Free Wild Horses by Brian Hodge Page B

money. Money was an aphrodisiac, he believed, and having it just out of reach was an unconscionable tease.
    He sprinted back to his motel, a couple of discreet blocks off the Strip, befitting his fugitive status. Up in his room he flopped on the bed and paged through this catalog of goddesses-on-demand.
    Great lips. I’ll come to you anytime. Leann. He kept going, found a picture of three girls with their pert bottoms thrust out. How about OUR assets? We also do parties. Three at once? Tempting, but as long as he was footing his own bill, there was a fine line between extravagance and overkill. Hot blonde, 40-DD. Will climax! Sure. Just like Jane Fonda in Klute , probably. Call Jennifer — I can get so nasty I’ll make you blush. Not likely, unless she showed up with Grandma Dobbins in tow.
    Boyd knew the moment he saw her that Krystal was the one. He liked her name, and sure as poker tables were green did he love her picture. A glorious and petite sprite of a young woman, no stranger to the gym, on one knee with her other leg exquisitely pointed toe-down like a ballerina. A cascade of raven hair fell halfway down her back. Her smile was charming, sweet, inviting. Her eyes full of both enthusiasm and unsullied innocence.
    I may live in Nevada, read her ad’s clinch line, but nudity is my natural state. Clever, understated … this could well be the woman he’d waited for all his life. Boyd scrambled for the phone before some undeserving loser out there could beat him to her.
    She was tapping at his door in forty-eight minutes, stripped in forty-nine. She stood five-one after kicking off her heels, as comfortable in her skin as Eve in Eden.
    “You like what you see?” Krystal asked, refreshingly free of come-hither posturing, but why bother to ask in the first place? The answer was written all over him, from face to trousers.
    “Obviously,” he said, dry-throated, “you believe in truth in advertising.”
    She took him by the hand, steered him toward the bed. “Lies just come back to haunt. Bad karma, you know. That’s why the only lies I ever tell are to spare someone’s feelings. So…! How would you like it tonight, Brad?”
    Krystal ran down the menu in tandem with his buttons and his zipper, and he wanted it all. By the time she’d stretched him out along the bed, the only fault he could possibly find with her was that she wasn’t twins.
    “You’re just the sweetest guy!” she said, and took delighted pity on his indecision. “I hardly ever suggest this to a first-time client, because I’m afraid they might think I’m really weird, but, like, you seem really special, like you might be up for something, you know … different?”
    “Connoisseur of the sexual smorgasbord,” he blurted. “Lay it on me.”
    She pitched, he listened. She claimed — and rightly so, he imagined — to be the only call girl in Las Vegas who practiced techniques of the eastern sex masters. She told him that she could stimulate his chakras to give him an orgasm like none he had ever experienced. Which in itself sounded righteous … but chakras? Her terminology was spawned from some other planet than his own.
    The chakras, she explained, were seven centers of energy, in a straight line down the center of the body. First discovered in the east, they had been known to esoterically wise men and women for thousands of years, long before western doctors were able to correlate them precisely with specific nerve centers. The more she explained, the more animated she grew. This is no act, he realized. She really believes in this.
    From her purse she produced a drawstring pouch and opened it, spilled onto the bed seven rosy pink gemstones. “Rhodochrosite,” she said. “It enhances blood circulation, and I think we both know how important that is for what we’re about to do.” She ran her velvet tongue along his body, planting kisses upon each strategic hot spot, then depositing a crystal. The first she nestled just under his