Love in the Limelight Volume Two: Seduced on the Red CarpetLovers Premiere

by Ann Christopher

  “We start early here,” he informed her.

  “Have mercy,” she begged.

  His smile dimmed, leaving behind that naked intensity that made her skin sizzle. “I can’t.” The sudden roughening of his voice signaled that maybe he was struggling, too, that maybe he’d also been doing some serious yearning. “I had a tough time sleeping. I wanted today to start so I could get back to you.”

  Breathing suddenly got a whole lot more difficult. “Oh,” she said in a stunning display of eloquence.

  “Did you sleep?”

  God. It was so hard to think when he looked at her like that, as though her face held the answers to all his prayers and he could study her forever. She shook her head, hating to be so honest but unable to deny him anything.

  A deepening of his dimples told her that she’d just made him happy, and that made her happy. Like a hormonal junior high schooler who’d been caught passing a note to her crush, she flushed to the roots of her hair.

  “Here’s your coffee. Get dressed, okay?”

  Turning to go, he passed the cup to her and their fingers brushed. With that simple touch, all bets were off. He paused, his shoulders squaring off with a new tension that radiated out from him and tightened something deep inside her belly.

  Then he turned back. “Just out of curiosity…what’re you wearing?”

  A nervous titter flew out of her mouth before she could choke it back.

  “You’re kidding.”

  The early-morning shadows hit his face just right, heightening the gleam in his eye and making him wicked. Dangerous. Irresistible.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  Absolutely not. “Panties,” she said, swallowing hard. “A tank top.”

  His gaze, speculative now, flickered over her face and down the door, as though he wished his X-ray vision would kick in and help him see past her hiding place.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  A beat passed.

  “Show me,” he said softly.

  Wow. She’d known that was coming, hadn’t she? “I haven’t been retouched and airbrushed,” she warned.

  He almost smiled. “I’ll try not to scream.”

  She hesitated. In that moment, she had lots of options available to her. She could laugh and make another joke. She could slam the door in outrage. She could read him the riot act for suggesting such a thing.

  She didn’t do any of that.

  Instead, she held his gaze, tossed her hair over her shoulder to shake off her wild nerves and stepped out from behind the door in all her nearly naked glory. He didn’t look right away; he seemed far more interested in interpreting whatever he saw on her face. And then, at last, he looked down, his gaze gliding over her thin white tank and string bikinis with the ease of an Olympic skater on the ice.

  Livia was comfortable with her body. As a model, she’d sashayed down runways all over the world, often more naked than clothed, and she’d posed for more than her share of magazine bikini shots. There’d even been that Times Square billboard of her in a teeny-tiny dress that’d barely covered her privates, selling her line of perfume.

  None of that bothered her.

  Hunter’s eyes on her—now that bothered her. Correction: Hunter’s gaze on her made her hot and bothered. It also made her ache with repressed needs until she felt the wet clench between her legs and the insistent swelling of her nipples.

  He wasn’t unaffected. All of his desire for her was obvious in his high color, glittering eyes and growing bulge in the front of his jeans. Watching him stare at her and feeling their effect on each other without even touching, she wondered how long they could hold out and why they even wanted to.

  Some things couldn’t be fought.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  Putting one hand on her hip, she turned the way she’d been trained to do. There was an audible hitch in his breath and, spurred on by a tiny devil whispering in her ear, she looked over her shoulder at him. After a lingering look at her ass—judging by the open appreciation in his expression, he didn’t think she had too much junk in her trunk, or anything like it—he stared into her face again.

  That sharp electrical current flowed between them, making her feel like she’d been zapped by those defibrillator paddles they were always using on medical TV shows.

  “Soon.” His voice was raw now, husky with a passion that yanked against its restraints. “Okay?”

  Soon? Was that, like—what? Now?

  Now would be good, but she didn’t want to be needy or brazen. Although that horse had, clearly, raced out of the barn hours ago.

  Still, if he could be patient, then so could she. Sort of.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Soon.”

  He blinked and then dimpled again, breaking up some of the tension. Her mouth, on the other hand, had used up all of its skills on those last two words, so speaking was out of the question for her, at least for now.

  Stepping back, he put some much needed distance between them. Not that it helped or anything, but it was a move in the right direction.

  “Get going. Oh, and Livia?”

  She waited.

  “Don’t forget to brush your teeth so I can kiss you good morning.”

  That snapped her out of it. Roaring with outrage, she slammed the door in his laughing face.

  Chapter 8

  “Help me lift it, please,” Livia said.

  Hunter stared at her with what was beginning to be a familiar mixture of exasperation and admiration. After a quick breakfast, they’d started their day in the pinot-noir vines with the workers. He’d meant to show her how the picking was done and move on to the next stop on his nickel tour, but was that good enough for Livia, she of the bright eyes and endless curiosity? No. “I want to pick some,” she’d said. So he’d found her a tub, showed her how to cradle the bunches and angle the curved blade just right and watched as she’d worked quickly and efficiently to fill it with purple grapes.

  Now she wanted to lift the damn thing onto her head to carry it to the nearest gondola the way everyone else was doing.

