Page 4

Klaus offers an elbow. After a pause to consider, I take it. Immediately I’m struck by the warmth of him radiating through the fabric—there’s something so personal about it. We wander slowly, passing through two pools of streetlight before either of us speaks.

He lays a hand over mine in the crook of his elbow.

“My gaffe the night we met in Abu Dhabi… it’s no excuse, but I must clarify that this habit—the giving of money—has never been a reflection on the women.

It’s far more the case that…” He looks up at the city-light-tinged sky.

“I sometimes find it difficult to trust that a woman is interested in me for non-monetary reasons.”

“Oh, hush. I’m not buying that you don’t recognize you’re objectively hot.”

“It may surprise you to hear that the money is rarely declined. You’re the only person who has been offended—”

“ Hurt ,” I cut in.

“Hurt, yes. It has shamed me, realizing there may have been many women over the years who were hurt or offended but didn’t call me out as you did.”

I pull my arm from his. “I wasn’t insulted at being mistaken for a sex worker.

I don’t judge, and sex work is work . But you implied I might’ve been in it for a reward.

That my enjoyment was… performative. I’d have been less upset if it hadn’t been good with you.

Like you understood more than just my body. ”

There’s no mistaking the ripple of sorrow that crosses his expression at my words.

“I felt that too. You may not believe me, given the circumstances.” His left hand faintly moves toward me; then he pockets it—I’m not sure if he’s trying to seem aloof or trying not to touch me.

He clears his throat. “It was an amazing evening.”

I want to agree, but I want to punish him even more.

He’s making it really hard to keep hating him.

“I knew… why Sofia cared for me,” Klaus continues, tentative.

He tries for the comment to land lightly, but it can’t not fall unruly and broken as a dropped sack of groceries. It’s interesting that he doesn’t specify who Sofia is, like he knows I must’ve looked him up. It’s then I realize he’s surely looked me up too.

“There was an ease in my essential self being… remembered ,” he goes on.

“We were, to each other, always the people we’d known since our youth.

Now so much feels like pantomime.” He shakes his head.

“Wealth changes everything, makes it harder to let anyone in. But I’m the person my life has made me: a businessman, head of a hundred-million-dollar racing team, a widower, a pragmatist.”

I don’t know him well enough yet to tell if his candor is vulnerable honesty or manipulation.

He studies me sidelong. “I don’t suppose I have any chance with you?”

“Not a prayer, bub.” I do my best to make it lighthearted—a joking tone like a Prohibition-era wise guy. I need to act as if I don’t recognize what’s at stake. The moment feels bigger than both of us, bending time with its gravity.

We’re quiet for a full block, watching lit windows as we pass.

Mostly it’s just illuminated curtains, walls, furniture.

But in a few houses there are visible people: a standing man holding a beer and talking to some friends who sit on a nearby sofa, a woman carrying a laundry basket, a stocky man on an exercise bike watching TV.

“You won’t forgive me for what happened,” Klaus says, resigned.

“I do mostly forgive you for the… the misunderstanding. But I still wouldn’t date you.

We already made things weird by coming in hot like that, jumping right into bed.

Plus, dating you would be unprofessional.

Way too much chance for conflict of interest.” I risk a glance at him.

“Though I do find you very attractive.” There’s an unexpected ache in my chest. “And despite what you may’ve been led to believe by what happened in Abu Dhabi, I don’t do the friends-with-benefits thing well. It’s not where I am in life.”

As I step off a curb in the dimness between streetlamps, my heel goes sideways.

I grip Klaus’s arm hard with a gasp, and he’s suddenly like a mountain—the most solid thing I’ve ever felt, impossibly immobile, steadying me.

Catching my breath, I have the fanciful sense that if a tornado roared past, I could hold his arm and not fly away.

His eyes in the darkness are touched by twin flares of reflected light. He watches me with a completeness, as if we’re the only two people in the world. The thumping hum of music from a nearby house could be a faint radio transmission from a distant galaxy.

