The Barter System Companion: Volume One Page 14

  He pulled the mask away from his face and she exhaled sharply. He was more beautiful than she’d imagined.

  “Tell me where you live, Phoebe.”

  He watched her consider his request. As a wealthy man who already knew her name, discovering her address would be ridiculously simple.

  It didn’t make sense to guard the information and he smiled when he saw she’d figured that out.

  Chapter Three

  She quietly relayed the address of her lovely old shop and the home she made above it.

  He turned on a collection of classical music and she found herself relaxing against the seat. The silence between them wasn’t awkward and she wondered why.

  Thirty minutes later, they entered the recently rejuvenated area that held so much potential when she bought her small building for a song four years ago.

  He pulled to the curb in front of Simon Says – Books and Coffee. Getting out, he came around and opened her door, holding her bag again. She took the hand he offered and stepped to the sidewalk in front of her building.

  Walking around him, Phoebe approached the antique door covered by refurbished ironwork and let herself into the stairwell leading up to her residence.

  As they moved inside the space lit by sconces she’d installed herself, she locked the outer door and started up the stairs.

  Her body registered the heat of him behind her on the stairs. “I…I rarely have people here. I don’t remember when I dusted last.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Phoebe.”

  Unlocking another antique door she’d found at the Habitat for Humanity home supply store and given a fresh coat of stain and gloss, then they were inside the only sanctuary she’d known in her lifetime.

  He walked inside and she was instantly aware he made the place look better than she could’ve imagined.

  * * *

  Colm inspected her space and admitted he was impressed.

  Phoebe’s home was filled with refurbished antiques, rich colors and fabrics, and books. Built-in bookcases lined one wall. Several glass-enclosed cases acted as more space for books and a few tasteful knick-knacks and black-and-white photos.

  Above furniture and windows, carved shelves were installed to hold even more books of all shapes, sizes, and genres. At a glance, he could tell the ones protected by glass were first editions.

  “You have a lovely home,” he said honestly.

  “Thank you. It was the home I dreamed of as a child.” He heard the honesty in her words.

  A sleek gray cat emerged from what he assumed was Phoebe’s bedroom and ran his body against her legs.

  “Hello, Rochester. Where’s Mr. Darcy?”

  She scooped up the cat and moved toward the open kitchen at the end of the space. A beautiful black cat sat waiting patiently on the end of the bar.

  “There you are. Hungry, darlings?”

  She busied herself getting them food before turning back to Colm. He held out her bag. Their hands touched as she took it and the tension in the room escalated.

  “I hope you don’t regret going tonight, Phoebe.” She slowly shook her head. “Good.”

  He stepped closer, his suit jacket brushing lightly against her nipples. He watched a shiver pass over her and knew he needed at least a kiss.

  Touching one finger to her chin, he angled her face up, and lowered his head to take it.

  His tongue stroked between her lips and she opened for him, aching for the contact. He gathered her in his arms, holding her strongly but not threateningly, palms gliding over the silk of the robe covering her narrow back.

  After a long kiss, he pulled back, and said against her mouth, “It’s been a pleasure, Phoebe. Should you ever need anything, anything at all, please call me.”

  One last kiss and he released her, moving for the door.

  He placed a card on her foyer table and gave her a smile. “Goodnight.”

  * * *

  Phoebe stared at the closed door for a moment, fingertips touching her sensitive lips.

  Every nerve in her body flared to life with his kiss, reached for a man she barely knew in a way she’d never experienced.

  Shaking herself clear of the sensual fog, she hurried downstairs to lock the outer door and saw him standing beside his car.

  Enigmatic. Charming. Her knight errant.

  There was nothing she’d ever wanted more. Instead of locking the door, she opened it.

  “Wait.” His head jerked sharply in her direction, his eyes widening in surprise. “Mr. Troy…Colm, please wait.”

  Gathering her courage, she kept the robe snugly around her body as she crossed the cobblestone sidewalk. Looking up, she met his eyes, struggling to speak.

  “I…I don’t want you to go.”

  He gripped her upper arms. “You owe me nothing, Phoebe. The money was a gift. One easily given by a man who won’t notice it.”

  “Thank you for that.” Squaring her shoulders, she said, “I still don’t want you to go. I don’t have…relationships, despite where you met me. I don’t make friends easily. It’s difficult for me to trust. I have no family. I’m not…trying to trap you or anything. I want you to…to stay and be with me.”

  * * *

  The brutal honesty, the vulnerability he heard in her voice, crashed into his chest. A suspicion, and answering horror, began to form.

  “Phoebe, are you a virgin?”

  Her lip trembled and he watched her bite it sharply. “Please don’t ask me.”

  “I don’t care about the medical definition. I’m asking if, in your adult life, you’ve been with a lover.” She shook her head and heat flushed up her chest and neck to brighten her face. “You would’ve sacrificed that experience tonight? With a stranger?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. This building is all I have.”

