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“You’re showing me around yourself?” she asks.

“Da. Problem?”

“No,” she says. “Just noting that you’re not sending a housekeeper.”

“Housekeeper shows you where the towels are,” I say. “I show you where you can’t go and what happens if you do.”

She picks up her bag and walks to the front door like she already lives here. I watch her do it and think that it’s going to be a problem.

I take her through the ground floor. Kitchen first. Big table, long, seats twelve, heavy wood. I stop beside it and put my hand flat on the surface.

“Good table,” I say.

“It’s a table,” she says.

“I’m going to eat your pussy on this table,” I say. “Thought you should know.”

She stops walking. Just for a second, just one beat, then she keeps going like I said something about the traffic. But that second was real, and I caught it. Her jaw went tight. Small, fast, gone, but I caught it.

What I also caught was the look on her face in that second. Not the anger I expected. Something else, something that looked more like confusion than fury, like she didn’t know what to do with the information her own body just gave her. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting.

“The kitchen has excellent light,” she says.

I suppress a smile.

The dining room is next. Long windows, sideboard against the wall, another solid table. She walks in ahead of me, doing her thing where she scans the room without looking like she’s scanning it. I come up behind her, close enough that she has to know I’m there, and I nod toward the wall to her left.

“That wall,” I say.

She looks at it. “What about it?”

“Thick. Old plaster over brick.” I knock on it once with my knuckle. “Sturdy. I’ll fuck you against it, you won’t have to worry about it moving.”

Her shoulders don’t move. Her hands don’t move. But I’m watching the back of her neck, and there’s color there now, just a little, just enough, creeping up from her collar.

“Structurally sound,” she says. “Good to know.”

She walks out of the dining room, and I follow her, grinning at the back of her head where she can’t see it.

The sitting room has a large rug in the center, thick, expensive, some dark red thing that came with the house. She steps onto it and looks at the view of the garden through the window.

“Nice rug,” she says.

“Soft on the knees,” I say.

She turns around slowly. Her face is perfect. Her eyes are doing something though, pupils blown out just slightly, and she’s working hard to keep it out of the rest of her expression. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her. I’ve been with enough women to read the difference between a woman who’s annoyed at wanting something and a woman who doesn’t understand what she’s feeling yet. This is the second one. She’s confused and trying to think her way through it, and the confusion is more interesting to me than the wanting would be on its own.

“I’m sure it’s very practical,” she says.

“When I fuck you in the ass, you’ll want something soft under you,” I say. “I was thinking ahead.”

This time her breath does something. Just a short, sharp pull through her nose that she covers fast, turning back to the window. Her hand goes to the curtain, adjusting it, giving herself something to do with her fingers.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” she says.

“Doing what?”

“Trying to rattle me.”