Free Seductress Seduced (The Embassy Book 4) by Kira Barker Page A

where?”
    “Hold your horses,” she admonished and chuckled—actually chuckled! Oh my, that new man in her life must be plowing her good. “You know the protocol—“
    “Yes, yes, interview first, assessment last. Take out all of the fun until it’s just about the fucking,” I supplied helpfully.
    “Like you’d want it any other way,” she replied and paused. “I’m not even sure I should hand this one over to you. I want to do a preliminary assessment with both of you first.”
    Now that made me frown.
    “Don’t you trust me? I doubt you have anyone else in your Rolodex who has as much experience under her garters as I do.”
    “No one uses a Rolodex anymore. You’re dating yourself,” Emily said offhandedly.
    “Sugar, if I did that, I’d have to switch to a language that none of you have ever heard,” I purred, but gave myself a mental shake. As much as I tried to keep up with the current speech patterns, bits and pieces of the past kept filtering through. Then again, eccentricities like suddenly falling back into pre-medieval French were viewed benignly, and not as a sign of demonic possession nowadays. As if that was something I’d ever had to worry about, but this country had come a long way indeed from the Puritan witch trials. Nasty stuff, that. The trials, and the burning that usually followed—particularly when you actually were a demon, and thus a hundred percent fireproof. Now that had been one hilarious discovery, back in, oh, I couldn’t even remember the year anymore.
    “Be that as it may, I’d like you to come in for a joint interview, provided you still want this one?”
    I gave myself another mental shake at Emily’s soft reprimand.
    “Possible sex addict, certain asshat, what’s not to love?” I joked, before turning serious again. “Are you going to make me suffer through the usual precautions again? You know that they are not necessary.”
    “Of course I will. Our establishment, our rules. If you can’t abide by them, I’m afraid we will have to terminate our contract.”
    We both knew that it was an idle threat, but I couldn’t resist asking each and every time.
    “One of these days, you know—“ I began, but Emily cut me short.
    “Be here at five. And wear something sexy.”
    “As if I’d dare turn up in rags,” I replied, only half-scandalized. At first sight, drab clothes might deter most strong-willed men, but as soon as I ramped it up, all of them were putty in my hands. A strange idiom , come to think of it, as said state usually came with delicious hardness, but then verbal language always felt insufficient to me where bodily lust was concerned.
    I ended the conversation and took another sip of coffee. As much as the prospect of a good meal was enticing— after all, weren’t we all hardwired that way? —I couldn’t quite bring myself to care very much. Emily hadn’t sounded even a bit perturbed by me being right in my assessment earlier this week, taking the last bit of fun out of the gloating I’d been prepared to do for days now.
    Really, what was the world coming to?

    At a few minutes to five, I swept into the Embassy, dressed to the nines. Did people still say that, at least? Getting a whiff of need from Martha as I stalked by her desk and on toward Emily’s office was most gratifying. Strictly speaking, the three hours of primping I’d put myself through hadn’t been necessary; as a sex demon, I had what the poets of old had described, even back then, as ‘beauty not quite of this world.’ Uncannily true, that. Not that pretty girl thing, or the allure of an aging beauty that was more based on charisma and confidence than looks. No, plain old tits and ass in abundance, my entire body simply oozed sex appeal. Even in a world where perpetual starvation was all the rage, men still flocked to me like moths to the flame. So why bother with plucking stray hairs and applying liberal amounts of cosmetics of all kinds?
    I’d been asking myself that