Control

I do love my store. Occasionally I’ll take my shoes off, just so that I can wriggle my toes into the thick crimson carpeting.

Jeanette seems to appreciate it, too. She keeps pushing her plain white trainers into the pile and she has that look on her face—the one she always gets when she’s in here. A kind of wonderment, I think, despite her sure and certain knowledge that I am a lonely spinster. She giggles every time she has to say the name of my store: Wicked Words.

Though at least she gets the intention. I honestly didn’t think people could miss it, what with the red lettering on black and all the glossiness, but I get a lot of disappointed Goths and Wiccans, too. Some who are expecting handcuffs, some who aren’t.

Not that I mind. In truth, I thought it would alienate far more people than it actually ended up doing, in such a bustling but twee city as York. And I honestly didn’t think that so many romance fans would be attracted, but I get more romance customers than any other. They like me, because I get in a lot of the big American names that take seventeen years to filter down to us. I get the smaller ones, too, that never appear on these shores.

I fill a niche with my Wicked Words.

“Did you manage to hire anyone yet?” Jeanette asks, just as I’m busy trying to think about books.

At least I can answer no, thank God.

“Really? That chap who came by yesterday looked…interesting.”

I think about his mouth, crushing mine. The wood against my cheek.

“Him? Oh, he was awful. No good at all. Couldn’t hire him.”

“That’s a surprise. He looked just the sort to fit right in here.”

She glances around as she says this—it’s pretty obvious what she means. Big, liquid-sex Andy Yarrow, surrounded by books that feature men just like him, doing plenty of randy things. Yes, I’m sure he’d fit right in amidst all the sex and the horny shopkeepers.

“He didn’t know the first thing about books,” I say, which is perfectly true. He did have plenty of firsthand experience of the kinds of things that go on in my books, however—though of course I don’t say this.

“That’s odd. Maybe he was just nervous.”

As Andy appeared about as inclined to nerves as a robot programmed to kill, I have to start wondering if Jeanette knows him somehow. Perhaps this is some sort of defense of him, which will then be followed by her persuading me to hire him. I can’t imagine why she keeps banging on about him, otherwise.

“I don’t think he was the nervous type,” I say, at which she laughs.

“What, that little mouse? I think we’ve got our wires crossed, Maddie. He was the most nervous I’ve ever seen such a tall man be! He could hardly ask me if you would make a nice boss. I told him yes, of course—”

“Who on earth are you talking about?” I ask, but of course I know the moment the words are out of my mouth.

The nervy guy. The one who watched.

“The chap with the dark hair and the glasses! Didn’t you interview him? Perhaps he took a fright and ran off…”

Of course, of course—he wasn’t some spying customer at all! He was my second candidate.

Chapter Two (#u3a809947-09e9-5a64-bb5d-9037ab902305)

It’s odd, showing him the ins and outs of the place. I can feel his eyes on me all the way around my store, as though they’re checking me for specks of seediness. My wicked ways are going to rub off on him—poor, sweet, nervous candidate number two.

His name’s Gabriel Kauffman. Gabe, he tells me, but he doesn’t sound convinced about this shortening of his name. Clearly he prefers Gabriel, but that’s a bit too formal for someone who’s probably seen most of my tits and at least some of my pussy.

Or maybe he doesn’t look convinced about the shortening because he’d like things to stay formal—something I can well believe when looking at him. He’s even more tweedy and well put-together than the glimpse had suggested.

He has side-parted his hair so perfectly, I could use the white stripe of his scalp to rule a line under Bargains! on the sign in the window. It’s made even whiter and straighter looking by the perfect coal black of his hair.

I think it should be weirder that I immediately think Snow White, but somehow it doesn’t seem weird at all. The perfect pale skin, the dark hair, the probable fear that seven dwarves are going to do dirty things to him…it’s all there.

Snow White was pretty nervous and unaware of her own beauty too, after all. And she likely thought all sorts of things, before the dwarves reassured her that they just wanted her to keep house.

