Surrender to Mr. X Read Online Free Page B

hadn’t had to pay a single thing for them. It seemed remarkably like cheating to me, and I felt a spasm of indignation. But a goddess’s servant isrequired to accept what comes, and be grateful with noblesse oblige: no doubt rare Centre Court tickets sanctify the act as well as money, if not better.
    The champion thanked me, asked me with albeit genial impatience to stop rambling on about the room—it wasn’t the first hotel room he’d been in and he could see with his own eyes where the minibar was—ran his fingers round my mouth, iron-fleshed as they were from many a racquet handle, and assured me I was surely “the best,” whatever that meant, and I left. I was tongue-tied; I think I bowed first.
    As I left 402 I passed La Weiss going to her own suite. She looked right through me as though I were not there: hotel staff are often invisible to the guests, like the wallpaper. She seemed quite pleased with herself. Perhaps she had managed to beat Alden’s fee down in whatever project they were jointly involved in. I worried for him: I wasn’t sure he was necessarily tough enough to look after his own interests. I was feeling sorry for him again. I remembered the way the stored energy had leapt between him and me—and the feeling of repletion that usually follows the closure of a successful sexual act had gone into abeyance before I even made it to the lift. I wanted Alden, though in what manner and with what choreography I could not be sure.
    The stocky personal trainer, with neck almost wider than head, who was booked into 314—a much cheaper room—opened the door of Suite 406 to Mrs. Weiss,and he wore no clothes. That must have had plenty to do with her earlier reluctance to meet Alden for lunch. Nothing will do for some people, when they first set eyes on an hotel bed, but that they use it for sex. And some women become foul-mouthed while they’re in rut.
    Max held out his hand as I came down into the foyer and I gave him the two tickets. I don’t do eBay. A friend of mine had her identity stolen from using it, and I am more computer-illiterate than she. Anyway, I can’t stand a bargain: I like to pay full price. Show me two similar objects, one cheap and one expensive, and I go for the dear, investing it with some extra magic. If eBay has magic, I don’t know what it is. And Max was expecting the tickets. That was why he had given me no choice but just told me, by inference, to get on up there quick before someone else got hold of them. Max is a Wimbledon junkie; he saw his opportunity and moved quickly. He would probably hand me, what?—probably a grand in cash in his own sweet time. We were, after all, partners, in a team.
    I got off home as quickly as I could, with less time now to make myself “pretty” for Alden.

Home
    I LIVE ALONE, BETWEEN P ADDINGTON and Maida Vale, in a much too expensive apartment looking over a canal. My London telephone prefix is 286, which in the old days when it was represented by the letters on the instrument dial was “CUN”: some wag must have been in charge of the allocation of codes a hundred years ago at the telephone’s inception, because newly built Maida Vale was then where the grand pubs had music-hall acts on their cavernous ground floors, and more or less discreet brothels on the first and second, and the mansion blocks contained spacious apartments where gentlemen kept their mistresses.
    I have tried sharing with other girls, but it never seems to work very well. I like my own space, and I don’t put things away very often, except in the kitchen where everything is clean and orderly. Elsewhere you can’t see a surface for the mass of discarded, once worn, or about to be worn garments, shoes, scarves, pashminas, beaded jackets and bags—I just love beads—promiscuous jewelry and all the trappings of an admitted fashion shopaholic. But I like to think that all the mess that