The door opened onto a short hallway, which quickly opened into a large room. I paused in the doorway and took my bearings. We had come out into the living room—or at least, I thought it was the living room. There was a couch in it, and a coat rack, and a floor lamp. And that was it: no other furniture, no decorations. Not even a rug on the bare parquet floor.

Turner sat on the sofa, and I waited for him to say something, to give me some cue, but he just sat there and watched me. Okay, fine. I wasn’t interested in playing guessing games with him. If he wasn’t going to give me any orders, I would take the chance to snoop around.

He didn’t stop me. I dropped my bag on the floor and then walked through the whole apartment, opening closets, peeking in cabinets. The building was old, and the apartment had the high ceilings and big windows to go with it. And the place was huge, especially by New York standards: three bedrooms, plus a large terrace overlooking Central Park, and an empty room with nothing in it but a small trash can. One of the bedrooms showed some signs of a life—some clothes folded in a dresser, a single toothbrush in the attached bathroom—but nothing that made it seem like someone lived there. Even the fridge was empty except for a pitcher of water.

It was really weird. My tour finished, I went back into the living room and said, “This place is like a creepy hotel.”

“Thank you,” Turner said. “What a delightful compliment.”

“Oh, are you offended?” I asked. “Did I upset you? Your apartment is weird. Nobody lives like this. You don’t even have any food!”

“It’s New York,” he said. “I can have Ethiopian food delivered to my door in thirty minutes.”

“It’s not healthy to eat takeout all the time,” I said, and then realized I sounded like a nagging mother, and shut my mouth.

He just sat there and looked at me. I shifted my weight onto one foot and shoved my hands into my pockets, then took them out again. I was nervous. It was stupid, but there it was. We were supposed to be having sex, but I didn’t know how to get there from where we were now: bickering like teenagers, and him sitting on the couch like a statue.

And I was nervous about the sex. It had a been a while for me. Not since my first months in New York, before I started working at the Silver Cross, before I decided that going all the way with clients wasn’t worth it.

Turner wasn’t helping. I wanted him to take control of the situation, to tell me to come sit on his lap or whatever. That would make it easy: I could just do as I was told. But the longer he stared at me, the more nervous I got, until finally I couldn’t deal with it anymore.

Time to take action.

I kicked off my flip-flops. They made quiet smacking noises as they hit the floor. Turner raised his eyebrows, like he didn’t approve of going barefoot indoors.

Too bad.

I took a deep breath, and then I unzipped my shorts and shoved them down my thighs.

Oh, I had his attention now. The shorts fell to the floor, and I stepped out of them. I was wearing a lacy, hot pink thong, and I turned slowly, letting him get a good look at my hips and ass. By the time I’d done a full rotation and come back around to face him, his eyes had that dark sex look I was getting to be so familiar with.

“There seems to be something that you want, Sassy Belle,” he said.

“I thought it was what you wanted,” I said. “You didn’t bring me over here to admire your lack of interior decorating, did you?”

“No,” he said. “Turn and show me your ass again.”

I did it, heart pounding. I wanted him to be pleased with me. Which was stupid, because he was obviously pleased already if he was willing to pay me a quarter of a million dollars to hang out with him for a month. But I wanted him to be so pleased with me that he didn’t have any reason not to give me the other half of my money when the month was up.

“Very nice,” he said. “Now take off that awful t-shirt. I can’t believe you walk around like that in public.”

“You have a problem with Iron Maiden?” I asked. “I bet you listen to, like, classical music and that easy listening shit they play in elevators.” I stripped the shirt over my head and tossed it onto the floor with my shorts.

I wasn’t wearing a bra, and my nipples tightened from a combination of air conditioning and arousal. Having an audience, it turned out, was just as effective when it was an audience of one. I swayed my hips, raised my arms above my head, and slowly gyrated back around to face him.

He ignored my jab about his musical tastes. “I can’t imagine that’s legal,” he said. He had crossed his legs, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, and I took it as a sign that he was turned on and trying to hide it. Good. I wanted him to want me so much that he couldn’t think. We would be on equal footing, then.

“What, not wearing a bra?” I asked. “Actually, women can go topless in public in the city. Weird law.”

“It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you know that,” he said. “But I don’t want you going topless for anyone but me.”

The note of hungry possession in his voice made me flush hot. “I won’t,” I said. “Not until the month is over.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Now come here.”

I padded across the room to the sofa, my bare feet sticking ever-so-slightly to the waxed floor. Turner watched me as I approached him: motionless, unreadable as the Sphinx. Or the Mona Lisa, really, with that little half-smirk of his, like he was amused by everything but not enough to bother with the effort of laughing.

I stopped a foot in front of him, just out of arm’s reach, and he said, “Sassy, you know that isn’t close enough.”

Okay, fine. I took another step.

He uncrossed his legs and spread his thighs so that I could see the bulge of his hard-on in his trousers. “Closer.”

My tongue felt too big to fit inside my mouth. I took another step, and felt the fabric of his trousers brush against my legs. The heat of his body radiated through the thin wool and made me think of how much hotter he would be when we were pressed together, skin to skin.

It wouldn’t be long, now.

There was nothing to be scared of, I told myself sternly. It wasn’t like this was my first time. He was just a man. I understood men. I knew what made them tick. They were uncomplicated creatures: all they wanted was a good fuck and someone who knew what was in their secret hearts. The first part of that was easy to provide, and the second part was easy to fake.