  “Livie.” He chose his words with care because making it sound like it was too heavy for her would have the effect of doing the red cape shimmy in front of a charging bull. “These tubs weigh forty pounds.”

  As he could have predicted, this didn’t slow her down any. Squatting to get a grip on the tub’s handles, she gave him a pursed-lipped glare.

  “And therefore…?”

  “And therefore I don’t want you to get hurt. Your beautiful swan neck could snap in two and all your sponsors would come after me when you wind up stuck in traction for six months. I don’t want to get sued.”

  Rolling her eyes, she stood, hefting the tub waist-high. “You’re full of it, Chambers. Are you going to help me or not?”

  Ernesto Sanchez, his foreman, chose that moment to stride by. Overflowing with amusement, he gave Hunter a “don’t fight city hall” sort of shrug. “Do yourself a favor, el mero mero. Help la muñeca. She’s picked more grapes than half the no-accounts on the payroll, you know? I think we should hire her.”

  Livia grinned. “‘La muñeca,’ eh? Eres un coqueto.” You’re a flirt.

  “Siempre.” Always. Winking at her, Ernesto disappeared down the path.

  Feeling unaccountably annoyed, Hunter gave her a look. Was there no end to this woman’s charms or talents? “You speak Spanish, eh?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Yeah, well.” Lifting the stupid tub onto her head, he made sure she had a good grip on it before he let go. “If you need someone to flirt with, doll, you can flirt with me.”

  Laughing and happy now—hell, if she liked manual labor so much, he should put her to work mopping the floors in the cave; that’d make her weep with joy—she called over her shoulder to him. “Yeah, but his accent is so sexy, big boss. Or do you prefer el mero mero?”

  He got his own tub settled on his shoulder and grumbled. “
I’d prefer getting out of this hot sun and not working so hard. A big boss shouldn’t have to sweat.”

  Pausing, she swung around to face him, all sun-kissed enthusiasm and light. A waking dream that made his breath hitch and his thoughts scatter. “Have I mentioned how full of it you are? You love every second of being out in your fields.”

  Yeah, he did, but how did she know that? Was she that intuitive or did she have a secret window into his soul that no one else could access?

  “I’m not that easy to read.”

  “Of course you are. I don’t blame you, though.” She glanced around, absorbing the natural beauty in every direction. “I’d never leave here if I were you.”

  “I never plan to.”

  She paused, a shadow flickering across her face that had nothing to do with the vines or the clouds. A thousand things went unspoken between them in that second, things he didn’t want to think about until he absolutely had to. That he belonged here and she didn’t. That while he would never live anywhere else, she did. That this interlude between them, this moment, this connection, had a shelf life that would soon expire. That she would leave to return to her real life before he knew it, and he was beginning to fear she’d take the sun with her when she went.

  But then she smiled again, delaying anything sad or serious between them.

  “Let’s go. I want to make sure I fill out the paperwork so I can get the employee health plan you owe me.”

  *

  “So.” Livia turned in a slow circle, feeling as though she’d been trapped in a Schwarzenegger/Stallone movie in which a thirty-foot wall of water would soon flood through, leaving little to no chance of survival. “Is this where the tortures are carried out?”

  They stood inside one of the caves, which was a cool subterranean tunnel with naked overhead bulbs providing the only dim lighting. Shadows surrounded them on all sides, and she didn’t peer at them too closely lest she spy an eight-legged critter and humiliate herself by screaming her fool head off.

  Enormous wooden bins two rows deep lined either side of the path through the cave, and inside of each were about a hundred upside-down bottles of sleeping wine. The overall effect was more than a little eerie, and she was glad, in the farthest girly-girl corners of her heart, to have a big, strong man with her if she had to spend time in this dungeon.

  “This is where the wine rests until it’s ready,” Hunter told her.

  “Have you ever been trapped in here?”

  “No.”

  “Have the lights ever gone out on you?”

  “Only that time Ethan flipped the switch on me.”

  “I can see him doing that.”

  He leaned against one of the bins, rested one ankle over the other and studied her with shrewd interest. “I forgot you know my brother from the show.”

  “That’s right. Paging the Doctor. I was a proud guest star for a few episodes.”

  “Did you like acting?”

  “It was fun, yeah. But I can tell by that scowl on your face that you’re not wild about acting.”

  Caught, he crossed his arms over his chest and tried to shrug off his disapproval. “Ethan left the vineyard to become an actor. If that’s what he wants to do with his life…” Another shrug.

  “Oh, you’re funny. If that’s what he wants to do with his life, then—what? You support him a whopping two percent?”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled but he withheld the full smile. She had the strong feeling he wished she couldn’t read him so well or would at least stop doing it when he wasn’t prepared.

  “I’m not cut out for acting, or life in Hollywood,” he told her. “But if that’s what Ethan wants to do, then that’s fine with me.”

  “He and Rachel seem very happy together, you know.”

  “Yeah. I can hear it in his voice when he calls.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  Hunter frowned. “You seem a little too fond of him. He didn’t hit on you, did he?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “He was all over Rachel. I don’t think he ever even looked at me.”

