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The Hotel Room — Sloane’s POV

A scene too hot for Amazon — from Her Plus-One Problem by Aurora North

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Preview

Sloane had a rule about hotel rooms.

The rule was simple, honed over four years of entering them with people who weren’t hers and leaving before the sheets cooled: don’t get invested. Read the body. Deliver the experience. Make them feel extraordinary. Walk away with the envelope and the professional satisfaction of a job done well, and do not — under any circumstances — lie awake afterward thinking about the sounds they made.

Naomi Blake was breaking every clause of that rule, and they hadn’t even made it past the minibar.

The woman was standing by the window doing the thing she always did when she was nervous — organizing. Adjusting the curtains. Cataloguing the minibar. Issuing logistics in that clipped, controlled voice that made boardrooms fall silent and made Sloane want to pin her to the nearest flat surface and find out what happened when the control ran out.

“There’s — the minibar has — if you want —”

Sloane closed the door. Leaned against it. And watched.

This was the part of her job she was best at: the read. Every client had a frequency — a combination of desire and anxiety and need that broadcast from their body language like a radio signal if you knew how to tune in. Most clients were easy to read. Uncomplicated. They wanted to feel powerful, or wanted, or young, and Sloane dialed the experience accordingly.

Naomi’s frequency was something Sloane had never encountered.

She wanted to surrender. That was the signal — underneath the composure, underneath the charcoal suits and the metronomic stride and the voice that could fillet opposing counsel at fifty paces. Naomi Blake wanted, desperately and furiously, to stop being in charge. To have someone else take the wheel. To be handled instead of handling, just for one hour, in one room, where no one was watching and no one was keeping score.

And she was terrified of it. The terror was the other half of the signal — the static that ran under the desire, the white noise of a woman who’d been in control so long she’d forgotten there was another setting.

Sloane could work with terror. She could gentled it, redirect it, metabolize it into pleasure. That was the craft. That was the skill set she’d spent four years honing until it was second nature.

What she could not work with — what was currently making her pulse do things that were professionally inadvisable — was the fact that she wanted this one.

Not wanted-as-performance. Not wanted-as-professional-investment. Wanted. The basic, artless, inconvenient kind that started between her hips and radiated outward until her fingertips hummed with it. She’d been wet since the elevator — since Naomi had said I know exactly what I’m asking for with that rough Philly edge cracking through the corporate veneer, and Sloane’s body had responded before her brain could intervene.

This was a problem. This was, professionally speaking, a five-alarm problem. Wanting a client was an occupational hazard she’d navigated before — you spent enough time in proximity to attractive people doing intimate things and occasionally your body got confused about the boundaries. But she’d always been able to file it, manage it, maintain the membrane between the performance and the person.

With Naomi, there was no membrane. There was just a woman standing by a window, trying to organize a minibar she didn’t need, radiating a want so intense it was practically audible, and Sloane standing by a door thinking I am going to take you apart and I’m going to mean every second of it and that is going to be a problem tomorrow.

“Naomi,” she said.

Naomi turned. Backlit by Manhattan. Still in the burgundy gown, still in the armor, still holding herself with the rigid posture of a woman who’d rather fracture than bend.

“Come here.”

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