“You don’t have a problem prostituting yourself?”
She bristled. Was he trying to make a moral judgment? He was the one shelling out a ridiculous amount of money.
“If men don’t have a problem paying for sex, why should women have a problem selling it?” she returned.
“They shouldn’t. Your body, your choice.”
She was stunned. He made prostitution sound like a progressive value. He wadded up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the wastebasket like he was making a jump shot. From the soft flick of his wrist, she could tell he had some shooting skills.
“You play,” she commented.
“Do you?”
“In high school. I wasn’t good enough to play for Tara, however.”
“Very few people are.”
She couldn’t help but like that he knew a little about Stanford women’s basketball and the name of the coach. Most men knew next to nothing about women’s team sports. Having eaten half her sandwich, she wrapped the other half to save for Claire.
“You ever watch the team play?” she asked.
“I took my younger sister to a few games. She thought about playing for VanDerveer.”
“What position?”
“Small forward.”
“That’s the position I played—in high school. Did your sister go to Stanford?”
“UCLA.”
“She must be really good.”
“She is.”
Kimani looked down. This was surreal. She was having a conversation about basketball while half-naked in a remote cabin with a stranger who had paid two hundred thousand dollars for sex without batting an eye.
He paid to own you for a week, she reminded herself, and reasoned that she was getting chummy with him so that she could learn more for her story.
“You look like you could use a nap.”
Her gaze snapped up. Was “nap” a code word for some kind of kinky sex?
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing. I...”
“You look tired.”
Even if nap didn’t mean anything else, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back down into that depressing basement.
“Go wash up and rest,” he said. “I’ve got calls to make.”
At her hesitation, he asked again, “What?”
“Wash up where?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “The bathroom.”