I had a ton of things to do before the end of day tomorrow. I needed to solidify the booking with Givenchy. I needed to make sure we had first class tickets to Abu Dhabi for next week. I needed to make certain that the samples Vogue had sent for their upcoming cover made their way back to NYC…

“À demain!” I called to Yvette. See you tomorrow. Yvette said something back, but it was muffled by the closed door of her apartment. I hit the elevator button and rode the elevator down to the lobby, thumbing through my texts and making sure I’d left everything in order. There was a text from Roz, checking in and letting me know that she’d be at her boyfriend’s tonight…

The elevator doors dinged open, and I stepped out.

“Have a good evening, Sarah!” called Phillipe from his position behind the front desk. I waved back, noting that Phillipe was in the midst of dealing with a customer. Whoa. Not a customer. Burke Tyler.

Burke looked up when Phillipe called my name, and he smiled at me, waving a friendly hand. My heart fluttered a bit, and I waved one back, feeling nervous and excited at the same time. What was he doing here?

Burke turned to say something else to Phillipe. The concierge nodded to him. Phillipe was not a small man, but Burke made him look tiny.

“On your way home?” asked Burke as I passed the desk. We were both heading for the door. God, he looked great, like he’d just come from a business meeting. He wore crisp black pants and a soft, blue, button-up shirt with a black silk tie. The sides of his head had been freshly shaved, and his braided Mohawk glinted gold beneath the dim lights of the hall.

“I was, yes. What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Dropping off a letter for your boss,” said Burke. “She’s not responding to texts, so I decided to go old school. Will that get her attention?”

A letter? I shrugged. “Maybe.” Luis wrote her letters all the time. They came to the apartment sealed with red wax – like he was some medieval lord writing his lady. It made me slightly queasy, to be honest. Burke Tyler didn’t seem to me like the kind of guy who wrote letters. But what did I know? In just the two short conversations I’d had with Burke Tyler, he’d upended every single idea I’d had of who he was.

“Maybe,” Burke repeated, frowning. “Is it, me, Sarah, or is Yvette an enigma?”

“It’s not you,” I said, pushing open the door and exiting out into the chilly April evening. “It’s part of her appeal. I’ve worked with her for three years. Even I don’t get her.” It was true. She was inconsistent. I had no idea what motivated her. In her more petulant moments, she was impatient, crabby, and sullen. She seemed to thrive on drama and strove to create it. In her brilliant moments, she was focused, friendly, funny, and magnetic. She refused to tolerate fools, cut past all bullshit, and understood the bottom line. She had a great mind for marketing, and she was her own best product.

“Hmmm,” Burke mused thoughtfully. He stopped and stared out across the street. While we were gradually coming out of the winter blackness, at 7 p.m., it was fully dark and the streetlights lit up Boston like stars floating in the night sky. God, I loved this city!

“Have you had dinner yet?” he asked suddenly, turning to me.

My stomach plummeted into my feet, and I swallowed. “No.” I shook my head.

“Come back to my place,” said Burke suddenly. “I want to talk somewhere where people aren’t going to be taking pictures of us.”

It wasn’t a request; it was a command, delivered with the confidence of a guy who knows you’re not going to say no. Ugh, why does that bullshit work? A part of me just melted, and my brain chose that moment to remind me of ESPN’s Body Issue: Burke Tyler, stark naked and chiseled, a football in front of his crotch. Eyes blazing and intense.

“Is that a good idea?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Burke looked at me as if I’d grown another head. “Sarah,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m not going to have my way with you on my kitchen table.” The graphic image that erupted before my eyes had me wet. I was in trouble.

“I just want to pick your brain…” Burke continued. Why was it guys just wanted to pick my brain? Was there something wrong with my body? I ran. I did Pilates. Burke was still talking. “I want to know more about Yvette. I’ve got lobster in my fridge. I’ll fry it up with some buerre blanc and scalloped potatoes? Who says no to potatoes?” His smile would have melted an iceberg.

“Okay,” I said, and I knew I sounded as dazzled as I felt.

Burke had parked in a nearby parking garage and, as we walked to his car, I asked him why he was dressed up. Apparently, one of his sisters was in town for a medical conference, which had culminated in a fancy dinner, and she’d asked Burke to be her date.

“Sister?” I asked.

Burke frowned. “I have four of them,” he said. “This is one of the middle ones…”

“And she’s a doctor?”

“Cardiothoracic surgeon,” he said. He fished his keys out of his pocket and hit the unlock button. A sleek, black SUV blazed to life in front of us. I tried to figure out what kind of car it was, but I wasn’t good with cars. It looked expensive.

Burke went to open the door for me, but I waved him off. “I’m not Yvette,” I said. “I can open my own doors.”

Burke shrugged and hopped into the driver’s seat, turning the key into the ignition and allowing the car to roar to life.

While he maneuvered the car out of the parking garage, I shot off a quick text to Roz, updating her on the latest turn of events. Not that I expected anything to happen between me and Burke Tyler. I took him at his word. He wanted to talk, and it was easier to do so in private. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to fantasize about all the things that might happen.

