“Did you see that?”
“What?” I was having difficulty focusing on anything but the erect nipples peeking out of her thin shirt, if I was being honest.
“Those two guys,” Bianca pointed to two suits sitting on a park bench along the paved walkway about forty feet from where we were sitting on the grass. It was the first time I’d stepped foot on the Great Lawn in Central Park since I was a kid. Although I had a spectacular view of it from my apartment, on most days I didn’t find the time to look out at it.
“What about them?”
She lifted her chin in the direction of an old lady who was several feet on the walk past the two men. “That lady almost tripped and fell on her face.”
“And it’s their fault?”
“The one on the left has his legs stretched so far out, there’s barely room to pass. That walk is only about three feet wide, and his legs are taking up thirty inches of it.”
“He’s tall. I doubt it was his intention to trip an old lady.”
“Maybe not. But that’s the trouble with that type of guy. He doesn’t have common courtesy for the people around him. He’s only aware of things that have a direct impact on him. I bet if a woman with tight yoga pants and a big rack walked by, he would’ve moved his legs because he was interested in the view.”
“I think you might be a bit pessimistic of the entire suit-wearing population.”
“Nope.” Bianca unwrapped her lunch as she spoke. We’d picked up burgers and fries at some deli I’d passed a million times and never stepped foot into before today. “There is a direct correlation between the net worth of a man and his manners. The higher the tax bracket, the worse his etiquette.”
“I think you’re exaggerating. Where’s your research to support such a bold conclusion, Ms. Finance Times?”
She reached into her cardboard cup of fries inside a small white bag and pulled one out. Waving it at me, she said, “I’ll show you my research. You up for a bet?”
“That depends on what I stand to lose?”
She took a bite of her fry and smirked. “You already know you’re going to lose, huh?”
“I didn’t say that. But I like to know all the facts before I jump into anything.”
“Sure you do, chicken.”
I laughed. “What’s the wager, smart ass?”
“I bet I can make that suit move his legs without even asking.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“Is it a bet?”
I was intrigued. “Tell me the prize.”
She thought for a moment. “If I win, you have to drive me back to my apartment on the back of your tandem bike with my feet up.”
“And what happens if you lose?”
“I’ll pedal, and you can sit in the back and relax.”
I was six foot one and a hundred and ninety-five pounds. She couldn’t have been more than one-ten soaking wet. There was no way I was going to let this woman pedal me around town. “I’ll tell you what, if you win, I’ll drive you wherever you want to go with your feet up. But if you lose, you have dinner with me. And I’m taking you to a nice restaurant filled with men in expensive suits.”
She seemed to like that bet. Holding out her hand, she said, “You’re on. Be prepared for a good workout this afternoon.”
I wanted to give her a good workout, but it had nothing to do with a damn bicycle.
She stood and dusted off the grass from her hands. “Can I borrow your sweatshirt?”
I’d had a hoodie with me when I went to the gym. Since it was beautiful out, I tucked it into one of the two carrying bags on the back of my new messenger bike. Her purse and heels were in the other one. She’d exchanged her sexy sandals for a pair of flip flops that were in her bag before she’d hopped onto the back of the bike.
Bianca pulled a ponytail holder from her purse and tied her long hair back into a knot. Then she proceeded to slip on my sweatshirt and zip it all the way to the top before pulling up the hood.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to walk past those suits and show you they won’t even notice that I almost trip.”
“And you need to be incognito for that?”
She pulled the sweatshirt all the way down so it covered her ass. The thing hung to her knees. “I’m covering up my assets.”
“You do have some pretty distracting assets.”
With a dark sweatshirt four sizes too big covering her body and a hoodie pulled tightly over her head to hide her beautiful face, she took off, jogging back a bit and then entering the concrete path. When she reached the two suits, she pretended to trip. One guy looked up for a brief second and then kept right on talking. Damn if they weren’t making the rest of us look bad.
Smiling like she’d already won, Bianca strutted back to where we were sitting. She immediately began to take off the sweatshirt as she spoke. “See. Rude. No manners. The one who didn’t even look up, probably has a view of the park from his living room.”
It probably wasn’t the time to mention I lived on Central Park West and had a view from my living room and bedroom. Which reminded me, where the hell would I even take her if she told me she’d come home with me later? Jay, the bike messenger, wouldn’t be able to afford the closet in my place.
Once Bianca had my sweatshirt off, she began to unbutton a few extra buttons on her own blouse. While before, I had to imagine what was beneath the silk, now she was flaunting perfectly tanned skin and a healthy amount of cleavage. I wondered if she was wearing a push up bra or her tits were that perfectly round.
