What She Needs - Lacey Alexander [12]
She gave her head an irritated tilt, back to being annoyed. “So you can tease me about that, but you can’t tell me about it?”
He shrugged, biting into a dinner roll. If he told her everything he knew about her—about the way sex had shaped her psyche, her reactions to people, to men, the world—she wouldn’t believe him right now. She had to be shown. Changed. But he could tell her . . . a little. “Let’s just say people who place a high value on emotions are people who tend to feel things deeply themselves. Meaning that every good thing—or bad thing—that happens to you affects you perhaps a little more than it would most people.”
She simply blinked at him, still clearly just as aggravated. “You just told me I’m emotional—which I could have told you myself. That doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.”
“As I said, you need to be shown the heart of the matter, Jenna. And I promise if you let your guard down enough to experience what the Hotel Erotique has to offer, you won’t regret it.”
Across from him, she simply rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you think you’re very suave and persuasive, but I’m afraid it would take a hell of a lot more than that to make me . . . do what you want me to do here. Speaking of which,” she said, “dare I ask how someone gets into your line of work?”
He smiled. “It’s simple, really. I like sex.”
She was obviously waiting for him to expound upon that, and when he didn’t, she said, “That’s it? You like sex? Lots of people like sex.”
“But most of them don’t like it enough to get a PhD in the study of it and make it their life’s work. I like sex enough that, when I was young, I realized I wanted to be in an environment where I was surrounded by it, but where it was . . . treated like an important part of life. Then, later, I decided I wanted to help people experience sex to the fullest, so they could learn to love and revere sex as much as I do.”
“Revere,” she repeated. “That’s an interesting word to describe sex.” She took another sip of wine and he realized she might be getting slightly drunk. He took it as a cue to refill her glass. Her profile indicated that alcohol often relaxed her and helped release her inhibitions—and that was exactly what he needed to happen tonight.
Only . . . hell. It was a long leap between getting her to talk about sex and convincing her to indulge in the resort’s sensual offerings over the next two weeks. He’d simply had no idea she’d show up for dinner as anything but a compliant guest, ready to begin her fantasies. So he wasn’t entirely sure how to accomplish this. But one thing he knew was—her denial complicated everything, and when she did agree, he’d have to toss most of Mariel’s plans for her out the window and devise his own.
In the meantime, he needed to focus on the conversation here—it was all important. “You wouldn’t say sex is something you hold in reverence?” he asked.
She drew in a deep breath, obviously thinking it over, and suddenly not seeming as argumentative as a moment ago. Good—maybe the wine was doing the trick—urging her to drop her guard. The problem with emotional people was that sometimes they stumbled upon emotions so deep they couldn’t face them, so they turned them off. That was clearly what Jenna had done—with many of her feelings surrounding sex—and his job was to take those bad emotions and memories and replace them with good ones.
“When I’m with a guy I really care about,” Jenna finally replied, “sure, I revere sex. Only it’s . . . the intimacy I’m really holding in reverence then. Because . . . if it were just the sex, it wouldn’t need to be with a guy I care about, right?”
“Right,” he said. “So you revere intimacy, but not just sex itself.”
She nodded. “And you . . . you value sex alone that way, without intimacy?” she asked as if sincerely trying to understand.
“Yes,” he replied easily. “Humans were built for sex—our bodies were designed for it. It’s one of our most basic instincts and among life’s greatest pleasures. Everything about sex—every nuance, every physical response,