Cutting Loose Read online

  “Consultant, huh?” I asked, once I finally found my voice. “That pays well enough to cover this place?”

  “It does if you’re good at it,” he said smoothly, guiding me down the main hall of the apartment, through the open concept kitchen and living area. “And yes, I’m very, very good at it. Among other things.”

  I glared at him to see if he was insinuating something unprofessional, but I couldn’t read his expression from the backside of his head.

  At the end of the hall, Sawyer opened a door. “And this is where you’ll be staying,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass.

  It wasn’t the largest bedroom I’d seen. My parents had slept in a bedroom that was the size of a ballroom, and this was much smaller than that. But for all Sawyer’s talk of “the smallest apartment,” this wasn’t bad at all. It had room for a full-size bed, a dresser, a wall mirror as the sole occupant of the room’s walls, a window that gazed out at the city’s other skyscrapers around us, and enough room for me to maneuver in it. There was even a small closet, just big enough for me to hang up the assorted handfuls of clothes I’d liberated from my old place when I left.

  “This will do,” I told Sawyer, not wanting to give away my relief that he wasn’t pushing me into a broom closet.

  He remained in the doorway, watching as I hauled my suitcase up onto the bed with a grunt, opening it and trying to sort through the chaos of clothing contained inside. “Work starts at eight AM tomorrow,” he said, his eyes on me. “Look professional.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You can meet me at the elevator.”

  I turned to him, planting one hand on a hip. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No,” he smiled, “it doesn’t.”

  He started to turn away, but I had more to ask. “What about paying me?”

  He turned back to face me again. “Have you done any work?”

  “No, but I agreed…”

  “You agreed to take a job. You get paid for the job. You haven’t done anything for the job yet, ergo, you don’t yet get paid. Unless you want some extra work.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is this going to be something disgusting?”

  “Like what?”

  He made those words sound far too innocent. He practically batted his eyes at me! I made sure to glare back, hating how a little voice in my head pointed out, without my permission, that Sawyer was quite handsome. He was tall, with those perfect white teeth against his dusky skin, and his well-tailored suit made it clear that he spent plenty of time in the gym, sculpting an ideal male figure. He moved with a curious lightness of foot that suggested excellent skills on a horizontal surface, as well.

  “You know what I mean,” I told him.

  He rolled his eyes, stepped forward into the bedroom that had just become mine. “Afraid that you’ve wondered into the lion’s den, little lamb?” he asked, looking down at me. His hand rose up, lightly brushing my chin and tilting my face to look back up at his. “Because I can think of something here for you to do – but it involves quite the embarrassing costume…”

  Half an hour later, I was still fuming that I gave in and said yes.

  “Do you have any idea how demeaning this is?” I fumed as I rose up on my tiptoes, fighting furiously against the self-conscious need to cover my derriere.

  From the sofa across the room, Sawyer idly flipped through the pages of a magazine, pretending that he wasn’t watching my exhibitionist struggles. “Of course I do,” he answered, appearing to speak directly to the magazine’s cover model. “That’s why I had you do it.”

  “I’ll get you back for this.” I angrily swiped the feather duster in my hand over the top of the mirror hanging above the mantel, sending dust raining down in a blizzard of little motes. I’d agreed to dust Sawyer’s apartment in exchange for him covering dinner and breakfast, but I’d failed to account for two factors:

  First, I’d severely underestimated the size of his apartment. He might have little to no decoration or personal touches anywhere, but that just meant more flat surfaces where the dust could collect.

  Second, when I’d sarcastically asked whether he also expected me to wear a maid’s uniform, I hadn’t expected him to actually call my bluff, much less to have one in his closet.

  “Am I getting all sorts of horrific diseases from this outfit?” I asked him as I switched over to dusting the end tables.

  “Not likely,” he answered. “I pay for the clean hookers.”

  Joke. I hoped.

