Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect by M. J. Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

given me.
    Inside the manila envelope was a manuscript printed out on three-hole paper with shiny brass brads holding the heavy load together.
    The paper smelled clean and inky, a pristine copy. It must have been printed within the past twenty-four hours, because usually the smell of ink didn’t last any longer. There was another scent on the paper, too. But I wasn’t sure what it was. I shut my eyes and breathed it in. Menthol. Faint, but persistent.
    For Love or Money
by Cleo Thane
    Chapter One
     
    The room is in a five-star hotel. It could be any one of the luxury hotel rooms in any one of a dozen cities in the United States that have such hotels. At least four hundred dollars a night. Sometimes five hundred. Often six hundred. And so the rug is thick and the linens on the bed are from France or Italy and have thread counts as high as the cost of the room.
    It is nighttime. The only light in the room comes from the lamp on the desk. The drawn curtains hang, heavy and rich, and their hems pool on the floor.
    The wallpaper is pale blue with a slight diamond pattern. The furnishings are ornate and gilded. The man is about forty-two years old. He has dark hair, slicked back, and a slightly receding hairline. He is in decent shape. You can tell because he is practically naked. His arms are muscled—he probably plays tennis every weekend and goes to the gym at least twice a week. And with his arms pulled above his head, the muscles are bulging against the awkward position. His chest is broad. Good skin. A slight tan. You are surprised that he is good-looking, aren’t you? She isn’t. She wets her lips, not to be purposely provocative but because she needs them to be wet, and then she leans down and puts her face very close to his, so close that if he reached up he could kiss her. But they are not playing at romance. This is seduction. And there is a difference.
    “Wet enough?” she asks him.
    He shakes his head no.
    She lubricates her lips more.
    “Now?”
    He nods.
    “Don’t move.”
    “I won’t.”
    “No, you won’t. If you do, you know I’ll stop.”
    He nods again. But he does move, he stretches out his legs just a little against the ties constraining his ankles.
    The man who is tied up is waiting for her to put her lips on his nipples and suckle him. First he feels the tips of her hair tickle the smooth skin of his chest. He wants to arch up, to get her mouth on him sooner, but he knows that if he does she will stop. And he doesn’t want that.
    The sound of her wet lips on his skin is the melody he is paying her to play. It fills his ears. He shuts his eyes. Her tongue swirls on his skin, her teeth pull at him, taking small nibbles. The muscles in his back are pulled tight and he can feel the heat moving from his fingers, toward his elbows, toward his chest and traveling down, meeting the heat that is traveling up his legs. Everything converges dead center in his body at his erection.
    Her hair is fanning his chest now. She raises her face to him and shows him how she is licking her lips once more and then she bows down again before him to take his other nipple in her mouth.
    She sucks on it as if she is a baby and starving and he does not even realize, so focused is he on her sucking, that milk of another kind does flow from him, spurting out, arcing over his body, wetting his chest, and her arm and the back of her neck.
    She feels it and lessens her hold on his nipple. Slowly she straightens up, still smiling. There is an art to disengagement.She does not just stand up the minute the man has ejaculated and say, “Well, that’s done now, so I’ll be taking off.”
    She finesses the rest of the encounter without breaking the fictive dream. She is a poet, and even if she is writing disturbing poetry full of putrefied images that make some people want to vomit, she has to finish the poem. She has to complete the last stanza.
    After all, this man has paid for this evening in this chic hotel. And he has been