I pulled out my digital camera and showed an amused Jack the shots I’d already managed to get in the limited time we’d had. There was the view of the beach as we drove up to the hotel, Sugar Loaf in the distance. The one really good, unobstructed view we’d had so far of the Christ the Redeemer statue in the distance. A lone pigeon pecking at some sort of wrapper on the sidewalk near the base of a streetlight pole and a few shots of Jack’s amazing hotel suite.
Oops.
I tried to flick past the shot of Jack, whom I’d snapped from the back as he leaned out over the balcony admiring the ocean view while I had been inside, also admiring the view.
“Hey, go back, go back. What’s this?”
“Do you want me to send you a copy?” I tried to dissemble, as he took the camera from me and clicked around to find the shot again.
And then I realized he was looking at me with those eyes, with that smile creeping around the corners of his mouth. “You can make a special edition of your photo essay just for me,” he finally said and advanced to the next shot, which was a broad view of the
avenida
we were sitting next to, featuring the sidewalks with their geometric-patterned tiles. The last photo in the series, I thought, taking the camera back…until I clicked the arrow one more time, thinking it would return me to the main menu, and saw a photo of myself trying on the red dress. In the picture, I had just come out of the dressing room and was turning and looking over my shoulder to find the mirror.
“We need to get moving. We still have some things to get done if we’re going to finish in time for a nap before the thing tonight,” he said.
He wasn’t looking, didn’t realize I’d seen the photo. It wasn’t a bad picture of my profile, actually, although I didn’t usually like photographs of myself. Resisting the urge to delete it, I turned the camera off and returned it to my tote bag.
“My friend Mario doesn’t still live in São Paulo, by the way,” Jack was saying. “He has a house about an hour and a half from here, up in the hills. I’m actually planning to spend next weekend there once the conference is over, see some sights, that sort of thing. You’re welcome to come too, he has plenty of room. Or you can just spend Saturday and Sunday at the hotel of course, either way. But you might even change your mind about Rio if you get away from the beach. Brazil is one of those places ecologists tend to like.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Rainforests. They’re pretty neat.” And my subsequent story about a two-week bird-tagging project in Costa Rica took us from the café back out onto the street, ignoring the charming sidewalk tiles and the colorful local flavor to chat about interesting creatures we had camped out to see and take notes on in our college days.
It wasn’t until Jack stopped at the swimsuit shop we’d been heading toward and looked across the street with a funny expression that I abandoned the conversation to follow his gaze. I nearly choked on suppressed laughter when I saw what he was looking at.
There, next to a formalwear rental place with tuxes in the window, was what by every indication appeared to be a kinky lingerie shop.
The window display featured torso mannequins sporting a range of apparel, from simple leather g-strings to fairly fetish-worthy bustier-and-garter sets. The
crotchless
black leather hipsters with little red hearts along the edges were my immediate favorite, possibly because I had a pair much like them only in satin, back at home.
If Jack hadn’t been there I would have been in that store like a speeding bullet, probably ignoring the panties and checking out what they had under the glass display counters I just knew were in there somewhere behind all the leather, lace and high-gloss latex. Would they carry lubes in interesting local flavors? Were Brazilian vibrators any different from American ones? Perhaps I owed it to myself to find out. Later. When I wasn’t shopping with my boss.
After a moment of awkward silence, Jack gave a little shrug and said a bit too innocently, “But you said you had
undies
in your carry-on bag, so you’re already all set.”
At my incredulous snicker he just grinned disarmingly and steered me back toward the swimsuit shop, where I tried not to act too shocked at the prices. Even with limited experience in converting the currency in my head, I could see this was going to be an expensive purchase. I was already deep into justifying that expense to myself. It was a special situation, after all—a girl doesn’t get to buy a bathing suit in Rio every day, and the suits were absolutely gorgeous.
“This isn’t on the company card
or
on you, by the way,” Jack murmured, startling me as I pored over a rack of suits that looked like they would be almost painfully complicated to put on. “In fact, can I get about a twenty-second suspension on the company’s very clear and excellent and appropriate sexual harassment policy to ask you something, Kate?”
