LITMIR.BIZ

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for you.”

      “To keep me in or to keep me out?”

      “To keep you surrounded by beautiful things. As you should be.”

      She raised her eyebrow slightly and without another word turned and walked into the house. If she hadn’t been looking, McQueen might have patted himself on the back. Good line.

      “Welcome to Lockwood,” McQueen said, glad it was late enough all the staff but his security guard were gone. “Hope you like it.”

      “Very nice,” she said, barely giving the opulent interior a glance. McQueen didn’t mind that much. He’d rather she looked at him than his foyer, and she was definitely looking at him. Women considered him handsome, and even if they didn’t, they considered him rich, which was usually enough to close the deal.

      “I’m the fourth generation of McQueens to live here. My great-grandfather bought this house when he came over from Ireland,” McQueen said. It was summer, warm, and she wasn’t wearing a coat for him to offer to take. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. At his age he should have his seduction skills down by now, but Paris made him nervous for a reason he couldn’t name. “He’d planned to settle his family farther west, but the hills reminded him of home. So he stayed.”

      “And here we are. What would your great-grandfather have said about you bringing me to his home?”

      “I’d like to think he’d have taken one look at you and said, ‘Good job, lad.’”

      “I’ll be the judge of how good the job is done.”

      “Maybe we should get to work, then.” He reached for her and kissed her under the crystal chandelier, which before today had looked elegant to him, but tonight seemed ostentatious compared to the elegance of this woman in her red dress. She tasted of apples and bourbon when he kissed her and she was right—it did burn, but once he had his first taste, she was all he wanted in his mouth.

      McQueen pressed her back against the banister of the spiral staircase that led upstairs. He hooked her leg around his hip, slid his hand up her long bare thigh. She had panties on, but they weren’t enough to keep his fingers out of her. He stepped back, pulled them down her thighs and left them on the floor, where he hoped they would stay until morning.

      “Did you plan to seduce me when you came to the bar?” he asked against her lips.

      “Yes.”

      “Are you after my money?” He sensed such a woman wouldn’t be insulted by such a question.

      “Only your bourbon, Mr. McQueen.”

      “You want to see my collection?” he asked. “I promise it’s nothing but booze. I don’t own a single etching.”

      McQueen and his world-class bourbon and whiskey collection had recently been profiled in Cigar Aficionado magazine, inspiring a few phone calls from collectors trying to buy some of his rarer vintages, but she was his first official bourbon groupie.

      “Eventually,” she said, spreading her legs a little wider for him, inviting his fingers a little deeper. “Once you’re done showing me everything else you’ve got.”

      McQueen showed her. First he showed her right there against the wall. Then he took her up to the master bedroom, a room baroque with ornamentation and ostentation. Even the bed was gilt. He never actually slept in the room if he could help it. He found other uses for it, however. And that red dress of Paris’s looked about as good on his floor as the priceless gold-and-green Persian rug it lay upon.

      When it was all over, Paris reached for her red dress, and it occurred to him that if he let her leave now, he wouldn’t be likely to ever see her again. Something told him he shouldn’t let her go. Something told him if all he did was sleep with her, he would forfeit something, a victory or a prize.

      “Don’t leave,” he said as he obliged her by zipping the dress up for her. She had such a lovely back and the light of the bedside Tiffany lamp danced over her dark skin like a tongue of fire. “I haven’t shown you my collection yet.”

      “Oh, yes, I’d almost forgotten,” she said, cool as could be. He wasn’t used to women this quiet and unimpressed by being in the bedroom of a billionaire. Too cool.

      “I don’t know what to make of you,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her as she wrapped the red ribbon around her hair and pulled the long locks over her shoulder, Venus at her toilette.

      “Make of me? Are you putting me in a pie?”

      McQueen laughed. “I’d rather keep you in the bedroom than the kitchen. Come on, tell me about yourself.”

      “My name is Paris. I was born and raised in Kentucky. I moved to South Carolina for school. I got married a couple years ago, inherited money when my husband died, and now I’m back. I have no children. I am no one special. You only think I’m mysterious because you’ve noticed I’m not terribly interested in spending the rest of my life with you and that is one mystery a man like yourself can’t solve.”

      “That hurts.”

      “No, it doesn’t.”

      McQueen raised his eyebrow. “A rich widow. That explains a lot.”

      “What does it explain?”

      “Why I don’t impress you. You have your own money.”

      “You tell yourself that’s the reason,” she said with a smile sweet as the pie he should put her in, and goddammit, McQueen wanted her again already. She made him forget he was forty-five. “I won’t contradict you.”

      “I’m going to impress you before you leave,” he said. “Watch me.”

      “I’m watching.”

      He dressed in his suit minus the jacket and tie and led her from the bedroom, down the hall and to a bookcase. On the bookcase were unread leather-bound volumes of all the classics.

      “Very nice,” Paris said. “Did your decorator provide the books? Or did you order them from the pretty book wholesale warehouse?”

      “This isn’t it,” he said. “I’m going to show you my prized possession.” He pulled on the middle shelf of the bookcase, revealing that it wasn’t simply a bookcase, but a door. He switched on a floor lamp inside the door and waved Paris inside. As she gazed around the hidden room, he watched her face. She revealed nothing—no shock, no surprise, no disappointment.

      “Cozy,” Paris said, but from her tone she might have meant “airless.” He watched her take note of the old stone fireplace, the antique sofa with the worn jade fabric and the carved ebony arms. She walked to the wall and pulled back the curtain to reveal...nothing.

      “You covered your window with a wooden board?” Paris asked, tapping the board.

      “That’s a mirror,” he said. “I don’t want anyone looking in here. And really, what’s more terrifying than peeking in the window of a house and seeing yourself?”

      McQueen retrieved the key he’d hidden in a small silver vase on top of the fireplace mantel and opened a satin bronze cabinet with the Twelve Apostles embossed on the side.

      “Is that a tabernacle?” Paris asked.

      “It is.”

      “You store your alcohol in a cabinet designed to hold communion wafers?”

      “My grandfather had a dark sense of humor where the Catholic Church was concerned.”

      “I assume he was Catholic?”

      “Until he fell in love with a girl who left him for the Carmelites. Never stepped foot in a church again after that. Said no man with any pride would enter the house of the man who stole his wife.”

      “Pride indeed. Sounds like his lady picked the right man. You exist, so I assume he got over his lover’s defection?”

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