I tell him his duties in a clear, direct sort of way. No sexual subtext.

He seems to respond well to boundaries. Restrictions. He’s as obedient as a dog, his tongue curling up to his teeth whenever I lay out another rule or duty for him. I explain that the shelves need dusting every Wednesday, that I like the little recommendation cards to lie flush to the wood, that the book of the week stand should be perpendicular to the shelf behind it.

I like right angles, I tell him, and his tongue touches his upper teeth. He has neat little pointed incisors, I note—that should seem vampiric, but don’t.

Eventually, he manages to work up the nerve to ask questions, though they’re not exactly the questions I expect. If Andy asked them, I’d be nervous. They’re the questions of a thief, a meddler, a pain in the arse.

“So, while I’m working in the shop, where will you be? Will you be here with me?”

He looks away while he says it, too. I’d think he was planning something, if he wasn’t so wound tight and reined in. He probably just wants to make sure he doesn’t fuck everything up.

“At first, I’ll be with you. There’ll be a short training period, and then you’ll be on your own for three mornings and two afternoons of the week. Maybe less at first, if you’re not quite ready.”

He turns and flashes me the first smile of this entire interview and hiring process. It makes his face different—much less somber, obviously, but it gives him a boyish air, too. His application told me he’s thirty, and he looks it until he smiles. It’s the heavy eyebrows, I think, and the tweed.

“I think I’ll be fine. Everything seems really straightforward,” he says, and then there’s a moment. It’s not exactly the kind of moment that tells me he’s going to use what he saw against me in some way, but it’s definitely one that gives the impression that he hasn’t forgotten. The whole thing hasn’t just slipped out of his head, as his behavior until now had almost suggested.

I think the event embarrassed him. But not enough to make him block it from his mind.

I stick out my hand, and he hesitates before shaking it. As though maybe sex is coating my palm, or girl cooties, or something similarly nerve-firing. It’s weird enough that I imagine, for a second, that he’s never actually shaken a woman’s hand before.

But then he steels himself, and grabs ahold of me, and shakes until my teeth rattle.

I need to get Gabriel on his own as soon as possible. I know this, because while we’re in the store together, stuff happens. Stuff that isn’t within the boundaries and restrictions and rules. And it’s entirely my fault and it’s nothing to do with him, it really isn’t.

It’s just that I keep thinking: watch me.

I keep bending over, right when I shouldn’t. In much shorter skirts than I’d usually wear for work. And stockings with seams, that I absolutely never wear for work. It’s much too delicious and addictive when he reacts as predictably as a puppet whose strings have just been pulled.

He gets flustered. Blushes are really obvious on his face, because his complexion is that perfect milk-pale—he can sometimes compose himself by the time I turn around, but he’s never able to hide that flush high up on his cheeks. Sometimes it even gets him around the throat and at the tips of his ears, and then I just want to lick it off him.

By the end of the fourth day, I’m beginning to suspect that hiring him was as much a mistake as hiring Andy would have been. Apparently I’m not allowed to hire any men at all, because I’m a sex maniac.

Not that he knows it. I mean, obviously he knows I have sex with men in my kitchen. But I don’t think he has any idea that I’m delighting in driving him up the wall. He tells me that he was largely homeschooled. That until a year or so ago, he still lived with his parents. When I ask him if he has a girlfriend, he goes even redder than he did for my shirt with one too many buttons undone.

“No,” he says, but it’s after a long, long, putting-books-on-the-shelf pause.

I’m absolutely dying to ask if he’s ever had a girlfriend. The urge to run my hand down the strange arch of his back is more overwhelming, however. I settle for a pat, but even that startles him. I’m not sure he knew I was directly behind him, and now he hurriedly stuffs the book in his hand onto the shelf—as though he’s been caught reading something he shouldn’t.

Which is odd, because he was only looking at the back cover. What’s wrong with the back cover of Temptress in Time?

For the first time I wonder: What on earth is a man like him doing in a shop that sells erotica and erotic romance novels? They must be like alien spaceships to him.