  Turning, he held her to his side, and moved rapidly to the door leading back inside. When it closed behind them, he spun her against it.

  “How old are you, Phoebe?”

  She cleared her throat and pushed her hair out of her face. “I’m almost twenty-three.”

  “How did you buy this building?”

  A small frown formed between her eyes. “I’ve worked since I was fourteen and saved my money. The area was run down and mostly empty but I could see the rejuvenation efforts heading this way.”

  He watched her eyes light up.

  “This place was a dump and cheap. I wanted it so I could live upstairs. I did a lot of the work myself while I kept my full-time job. I opened when the renovations to the big apartment building across the street were done.” She shrugged. “They were my first customers. I still sell more coffee than books.”

  “You worked hard. This was your dream?”

  Phoebe nodded. “Books and writing. Yes. I didn’t want to work for someone else all my life in a job I hated. I like words.”

  “And coffee?”

  Her smile was spectacular. “Yes, I love coffee.”

  There were too many possibilities in his mind to verbalize in a dark stairwell. He smiled and there was no doubt it reached his eyes.

  “Then let’s have a cup of coffee and talk.”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  The Barter System

  Published Book

  South Florida - August 2012

  Riya O’Connell perused the profiles of each man she’d chosen to participate in the final stage of her dissertation. Page by page, she reviewed the data she’d gathered from them as well as her own carefully performed background checks for what must have been the hundredth time.

  The applications submitted to her website The Barter System originally numbered more than thirteen thousand before her six-month deadline in May. Potential subjects filled out a brief application and gave basic information about themselves and their non-sexual lives.

  It shocked her to see the number of bogus candidates – though she knew it shouldn’t have. A clear majority of applicants submitted false information about age, rela
tionship status, employment status, and criminal history.

  If someone lied about the little things, they were likely to lie about the big ones. She needed honesty if her data was going to be accurate. The rejected applications were numbered and now comprised the first fifty pages of her research. Not a single word would be wasted.

  In the last three months, she’d trimmed the list to just over five hundred by sending out a questionnaire that had to be completed on a tighter schedule of ten days. The second survey was much more detailed and specific, asking general questions about sexuality and preferences.

  Many men emailed her website with complaints about all the “work” she was making them do. Naturally, those potentials were culled immediately from the list of possibilities.

  She would need – legitimate information – to submit with her dissertation. If a simple questionnaire scared them…they weren’t going to be up for the countless questions she planned to ask casually and formally.

  From those several hundred “real” applicants, Riya narrowed the list once again by requesting an essay about why they wished to participate. More than three hundred men submitted their compositions by her third deadline.

  The majority were filled with sexual fantasy and very little emotion. Those final-tier applicants were painstakingly narrowed to less than thirty. Of those, less than a dozen men remained in her “first choice” stack of files.

  After serious internal struggle and a bit of juggling, her final eight men were chosen at the end of July. Only one change had to be made within the last few days and she was still unsure how she felt about it.

  A snapshot accompanied each of their files and she knew these photos well. They were faded and a little worn from how many times she’d handled them.

  Over the last weeks, she’d exchanged countless emails with them, giving herself a layer of familiarity she knew she needed to go through with her plans.

  It seemed strange she’d never met them face to face or even spoken to them on the phone. From such sterile interactions via technology, so much had already happened.

  Riya felt as if she already knew them personally, in the real world. It was ultimately these men’s essays which tipped the scales in their favor. Already physically attractive to her, what they’d written stood out above and beyond the others.

  To her core, she believed she’d chosen correctly.

  These men represented the overall success or failure of her dissertation – an investment of several years of her life to date. She’d been compiling her data for the past year of graduate school and anticipated the end of this road eagerly.

  At the end of the day, it wasn’t as much about the degree as it was about the actual evidence; her personal validation the project she had in mind could and would work – despite being unorthodox in the extreme.

  Not only would her records be the structure for her dissertation, they would also – perhaps even more importantly – be utilized in the acquisition of her secondary degree in creative writing.

  Though also curious as a woman, that didn’t technically figure into the equation. Sex, for most women, was intrinsically linked to their emotions. If you believed popular media, the clichéd version of men when it came to sex was much less emotional and far more juvenile.

  How men were stereotypically portrayed – combined with her own less-than-wonderful experiences – could not be all there was to the sexual interactions they had with women.

  Ultimately, her research would translate from the virtual world to reality…and provide concrete data on male sexuality in a way never attempted by another PhD candidate.

  Her advisor at the University of Miami was not convinced her methods were either appropriate or altogether safe but gave her blessing to make the attempt with the caveat Riya’s degree, as well as her reputation, hinged on tangible results.

  She scanned the last documents and backed up her files to the server maintained by her best friend, Tawny Ratliff. Tawny believed there wasn’t a hacker alive who could infiltrate the complex layers of her network. Anyone who tried found themselves – and their systems – falling down a rabbit hole of epic proportions.

