What the hell am I doing here?

I ask myself that for the thousandth time tonight as I scan the room.

As Seth promised, there are more gorgeous women here than you can shake a stick at. All of them are scantily clad and doing their best to impress the men. The top-shelf liquor is flowing, the best Cuban cigars are out, and soft jazz music is playing. Surrounded by everything I love; I should be in my element.

I take a gulp of my scotch and lean against the bar, surveying my surroundings. It’s smoky and dark and every face has a look on it that’s contemplating sin. Seth drones in my ear like he’s trying to sell me something, which is what he’s best at—Jesus Christ does he ever shut up? He keeps pointing out possible options—massive set at 2 o’clock, legs-for-miles at 3 o’clock, like I’m blind and need the help.

“I got it,” I say, crunching on ice miserably.

“Well, then. Just pick one,” Seth says with a laugh. “You can’t go wrong here.”

I give him a look. I’m about to lay down an obscene amount of money on a gorgeous woman. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong, where money, sex, and duplicity intermingle. Right now, all of those possibilities are teeming inside my head. Seth hasn’t the same worries I do—the most he has to concern himself with is his wife Vivian finding out. He’s been to the Suitor’s Club on the Upper West Side of New York City a dozen times. Each time, he’s paid upwards of five-figures for a high-priced woman to spend the night with. These women are advertised as the upper echelon of the gene pool, and have to go through a very strict vetting process to qualify as Suitors Mistresses.

According to Seth, it’s worth it.

But though it’s well-travelled terrain for Seth, it’s new territory to me. I’ve never had the need to pay for the company of an alluring woman. I haven’t ever suffered in that regard. Gorgeous women usually submit willingly to me, without my so much having to lift a finger. Until now, a place like this was unnecessary.

No, my problem, and the reason I’m here, is because where I have a hard time shaking them off me, once I’ve gotten what I need. Most women just don’t seem to understand the meaning of no-commitment. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it. Relationship doesn’t even make an appearance on my priority list, because . . . no. Not interested.

And I only need this woman for one, maybe two months. Not for sex, although I’ll be fine if that happens. No, I need this woman for something much more important.

And thus, she has to be perfect.

The type of woman that would make people believe that I, Max Winchester, the city’s most notorious playboy, gave up singledom for her. Yes, I need a fiancé. She has to be beautiful, and sweet, and . . . a goddamn magician, honestly.

Because a woman like that doesn’t exist.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. I only have to convince my family. My stodgy old father, who’s on his deathbed, and my sniveling younger brother Dan. They’re the ones I need to fool in order to get this plan to work.

“So?” Seth asks for the hundredth time. “Haven’t you found one?”

“No,” I say flatly.

He laughs. He’s on his third scotch and his eyes are glassy, so I know he’s drunk. Seth is a sloppy drunk, a clumsy drunk, and if he has one more, it’ll be embarrassing to be seen with him.

He’s told me there are rooms upstairs, should I want to partake of the services of a woman right now, and I know he’s frequented those rooms, since he’s been married for twelve years and can count on what happens within these walls as being discreet. “No? Are you freaking blind?” He points at a woman with dark hair who’s been giving me eyes from across the room since I came in. “Her?”

“Too sexy.”

He raises an eyebrow. “How is that possible?”

“She has to be wife material. Remember?”

He shrugs. “Just put her in a cardigan.”

I shake my head. The woman looks world-weary, and I’d think she was up to no good even if she was in a nun’s habit.

“What about that one?”

Now he points at a blonde in a slinky red dress. She’s the epitome of a blonde joke; I can already tell there’s nothing between those vacant blue eyes. “She has to be able to carry on a conversation, Seth. And not giving away the whole thing would be a major plus.”

“Geez, no wonder you’re still single.” He shakes his head. “You’re looking for a fake fiancé, dude. A fake one. You don’t have to marry her.”

I point at a woman with hair so sprayed it’s crusty, thick make-up, and a skirt so short that you can almost see her ass. Hot, definitely. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, but that’s not what I’m here for. “You really think I can get someone like her to pass as my fiancé? My family will never buy it. I need to find the right type.”

He snorts. “You don’t have a type. If it’s a hot piece of ass, you’re in, as long as you don’t have to see her again.”