He followed up quickly at my raised eyebrow. “It has absolutely no bearing on your work, which I wouldn’t ever call into question because it’s impeccable. You’re here because you’re good at what you do, and for no other reason. I don’t want you to think I had any ulterior motive in asking you to come to this thing instead of, say…well, anybody else. And your reaction can be just as off-the-record as the question. No harm, no foul. Okay?”
He looked so earnest, I ignored the huge neon sign in my mind that was flashing
DANGER, Katie Snow, DANGER!
Instead I just nodded. My mouth was too dry for me to say much of anything anyway.
“The thing is, we could go to a tourist-trap swimsuit place anywhere on the strand,” Jack explained, “and I’d hand you the company card and tell you to knock yourself out. I brought you here instead because I feel a little bad about the lost luggage. I mean, you didn’t even want to come to Rio in the first place, and now your clothes may be lost forever. So I wanted to get you something, a souvenir. I thought I could buy you a really great bathing suit to wear in Rio, since you need one anyway. It’s sort of the bathing suit capital of the world, so it seemed like a good memento. But I didn’t know how that sort of gift would be received. By you. And my twenty seconds is probably up now.”
He was offering to buy me a bikini worth a few hundred dollars, American, and he wondered how I would receive the gesture? I looked for my flashing neon sign but it was flickering out in a flood of hero-worship and rampaging hormones, egged on by travel fatigue. “I have absolutely no problem with that, Sir.”
Oops.
The “Sir” was possibly a bit much. “If anything, the comment about the lingerie store was more inappropriate than that, when you think about it. Although since you weren’t offering to buy them, I guess it didn’t really have the same impact.”
Jack smiled at me then,
really
smiled, and at that moment I would’ve gone along with him buying me a full kinky wardrobe of lingerie from the store across the road if he’d suggested it. My mother—who, fortunately for me, was not there—would probably have assured me that there was absolutely no difference between accepting underwear as a gift and accepting a bathing suit as a gift. She would have insisted that I should in no way consider it socially permissible to accept a present of this nature from a man who wasn’t my husband, in any case.
And I suspected Jack had a mother somewhere who would tell him the same thing about buying me such a thing, and would also have a thing or two to say about the type of woman who would receive that present and not fling it back in his face. But she wasn’t here either, and we were both exhausted from the flight, and my own swimsuit was somewhere between São Paulo and here, and it was
Rio
…
Fifteen minutes later I was the proud owner of the slinkiest black bathing suit ever constructed. Surprisingly, though it looked complicated, it had proved easy enough to put on. After I brought it out to the register, the salesgirl—who spoke a surprising amount of English. Maybe Portuguese wasn’t going to be needed here after all—started to get simpering and catty about Americans’ grooming habits, and where I could go to get a bikini wax. I adored the expression on her face when I calmly explained that I found even the typical Brazilian-style wax simply left too much hair for my taste.
It was a delicious moment because it was nothing but the truth. I had actually gotten into the habit of keeping the whole area completely clean-shaven about a dozen years earlier, when I was seventeen and terrified somebody might see a scrap of hair at a pool party or peeking out of my drill team uniform trunks. It did mean traveling with some fairly extensive shaving equipment at all times, but at least I never had to worry about embarrassing pubic hair sighting when I picked a swimsuit. The occasional ingrown hair, yes. Having to go to a strange bikini-waxing parlor in a country where I didn’t speak the language, no. It was a trade-off that seemed fair enough to me.
Jack, of course, was not privy to the bout of bitchiness over girly hair grooming practices. He had stepped up to the counter to pay for the suit only after all of that had transpired. More glee for me, because the snotty salesgirl clearly found him attractive but assumed he was mine since he was buying me a hot bathing suit, and his fluent Portuguese just messed with her anti-tourist mindset even more.
And then his hand was on my back again, and was it my imagination or did he wrap his fingers just a little bit farther around my waist? We wove our way through the pedestrian traffic and talked about possibly renting some scooters to check out some other sights the next day, since the actual conference sessions didn’t start until Monday.
