Vicki woke up when her head slipped under the water. She came up for air gasping and sputtering, to find herself in a fine porcelain bathtub, the water gone lukewarm and quilted with the scum of dissipated bubble bath. She ladled water over her face and hair, scouring herself clear of anything that might be clinging to her, then stepped out of the tub. She was too freaked to care much about someone seeing or recording in the few seconds it took her to grab a towel from the bar.
Her reporter's instincts came to the forefront. She remembered going to Wayne Manor—and the bathroom was plastered with the sterling W monogram, on the towels, on the pebbled glass of the shower, on the bath mat. It was like a themed hotel, just this side of tasteful, but only just.
She couldn't quite remember how she'd ended up in this tub, but her old clothes were missing, not in the empty hamper either. But there were fresh clothes laid out for her. Drying herself off quickly, she changed into them. They fit her perfectly.
There was a gentle rap at the door. "Are you decent, Vicki?"
She recognized the voice. "Bruce?" She flew to jerk the door open. There he stood, wearing an elegantly casual outfit—chinos, polo shirt, penny loafers. "What happened? What am I doing here?"
"You came here for an interview," Bruce prompted her. "Unfortunately, you wandered into the garden, where Ivy was working on some of her experiments. I'm afraid you caught a small dose. You passed out, fell in the mud, I offered to let you wash up—you must've fallen asleep. I suppose until the gas wore off."
"You just let Ivy grow some hazardous chemical on your grounds?" Vicki demanded.
"I let women do all sorts of things," Bruce said urbanely. "Would you like to go on with the interview now?"
For a journo, that was no question at all.
***
"After you," he said, ushering her into his oak-paneled home office. She swept by him in a mist of jasmine, the perfume she'd found no doubt left by a past lover. His eyes were riveted to her ass as her buttocks flounced under her short skirt. He had picked out the skirt, probably guessing correctly that it would display her thighs, trim and fit, all the way down to her knee-high boots. Those were better suited to what she'd been wearing, but they proved startlingly erotic with bare skin.
Vicki stopped in the middle of the spacious office, atop the luxurious carpet, and turned around with her pocket recorder in hand. "A lovely office, Mr. Wayne," she said.
"Please," Bruce said. "I thought we've moved on to just 'Bruce and Vicki.'"
"Perhaps when we're off the clock."
"I didn't know I was on the clock." He took Vicki by the arm and steered her toward a chair. Her flesh was vibrantly alive under his fingers. After all the 'misfit toys' he'd interacted with, a normal—albeit beautiful—woman was paradoxically exotic. "Do sit down. I'm sure your readers are quite interested in how my wives and I are holding up. I'd rather they hear the truth from someone they can trust, such as yourself, not some muckraker..."
Vicki smiled up at him with ruby lips, standing in front of the chair. "I understand, Mr. Wayne," she said. "The truth is why I came here today. Oh, I hope to interview you of course. But my real purpose is that... there's something I have to say."
Bruce shook his head and laughed. "Vicki... I know."
"You... do?"
"Of course. It's not the first time."
"It's not?"
"No." Bruce laid a hand on her shoulder and eased her back into her chair. "Even with that whiff you took, I'm sure you remember what happened at the restaurant. You can't stop thinking about it. You can't get me out of your head."
Vicki blinked. He was disconcertingly close to the mark—she had been fascinated by where that cruel, capricious, and frighteningly effective lust had come from, sprouting from America's shallowest playboy, a depth charge proving that still waters ran deep. She liked to think that if she'd just been picked up at a bar and fucked like that, she'd just give the guy a ring and see if they could be a regular weekend thing. But coupling that performance with an elaborately harmless, essentially amicable man like Bruce Wayne made her smell a story.
Still, his arrogant words hit too close to home for her not to snap in retaliation. "You'd like that, wouldn't you!? I get hung up on you while you run along, chalking me up as just another of your conquests!"
His eyes darkened. For a moment, she thought she saw the animal that had fucked her before. "Actually, I was thinking that as long as you're interested, we'd make a good team. You're a smart, capable woman—an excellent journalist—we could do a lot for this city, working together."
Vicki gulped, her eyes sliding downward. She looked away before they reached his lap. "I thought you already had a publicist."
"That's not what I'm talking about."
Vicki stared at him as if she could see what he was implying. It sounded too good to be true. Could Bruce Wayne, the playboy, really be a tiger in disguise?
"What I'm doing with Ivy and Harley is only the beginning. You're a reporter. You know there's more to me than wine tastings and soirees. Through Wayne Enterprises, there's social work, charities, job creation—"
"And what about the wine tastings?" Vicki asked him, voice rich with insinuation. "The soirees?"
"They're more fun," Bruce replied darkly. "Wouldn't you agree?"
None of this sounded like Bruce, even if she knew intellectually that his company was generally on the up and up, that for as much time as he spent in the gossip columns, he really did care about something besides adding zeroes to his bank account. He was just trying to spare her feelings, she thought. She smiled sadly and patted his hand.
