Vanilla. Megan Hart
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was meant to be sexy.
“It’s a little too bondagey for a charity calendar,” I said. “But it’s fun.”
Alex looked at me. “It’s sexy as all hell, that’s what it is.”
“You’re right, my darling perv,” Olivia said, scrutinizing it. “But so is Elise. It’s too sexy for the project. The ones I marked would work better. Elise, let me know. I have to run now. I have a shoot scheduled with a set of newborn twins, and their mother tells me if we don’t catch them at nap time, it will be impossible to get any good shots. I tried to tell her I could work with kids, but hey, she’s the client.”
She kissed her husband and gave me a wave before heading out. Alex was now clicking through the rest of the pictures she’d taken. All variations of some kind of pinup imagery, though all far tamer than the first he’d picked. He paused on one of me with my head tipped back and eyes squinted closed, laughing. It had been a good day in Olivia’s studio.
“You could do this full-time, you know. Why are you crunching numbers and doing data analysis for me?”
“Because I’m more than just a pretty face?” I posed it as a question, adding an innocent blink and making dead doll eyes. “Because I like to pay my bills and do things like eat and buy stuff?”
“Bills, schmills,” Alex said.
I rolled my eyes. “Says the bazillionaire.”
“Pfft.” Alex leaned over my shoulder again to scroll through the pictures then nudged me. “Seriously, I know my wife’s a bloody genius with the camera, but you...look at you.”
I looked over the photo he’d pulled up. Critically, I could see what he meant. False modesty is a worse sin than vanity, I’ve always thought. I was pretty. I’d been pretty my whole life.
“There’s more to me than eyes and mouth and tits, Alex.”
He stepped away as I swiveled in my chair, and though Alex could be counted on to make light of nearly anything, this time he looked solemn. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” I shrugged, looking again at the pictures. “I like having my picture taken. I like working with Olivia. I like the idea that something we’ve done together goes to raising money for something useful. It seems to make it worthwhile.”
“And if you hadn’t met Olivia in Scott’s workshop, you’d never have met me, and I’d never have been able to convince you my life would not be complete without you by my side.” Alex put his fists under his chin and fluttered his eyelashes at me. “So, lucky me.”
I was the lucky one. Alex had started his own investment-planning business a few years back, consulting mostly. He had the contacts and the skills to make people a lot of money if they let him. He’d brought me on as a partner, my job to take care of all the bits of the business he found boring, which was just about everything other than figuring out the best places to make money grow. I handled client accounts, paperwork, office filing, billing...and though there were days when working with him felt more like trying to wrestle a bag of kittens into a top hat worn by an eleven-armed octopus that hated cats, I wouldn’t have given it up for any other job. Before agreeing to take on the responsibility of keeping this joker in line, I’d been drowning in the corporate world of human resources for Smith, Brown and Kavanagh, where going to work every day had been like feeling another small piece of my soul shrivel and die.
“Serendipity. If I’d never met Scott, I’d never have met Olivia, and then I’d never have met you while you were throwing a pity party about how starting your own business was so much more work than you wanted to do...”
“It wasn’t a pity party,” Alex interrupted. “I was just, you know.”
“Whining,” I told him with a grin and ducked his attempt to poke my upper arm. The truth was, he might like to slack off in the office during the boring bits of paperwork and filing stuff, but he was a genius with the clients. And he knew how to make money grow, no question about that.
He leaned over my shoulder again to look at the picture of me in front of the apple-bobbing barrel. “That picture is hot as fuck, Elise.”
From another guy, in another office, this might’ve been grounds for sexual harassment. Instead I eyed it, then him, with another lift of my eyebrow. “You like the whole woman tied up on her knees with something in her mouth, huh?”
“Who doesn’t?” Alex laughed.
It wasn’t like Alex and I talked in detail about our sex lives. We’d become friends, but there are some things you don’t talk about with the people you work with. Especially when he’s a married man, and you’re basically the only two people in the office. I had no idea if Alex had seen any of my other photos, the ones I did with Scott. Alex and I were linked on Connex, of course, because these days everybody collected connexions like kids used to collect baseball cards. I’d posted a few shots on there a long time ago, but I now avoided putting anything too private on that social networking site because I’d connexed with family members. My mother had a hard enough time accepting the fact I posed in my bra and panties. If she saw me in a black vinyl catsuit with a whip in my hand and a man at my feet, she’d have plotzed. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed about any of it; it wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t as if I went around introducing myself like “Hi, I’m Elise, and sometimes I like to dominate men.”
I laughed, too. “Lots of people like it the other way around, believe me.”
“Both work,” he said with a flash of a grin I suspected had wooed him into the pants of many a woman in his day. Alex Kennedy was just one of those guys who turned heads and made lashes flutter. It wasn’t just his face, which was gorgeous. It was the way he looked at you, like what you said mattered, like in that moment, nobody else existed but you.
“You could be a model yourself, you know,” I told him somewhat abruptly. “I’m surprised Olivia doesn’t use you more often.”
Something flashed in his eyes, and a secret sort of smile slipped across his mouth before he focused again on me. “I’ve let Olivia take pictures of me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, but didn’t ask. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about that. “Tell you what, rock star, how about you sign off on all this stuff, you take me to lunch and then you can get home early to your gorgeous wife and make some more pictures together.”
Alex grinned. “You got it. I’ll even take you out for sushi, how’s that?”
“Awesome.” I pushed the folder toward him. “Sign.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was teasing him about how painless it had been to actually finish some work, and we were walking to the closest sushi restaurant. Tucked in a small storefront on Front Street and directly across from the parking garage, it was a favorite lunch spot for a lot of the people who worked downtown. Fortunately for us, Alex’s procrastination meant the lunch rush was over, and the dinner crowd hadn’t yet arrived. We had our choice of tables in the restaurant’s cozy back section, and we took a seat in the corner. The server brought us hot tea and bowls of miso soup. I dipped my porcelain spoon into the golden broth, stirring up the bits of scallion, then blew on it to cool it. I was suddenly starving.
We talked for a while about our favorite TV program. Alex had turned me on to the show about two monster-hunting brothers who drove around in a black Impala—sometimes in the office, we’d toss quotes from the show back and forth to each other, trying to stump the other. Because Alex was way more into the show and had been watching it for a lot longer, he was usually able to beat me at the game. Now, asking me which of the brothers I’d be if I could choose, he claimed he would always be Dean, the older brother, and I was stuck being the younger brother, Sam.
“Except shorter,” he said.
I made a face. “And without a penis, don’t forget that part. That’s kind of important. Anyway, I’m totally Dean. Dean’s way