“That’s stacking the deck a little, isn’t it?”
She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and fluffed it up, then reached into her bag and pulled out a bright red lipstick. “It shouldn’t matter who walks by.”
When she was done, she took off her flip flops and grabbed her sexy heels from the bag, putting them on. Then she turned to me. “Ready?”
I leaned back on my elbows to enjoy the show. I didn’t really give a shit what the two suits did, but I was liking watching Bianca strut her stuff a hell of a lot. “Go for it.”
Just like before, she walked a bit down the grass before entering the walkway. Her hips swayed from side to side as she placed one foot in front of the other. Right before she reached the suits, she dropped the elastic band that had been in her hair to the ground. She turned, bending dramatically at the waist, and gave the two men a perfect view of her very fine ass. The one with the outstretched legs definitely noticed. Bianca stood, turned to look my way with a cheeky grin on her face, and took a few more steps. About three feet before she reached the bench, the suit pulled his legs in so she could pass.
He also followed her ass the rest of the way as she walked back to where we were sitting.
“Cute. Very cute.”
“I think I need to make a few stops on the way home and pick up some things,” she gloated.
“Let me guess. Bricks?”
She laughed. I loved that she just slipped off her shoes and sat in the grass without giving a shit that she might get dirty. I was pretty sure the last time Caroline’s feet touched the grass, it was for a photo shoot, and she probably made one of the cameramen carry her.
My cell vibrated in my pocket. It had been doing it the entire time we rode around the city and picked up lunch, but Bianca hadn’t noticed it from the back of my tandem with the sounds of the city all around us.
“Is that your phone?”
“Apparently so.”
“I thought you didn’t have a phone on you? That’s why you couldn’t give me any light to find mine when I’d dropped it?”
Shit.
“I didn’t have it on my person because I’d forgotten it in the messenger bag on my bike when I went up to do my delivery.”
“Oh.”
My phone buzzed again.
“Don’t you have to answer it?”
“It can wait.”
“Are you the only messenger? Or is it a big company?”
“There are a few of us.” Pick up shovel, dig yourself deeper, Jay, you dick.
She squinted. “You’re being vague. Most men jump at the opportunity to talk about their success.”
“Maybe my company is extremely successful, and I don’t want to scare you away thinking I’m one of those rich men you seem to dislike so much.”
“I don’t dislike people because they have money. I dislike them because of what having the money does to them. It seems to cause a warp in priorities and make them think the world revolves around them.”
“So you wouldn’t necessarily eliminate an extremely wealthy man from your list of potential suitors just because of his wealth, then?”
“Potential suitors?” She chuckled. “Now you sound like the assholes I went to grad school with at Wharton.”
“You went to Wharton?”
“Yes. Don’t sound so shocked. Girls with brains use obscene four letter words and their bodies to win bets, too, you know. How about you? Did you go to college?”
I couldn’t very well tell her I’d gone to Harvard, so I added another lie to the growing pile. “I went to state school. It was what my parents could afford.” It wasn’t a total lie. My parents could afford state school—to buy one…the grounds, the professors, the entire university, for that matter.
We sat on the grass for another hour eating our lunch and shooting the shit. The woman intrigued me on so many levels, and I wanted to know more about what made her tick. “So what do you do in your spare time, aside from hustling men in bets on the Great Lawn?”
“Well, I work a lot. You already know I’m a writer for Finance Times, but I also freelance for a few other business magazines. So sometimes I’m traveling on weekends for assignments. When I am home, I’m usually out. I’m a foodie. I like to try different ethnic places to eat with my friend, Phoebe. We’ve been on a Vietnamese kick lately. The last place we went to, I have no idea what I ate because we were the only two who weren’t Asian in the place, and no one really spoke English. Other than that, I volunteer at Forever Grey on most Sunday mornings. It’s a nonprofit that rescues retired greyhounds that their racing-obsessed owners discard when they can’t run fast enough anymore. The dogs are beautiful and smart and need to be exercised, so I take two out for a run whenever I can.”
“That’s very nice of you.”
She shrugged. “It’s good therapy for the dogs and for me.”
“Do you have a dog yourself?”
“I’d like to, but my building doesn’t allow dogs over ten pounds. And I’m not really a small dog kind of person. Plus, with all my travel, it wouldn’t be fair to have an animal cooped up in my small place. Since I left the stock market, my lifestyle has taken a hit—starting with a reduction in my square footage. My old place had a closet bigger than where I live now. What about you? What do you do for fun?”