  He snorted as though this was as unlikely as surfing on Mars. “Get real.”

  She flushed and their gazes locked, leading into another of the deliciously silent moments they’d been sharing all morning. He had a way of studying her face that was so darkly, frankly appreciative that she suspected he’d swallow her whole if given half the chance.

  The funny thing was, she couldn’t wait to give him the chance.

  They’d settled against opposite bins, both leaning, neither moving. The three or four feet of path separating them felt suddenly like a yawning canyon—way too wide and nearly impossible to cross.

  “You know,” she said, wishing he would take all decision making out of her hands and touch her. Hold her. Because she needed him to, even if she had a terrible time figuring out how to ask. “I brushed my teeth this morning. I even gargled. You never did give me my kiss.” Trying to pout, she waited for him to react and meet her halfway. “Do I smell bad?”

  “Your smell is not the issue, trust me. I love honeysuckle.”

  Whoa. Had he just correctly identified her body cream? “How did you—?”

  “Like I told you. I’m a farmer. I know my flowers.”

  There was so much intensity in him, so much in the two of them together. If only she could figure out whether she should be running toward it or away from it. Right now she knew they were circling an issue that could be awkward, but did that really matter next to her consuming need to be close to him? Hell, even her pride was beginning to matter less.

  “Are you dodging the question?” she wondered.

  He cleared his throat and studied his shoes. Ran his hand over the top of his head and scrubbed his jaw. Showed every sign of being a man about to come out of his skin with agitation. The one thing he didn’t do was come closer.

  “The thing is,” he said finally, his voice low and hoarse, “the more I kiss you, the harder it is for me to stop.”

  “Then don’t stop.”

  There it was. Carte blanche. It didn’t get much clearer than that, although of course they’d already discussed this a little bit this morning. He could have her any way he wanted her, as soon as he decided it was time. The rational part of her knew this was probably a bad idea that would lead to doom in the end. The rest of her just didn’t care.

  “We need to get this on the table right now.” He stared at her, giving her a clear shot of the unhappiness in his eyes, the turmoil. “I’m not going to want you to go when your vacation is over.”

  God. That was exactly the kind of thing she should never hear.

  Exactly the kind of thing she needed to hear.

  There was no real way to lighten the mood or divert the conversation, but she felt she needed to point out the obvious. “You’ll probably get sick of me in the next day or two, don’t you think?” Funny how she said the words so easily when the mere possibility of this happening made her stomach drop; the chances of her getting tired of him anytime soon were somewhere between the probabilities of harvesting gold for food and spinning straw into usable petroleum. “We hardly know each other, Hunter.”

  “I know enough,” he told her. “More than enough.”

  *

  “Pick,” Hunter said. “A or B.”

  After a delightful lunch on the terrace, he’d loaded her into his truck for the second half of what she was already thinking of as a fairy-tale day. Possibly the best day of her life, although she hated to make that concession before the sun even set on the horizon. Holding hands in a wonderful silence, they drove down a peaceful road with valley views of orange and gold in every direction. Now they’d come to a dead end, and Hunter, who seemed to be brimming with a kind of smug excitement, expected her to select the next activity.

  “B,” she said, grinning and hoping she hadn’t chosen between, say, a trip to either a mall or museum. Neither idea appealed to her. While she was here in Napa, she fully
planned to spend as much time outside in the crisp air and sunshine as possible.

  “B it is.” Shooting her a return grin, Hunter turned right.

  They drove a little farther and then, suddenly, the trees gave way to reveal flashes of startling color and—

  “Balloons.”

  Clapping a hand over her frantically beating heart, she tried to keep some of her excitement inside lest they were planning to drive on past and head to an art museum after all. Four balloons, in various stages of inflatedness, stretched out in the valley before them, their baskets—gondolas, right?—waiting nearby. One was rainbow striped, one rainbow swirled and the other two were mostly blue with red zigzags. Did he know she’d always wanted to ride in one?

  “Are we going on a balloon ride?”

  Laughing, Hunter parked and cut the engine. “That’s the plan. Unless you’re scared of heights.”

  “Of course I’m scared of heights! Let’s go!”

  If she’d given herself more time to think about it, she’d have behaved with a little more decorum rather than leaping out of the truck and clapping and hopping like a two-year-old. She probably would have said her prayers and called her life insurance company to make sure she was paid up. But she was too excited and happy, and the sun was shining and she was free to play for once in her life.

  Why not wallow in the joy?

  “Thank you!” Racing around the truck’s cab, she launched herself into Hunter’s arms, nearly knocking him over with her Amazonian enthusiasm, poor guy. He was a good sport about it, laughing and holding her tight, and he didn’t even protest when she planted sloppy kisses all over his face. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “You’re welcome, angel.”

  He set her back on her feet, staring at her with such glowing tenderness that she fully understood, deep in her gut, how much trouble she was in. This wasn’t about having a bittersweet vacation fling and taking fond memories with her for the rest of her life. This was about falling crazy in love with a man who didn’t belong in her world any more than she belonged in his. This was about her life changing into something unrecognizable, and if she was smart, she’d walk away now.