He brushes the backs of his fingers against my cheek, and I lean into the touch. I wonder if we’re both too proud to initiate the kiss that is already there, a spectral thing between us, like a little soul waiting for life to be breathed into it.

God, his lips—I can’t stop looking at them. What kind of idiot would I be if I stepped over a line I drew minutes ago? I can’t kiss him. I can’t…

I grab his silk necktie, holding it light but sure.

Would another kiss be so terrible? Maybe it won’t be as good as I remember.

He gathers my hair and winds it around his hand once with the same cautious firmness I’m using to hold his tie. He’s so close, I can see the pattern of his laugh lines, natural and beautiful as striations in marble.

“This is unwise,” he murmurs with a troubled frown.

I give a small nod. “Let’s do it anyway. Just one more—to say goodbye.”

Heat floods me as his mouth makes contact in a glancing pass, sliding along my lower lip, tender and exploratory.

I open to him, pulling on his necktie. An involuntary whimper rises in my throat.

My heart hammers as he spreads his hand at the back of my head, cradling me, and his tongue sweeps mine in a welcome trespass.

We leave our hands where they are, gripping each other at only one point as our lips feast, re-angling, then closing in again.

I wait for his free hand to connect, wanting it everywhere, anywhere: skimming over a breast, surfing the curve of my hip, grabbing my ass and clutching a handful, commanding.

But he holds back; the only clue to his emotion is the way his fist occasionally tightens in my hair.

Finally he rests his forehead against mine before pulling himself upright and opening his eyes. He releases my hair, smoothing it over my shoulder.

“I will miss you,” he says.

I know it’s what he should say. But that was before I remembered how everything about his touch is right, stunning, as real as the gravity pulling us together. I can’t let him know how his words disappoint me.

Dammit, I don’t want to punish myself for allowing the kiss, don’t want to engineer a wall between us… but I have to, or I’ll change my mind…

“Klaus?”

“Talia.”

My eyes squeeze shut. The sound of the diminutive he’s so naturally chosen for me hits like a wave capsizing an insignificant boat. Gradually I open my eyes.

“The woman who was with you tonight—where is she now?” I ask.

He moves a lock of hair off my shoulder, baring my neck.

“There’s no answer that won’t make me sound bad.” Trying for a smile, he adds, “You’ll recall I had a five-minute window, which a certain imperious queen granted. If I say I sent the woman off without another thought, I’m a cad. If she’s waiting for me in my suite, I’m far worse.”

I nibble the inside of my lip, studying him. “Maybe there’s no nice answer, but there is one that’s the truth. So which is it?”

He takes my hand, and I let him. His thumb coasts back and forth over my knuckles before he releases me. “She’s still there.”

I focus on a crack in the sidewalk, aligning the toe of my shoe with it as I determine how I feel. I try to work up some anger, but it seems forced.

“Is she, um…” I twist the thin strap of my purse. “You know…”

“A ‘working girl’?” he supplies.

I nod.

“I don’t know. We’d got no further than a bit of conversation in the lounge.”

Ah. And there’s my anger. Conversation in the lounge…

It feels worse than the thought of him having sex with her.

I wonder if he asked her too, as he did with me: Are you shy?

If he shared a sip from his Courvoisier and gave her the same wicked smile.

If his charming patter with me in Abu Dhabi had been from a playbook of well-tested pickup lines, and once again my heart was swindled by a beautiful scoundrel.

My brain taunts me for my naivete:

Didn’t he tell you as much when he confessed that he gives cash to them all? You’re not special, Natalia Jane Evans. He’s told you what kind of man he is, but you’re not listening.

I wrap my arms around myself. “I’m getting cold. We should go.”

I start down the sidewalk the way we came. Klaus has one arm half out of his jacket, ready to offer it to me, when I stop him.

“I don’t need that.” I lift a hand, warding him off, before knotting it into the cradle of my arms again. Manufacturing a blithe smile—because if he knows how upset I am, it’ll give him an opportunity to change my mind—I tell him, “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your date.”