Allure of the Vixen Read Online Free

know that? We started
working here about the same time, about seven years ago. She was sleeping around
even when she was married.”
    We’d reached the bar and picked up the drinks. “I wouldn’t
do that,” I said. “Sleep with a married woman. Or sleep with another woman if I
was married.” What as the point of getting married if you still wanted to fuck
around?
    At that very moment Joanne reappeared, walking past
the other side of the bar, out toward the middle of the room, not looking our
way. The crowd partially parted for her, the men following her with their eyes,
even the women giving her room, the lioness in the den.
    Dan was openly staring. “I don’t think I could
either. Cheat, I mean. But that woman, Joanne, she certainly would tempt me.”
    I watched as Joanne left the room, leaving behind a
wake of unleashed hormones, thinking the same thing.
    A week went by. I was on the road for some
out of town meetings, trying to put the events at the party out of my mind,
still somewhat intoxicated by Joanne’s allure. I studiously avoided going
anywhere near the part of the office where she worked.
    The phone rang, and when I picked it up, without
preamble, a sultry voice, somewhat hushed, said, “I want to apologize for last
week.”
    Even without looking at the internal caller ID I
knew her voice. Joanne.
    “No apology necessary.”
    “I think there is.”
    “Okay, then, I accept.”
    “I can’t talk now, you know I don’t have my own
office. I want to do it in person.”
    “I’m not hard to find. You know where my office is,”
I said.
    “People will talk if I come there, I’ve got no
business up on you floor. Is that what you want?”
    It wasn’t. But I wasn’t sure what I did want.
Actually, I knew what I wanted. Her. But that wasn’t going to happen.
    “Lunch, tomorrow,” she said.
    “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, maybe
trying to convince myself instead of her.
    “You afraid of being seen with me?”
    That too, I thought. And a sneaking, perhaps
unfair, thought. I didn’t know this woman from Eve. She might be Eve,
tempting me to do something I didn’t want to do, perhaps something to hold over
my head.
    “Joanne.”
    “I guess I was wrong about you.” Her voice had
changed, a little disappointment, maybe some anger, maybe some surprise.
    “I don’t know what you were thinking, which kind of
guy classification you had me in. So I can’t respond to that.”
    “I thought you’d at least give a woman a chance to
say she was sorry.”
    I didn’t for a minute believe that Joanne was sorry
about anything. “What do you want, Joanne?” As beautiful as she was, I was
getting a little tired of the game. If this was her idea of teasing, it was
having the wrong effect.
    “To see you during my lunch break,” she said. “You
have to eat, don’t you?”
    I usually grabbed takeout and brought it back to my
desk. Sometimes I ate at the brasserie on the first floor of the building, but
so did almost half the office; if I ate lunch with Joanne there everyone would
see us, and not for a minute did I think anyone would believe that it had been
a coincidence. And maybe that’s what Joanne wanted, to manipulate me into a
position where everyone would see us together.
    A silence can send its own communication. Joanne’s
was infused with patience. “You’re not going to give up, are you,” I said.
    “Never,” she said, and now her sultry voice was
back.
    “People will see us and talk. I don’t want that, and
I suspect you don’t either.” I’d never heard a whisper of Joanne doing anything
with anyone in the office, and I’m sure that kind of talk would have spread
like fire.
    “You have an apartment just a few blocks from the
office.”
    I did, but I wondered how she knew about that. It
was no secret, but I hadn’t mentioned it to her. I lived outside the city, the
apartment was a simple pied-a-terre, a bachelor one bedroom so I wouldn’t have
to make the long