The elevator opened on his floor, and I stepped out and rang the doorbell. While I waited for him to answer, I ran my hands over my hair, smoothing down the fly-aways. That was part of the reason I started wearing the wig: my hair was so dense and staticky that it refused to behave for more than about three minutes at a time.

I waited, but the door didn’t open. I took out my phone and checked the text message Turner had sent me that morning. He’d definitely told me 7:00. I frowned and pressed the doorbell again.

After a handful of seconds, I heard the deadbolt slide open. My heart started going even faster, racing in my chest like a thoroughbred. The door swung outward and Turner was there, looking tired and rumpled in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his feet bare.

I had never seen him look so… ordinary. He could have been any businessman at home in the evening after a long day. I felt an unexpected tenderness break open inside my chest. I wanted to make him a sandwich and curl together in bed, kiss the back of his neck until he fell asleep, and lie there in the darkness and listen to him breathe in the quiet room.

I couldn’t. It wasn’t like I was his girlfriend.

“Looks like you’ve had a long day,” I drawled.

“I forgot you were coming over,” he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “Come in. Is it 7 already?”

“It’s 7,” I said, moving past him into the apartment. The living room was dark, but there was a light on in the room beyond it, and I followed the warm glow and found myself in what looked like the dining room. I had somehow missed it during my tour. There was nothing in the room but a large table surrounded by sleek wooden chairs, but the table was covered with papers, and there was an open laptop and a glass of amber liquid. Probably whiskey. Turner had obviously been sitting in here.

I hoisted myself onto the table and sat there, feet swinging, watching as Turner followed me. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me. I slid my thighs apart slightly, hinting at the soft heat between my legs. His eyes dropped downward, but flickered back up to my face an instant later. No luck.

“You’re a distraction I can’t afford right now,” he said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here. I meant to call you and tell you not to come.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Anything that’s wrong with you, sex can fix.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Is that the fourth law of thermodynamics?”

“I don’t know anything about thermodynamics,” I said. “Is that what makes water boil?”

“You’re very good at pretending to be stupid,” he said. “If only you actually were stupid. That would make this situation far less complicated.” I opened my mouth to ask him what he was talking about, but he crossed the room in two long strides and bent to kiss me.

It was our first real kiss.

His mouth crushed against mine, firm and demanding, and my eyes slid shut. My clients wanted to kiss me, sometimes, and I would give them a dry peck on the lips and direct their attention elsewhere. It wasn’t that I had anything against kissing, I just found it kind of tedious. It was inefficient, and not very interesting.

But with Turner, oh—it was something else entirely. He ran his tongue against the closed seam of my lips, and when I opened for him, he teased me with teeth and tongue, nibbling at my lower lip, sliding his tongue against mine in an exquisite glide. My backbone turned to liquid. I gripped two fistfuls of his shirt and surrendered myself to him. I had never imagined that kissing could be like this.

He pulled back, finally, and rubbed one thumb along my cheekbone. “I’ll have to send you home,” he said.

His voice was tinged with what sounded like regret. What was it that Scarlet had said? Hook, line. Sinker. I opened my eyes again and looked up at him. The expression on his face was so raw and open that I instinctively looked away, like I wanted to respect his privacy or something. When I glanced back a second later, he’d wiped his face clean of whatever it was. The man returning my gaze was Mr. Turner, The Owner, cool and unreadable.

But beneath that was Alex, hidden inside.

I understood him, then. We weren’t so different after all. We were both concealing something: our true selves, the careful heart, the hot blood. What my mother would have called the soul.

He saw it in my face. His hands, resting against my knees, flexed once, fingertips digging into my thighs, and then fell away. “Okay,” he said.

It was strange to hear him say that word. It seemed too casual. “Okay?” I asked.

“If you won’t leave, then you can help me,” he said.

I didn’t remember telling him that I wasn’t planning to leave, but whatever. He was a puzzle, and I wanted to spend a while longer poking at him. One of my brothers, when he was about ten, got a Rubik’s cube for his birthday, and spent a solid two weeks doing nothing but twisting it around and around, trying to get the colors to line up. I understood the impulse, now.

“Help you with what?” I asked.

“Crisis at work,” he said. “I could use an extra set of eyes to go through this paperwork.”

“What kind of crisis?” I asked, worried. “I was there, like, three hours ago and everything seemed normal.”

He frowned at me, brow furrowed. “You were—oh.” His face cleared, and he laughed. “You sweet thing. The club is fine. Surely you don’t think that’s my only business venture.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked, and then blushed and wished I had kept my mouth shut. He had just told me that it wasn’t, and now I looked like an idiot.

“You really don’t have any idea who I am, do you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“You’re Alex Turner,” I said. “You own the Silver Cross Club, and you’re the only person I know who doesn’t have a television.”

He leaned in and kissed me again, slow and heated, and then pulled back and said, “I haven’t watched television in five years, and I don’t intend to acquire the habit anytime soon. Now, are you going to be a good girl and help me, or do I have to send you home without any dinner?”

“Yeah, I’ll help,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve done for a client.” I said that deliberately, trying to provoke him with the reminder of all the other men I’d been with, but he just turned away and picked up a manila folder.