When the crowd moved across the street, we moved along with it automatically and were soon back at the Copacabana Palace, retiring politely to our separate suites for our separate, much-needed naps.
Chapter Three
I hated the alarm that woke me. It was an absolute son of a bitch. Only my inability to find the snooze button on the unfamiliar device kept me from hitting it repeatedly. Well, that and realizing I had no choice but to get up right away if I wanted to have time to shower before the cocktail party. And walking around in eighty-degree weather might be small potatoes compared to Houston in the summer, but I still felt grungy after half a day of that. Not to mention the overnight flight that had preceded it. A shower was a clear necessity.
The prospect of my new dress got me going and I pushed myself into the shower, finding the instant heat and endless water pressure to be a pleasant surprise. The whole bathroom itself was a surprise, really, inasmuch as it was clad from floor to ceiling in pink granite, with high-end fixtures and a tub that could probably fit three. The Brazilian notion of “business class” clearly outstripped the paltry American view of what people at a work-related conference required for comfort. I promised myself a long bath later, sticking to the glass shower enclosure for now and trying to hurry despite how fantastic the heavily thrumming water felt on my back and shoulders.
At last, with my hair tucked into a dampish, messy, silk-frilled bun and wearing the least makeup I thought I could get away with—which was still about twice as much as I ever wanted to wear—I presented myself at Jack’s door and knocked politely, heart suddenly pounding in my throat. Why was I nervous? I saw the man every day of the week at work. Of course, he didn’t buy me bathing suits every day of the week.
Oh. And he didn’t come to work looking or smelling anything like
this
either. He looked like he’d just strolled off a yacht, and he smelled…exotic. Spicy, heady…really almost edible. If he wore that scent to the office he’d never be able to walk around, the floor would just be covered with swooning women.
“What do you think?” he asked casually, rubbing his face and sniffing his hand, then smiling in a purely friendly way as he walked me to the elevator. “Too much? Too girly? I got it at the gift shop downstairs, mine was in my big suitcase.”
“Hmmm? Oh. No, not too girly.”
Heavenly, sexy, dizzying, complex, lust-inducing. Do you mind if I just bury my nose in your neck and smell you, maybe take a few tiny nibbles?
“It’s very nice.”
“Good. Hey, you look nice, by the way. I wouldn’t normally say anything, because of the whole sexual harassment thing, but I figure you’d want to know.”
“Thanks,” I chuckled. “That’s okay, you can feel free to reassure me that I look nice, and also please tell me if I have toilet paper dragging from my shoe or anything like that. I mean, you’re the only one I know here.”
That last part turned out to be not quite true, as it happened. When we got down to the poolside bar area where the early arrivers were meeting for cocktails, I saw no less than three colleagues I knew slightly from previous conferences or through work. Two of the women I recognized swept me into their conversation immediately. Much to my relief, actually. I knew I couldn’t spend the whole evening talking only to Jack, and I had never been good at mingling.
“Isn’t that Jack Benedict? Your boss, right?” one of the ladies asked, trying not to eye him too obviously as the three of us walked toward the bar. “I heard about the re-org, by the way. Congratulations.”
“I admit I’d rather still be in the field,” I said, reaching for a fruity drink with an umbrella in it. “But I can’t complain, and it isn’t like I had any conferences in Rio in my old position.”
“I just got lucky,” our other colleague said. Jane, was that her name? I wasn’t sure if I knew her too well for it to be embarrassing to ask at this point. “My boss was supposed to come, but his wife is about nine and a half months pregnant and evidently she pitched a huge fit about him leaving the country. So here I am.”
I explained the amazing coincidence, that my own attendance here was pregnancy-related as well. “It’s Jane, right? I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names. I think we sat next to each other at some session on cleanup at OTC.”
Jane flicked her streaked blonde hair over her shoulder with a laugh. “That’s okay, we should all do introductions. I admit I can’t remember either of
y’all’s
names. Sorry, sorry!” She giggled at the other girl, who wore a look of mock affront.