My life for the last six months pretty much consisted of working eighty hours a week, going to mundane social engagements that my work required, and occasionally fucking Caroline when she was in town. All of which, Jay, messenger boy extraordinaire, could not reveal to Bianca. And so—I dug even deeper.
“My business keeps me pretty busy. I have some employees but the company is only a few years old, and we’re still in the building stages. I try to hit the gym five days a week, and…” I needed to come up with something so it sounded like I had some interests. Unfortunately, when I reached into my bag full of decent lies for another, all I came up with was a handful of lint. So, I said the first thing that popped into my head. “I also whittle.”
“Whittle?”
“Yes, whittle. You know, the ancient form of woodcarving. I carve various things from wood.”
What the fuck? Hiking or distilling couldn’t have popped into my head first? I didn’t know the first thing about wood. Well, not that type of wood anyway.
Bianca looked amused. “That’s not something I hear too often—whittling. What kind of things do you make?”
“Ah. I can’t tell you that on the first date.” I winked. “Just know I’m good with my hands, and you have some impressive wood to look forward to seeing in the future when we go out again.”
“When, not if, we got out again?” She questioned with a raised brow. “You’re rather sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“I like to think of myself more as persistent. I may be just a simple messenger, but that doesn’t mean that I let something stand in my way when I know what I want.”
The afternoon flew by, and I hated that I had to end things, but my four o’clock appointment had flown in from London last night. I couldn’t very well abandon him as I had done with my entire afternoon of responsibilities. Not to mention that my secretary had been blowing up my phone with a string of urgent messages for more than an hour.
I reluctantly pedaled Bianca back to her apartment. Being a woman of her word, she didn’t provide one ounce of assistance in toting her ass halfway up town. Even though I was in tip-top shape, I was sweating and winded by the time we made it to her apartment.
I wiped my brow with my sweatshirt after parking the bike. “You really didn’t lend a hand at all on that ride.”
She smiled. “Nope. A bet’s a bet, and you lost.”
I was starting to think what I’d lost was my goddamn mind. “When can I see you again?”
“Are you going to pick me up on your bicycle?”
“Does that matter?”
“No. I just wanted to know what I should wear.”
“Wear something sexy.” I took a step closer into her personal space, testing the waters. She didn’t back up.
“Where would we go?”
“Wherever you want.” I’d been dying to touch her all day, but mauling her in the park or stopping in traffic to take her mouth wasn’t exactly the vibe the afternoon was giving off. But now that we were standing in front of her building and it was just the two of us, I was done resisting. Her hair was windblown from the ride, so I reached out to smooth it down and let my palm linger on her jaw so my thumb could stroke her cheek. “Name it. I’m game for anything.”
“How about Ethiopian food?”
“Done.” I leaned in closer. “Anything else you want?”
Her eyes drop to my lips.
Right answer.
Just as I was about to bring my mouth down to finally meet hers, something caught her attention behind me. I turned and watched an elderly woman attempting to get out from the cab.
“That’s Mrs. Axinger,” Bianca said. “She lives across the hall from me.”
I wanted to ignore the woman getting out of the car and go back to what I was about to do, but I couldn’t. She looked like she might fall, and the damn cabbie wasn’t about to help. I groaned, but headed to help the woman. Bianca followed right behind me.
“Hi, Mrs. A. This is my friend, Jay.”
I took the woman’s arm and helped her out of the cab and up the tall curb. Once she was steady, I lifted her grocery bag from the seat and carried it behind her and Bianca as they walked to the door.
“Bianca, dear, do you think you can give me a hand getting a box from the top of my closet? I’m afraid to climb up on a chair, and I want to ship some pictures to my son out in California.”
“Sure, of course. I told you to knock anytime you need anything. I’ll help you put these groceries away and get whatever you need down.”
After I opened the door and we were all standing in the lobby, Bianca gave me an apologetic look. “Call me?” she asked.
Begrudgingly, I dug my phone out of my pocket and handed her my cell so she could put in her number. When she was done, we swapped the phone for the small bag of groceries I was still carrying.
I couldn’t very well suck her face while Mrs. A. was watching, so when the elevator door opened, I leaned in and kissed her cheek. “It was very nice meeting you, Bianca. I’ll call you.”
“I look forward to it.”
I waited until the elevator doors closed before heading back to my bike. As I walked, I looked down at the phone number she’d typed in. She had also left me a message.
Bianca: Whittle me something small and you’ll get that kiss you were screwed out of next time.
Great. Just fucking great. After I rode my bicycle back to my multi-million-dollar company, I was going to have to learn how to whittle.