  When it came to hacking, Tawny had no mercy. Likely because she was part of a shadowy hacking community who stood by a certain code of ethics. A loose one…but a code of ethics all the same.

  Layering the hard files in a tier, she stared at the tabs for a long time. They were frayed on the edges with handwritten notes on the outside. It was nothing compared to her typed and written notes inside.

  Riya had no doubt she now knew deeply personal information about these eight men no one else in their lives knew about them. She took their trust seriously.

  Sean 37, Internet Entrepreneur, Orlando, FL

  Victor 31, Fisherman, Savannah, GA

  Joshua 22, College Student, Austin, TX

  Lucas 42, Rancher, Billings, MT

  Ricardo 32, Police Officer, Los Angeles, CA

  Bobby 27, Musician, Boston, MA

  Micah & Max 34, Financiers, Manhattan, NY

  One by one, she traced their names as she called her friends and family to say goodbye. They knew she’d be gone for several weeks. Her conversations were purposely vague so she understood why the people who loved her most were more than a little concerned.

  Only Tawny knew everything about her, her dissertation, her website, and her various other hobbies. Only she knew how extreme her research was and to what lengths she was willing to go to get it.

  Their friendship spanned their entire lives and the unspoken motto was “no judgment” – not for any reason at any time. In many ways, they were complete opposites; in others, they were shockingly similar.

  On paper, it was doubtful anyone would connect them as friends. Thankfully, their mothers hadn’t worried in the slightest about supposed compatibility.

  During her call, she warned her father she’d essentially be on radio silence until further notice. That fact made Archer O’Connell intensely unhappy. She was the only family he had with exception of Tawny and her mom and he was fiercely protective of all three women.

  That he hadn’t threatened to lock her away until he could talk some sense into her was both a surprise and a blessing.

  He and Tawny’s mom Maggie would have a hundred questions and even more concerns for her safety. They wouldn’t care about her motives or what she hoped to gain.

  Therefore, they knew what she could tell them and nothing else. They believed she planned to visit college campuses across the country to study the sexual habits of young men entering adulthood. It was implied – though not exactly stated – she’d be conducting nothing more than verbal interviews with her subjects.

  For the sake of argument, she actually would be doing interviews.

  It wasn’t the whole story.

  Less than one dozen candidates knew her true first name. They’d only been informed after signing an ironclad non-disclosure agreement to protect her privacy and her personal reputation.

  After all, for the majority of the world, there was no such thing as “no judgment.”

  To keep things fair, she completed sections of each survey herself for the men she’d chosen. Since her applicants were asked to share so much about themselves, she felt it was appropriate to meet them halfway. Some details were not shared for fear of skewing their initial impressions and tainting her conclusions but she gave them as much as she felt was possible.

  She scanned her most recent handwritten notes into her laptop, making sure she didn’t miss a single piece of information, such as a letter or photos received at her post office box.

  There was no way to carry every file with her for more than two months and this way, everything would be at her fingertips for reference. Each subject had a folder on her main drive remotely backed up every night.

  For almost an hour, Riya stared at the men she would soon be intimately acquainted with on various levels. They represented a vast array of ages, backgrounds, and socio-economi
c status. The racial mix wasn’t as diverse as she’d hoped but the other aspects about the men’s lives were night and day.

  She updated her Good Girl blog and answered a few comments while she was online.

  The site wasn’t linked to anything else she did and she was careful to ensure no one knew she was the woman behind the eclectic mix of online diary, erotic short stories, and open forums about everything from adult toy experimentation to porn addiction.

  Since her senior year of high school, she’d used the blog as a place to relax and be herself.

  Interactive with her followers, Riya didn’t hesitate to talk about her relationships with men, her sex life (or lack thereof), using celibacy as a test of personal willpower, and what piqued her curiosity as a single woman in the modern world.

  Many people told her over the years she held ridiculous expectations when it came to the opposite sex but she disagreed. She felt “standards” was a better word choice.

  Men offered to be her guinea pigs and she always turned them down gently. Women wrote in with suggested reading. Some wrote in with suggested lovers.

  Occasionally, her posts – and the threads they inspired – would spark her creative flow and she would pen a short story, novella, or full-length novel. The cornerstone of her writing was men and women were not so different after all – much like her dissertation.

  It wasn’t long before her own books started showing up as suggested reading by her Good Girl subscribers who were unaware it was she who wrote them.

  Initially begun as an outlet to release her surprising – and often concerning – amounts of pent up sexual energy, Riya’s erotic fiction gradually morphed into a valid way to avoid touching her inheritance from her mother.

  She knew she was a sensual person at the core of her being. It was also an indisputable fact that the possibilities of sex continued to intrigue her even though she hadn’t experienced much personally. There wasn’t anything memorable enough in her sexual history to be used as a plot.

  In two months, without a doubt, there would be. The thought filled her with nervous anticipation.