Slow Hands

interest.
    First because she had some wicked curves. She wasn’t a tall stick figure in a little black dress like half the women here. Instead she was petite, very rounded with the kind of full curves—generous hips and lush breasts revealed in a low-cut, silky blue dress—that weren’t currently fashionable but made his heart pick up its pace and his recently dormant cock come awake in his pants.
    Nor did she have bottled blond hair swept up in a complicated hairdo like the other half of the audience. No, hers was dark and thick, with long curls that fell in disarray past her shoulders. The look was wildly seductive, as if she’d just left her bed rather than an exclusive Michigan Avenue beauty salon.
    Earthy, sultry, not at all restrained. The woman was sexy in a way that women didn’t seem to allow themselves to be sexy anymore.
    Her looks, however, merely started the fire in his gut. Her untouchable, out-of-place demeanor stoked it until it almost engulfed him.
    The brunette wasn’t laughing it up with her rich gal pals, or tossing back Manhattans while turning her hand to make sure her diamond rings showed to their greatest flashy advantage. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she looked almost disapproving, even tense. He couldn’t see her face very well, though he got a glimpse of a stiff little jaw, lifted up in visible determination. And her back was military straight.
    He sensed she was keeping it that way intentionally, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down lest she be distracted from whatever mission she’d set for herself.
    As if realizing she was being watched, the woman glanced around, turning her head enough to cast her face in a bit of light spilling off the stage. Enough to highlight the creamy skin, the curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips and the dark flash of her eyes.
    Beautiful .
    Jake’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. Though she couldn’t possibly see him and was in no way mirroring his reaction, hers did the same.
    She clenched out of visible concentration that seemed to swirl around her, creating a no-fly zone between her and everyone else in the room.
    He clenched out of pure lust.
    He hadn’t had sex in a while—not since breaking up with a woman he’d been dating last winter. And nobody had as much as given him a quickened pulse rate since. Not the women he met at the station. Not the ones he helped. Not the nurses at the hospital. Not the hot girl who’d moved in upstairs from him, the one who’d already locked herself out three times just so she’d have an excuse to ask for his help.
    This stranger? She’d given him a hard-on from ten feet away.
    She looked around the room again, watchful, her gaze passing without hesitation over the crease in the drapes behind which he stood.
    Buy me .
    She couldn’t possibly have heard the mental order, yet she narrowed her eyes, focusing again on the drapes concealing him.
    He couldn’t help repeating the silent appeal, trying to remember all the stuff one of his sisters had said about that dumb book she’d been obsessed with lately. About how the universe would grant you what you want if you just visualized it hard enough.
    Oh, it was easy to come up with some fast-and-hot visualizations right now.
    “You want to know my biggest fear?” said Number Eighteen, a blond-haired surfer-looking guy who said he worked as a stockbroker. “What if whoever wins me pays like fifty bucks? I mean, how humiliating would that be when the richest women in Chicago are all drooling like a pack of stray dogs eyeing a butcher shop window out there?”
    Mr. Polished European guy laughed softly at the very thought of that even being a possibility for him. Jake, however, immediately understood the stockbroker’s worries.
    Geez. He’d thought being bid on would be a humiliation. But not being bid on? “Get me out of here.”
    “Too late,” said a perky voice belonging to the young woman who was stage-managing tonight’s events. She glanced at the blond pretty boy. “You’re on. They’re reading the introduction right now.” Then she pointed the tip of her pencil at Jake. “And you’re right behind him, Nineteen.”
    Nineteen. That’s how they’d addressed him from the moment he’d checked in at the event desk and had been whisked to a private dressing room with all the other saps whose bosses, friends, siblings, mothers or coworkers had talked them into doing this.
    Jake glanced through the slit in the drapes