  The outfit wasn’t too scandalous, considering what my mind first imagined when he pulled it out of the closet. It did cover everything, although it still left a lot of skin exposed on my arms and legs. It wouldn’t be considered risqué at a nightclub, but this wasn’t a public venue. This was private, with just one man keenly pretending not to watch me.

  I wondered how red my cheeks must be glowing. Was this really worth it? Should I go back home after this, consider myself lucky if I got back under my mother’s thumb with little more than a couple scars from mild sexual assault?

  A little part of my mind gibbered in terror at all the wild actions I’d chosen over the last couple hours. I’d run away from my stable life! I’d fallen in with a confessed thief! I was agreeing to live in his condo, even though he could be lying about everything and planning to sell me into sex slavery as soon as I fell asleep! And now I was letting him pick out an outfit for me and prancing around, probably looking like a complete idiot!

  I could run back, that little part of my mind insisted.

  I pushed it down, blocked out its dangerously reasonable suggestion. No. I could endure this. I gritted my teeth and kept cleaning.

  Of course, things didn’t stop at dusting. Just as I was beginning to feel that I’d adequately covered every horizontal surface above the floor in the apartment, Sawyer rose from the couch. Without glancing at me, he walked over to a closet, opened it, and wheeled out a heavy-looking vacuum.

  He didn’t say anything. The message was clear.

  I glared daggers at his back, wishing I could just go smack him, beat some sense into him for treating me so horribly. But I knew that this was some sort of test, and I wasn’t going to fail it. For once in my life, I wasn’t going to let someone else make me feel like a failure.

  As I reached the halfway point of vacuuming his apartment (whose size and luxury I was growing to bitterly resent), Sawyer got up from the sofa once again. I heard him speaking softly in the other room. I didn’t ask what he’d been doing, to whom he’d been speaking. It became clear about fifteen minutes later, when the elevator chimed softly.

  At first, I guessed that he’d gone so far as to hire a real prostitute, just to throw it in my face! Sawyer seemed like the kind of guy willing to go to those lengths to prove that he belonged on top. The elevator doors opened not on a beautiful woman, however, but on a young boy, still drowning in his teenage years, his face a mess of errant hairs and pimples. He wore black pants and a red uniform, but more importantly to my suddenly growling stomach, held a flat cardboard box balanced on one palm.

  “Are you going to eat that in front of me, just to tease me?” I asked Sawyer once he’d paid the delivery boy, trying to keep from drooling at the smell drifting out of the pizza box.

  “That depends,” he answered. “Do you think that I’m a complete and utter asshole?”

  My mouth started to wrap around a positive response, but I bit it back. “Only most of an asshole,” I said instead. “You did give me a job, after all. Supposedly.”

  “And you did clean my apartment,” Sawyer countered. He ran his hand over the surface of the table, frowned as he rubbed his fingers together. “Supposedly.”

  If he’d intended to make me feel guilty about my shoddy cleaning job, he failed. “So I don’t think you’re a complete asshole,” I concluded. “And you can prove that I’m right by sharing that with me.”

  That made him laugh. “Okay, honey,” he said, setti
ng the pizza box down on the table. “I’ll admit, I wanted to see whether you had a spine, or if you were just going to cave when I threw a bit of adversity your way.”

  “What, because I haven’t been through enough already today?” I burst out, stung.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. I hated when men could pull off that level of condescension. “You decided this morning to run away from home because you dropped a muffin, honey. You made it as far as you could get on a tank of gas and a car on the verge of breaking down, and then when it failed you, you ended up being the one who totally broke down. You burst out crying when you told me about eight hours’ worth of adversity. It’s not the strongest look for you.”

  I glared back at him, but I couldn’t pull together any sort of counter-argument. He did have a point, I gave in. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I don’t know if I’m really strong or not. I never had to find out, and I’m really scared of the answer. What if I’m weak? What if I just give up and crack whenever anything doesn’t go my way?”

  I felt the tears coming on again, but sniffled a few times, trying to keep them back. Sawyer’s expression grew pained. “Aw, no. I’m no good at any sort of comforting. For emotional reasons, at least. If you want me to help you forget about all these troubles in the bedroom…”

  Still sniffing snot back into my nose, I hefted the vacuum hose threateningly.