That much is true. I consider myself a connoisseur of women. I have experienced many of them, and I know a good one when I see her, but with my vast knowledge of them, I don’t think I’ll be satisfied with a single one. It’s simply impossible to find everything I want in just one woman. And I’ll never grow weary of trying new flavors.

He goes through nearly a dozen more women, all of them, in one way or another, sub-par. They look like they belong at a place like the Suitors Club, like they’ve been to rodeos like this all their lives. It’s boring. Predictable. A let-down.

Then he downs his drink, pulls out his phone, and says, “Well, I’m not letting you spoil my fun. I’m getting mine before she gets away.”

I watch as he brings up the Suitors Club match app. He types in a number and the picture of a woman comes up. It’s the vacant blonde. Unsurprising. Seth always did have a thing for blondes, considering how he always hired blonde assistants. Until recently, he’d been content to fuck them, but then one of them went stalker on him and Seth’s wife nearly found out. Since then, he’s been using the Suitors Club regularly.

I can’t say I approve of what he does behind Vivian’s back. I think if you make an investment, you stick with it. You make your bed, you accept responsibility and lie in it. My best friend is a dog, the textbook example of why I will never make that investment. All he ever does is complain about how torturous marriage is, the worst mistake of his life. But does he seek out a divorce? No. Because, he says, it helps him look “stable” to colleagues.

I’d rather be unstable. I hadn’t found playboy moniker to affect my business opportunities in the least.

Well, until now.

The woman he’s selected already has three bids placed on her and is up to twenty-thousand dollars for the night. He ups it to twenty-five, a drop in the bucket for my Senior Vice President of Accounts, and grins when he presses submit.

“Well, Max, I guess you’re SOL. You’ll have to kiss the top dog spot of Winchester Properties goodbye and start getting really good at kissing your younger brother’s ass.”

He starts making kissing noises in my ear, like a fucking preschooler, and I shoo him away.

Hell, no. I’m the one who has built Winchester Properties up from the ground. Not Dan. He may have the pretty wife and kids, but he doesn’t have the balls for this business. I deserve to be CEO because I made it a multi-billion-dollar corporation. I may not be everything my father wanted, but I’m the one with the business sense, not him.

Fuck stability.

I look around, praying someone will save me. I do not do desperation. But right now, the collar of my Armani dress shirt feels tight, choking me.

If I don’t have a date for the weekend, one who can reasonably pass off as my fiancé to that sniveling brother of mine who just arrived in town last night, I will lose my company.

Seth’s phone buzzes. I look over his shoulder as he checks the message. BID ACCEPTED. He pumps his fist and rubs his hands together. “Time to make some magic happen,” he says, leaning in to pat my cheek, but I flinch and grab his hand before he can make contact, holding it there. “Don’t wait too long. If you do, all the best ones will be taken.”

I wave him away. Alone in the bar now, I finally have a chance to think without his constant blabbering.

My life has pretty much been shit every since the news of my father’s lung cancer had been delivered, two months ago. He’s rarely gone a day without a cigar, so I can’t say it was a surprise. By the time he was diagnosed, it’d progressed to stage four, because he was always nose-to-the-grindstone and didn’t have time for doctors. When he got the diagnosis, they told him he had three months left, if he was lucky. Right then, he started getting his affairs in order, and what was the first thing out of his mouth?

Not, Max, you’ve served me so well, tripled our business over the past three years. You should be CEO.

No. Instead, he looked at me and said, the person who runs this company should be married.

Just like that.

Which meant, of course, The person who runs this company should be Dan.

And then, he asked me to call my little brother, Dan, the owner of a tiny, nothing Ergonomics consulting outfit on the west coast, who’d been living a quiet life with his postcard-perfect family, and tell him that he had “an important business proposition” to discuss with him.

Right. Like a stupid ma-and-pa shop designing ergonomically-friendly offices is even close to being on the level of what Winchester Properties is. Winchester Properties is not only one of Manhattan’s top real estate development companies, it’s also one of the fastest-growing companies in the entire nation. And who’s responsible for that?

Not California Dan, that’s for sure.

