sounded energized, thrilled to be recruited on such a project. “I’ll head down into the basement right now.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
The truth was, once Penny had faked one orgasm she found herself questioning all of them. She’d stopped trusting her own physical reactions. With every nightly session, she worried that she was under- or overreacting to his ministrations. She’d never loved Maxwell, but she’d loved what he could generate in her body. Now even the orgasms were losing their hold over her.
She wondered whether this was how his affair with Clarissa Hind had ended. And Princess Gwen. And Alouette.
Only sixty-seven days were left.
Whether or not she did it intentionally, Penny continued to fake it occasionally. On those nights not even the steamy memory of Alouette’s hot mouth clamped between her legs could bring on a climax. A few times, she convinced him. More often, she couldn’t. He knew more about her body than she did.
The times she was caught—betrayed by her baseline heart rate, the pH of her sweat excretion, her skin lividity—Maxwell would summarily extract the prototype. He’d rip the applicable pages out of his notes and make a big show of tearing them into bits and sprinkling them into the trash can beside the bed. He’d open his laptop and begin reviewing the first generation of marketing materials for Beautiful You.
Once, to defuse his silent anger, Penny looked pointedly at his notebook and asked, “Are they all in there?”
“Who?” Max asked, not looking up from a screening copy of a television commercial. To Penny, these videos all looked the same: manically smiling women, their eyes gleaming, running home from the store or the post office carrying the same bright pink box printed with the curlicue Beautiful You logo. The voice-over tagline at the end of each commercial was a dulcet female purr saying, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced!”
“All of your former lovers,” Penny clarified. “Are they all in there?” She nodded at the notebook filled with his spidery shorthand. “The president, the princess, the steel heiress?”
She knew they were. Maxwell collected data like a magpie.
“That’s only the latest of many notebooks,” said the man who was scrolling down through mock-ups of print ads that would run in every women’s magazine in the world. The Beautiful You logo in Basque, French, Hindi, Afrikaans, Mandarin Chinese. “Are you certain you want to hear this?” he asked coldly.
She wasn’t sure, but she nodded.
“I have, indexed and cross-indexed, the forensic specifications of seven thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-four females, ages six through two hundred seven.” Turning to meet her gaze, he added, “Before you phone the child welfare authorities, my encounter with the six-year-old occurred when we were both that age and playing ‘doctor’ in the basement of her family home in Ballard.” The centuries-old subject was a mystic who lived high on Mount Everest.
He smiled. “I’ve trained myself with the abilities to please any woman,” Max said flatly. He wasn’t bragging, not in his own mind. “Young or old. Fat or thin. Any race. From any culture. I can quickly and efficiently bring any woman to greater levels of orgasm than she has ever dreamed possible.”
Turning back to his computer screen, he continued. “I’ve collected data about the sexual responsiveness of high school girls, college coeds, young professionals. I have studied the erotic tricks of Tajikistan temple prostitutes … German sex therapists … Sufi belly dancers. The women you know of, the rich and powerful, are only the tip of my sexual iceberg. By the time I bedded them I was already very well rehearsed in a thousand ways of providing pleasure.”
Penny realized that with numbers like that, very few of his partners had gotten more than a few minutes of Max’s attention. “Is that why you pursued Clarissa Hind?”
“No, the purpose of
“Thank you, Mom.”
The truth was, once Penny had faked one orgasm she found herself questioning all of them. She’d stopped trusting her own physical reactions. With every nightly session, she worried that she was under- or overreacting to his ministrations. She’d never loved Maxwell, but she’d loved what he could generate in her body. Now even the orgasms were losing their hold over her.
She wondered whether this was how his affair with Clarissa Hind had ended. And Princess Gwen. And Alouette.
Only sixty-seven days were left.
Whether or not she did it intentionally, Penny continued to fake it occasionally. On those nights not even the steamy memory of Alouette’s hot mouth clamped between her legs could bring on a climax. A few times, she convinced him. More often, she couldn’t. He knew more about her body than she did.
The times she was caught—betrayed by her baseline heart rate, the pH of her sweat excretion, her skin lividity—Maxwell would summarily extract the prototype. He’d rip the applicable pages out of his notes and make a big show of tearing them into bits and sprinkling them into the trash can beside the bed. He’d open his laptop and begin reviewing the first generation of marketing materials for Beautiful You.
Once, to defuse his silent anger, Penny looked pointedly at his notebook and asked, “Are they all in there?”
“Who?” Max asked, not looking up from a screening copy of a television commercial. To Penny, these videos all looked the same: manically smiling women, their eyes gleaming, running home from the store or the post office carrying the same bright pink box printed with the curlicue Beautiful You logo. The voice-over tagline at the end of each commercial was a dulcet female purr saying, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced!”
“All of your former lovers,” Penny clarified. “Are they all in there?” She nodded at the notebook filled with his spidery shorthand. “The president, the princess, the steel heiress?”
She knew they were. Maxwell collected data like a magpie.
“That’s only the latest of many notebooks,” said the man who was scrolling down through mock-ups of print ads that would run in every women’s magazine in the world. The Beautiful You logo in Basque, French, Hindi, Afrikaans, Mandarin Chinese. “Are you certain you want to hear this?” he asked coldly.
She wasn’t sure, but she nodded.
“I have, indexed and cross-indexed, the forensic specifications of seven thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-four females, ages six through two hundred seven.” Turning to meet her gaze, he added, “Before you phone the child welfare authorities, my encounter with the six-year-old occurred when we were both that age and playing ‘doctor’ in the basement of her family home in Ballard.” The centuries-old subject was a mystic who lived high on Mount Everest.
He smiled. “I’ve trained myself with the abilities to please any woman,” Max said flatly. He wasn’t bragging, not in his own mind. “Young or old. Fat or thin. Any race. From any culture. I can quickly and efficiently bring any woman to greater levels of orgasm than she has ever dreamed possible.”
Turning back to his computer screen, he continued. “I’ve collected data about the sexual responsiveness of high school girls, college coeds, young professionals. I have studied the erotic tricks of Tajikistan temple prostitutes … German sex therapists … Sufi belly dancers. The women you know of, the rich and powerful, are only the tip of my sexual iceberg. By the time I bedded them I was already very well rehearsed in a thousand ways of providing pleasure.”
Penny realized that with numbers like that, very few of his partners had gotten more than a few minutes of Max’s attention. “Is that why you pursued Clarissa Hind?”
“No, the purpose of
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