Honestly, was Yvette insane? Who said no to someone like Burke Tyler? He was just so large, so raw, and so masculine. And dressed like he was – God, I wanted to rip his tie off of him, tie him to my headboard and have my way with him. I smiled at that. I didn’t think Burke Tyler was the type to let a woman have her way with him. He was probably all about control…

“What’s got you grinning?” he asked, looking over.

“Nothing,” I lied. “Where do you live?”

I’d be dishonest if I said I calmed down on our ride to his place. In fact, I seemed to soak up every single detail, each one sending me into a continued state of excitement. Burke smelled incredible, and the car smelled like fresh leather, and I kept turning to look at the side of his face, so incredibly chiseled… Maybe I’d rewatched season four of Vikings just to see his cameo. He was like some sort of fantasy made reality: a Viking who’d stepped out of history and put on an expensive shirt and tie… I kept imagining what it might be like to take them off.

Burke lived near Downtown Crossing in one of the gargantuan new high rises. His place was on the very top. “Bought it before they’d even started construction,” he said as we rode the elevator up.

“You like penthouses?”

“I like heights,” he explained. “Boston’s a neat city. There aren’t that many skyscrapers. Here, I’ll show you.” The elevator came to a halt, and Burke had to turn a key for the doors to open. When they did, I saw why. The elevator opened into his living room.

“Wow,” I said. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Maybe something like Andrew’s apartment, with leather furniture and framed posters of football heroes. But Burke Tyler’s apartment was sumptuous. Where Yvette liked raw-edged modern furniture, Burke’s home was built for comfort. The main room was enormous, an open-floor concept with iron beams and high ceilings. The kitchen sat alongside the right wall, with the room opening up into a grand living room with bookshelves and an entertainment system, and beyond all of it was a huge wall of windows.

Burke didn’t give me much of a chance to look around. He strode toward the windows, and I followed in his wake. “There,” he said, pointing. “See?” There was a lot of light in Boston, but the moon was nearly full that evening and hung fat on the horizon, illuminating the black expanse of sea beneath. The Atlantic. He could see the Atlantic from this height. There were deeper spots of black, indicating the islands. I knew that in the daytime, this view must be spectacular.

“There’s a balcony out of the bedroom, too,” he explained. “So you can catch the sunsets in the west.”

“Amazing,” I said, meaning it.

“I’m going to get dinner started. Feel free to poke around,” he said, leaving me to stroll into the kitchen. The counters were black and white granite, and the appliances were all chrome. Burke loosened his tie and unbuttoned a few buttons on his shirt, revealing his thick, muscular throat and a white undershirt. My mouth went dry.

To distract myself, I turned my back on Burke and did as he’d said, exploring the living room and the formal dining room which sat just behind the wall of bookshelves. There were a ton of books on the shelves, and I investigated them. If you’ve seen Burke’s coffee commercials, or his Under Armour campaign, or any of his talk show appearances, you’d be shocked to discover that he read at all, let alone read books like Le Mort D’Arthur, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or L’Etranger. He had a few old books of maps, too. In fact, the only book that seemed to have anything to do with football was a coffee table book that sat on a wide, glass table next to a pot of sprawling vanilla orchids. Oh. My. God. Someone had turned his ESPN body issue spread into a coffee table book.

I resisted the urge to sit down on his creamy, white sectional and see which photos hadn’t made it into the magazine. Maybe I’d order myself a copy. It seemed somehow rude to ogle your host’s naked body while he was ten feet away making you dinner.

Burke was using the island to peel and slice potatoes. Behind him, a pot of water had been set to boil. “I feel like Belle when she enters the beast’s library,” I teased, sitting down at one of kitchen island stools. Fuck. Was I flirting again?

“Beast, Savage,” murmured Burke as he peeled. He looked up at me, his blue eyes staring into mine, mildly irritated. “You and yours boss are going to give me a complex.”

“I doubt it,” I said cheerfully. I was feeling incredibly giddy. I’d seen the dining room table and was having trouble not thinking about being bent over it, with Burke behind me.

“There’s a wine rack over in the corner,” he said, nodding toward where at least thirty bottles rested in a large, metal rack against the wall. “Pick one out.”

Bright white to go with lobster. I went to find a Sauvignon Blanc. There were glasses atop the wine rack, as well as a corkscrew, so I uncorked a bottle and poured us each a glass. He had good taste. The wine was crisp and refreshing,

I’d imagined him to be a beer guy, but with Burke Tyler, I was beginning to realize that appearances were incredibly deceiving. So deceiving that I wondered if they were intentional. Was he misleading the world on purpose? And if so, toward what end?

I shook my head.

“What is it?” he asked, raising a thick, blond brow at me with curiosity.

“You think Yvette’s an enigma,” I said. “Jeez. You’re on a commercial in which you yell ‘It’s party time!’ and leap into a pool, holding a cup of Dudley’s iced coffee, and I just found a first edition copy of East of Eden in your bookshelf.”

He grinned at me, shrugging. “Gotta give the people what they want.”

