She was wearing a tight. Red. Low-cut. Shirt.
“Good evening,” she said pointedly to Quentin. She gestured with her eyes. He got the message. She wanted him to kiss her hello in front of Owen.
He knelt on the cushion, pulled her as close as he could get her with the back of the sofa between them, and showed her that he’d missed her all day.
Finally she pushed him away. “I missed you, too,” she whispered, breathing light and fast.
“You figured out the gate code,” he said.
“I have eyes in the back of my head,” she said ominously. Then she laughed. “That’s my mother’s line. She always knows more than she’s supposed to.”
“That’s creepy,” said Quentin.
“You have a mother?” Owen asked.
Sarah didn’t answer. Her eyes had fallen on the TV. “When you’re through watching this, you can borrow my copy of Anna Karenina.”
Owen didn’t understand Sarah’s sarcasm. “The one with Helen McCrory or Nicola Pagett?” he asked. If he was going to understand that membership in a redneck country band was not consistent with an interest in nineteenth-century Russian literature, he was going to come to this understanding very, very slowly.
Quentin said only, “Owen, you dumbass.” Then, to distract Sarah, he grabbed her around the waist in a wrestling hold, lifted her over the back of the sofa, and threw her bouncing onto the cushions. It was a rude move that seemed ruder performed on a sophisticated woman like Sarah, which was why he did it. He slid her across the leather to trap her against the arm of the sectional.
“We hear you turned down a late-night talk show for us,” he said softly. Sitting close beside her, he stroked his thumb slowly down the open neckline of her shirt, dipped cheekily into her cle**age, and stroked slowly up the other side. Then he turned his thumb and stroked her in the same places using his callus from holding down his guitar string. She’d seemed to enjoy the touch of his thumb in his bedroom that morning.
She gasped a little. “I did,” she breathed.
“Well, we think you must be nuts,” he told her gently, retracing the tender path of his thumb. “That would have been great publicity.”
“We didn’t need you to come down from New York to do something inane,” Owen added.
Inane, Quentin thought in alarm. The Cheatin’ Hearts didn’t know the word inane. But Owen was too inane to realize this.
“I want my album,” Sarah said stubbornly, despite Quentin’s thumb in her cle**age. “The album is the most important thing. If you don’t have an album, you don’t have anything to publicize.”
“We could fly up there, do the show, and fly back down that night,” Quentin suggested, moving his whole hand to cup the part of her breast that was bare in her neckline.
“I know it’s never that simple with you,” she said. “There’s no telling what kind of stunt you’d pull, and that poor TV host has had heart surgery.” She slapped Quentin’s hand away and tried to stand. “I can’t believe Rachel told you about this. I’m going to have a talk with her.”
“You’re not going anywhere until we settle this,” Quentin said with authority. He stood over her, his hands on the sofa so she couldn’t escape.
She raised one eyebrow, asking him, Are you bluffing?
He was not. The band was too important. He kept his eyes on hers. But he had his contacts in, and he would have to blink sooner or later. So he said, “You need a spanking.”
“You have to catch me first,” she said. She feinted left under his caging arm, then dashed right. She slipped through his grasp.
“Thanks for taking care of it,” Owen called as Quentin ran after Sarah into the dining room.
She was on the far side of the pool table. “Elegantly appointed dining room,” she commented, patting the felt. Her voice echoed weirdly against the marble walls and the painted ceiling. The evening light from the window danced in the chandelier and shot shadowed dots across her face and chest.
He took one slow step to the left, and she moved to the right. He stepped to the right, and she moved to the left. He bent as if to slide under the pool table. She scrambled over it.
Too easy. He caught her, laid her down on the felt, and kissed her. His hand crept across her pants to the inside of her thigh.
She took a deep breath and said low, “I mean it. You’re stretched too thin right now. The talk show will ask you back after the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event.”
He kissed her neck, carefully avoiding the scar under her chin because he didn’t want her to shy. “From now on,” he said, “I want you to discuss it with me before you decide something like that.” He bit her earlobe.
“Okay.”
Now he ran his tongue lightly inside her ear, and it seemed from her reaction that he really did have everything under control. He told her, “If you were my girlfriend, I’d make love to you right now.”
“I’m not your girlfriend,” she whispered.
“You feel like my girlfriend,” he said. “Let’s see if you sound like my girlfriend.” Despite her protests and her feeble attempts to tickle his ribs, he lifted her onto his shoulder. Registering with a quick glance into the next room that Erin and Martin were leaning over the sofa in discussion with Owen, he climbed up the stairs to his bedroom.
He shut and locked the door behind him, tossed her onto the leather armchair by the window, and pushed the chair over to the door with her in it.
“I thought we agreed that we’re not going to do this,” she said, sitting up.
“We’re not.” He noted with supreme interest that she looked disappointed. “But we want Erin to think we are. Right?”
“Right,” she said uncertainly.
“So make it sound like we are.” He folded his arms. “Show me what you’ve got.”
She looked at him dubiously, then laughed, nervous. Her cheeks had turned bright pink, the same shade as a wayward lock of hair that half hid one of her big, dark eyes.
“Come on, now,” he scolded her. “This is for your job security.”
She got serious, squaring her shoulders. “Don’t watch me.”
He looked away while she uttered a pitiful imitation.
Turning back to her, he shook his head. “Every fake orgasm from now until the end of time is going to sound like When Harry Met Sally.” He picked her up, sat down in the leather chair himself, and settled her in his lap with her back to him. After cranking up the footrest so they reclined comfortably together, he deftly unbuttoned and unzipped her pants and slipped his hand inside, past the delicate lace of her panties.