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successful.”
    She smiled—still showing that confidence he liked in her so much. “ New York Times bestseller,” she said with an appealing pride. “And I’m fortunate to be in that small sector of the population that truly loves its work.”
    So was he, but this didn’t seem like the time to mention that. “Who have you written about?”
    “A wide variety of people—Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson, Anne Boleyn, Cleopatra, and I’m currently working on an anthology about some of the more famous pirates of the Golden Age. Basically, I write about people who are already pretty well-known, but I try to dig deeper than most biographies and find the really human, emotional sides of their stories.”
    “It doesn’t surprise me at all,” he said, “to hear you find emotions compelling.”
    “Something you got from my profile, I presume,” she replied dryly.
    Her attitude made him chuckle. “True enough,” he admitted. “And it fits with everything else I know about you.”
    She gave her head an irritated tilt, back to being annoyed. “So you can tease me about that, but you can’t tell me about it?”
    He shrugged, biting into a dinner roll. If he told her everything he knew about her—about the way sex had shaped her psyche, her reactions to people, to men, the world—she wouldn’t believe him right now. She had to be shown. Changed. But he could tell her . . . a little. “Let’s just say people who place a high value on emotions are people who tend to feel things deeply themselves. Meaning that every good thing—or bad thing—that happens to you affects you perhaps a little more than it would most people.”
    She simply blinked at him, still clearly just as aggravated. “You just told me I’m emotional—which I could have told you myself. That doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.”
    “As I said, you need to be shown the heart of the matter, Jenna. And I promise if you let your guard down enough to experience what the Hotel Erotique has to offer, you won’t regret it.”
    Across from him, she simply rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you think you’re very suave and persuasive, but I’m afraid it would take a hell of a lot more than that to make me . . . do what you want me to do here. Speaking of which,” she said, “dare I ask how someone gets into your line of work?”
    He smiled. “It’s simple, really. I like sex.”
    She was obviously waiting for him to expound upon that, and when he didn’t, she said, “That’s it? You like sex? Lots of people like sex.”
    “But most of them don’t like it enough to get a PhD in the study of it and make it their life’s work. I like sex enough that, when I was young, I realized I wanted to be in an environment where I was surrounded by it, but where it was . . . treated like an important part of life. Then, later, I decided I wanted to help people experience sex to the fullest, so they could learn to love and revere sex as much as I do.”
    “Revere,” she repeated. “That’s an interesting word to describe sex.” She took another sip of wine and he realized she might be getting slightly drunk. He took it as a cue to refill her glass. Her profile indicated that alcohol often relaxed her and helped release her inhibitions—and that was exactly what he needed to happen tonight.
    Only . . . hell. It was a long leap between getting her to talk about sex and convincing her to indulge in the resort’s sensual offerings over the next two weeks. He’d simply had no idea she’d show up for dinner as anything but a compliant guest, ready to begin her fantasies. So he wasn’t entirely sure how to accomplish this. But one thing he knew was—her denial complicated everything, and when she did agree, he’d have to toss most of Mariel’s plans for her out the window and devise his own.
    In the meantime, he needed to focus on the conversation here—it was all important. “You wouldn’t say sex is something you hold in reverence?” he