PRIVATE PLACES
Berkley
ISBN-10: 0425221725
ISBN-13: 978-0425221723
Prequel: Scandalous Lovers
Sequel: Cry for Passion
Discover the origins of the notorious club that features in Scandalous Lovers - and the shocking truth about the man and woman who founded it - in “The Men and Women’s Club,” Robin’s novella in PRIVATE PLACES, a Berkley anthology with authors Claudia Dain, Allyson James and Shiloh Walker.
Excerpt from Chapter One
Memory gouged the throbbing twilight.
One man questioning. One woman responding.
What does a woman desire?
Yet the woman had not asked what it was that the man needed. And now they must each appear—every single member of the Men and Women’s Club—in a court of law.
“Tomorrow we stand before a judge and jury.” Cold mahogany wood pulsed against Joseph’s fingers. “What do we tell them?”
The feather-tipped silhouette visibly stiffened, even as distant laughter mocked his impotence, everything he had ever wanted lost in this room: His reputation; his position at the university.
The hope for love.
“Do we tell them about the French postcards we didn’t look upon?”
Naked men and women doing things he had imagined but never performed.
“Do we tell them about the pornographic shop we refused to visit?”
In his mind’s eye flashed the print of a woman who sat backward across a man’s hips, wearing only a smile of unfathomable mystery.
Do we tell them we sat here while five men and six women flaunted every decent moral known to man”—the first in a series of dull bass bongs, Big Ben spitting out the hour, underscored his words—“and we did nothing to stop them?”
“We did everything in our power to direct those meetings,” shot through the deepening gloom.
Joseph was not fooled by the publicist’s righteous indignation.
“Do we tell them, Miss Dennison,” he asked, fingers choking the gavel that he had as president of the Men and Women’s Club wielded unsparingly, but which on the morrow would be used to direct jurisdiction in a court of law, “that when I had you on this table two years earlier, you were not a virgin?”
One final bong fell onto the sudden silence: It was seven o’clock.
A shudder vibrated the air, the public doors shutting. The sing-song hum of passing carriage wheels emphasized the dead stillness permeating the museum.
Ardelle Dennison’s voice, when she spoke, was arctic: “How dare you bring up that night, sir!”
Joseph would dare many things this evening.
“Did I give you no pleasure at all?” he rasped.
In the thickening dusk he could for one fleeting second make out two shadowy figures: A man . . . a woman.
Reaching. Embracing.
He knew that Ardelle Dennison also saw the two ghostly figures, a professor and a publicist who had for one brief moment dared to be a man and a woman.
“This lawsuit is a farce!” she lashed out with sudden anger. “We can not be held responsible for men and women who cannot control their animal lusts.”
“Like us?” Joseph rejoined.