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"Raise your hands higher, Clarke. If I have to tell you again, I won't touch you at all tonight."

Obediently, Pru lifted her arms, knowing he would otherwise make good on his threat. The heavy silken cord that bound her wrists together was tight enough to chafe. Edward - for her Ned was Edward at these times - pulled at the tail of the cord until the line ran smoothly through the ornate iron hook on her dressing room wall. The knot he'd made snagged into place, keeping her arms firmly where Edward wanted them. She was suspended from the hook, just on the verge of needing to go on tiptoe, and her body trembled briefly with the effort of finding and maintaining her balance.

He released the line, stepping very close. Her bare breasts tingled at the sudden proximity of his heat. With his shirt stripped off, she could make out the sheen of perspiration clinging to his olive skin. He was an active man, a gorgeous specimen, and Pru was utterly in thrall to his body, as always. The hollows at his hips, the cording of his forearms, the ridges on his abdomen - she longed to paint them with her tongue as well as with brush and canvas. He would let her, too, but only when he chose the moment.

"What gives you the right to disapprove of me?" Edward was asking her softly. His pupils were widening black inkblots against the blue of his irises. "I asked you to do one simple thing..." He sighed and turned away, moving to the washbasin. "You were very disappointing."

Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the broad muscles of his back.

Disappointing. This from a man who three hours ago had pushed her down onto the dining table, shoved up her dress and fucked her to his completion. She squirmed, remembering the feeling of his come trickling down the crease of her thigh and the way he'd panted against her back.

Her involuntary movements disrupted her fragile balance - she twisted for a panicked moment before the knot creaked loudly against the hook as her weight redistributed.

He sauntered back towards her, a wet flannel dangling from casual fingers.

She said quickly, "The challenge was only to see if he remembered me, not to make him uncomfortable. The way Harry looked at me-"

Edward's head tilted with hungry interest. "Harry, is it?"

Pru bit her lip. He liked nothing more than to provoke her, and she liked nothing less than the inevitability of his victory.

"He remembered you, but only after I pushed you to his attention. Perhaps you're not as memorable as you think." He paused to let that sink in before gentling his tone. "My dear Clarke. If anything made Harry uncomfortable it was your ineptitude."

A quick flick of his wrist sent the flannel snapping out against her naked hip. She cried out at the stinging pain. He ignored her whine.

"If the way that Harry was looking at you is worth remark, can you imagine how you looked at him? Ah, yes, I see you do know, Clarke. You were devouring that big golden body of his as though he was a particularly delicious-" He stopped. Smiled, very slowly. "What happened between you this afternoon?"

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The Herve Leger bandage dress was gloriously short, gloriously form-fitting. Lucy gave him a slow spin, her eyes heavy-lidded and unreadable as she posed for him. Her arse was a gorgeous inverted heart and the dress hugged what it could, cradling her curves and tugging them into prominence. The one-shoulder neckline brought the elegant slope of her throat, the musculature of her exposed shoulder into sharp relief. And when she completed the turn, facing him with breasts and thighs and waist painted in tight gradations of peach-orange-white, he really was done for.

"Oh," he said, because it was either that or bloody well moan out loud.

"You approve?"

He let out that moan after all. "Christ, you're a tease."

She gave him a loaded look before disappearing back into the fitting room.

He was still thinking about peeling it off her, slowly, when she re-emerged wearing the dress he knew she'd go home with.

Valentine moved towards her, more to give himself an excuse to interfere with the perfect lines of it on her body than out of a need to see it any closer. It was her, pure and simple, and he'd always loved the assurance of a well-dressed woman, one who knew her power and owned it.

He held a breath as she turned for him-there were velvet panels slashed into the not-quite-black fabric. At her right shoulder, like a medal, a buckle shone. Lower, at her hip, was another, right where it would draw the eye and his wandering hands.

She was clearly waiting for his reaction, but he found himself suddenly reluctant. "Well..."

"I love it," she said, without hesitation.

He gave in. "It is perfect."

"Undo me?"

Taking her by the shoulders, he slowly turned her, savouring the feeling of manhandling her into another position. Then he stroked gently down the velvet stripe that ran parallel to the zipper.

She reached behind her to graze her fingers across his set jaw, very, very lightly. Watching him in the mirror, she smiled. "Don't look so worried, Valentine, we're not done yet. I need to buy shoes and underwear too."

Relief made him giddy as he slid the zipper down. She was wearing a white bra and there was a beauty mark on her left shoulder blade. "I might need to see quite a few knickers before I'll be able to advise."

"Oh, I'm not so sure of that. You seem like a man who knows exactly what he wants."

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His fare was dressed like Charles Dickens' wet dream.

"What do you think?" she asked him.

Tim glanced away from the road just long enough to get an impressive view of plumped cleavage and a rouged mouth and cheeks. "Aren't you cold?" he asked, eyes safely back on the windscreen. With the driving snow and black ice patches to navigate, the only curves he could spare concentration for were the hedge-lined hairpins of the country road.

"Worth it though," she said, and he could hear the satisfied grin in her voice without needing to look again in the mirror.

Bankers drinking late had been his original thought when he'd decided to take one last fare before calling it a night. With Christmas Eve shopping still raging for the last-minute desperate on Regent Street, he'd been confident of finding a few guilty fathers needing a ride to Hamley's. Instead, he'd picked up the Victorian tart from the corner of St Mary Axe. When she'd told him in her public school purr that she was looking for a lift to deepest darkest Surrey and could he possibly help a damsel in distress, he'd decided she would suit just fine.

He'd recognised her immediately, even in all her fancy get-up, and she'd remembered him too.

"Diana," she'd said. "I never introduced myself before. And you're Driver Tim, who got me to my meeting on time. How lovely to see you again."

He'd driven her before from the Gherkin in a breakneck race to Canada Water. That day her spectacular breasts had been dressed for the boardroom. Money and entitlement had risen off her like perfume. But she'd spared him a cheeky wink, her blouse gaping and her pinstripe skirt riding up her thighs as she'd overpaid the tab. And now she was back in his cab-”who said there weren't such things as Christmas miracles?

Tonight they'd been chatting since she'd clambered into his backseat with her enormous dress and festive shopping bags. Better to listen to her playful teasing than the same old autotune carols on the radio. And those curving pink lips and little flashes of white teeth were an even nicer tip than the tenner the last punter had given him.

"I wore this to work today," she was saying. "Nothing quite like distracting bond traders with tastefully historic tits and arse."

He didn't buy that line for a second. He'd seen enough of her now to know the flighty girly act was just that, and he had no doubt she'd earned every rung of her boardroom rank. But she seemed to expect a response in kind, so he obliged. "You're like the National Trust on Viagra," he assured her and was treated to another glimpse of her wide smile.

"It was good fun, though I don't recommend sitting through meetings with whalebone digging into your soft bits. Have you ever dressed up?"

"Yeah..." Tim chuckled at the memory. "Utter disaster. I saw this bloke a few times, he bought me some leather. Felt like a right tosser."

She hummed in response to that. "You're into men then?" She flicked her polished nails against the transparent safety barrier between them. The click-clatter of them so untouchably near made his small hairs stand up to attention, stirred places lower as well.

"Men and women," he said, with an inviting smile at her in the mirror.

"Very generous of you to let both sexes make you feel like a tosser."

Tim laughed and she leant forward, the dress creaking, chest heaving, this was his lucky night.