back to the generations of maids who’d polished it, to the eighteenth-century worker who’d planed the wood, to the tree that stood tall in the forest.
Nothing fake about this place. Well, okay, the couches were modern, but you have to prefer comfort over authenticity in some things. The giant Persian rug was certainly real enough to make up the difference.
The place smelled of that best incense of all—old money.
David waited in line patiently at the long marble counter while the business travelers ahead of him presented American Express cards and listened to voice mail on cell phones. A thought occurred to me, and I tugged at the sleeve of his olive drab coat. “Hey. Why—”
“—check in?” he finished for me. “Two reasons. First, it’s easier, and you’ll find that the less power you use unnecessarily, the better off you are. Second, I don’t think you’re ready to be living my life quite yet. One step at a time.”
He reached into his pocket and came out with— an American Express card. I blinked at it. It said David L Prince in raised letters. “Cool. Is that real?” I said it too loudly.
His eyes widened behind concealing little round glasses. “Not a great question when we’re about to use it to pay for the room, is it?”
Oh. I’d been figuring we were still in some unnoticeable fog, but clearly not; the guy in line ahead of me was distracted enough from the cell phone glued to his ear to throw us a suspicious look. True, we didn’t have the glossy spa-treated look of the rich, or the unlimited-expense-account confidence of the corporate, but we weren’t exactly looking like homeless, either. I shot him a sarcastic smile. He turned back to his business.
“Sorry,” I said, more softly, to David. “Obviously, yes, it’s real, of course. I mean—hell, I don’t know what I mean. Sorry. Um… where do they send the bills?”
“Not to me.”
His smile made my train of thought derail and crash. Cell Phone Guy in front of us picked up his room key and got out of line; David and I moved up to the counter, where a highly polished young lady too nice for New York did all the check-in things, issued us plastic key cards, and fired off amenities too fast for me to follow. A uniformed bellman veered out of our path when he saw we were bag-free and gave us a look that meant he was no stranger to couples arriving for short, intense bursts of time.
David took my arm and walked me to the elevators, across the huge Persian rug, past a silent piano and a muted big-screen TV that was showing some morning show with perfect people interviewing more perfect people. We rode the elevator with Cell Phone Guy, who was still connected and chatting about market share and a corporate vice president’s affair with the wife of a global board member. The latter sounded interesting. As it happened, we were both on the same floor—twelve—and he looked at us like we might be after his wallet or his life, but before long he peeled away to a room and we continued on, down a long hallway and to a bright-polished wooden door with the number 1215 on it.
David didn’t bother with the key card. He touched the door with his finger, and it just swung open.
I looked at him. “What happened to ‘the less you use, the better’?”
He scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold. Gravity slipped sideways, and I put my arms around his neck until he settled me down with my feet on the carpet.
“What was that for?” I asked. He felt fever-hot against me, and those eyes—God. Intense, focused, hungry.
“Luck,” he said, and kissed me. I felt instant heat slam through me, liquefying me in equal proportion to how incredibly real he felt against me, and I felt a feverish urge to be naked with this man, right now, to be sure that all of this wasn’t just a particularly lovely dream on the way to the grave and oh God his hands burned right through my clothes like they weren’t there.