Jules’ sigh reached Mercy even over the hum of the website servers and the sweet sounds of Chet Baker and his trumpet.

Her BFF had been unhappy—and restless—for weeks. That was odd enough in itself, but even more odd was the fact that he hadn’t told her what was bothering him even though she’d asked him dozens of times.

Jules shrugged and turned away, refusing to meet her eyes, shoulders hunched up around his ears, when she asked. In the almost quarter century they’d been friends, she couldn’t remember a single secret. Until this one.

Mercy gave a small sigh. It obviously wasn’t something physically wrong—Jules still spent his hour at the gym every morning, still ate well, still, except for his hangdog expression and his slumped shoulders, looked fine.

Mercy shut off the music right in the middle of Someone to Watch Over Me. While waiting for Jules to turn around and acknowledge the silence, she looked over the cavernous space they’d leased just over a year ago.

Part Time Lovers inhabited what had, once upon a time, been the best dining and dancing hall on the West Coast. Its other claim to fame was that, unlike most other dance floors, this one—instead of being on the main floor or in the basement—lived on the fourteenth floor of the grande dame of Vancouver hotels—the Hotel Vancouver.

Windows half covered with musty red velvet drapes spanned the room, looking out over Burrard Inlet to the mountains in the north, the city and beyond to Mount Baker to the east, and the ocean to the south and west.

Jules and Mercy never closed the curtains, never shut out the views. Jules said he felt as if he worked in a sky palace, and he wanted to see the world around him. For a guy who spent most of his time in his own head, who loved programming the way some men loved their cars, his obsession with the open windows was odd.

But then, a lot about both Jules and Mercy was odd.

She stared at the space surrounding her. The room managed to maintain some of its faded glory despite the rows of computer servers, the discount tables and chairs, and the cheap and noisy fans smack dab in the middle of the big dance floor.

The rest of the room sat empty, the ceiling unreachable by even the tallest of stepladders. She knew that because when they’d first moved in, she’d cringed at the idea of the spider webs she’d sensed above her. They’d ending up buying four stepladders—trying them out like Goldilocks and the beds in the bears’ cottage—but unlike Goldilocks, they’d never found a ladder tall enough to reach the ceilings.

She loved the space despite her fear of spiders. Loved the dirty cream walls with the embossed rosettes. The bits of gilt remaining on the mirrors across the south wall, and the intricate design of the ceiling so unreachable above their heads. Mercy could almost remember what it had looked like in its heyday, when her parents had brought her to an office Christmas party in this hotel.

She did remember riding up in the red and gold and glass elevator to the top floor, did remember the sound that met them as the doors opened onto what she had thought at the time to be a palace. She had expected to meet Prince Charming and Cinderella and, occasionally, still waited in anticipation for them.

Late at night or very early in the morning, when Jules had gone home or wasn’t in yet, Mercy was almost certain she could still see the dancers twirling across the floor, the mile-long bar in front of the windows, the bartender making martinis and rye and ginger.

Their rent was more than reasonable. Dance floors in the sky had gone out of fashion in the 1950s, and although the hotel had tried to keep it going, by the late 1970s the room had closed. The hotel manager was happy to have someone pay even a pittance for the space, but even happier to have someone to waylay the few lost or nosy guests who made their way up to the fourteenth floor.

Mercy—because Jules was in avoidance-of-everything mode—had a very particular smile she used on these people. A sultry, old-fashioned kind of smile she’d learned from watching Lana Turner and Eva Marie Saint. The intruders were usually lonely, elderly men, bored and inquisitive, who had, most likely, spent time up here when it was the most popular bar in town.

“No,” she’d say, “they’re not opening the roof again.” And then she’d spend as long as it took to convince them that there was nothing to see, that she and Jules weren’t a new political party or a remnant of a long-deceased spy cell—whatever the old guy’s personal theory seemed to be.

They reminded her of her grandfather, so she often ended up downstairs in the lobby bar having a drink with them while they talked about the lost—friends, wives, children.

Mercy understood their needs. Mourning was one of the reasons she’d convinced Jules to join her in starting Part Time Lovers.

There was a single enclosed space; not an office exactly, but it had walls. And a door. It was called the Panic Room by Jules and Mercy. The name had started as a joke, but over the year they’d worked in this space in the sky, it had become one.

When Mercy’s doctor found a lump in her breast, she’d retreated there until the test results proved it benign. When Jules’ grandmother died, he spent days in the Panic Room mourning his beloved Gran.

They didn’t have many rules at Part Time Lovers dot com, but they did have one. If either of them requested a Panic Room meeting, there was no refusing it. Mercy gestured silently to the single enclosed office then turned her back and headed for the door. She sensed Jules’ hesitation before she heard his footsteps follow her.

“Sit,” she said, standing at the head of the small oval table they’d squeezed into the room, waiting for Jules’ butt to hit a chair before she said anything else.

“I get it,” she began. “You don’t want to tell me what’s bugging you, and as of right now I’m going to stop asking.”

Jules’ face brightened, and he shifted toward the door.

“Don’t,” she snapped. “I’m not done.

“You can be as unhappy as you like on your own time, but you’re going to learn to fake it at work. You know what we do here, you know how it works, and your pathetic face and sorry voice are losing us clients. Even your email responses sound sad. I’ve had enough.”

Jules grimaced and rubbed his hand over his jaw—a sure sign he was thinking about what she’d said.

There were both benefits and serious disadvantages to working with your best friend, Jules thought. He and Mercy had been friends and sometime lovers ever since he could remember.

They’d grown up next door to each other, both only children of older parents and somehow, because of that, left outside the groups that formed so naturally in grade school. By the time they reached high school, they’d formed their own clique with only two members, and they liked it that way.

They’d lost their virginity to each other the day Mercy turned sixteen. They’d waited only because they were careful—or at least they were at the beginning.

Jules grinned to himself, not wanting Mercy to see that she’d won the battle. That first few months, he thought, had been nothing short of painful. They’d done it with each other because they were best friends. They’d done it with each other because neither of them had a date. They’d done it with each other because Mercy had double dog dared him.

They’d spent more time planning it than they’d spent doing it, though that had been his fault rather than hers. Sixteen? Sex? It was, of course, pitiful.

They’d given it up with each other—and with anyone at all—after a few boring encounters. Five years later they were both still celibate and more than ready to try it again.

Why? Maybe because they’d spent the most beautiful night of the summer sitting on an amazingly empty beach drinking cheap wine. Halfway through the second bottle, Mercy had disclosed that she’d recently discovered masturbation and that it was fabulous. Jules, of course, seconded that fabulous and raised her an astonishing.

“I want to watch you do it,” she’d said, her eyes glowing.

“Only if you let me watch you.”

The heat he’d felt when she said yes was almost enough to send him over the edge without a single touch.

He remembered that night as if it had been yesterday. To this day, if he was having trouble getting it up—usually with a client they’d been unable to find the perfect match for and he or she had a male fantasy—he thought of that night.

“You first,” he’d said, little realizing what watching her masturbate would do to his cock, which had begun to swell with the very first mention of masturbation.

Mercy smiled a smile—sexy and shy and sly all at once—he’d never seen before, and then she nodded. Jules’ cock throbbed in his jeans, and he hoped he’d not embarrass himself. “Let me know if you hear anyone coming,” she whispered. “When I’m doing this I don’t hear anything except my heart pounding.”

She pulled off her T-shirt, and Jules gulped. No bra, and her breasts were the perfect size, the perfect shape. The palms of his hands heated. He leaned forward.

“No touching,” Mercy said. “Not me and not…” She looked down at the tent pushing against his loose shorts. “…yourself.”