  “…right, right. Look, we all have rough points. It’s how we get through them that makes us stronger. It’s like iron.”

  “Like iron?” I asked, confused, as he vanished around the corner.

  He returned a moment later with a stack of paper plates and a handful of disposable napkins. “Iron starts off weak. You have to heat it up and break it, beat it, in order to infuse it with carbon to make it stronger. Same thing for people. Gotta break them down in order to build them up again.”

  I took a plate and napkin, tore open the pizza box to grab a pile of slices. “Wow, Sawyer. That’s surprisingly human of you.”

  “It’s a weakness of mine. Usually I keep it repressed.” He sat down across from me, making no secret of how his eyes ran over me in the skimpy maid’s outfit. “At least you have good taste in dinner clothing.”

  I groaned, then got a better idea. Keeping eye contact with him, I picked up my top piece of pizza – and slammed it right into my chest, leaving a huge red splotch on the black-and-white maid’s outfit.

  He sighed. “I guess I deserved that. Try to eat the rest instead of getting it all over my apartment, will you?”

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  After we managed to devour almost the entire pizza between the two of us, Sawyer stood up and disappeared around the corner again. “Any wine preference?” he called back to me.

  “Nope,” I shouted back to him. With my stomach stuffed to bursting with pizza, I felt much better about… well, everything. Yes, I was in a strange man’s apartment, had agreed to questionable employment with a known thief, and currently wore little more than a boudoir dress-up costume with a big marinara sauce stain on its middle. But with a full belly, it was hard to muster up the same level of concern as I’d felt earlier. Maybe things were going to be okay.

  Sawyer re-emerged from the kitchen with two wineglasses and a bottle. “I chose a nice Riesling,” he said, placing one glass in front of me and pouring a generous splash of yellow-clear liquid into it.

  I sniffed the wine, frowned. Took a sip, frowned deeper. “No, it isn’t,” I said once I swallowed. “It’s too oaky, not sweet at all. This has to be a Chardonnay, maybe a Pinot Grigio.”

  Sawyer grinned, placed the bottle on the table, but kept the label turned away from me. “From where?”

  Ah, so this was a test. I tasted the wine again. I’d never considered myself to be much of a wine aficionado, at least not based on taste. I liked drinking it too much for the buzz and the stress release – not for the flavor. But I’d hung around with enough snobs to pick up some tips, figure out the basics of competitive tasting.

  Step one was to identify the varietal. Another swallow convinced me that my initial instincts had been correct. Chardonnay.

  Step two was to describe it. This was my favorite part, because there weren’t really wrong answers. Smell it, taste it, name whatever associations came to mind. I’d once heard a sommelier describe a wine as containing strong notes of “exuberant horse,” and while it sounded ridiculous, it definitely gave me a memorable connection to the wine. “River rock, stone fruits, light oak, and just a hint of fresh cut grass.” I took another sip, remembered summers at the lake house when we arrived just after the gardeners had passed through the grounds.

  Step three was to name the region. This got tricky, and I’d seen surprisingly fierce arguments from wine snobs over the origin of a wine. “France,” I guessed. “Maybe in the Rhone River valley?”

  I looked up at Sawyer’s surprised expression. “A recent French Chardonnay,” he acknowledged, turning the bottle so I could see that my guess had been correct. “You might have some useful skills after all, honey.”

  “Honey?” I took another sip of wine. “Not a fan of the insulting little nickname.”

  “You’re right, it’s far too common.” Sawyer took a slow sip of his own glass, regarding me over its brim. “Okay, I’ll let you choose – from two that I pick.”

  This was going to be awful. “Fine.” I finished my glass of wine to bolster myself for what I suspected was coming.

  “First one. Percy.”

  “Percy?” I burst out, as he calmly refilled my glass with more wine. “You want to call me a boy’s name?”

  “It’s after Persephone, the daughter of Demeter and Zeus. You know the story?”