“Do you?” I murmured, taking a long sip of the wine.

“So, tell me about Yvette. What do you know? Tell me about her family. About her upbringing. Anything that might help…”

Right. I was here to talk about Yvette. I took a deep breath and launched into what I knew. I’m loyal to Yvette, so it’s not like I was revealing her deepest, darkest secrets. Besides, telling someone that she preferred white chocolate to dark chocolate wasn’t the same as telling him that she had a heart-shaped mole on the top of her left butt cheek. Yes. I’d seen it. She was a model. She was constantly in and out of clothes in my presence.

I told him about how she’d grown up in Swiss boarding schools and how she was entirely self-made. It seemed that, with each bit of information I gave, he seemed more and more interested.

We talked for about a half hour before the lobster was ready. Burke didn’t bother going to his dining room table. He joined me on the other stool so that we sat shoulder to shoulder. He poured us both another glass of wine.

“Where did you learn to cook like this?” I said, nearly passing out after my first bite of lobster. He’d cooked it perfectly and had splashed some of the wine into the butter sauce so that it was mellow and bright at the same time. The potatoes practically melted in your mouth.

“My dad’s a chef,” said Burke. “He owned a restaurant in Santa Barbara. Hired me throughout high school as a sous chef.”

“And you became a football player…”

“I’m six-foot-seven and run like I’m at least a foot shorter. I’m better at football than I am at anything else. And I’m damn good at other things.” He winked. My heart fluttered.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I said. He nodded.

“Why do you have a coffee table book that has forty-six nude photos of you?”

Two glasses of wine had made me bolder than I might have otherwise been, and Burke blinked before opening his mouth and roaring with laughter. When he stopped, he looked up, his eyes still sparkling with amusement. “Doesn’t everybody have a coffee table book of nudes?”

“Is it wrong of me to admit that I want to see them?” What was I doing? Oh my God! What was I doing?!

“Please,” said Burke, smiling, and we moved to the living room. I sat on the couch, grabbing up his book and flipping it open to page one. Burke sat closer, and his presence overwhelmed me, making it hard to breathe.

The first few photos in the book were ones that I’d seen before, shots that showed off both Burke’s sheer size and athleticism as well as his “happy idiot” public persona. But as I flipped through, I saw why most of these photos hadn’t made the magazine. In them, Burke was much more serious. His poses more threatening, more masculine, and more raw. Silence descended between us as I flipped through the photos, stopping on one in which Burke was posed like the famous Thinking Man statue. His head was rested in his hands, his muscles were bunched and enormous, and his tattoo was in full view, with its tree and its ravens. Wow.

Beside me, Burke was still, but his presence was a force I couldn’t ignore. I looked up at him to see that he was looking at me curiously. As if seeing me for the first time.

“I like this one,” I said, and I knew I sounded breathless. I watched his eyes track my tongue, and I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly very dry. I wanted to reach out and have another sip of wine, but I didn’t want to break the sudden, electric tension that charged the room.

“That tattoo is one of the most magnificent things I’ve seen,” I said, needing to fill the silence somehow. “Can I see it?”

Burke held my gaze as he nodded and unbuttoned his shirt one small white button at a time. He stripped it off and tossed his shirt on the ground. His white undershirt was sleeveless and stuck to the impressive ridges of his muscle. He turned, presenting his left arm to me so I could see the intricate detail of the tree and see the hunger in the ravens’ eyes as they circled. “What’s that?” I asked, looking at where there seemed to be an outline of a hanged man near the top of the tree.

“That’s Odin,” said Burke. “A Norse god. He sacrificed himself to the Tree of Life in order to be able to see into the future.”

He was so close that I could feel the warmth of his breath. His gaze was devouring me whole. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself as my hand reached out to trace the edges of his tattoo. He seemed to shudder slightly beneath my touch. Goosebumps rose beneath my fingers. I looked up in time to meet his eyes. Both of us stilled as a jolt of electricity seemed to arc between us.

I don’t know which one of us moved first, but suddenly, we were on each other. I was half in his lap, his arms banded about me, his lips pressing against mine with bruising force. Oh God, the kiss was incredible. I’ve never been so hungry for someone.

He stood, holding me tight to his chest and, free from the couch, my legs wrapped around him, our kiss deepening, our tongues tangling, and our teeth clashing in our frenzy. Oh God, I was burning up, burning from the inside out.

Breath left me in a whoosh as I hit the wall, held there by his chest. One arm caged me in; the other wound into my hair, pulling it from its usual braid. My hips ground into his, and the bulge that met them was almost frightening. Oh God, I wanted him so badly. I whimpered into his mouth, and he seemed to growl somewhere deep in his chest.

I nearly leapt out of my skin when something vibrated against my thigh. I gasped, breaking the kiss. Another vibration. Another. He looked at me, his lips raw. One eyebrow quirked in a question. It was my work phone. It was Yvette. Yvette – the reason why I was here tonight.

I hauled in one more, steadying breath and then pushed away. Burke’s hand encircled my waist. He placed me on the ground and took a step back.