When I’d blanched, my father, the asshole, the man who’d never been there for me growing up and had been the antithesis of the family man . . . laughed at me. Long and hard. He laughed, a big belly laugh that I didn’t know the dying man had in him, and said, “What’s that? Your life flashing before your eyes? It should be, boy. Life isn’t just business. It took me too long to realize that.”

Fuck that. The business may be my life, but I make plenty of time for other things. Women, fine cigars, fine drink. I have a life, one I’m very content in. I just haven’t found anything that excites me as much as bringing in a new multi-million-dollar deal.

I like money. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I drain my glass and order another scotch. My second only. I figure I’ll have another drink, and a cigar, before calling this night an utter waste.

It’s as I’m handing my American Express to the bartender that I notice her. She has light brown hair, tied up in a ponytail, and isn’t voluptuous, but she isn’t skinny either. She’s talking to her friend, a dark-haired girl who must be a regular, and looking around the place like she made a wrong turn. She’s sipping a soda through the stirrer straw and pulling on the hem of her skirt. It’s short, but not eye-poppingly so. I can tell she’s not used to wearing skirts like that.

Now, this girl stands out.

She’s sunshine. Rainbows. I could definitely see her as a wife. Not my wife, but someone’s wife. What the hell is she doing here?

I find myself staring at her, my cock twitching to attention. She doesn’t notice me. In fact, she might be the only woman in this place who hasn’t. Instead, her eyes are doing an Indy 500 around the place. She’s nervous. I lean forward, studying her sad, dark brown eyes, her full pink lips. She’s pretty, yes, not classically so, but someone I can’t help but want to know more about. What brought her here? Why is she blushing like that? What kind of bid would it take for her to bring a man upstairs?

I want to unravel her.

All my previous thoughts go out the window. I know the second I look at her, with a ravenous hunger, that I’m going to place a bid. And she will be mine.

The bartender nudges my elbow. I turn to the bar to sign the tab, but the moment I look back, she’s gone. My eyes rove the room, avoiding a hundred come-hither stares from near-naked beauties wanting me for the night. But the sad-eyed brunette is nowhere to be found.

Shit.

I take a gulp of my scotch, push away from the bar, and head to the only place she could’ve gone, the hallway that contains the exit, the restrooms, and the stairwell to the second floor. When I get outside, I check up and down the hall, then look up the staircase, but I’ve lost her.

I pull out my phone and open to the app Seth had me download earlier that night. I scroll through a list of eligible women, hoping to match my memory of her to her picture, since I didn’t catch the number pinned to her shirt. I don’t have to go far. She’s at the top of the list. She looks more confident in the picture, but her dark, sad eyes are the same, boring into me. Her alias is Lavender. There’s a little red dot next to her name. I’m not sure what that means.

I press on her picture and see that she’s already had gotten what seems like an outrageous number of bids. One hundred and twelve, the highest being 95 thousand dollars, for one night with her. It’s not outrageous, I guess, considering the primal, visceral reaction she’s gotten from me. There’s just something innocent about her, something that can’t be ignored.

My eyes wander over to the red dot, which isn’t a red dot, after all. On this screen, it’s obviously a cherry.

Can that mean what I think it means?

I go back to the list of girls and sure enough, she’s the only one with the cherry.

She’s a virgin.

I click back over the profile and read: This sweet little flower is waiting for you—to do anything and everything you’d like to her! Open for one night, or a possible repeat engagement. You are bidding on one night of wild abandon, deflowering this gorgeous creature. 25-35 only. No BDSM, Fetish, F/F. Take a walk through her garden today!

The status of her profile still says OPEN- ACCEPTING BIDS. It hasn’t been closed out, yet, which must mean that wherever she is, she hasn’t made a selection yet. And that means she’s there for my taking.

One thing about me: I don’t lose. I’m the best in the business at negotiating, and I always end up with the upper hand. I intend to win her. For a night, and for as long as it takes to get my company back.

Smiling, I jab in the number to blow all the other bids away, and seal the deal. One million dollars.

And the world suddenly seems brighter. Because suddenly I have something to look forward to. I’m not thinking of my father anymore, or the fake fiancé I need to produce this weekend.

No, my thoughts are on that innocent little flower. Lavender. The woman I have my sights on, with a hunger that’s only growing, the more I look into those sad brown eyes. The woman I’ll conquer.

I click submit, and I can’t wait until she submits to me.