  “Let’s pretend that I don’t.”

  “Demeter tried to keep her daughter safe, but Hades, god of the underworld and the dead, stole her away.” Sawyer’s voice took on an oratory tone, as if lecturing to a class of students. “He fell in love with her, but she refused to marry him. He let her return to the surface world – but the other gods discovered that, while she was trapped in the underworld, she sucked on pomegranate seeds, and thus condemned herself to return to it. Zeus ruled that she had to spend three months in the underworld each year, and this is the origin of winter.”

  I thought about this. “So I’m the daughter who was stolen away. But I wasn’t stolen. I ran away on my own.”

  “As a professional thief, I’m preferring to go with ‘stole’,” he countered. “Your other option is Pom.”

  “Let me guess. After the pomegranate?”

  He pointed a finger at me. “Got it in one, Pom.”

  I sighed. “Better than Percy, I suppose. At least it could be taken as a girl’s name.” I finished the refilled wine glass, although I could already feel it starting to go to my head. I had a full belly, but it had been a long day, and the stress of my flight from my old life weakened my resistance to the alcohol.

  Sawyer refilled my glass again, and I frowned at him. “You’re going to get me drunk.”

  “I believe that I find out a lot about a person when they’re drunk.”

  “Well, if you’re hoping to find out more of what I look like, think again.”

  He looked flatly at me across the table. “You think very little of my self-control.”

  “But you’re a big, strong sort of guy, who takes what he wants. Like that guy’s watch.” If I could already feel the wine starting to work on me, would one more glass really hurt? I decided that it wouldn’t, and reached for the refilled glass. “You just took it. What if you decide to take me?”

  “Maybe you don’t need any more wine.” Sawyer was suddenly on my side of the table, reaching for the wine glass, but I jerked it away, trying to lift it to my lips before he could snatch it. I managed to get most of the wine into my mouth, although a fair amount splashed onto the already-dirtied maid’s outfit.

  “Oh no,” I burbled out as I swallowed the wine that made it to my mouth. “Now yo
u’ll have a reason to get me naked!”

  “Because all I needed was a reason.” I was pretty sure it was sarcasm, but what if I was wrong? He reached down, and I twisted as strong hands wrapped around me and lifted me from the chair.

  With a grunt, Sawyer hefted me up, carried me down the hallway towards the bedrooms. A spike of panic slowly bubbled up through the comforting blanket of fullness and drunkenness. What if he really was going to take advantage of me?

  The concern persisted as he laid me down on a soft horizontal surface, which I correctly identified after a few seconds as a bed. His hands moved to the back of my outfit, and I screamed as I felt him undoing the clasp at the top, pulling down the zipper on my back.

  My screams were muffled by the bedding, and I realized that there wouldn’t be anyone around to hear my calls for help. I twisted and tried to swing my fists at Sawyer. He’d taken me in, and now he thought he was entitled to do whatever he wanted to me? I was just the easy little runaway girl?

  “Ow!” the man grunted as I managed to connect with one flailing fist. “Damn it, woman, will you stop that? It’s hard enough to do this already with my eyes closed! I don’t need you slapping at me!”

  Eyes closed? I forced myself to stop swinging, looked up at him. He was a little blurry and spinning slightly, but he did seem to have his eyes closed. “Why?” I got out.

  “You’re going to get my sheets all covered in wine and tomato sauce,” he answered. “You’ve probably done it already. You know how much these cost? They’re silk!”

  “Well, that’s your fault,” I countered. I pushed his hands away and struggled with the outfit. “Keep your eyes shut.”

  “Fine. How is this my fault?”

  “You bought the sheets.” I finally managed to get the outfit’s straps off both my shoulders. With some grunting and wriggling, I fought it down over my hips. I kicked out erratically until I managed to free myself. “Here.”

  Sawyer reached out, a foot off, and I moved the outfit until it bumped against his hand. His fingers closed on it. “Great,” he said, still sounding a bit disgruntled. Maybe I’d hit him harder than I thought.