The Erotic Secrets Of A French Maid

'No,' she said, glad to change the topic. 'Being a personal chef crossed my mind, but I'm not going to pursue it for fear of getting sidetracked from architecture.' A faint thought flitted through her mind, a distant sense that the pieces of her puzzle had not been put together correctly. She'd offered to cook for Russ the first time she met him…

'Makes sense, I guess,' Beth said. 'But back to your love slave: I never knew you were attracted to older guys.'

The thought Emma had been trying to capture dissipated as she switched her attention to Beth's comment. 'He doesn't seem older, except that he doesn't walk around with a baseball cap on sideways, doesn't wear a gold chain around his neck, and I can't imagine him sitting around with his buddies drinking beer and talking about how 'hot' some girl is.'

'Since when do guys grow out of that?'

Emma shrugged. 'He just doesn't seem that way. He drives a hybrid, for God's sake. Granted, a Lexus high- performance hybrid, but still a hybrid.'

'That means nothing. Hybrids are status symbols now: they say, 'I'm smart enough to care about the environment, and rich enough to act on it.' And a Lexus performance car screams, 'I have money. Fuck me!' Granted, it screams it in a more gentlemanly manner than a Porsche, but it's the same thing.'

'So what if he is looking for sex? It's not like I don't want that myself.'

'But you don't want to be his young little sex trophy, either, stashed away in his apartment to come pork whenever he feels like it.'

Emma scowled. 'Why not? Why not for once just have fun with sex, instead of trying to tie it up into a big complicated relationship? I don't have time for a relationship. I don't feel like nurturing some guys ego and having him suck up all my free time. I have better things to do!'

Beth gaped at her.

The waitress set their lunches in front of them. 'Is there anything else I can bring you?'

Emma flashed her a smile. 'No, thanks.'

The aroma of chicken cacciatore stirred Beth back to the present. 'I always thought it was true love and Prince Charming you were waiting for. I never thought you cared about sex for the sake of sex.'

Emma dug into her grilled salmon. 'Yeah, well. Just because I didn't have any for a long time doesn't mean I didn't want it.'

'But do you really not care about not having a relationship along with it?'

'I just…' she started, but then couldn't find words to explain what she had not yet completely reconciled within herself. 'I just know that I'm horny and that I want to devote my energies to my career right now. Can I have sex on a regular basis with the same man and not get emotionally involved? I don't know. I've never tried.'

'Can you even enjoy it that way?'

'I'm willing to give it a shot.'

'I had a few relationships like that, where by the end I didn't care about the guy,' Beth said. 'Whenever we had sex, while I was lying under him and he was grunting away on me, tears would roll down my cheeks. The worst part of it was that the jerk never even noticed.'

'Jeez, Beth. If you were crying during sex, why did you keep doing it?'

She shrugged. 'The relationships usually ended a couple weeks later. It became a pretty good warning sign that things had gone sour.'

'I should think so.'

'The weird thing was, I didn't know that I felt nothing for the guy anymore until I started crying. It's like my body knew, even if my brain didn't.'

Emma shivered. 'I hope that doesn't happen to me.'

'If it does, don't ignore it. No orgasm is worth feeling like crap.'

Emma tried to shake Beth's words off. 'I wonder if men ever feel that way?'

'I can't imagine that they do. An orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm to them. What's not, to like? I mean, they pay hookers for sex, and that's got to be about as 'I don't care about her' as you can get.'

'I guess you're right,' Emma said weakly.

'Isn't there a famous quote that goes something like, 'Men don't pay women for sex. They pay them to go away after.''

Emma was getting queasy. She wanted Russ to like her; to respect her, even. To enjoy spending time with her. 'I read somewhere that when a man comes, he gets the same burst of oxytocin that a woman gets when someone hugs her.'

'What's oxytocin?' Beth asked.

'You know, it's that hormone that makes people bond to each other. Mothers to babies, women to men. You'll supposedly get big bursts of it when you breast-feed.'

'God, I hope so. At the moment I feel like this baby is the alien that took over my body.'

'Anyway, women get bursts of oxytocin when they're touched. Men only get a healthy dose of it when they come. It makes them feel love. Supposedly.' Emma shrugged.

'Which would explain why they declare their devotion after they've had their little 'moment.' And here I always thought it was gratitude for sex that prompted that 'I love you.''

Emma laughed. 'Nope. Chemicals.'

Beth sighed. 'I always knew that I'd better put out on a regular basis if I didn't want Ty to stray.'

'I hope there's more to his fidelity than that,' Emma said. 'I hope there's more to any guy's fidelity. We can't all be the same to them.'

Beth speared a mushroom with her fork. 'Just a hole to put it in. That's all we are.'

'You don't really believe that, do you?'

'I don't know. Sometimes I feel like all I am to Ty is that woman who does his laundry and cooks his dinner, and who's convenient when he wants to get off. He doesn't even seem interested in the baby.' Beth sniffled.

'But you know he loves you.'

'Does he? Maybe it's the path of least resistance for him to stay with me. He hates confrontation. He'd rather endure misery in silence than fight.'

'But I think that's true of most guys,' Emma protested. 'Have you talked to him? Let him know how you're feeling?'

Beth snorted. 'Oh, yeah, that will go over well. The last thing a guy wants to hear from any woman is, 'We need to talk.' No, I think your plan to seduce your cute landlord is better than I first thought: sex without attachment, where you can take what you need and leave the rest of the relationship mess behind. Everything will be on your own terms.'

'That's what I'm hoping,' Emma said, but found herself plagued by a niggling sense of doubt.

Chapter Eight

What's all this?' Russ asked. Emma looked up from where she was pouring the juices out of the roasting pan into a small bowl. 'Don't look at those!' How could she have forgotten to hide her dismal sketches for the train station?

'What are they?' he asked again, a glass of Chianti in one hand, the other hand moving the sketches around her drafting table.

Emma slammed down the pan and scampered around the breakfast bar to the living room. 'Don't look! They're terrible!' She grabbed the papers and flipped them over.

'I didn't see anything terrible. What are they drawings of?'

'They're designs for a train station,' she admitted. 'For the King Street Station, actually. There's a contest.'

'That's right, I heard about that. So you're going to enter?'

'Not if I can't think up anything better than this,' she said.