Strangers in the Sauna

by Caitlin Crews

  Step behind the hotel room doors of the Chatsfield, London…

  Jenny Harding is mortified when her lousy ex leaves her stranded - and furious! - in London’s most opulent hotel, in nothing but her underwear. Sneaking down to the sauna to ‘borrow’ a shirt, she thinks things can’t get any worse, until she’s caught red-handed by the shirt’s owner, Brax Tsoukatos! Jenny was ready to swear off men, but when this gorgeous stranger proposes an impulsive encounter, the temptation to live dangerously for one wild night is outrageously irresistible…!

  Strangers in the Sauna

  Caitlin Crews

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Discover the Chatsfield

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Jenny Harding had it all planned out.

  She wore Daniel’s favourite underthings, frothy and pink. They didn’t so much cover her naughty bits as make them that much naughtier, which was the point. Then, feeling bold and determined—because she wasn’t going to let over six months of a good relationship sink without a fight, and this surely qualified as a necessary sucker-punch—she belted herself into a trench coat, slipped on her highest and most decadent heels, and headed for London’s poshest hotel: the Chatsfield.

  The legendary hotel couldn’t have been further away from the house Jenny shared with a collection of other graduate students far outside Central London, in both geographic and monetary terms. It had been a surprise when Daniel had announced he’d planned to spend a week in such luxurious surroundings, if she was honest, so far from the noisy house where they lived in rooms they’d been placed in by their university for the duration of their year-long masters degree courses, but Jenny had rallied.

  ‘I need to work on my thesis,’ Daniel had said two days ago in his delicious Scottish accent when he’d told her his plans, though their masters theses wouldn’t be due until the end of the summer and it was only May. ‘But why don’t you come for lunch next Tuesday?’

  She’d smiled, though she hadn’t exactly felt supportive.

  But as the taxi pulled up in front of the landmark hotel in a very upmarket part of already deeply monied Central London on this Thursday night, Jenny found she couldn’t do anything but admire Daniel’s choice of studying retreat. Who wouldn’t enjoy this place—if they could afford it? It felt like walking directly into one of the fairy tales she’d read so voraciously as a little girl in the decidedly unromantic prairie town in South Dakota where she’d been born and raised. She couldn’t help but sigh happily when she stepped inside the opulent lobby with its soaring ceilings and glamour she could all but taste.

  This was the perfect place to reconnect with Daniel, who had felt further and further away lately. Which was quite a trick given he literally lived on the other side of her bedroom wall in the next room.

  Jenny felt reckless and wild in all the right ways as she sauntered across the hushed magnificence of the busy lobby. How many times in her nearly twenty-five years had she longed to feel like this—as if her surroundings were soaking into her, making her as lush and spectacular as everything she saw? As if the night was already hers?

  As if Daniel’s enthusiastic surrender to her plan was already completely assured!

  Maybe it was the hotel itself, she thought as she stepped into the glorious elevator and keyed in his floor. It seemed to make everything feel that much more sparkly. Including Jenny.

  The long walk down Daniel’s hallway felt good, she told herself—and not nerve-wracking at all. Powerful, she chanted internally, hearing her long, dark hair swish against the shoulders of the trench coat and deliberately lengthening her stride to feel the pull in her legs. I am a sexy and powerful woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to get it.

  It felt true as she found Daniel’s door.

  Tonight, she would sort things out in the time-honored manner of all men and women. Tonight, she would stop waiting for Daniel to take charge the way he never seemed to do. Tonight, she would reclaim what she wanted—and claim what was already hers.

  Jenny knocked, loud and confidently, and then stepped to the side of the peephole so he couldn’t see her from inside, the better to surprise him. She imagined him sitting at the desk inside, his red hair standing up in spikes from running his hands though it while he read, frowning at the intrusion after hours of intense focus. She smiled with anticipation. She glanced up and down the hall and then—seeing that the hall remained empty, shivering slightly at her own uncharacteristic daring, and rolling with the surge of accompanying adrenaline—slipped off the trench coat and tossed it to the side.

  Better to start as she meant to go on.

  She heard the chain being pulled off, then the bolt being thrown, and she stepped closer, assuming her best rendition of a saucy, smoldering expression. The door swung open and Jenny expected to hear his favorite expletive, uttered in that scrumptiously gruff accent of his.

  Except it wasn’t Daniel who stood there.

  It was a woman. A very blonde and pretty woman, with what could only be described as bedroom hair and a very smug and dreamy expression to match.

  Wearing nothing at all but a plush Chatsfield bathrobe she hadn’t bothered to belt.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I don’t think we ordered that,’ the woman said with a merry laugh.

  Jenny felt her entire body blaze into bright, humiliated red, which, she thought in what was obviously the edge of hysteria, must look ridiculous next to the pink underthings she was barely wearing.

  ‘I am so sorry!’ she breathed through a wave of mortification so intense that she was slightly worried it might take her out at the knees. ‘I must have the wrong room—’

  But how could that be? She’d checked Daniel’s text no less than twenty-five times on the way over because she’d been terrified of exactly this, and there was no mistake. 507. She was frozen in shock and humiliation, but she managed to jerk her gaze away from the blonde and confirm that, yes, this was room 507.

  Had Daniel switched rooms? He wasn’t expecting her for several days yet, so perhaps he had. He quite reasonably wouldn’t have thought to update her until Tuesday, she assured herself, when she was on her way—

  ‘Is that the food?’ came the voice from within.

  A voice that Jenny knew very well. Scottish and sexy. A little bit rough around the edges, much like its owner.

  She tried to deny it. She told herself she was imagining things. She and Daniel had fallen for each other when they’d met upon moving into their shared house back in September. They’d been together ever since. She’d told all her friends that yes, in fact, she’d moved to England and found her Mr. Darcy as she’d secretly hoped while pursuing her masters degree in English literature—he just happened to be a redheaded Scotsman from Aberdeen who was studying Economics.

  It couldn’t possibly be Daniel, she told herself now. Of course it couldn’t.

  But then he swung out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and Jenny simply… went blank.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there. She watched Daniel’s jaw drop. She heard nothing but a deafening white noise inside her head. She felt her heart thud hard and sickeningly against her chest and wasn’t sure she didn’t faint, after all.

  Except she was still standing when she could breathe again.

  ‘Daniel?’

&
nbsp; Later, she supposed she’d hate herself for the fact that was a question. Like she wasn’t certain when she was standing right there in front of him. Or like she was waiting for some explanation that would make it okay that he was in a hotel room with a blonde woman and neither one of them was wearing regular clothes. Like there was any reasonable sequence of events that could make such a thing all right.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’d ask what you’re doing here but I think I can work that out on my own,’ Jenny retorted. She didn’t even know where that came from. The person using her mouth sounded cool and regal and not at all like a woman who’d just discovered her boyfriend in a hotel with a clearly post-coital blonde.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be here!’ he threw at her, like this was all Jenny’s fault.

  Perhaps sensing that things could escalate at any moment, the blonde wisely retreated back into the room as Daniel moved towards the door. Jenny wanted to shout at her too, but caught herself. It wasn’t the blonde she was angry with. It wasn’t the blonde who had spent six months cuddling with her and spooning her at night and talking with such fervor about their shared future.

  ‘If you wanted to break up with me,’ Jenny hurled at him, her voice almost cracking from all the things that churned inside her then, that she was terribly afraid were written all over the acres of skin she was exposing, ‘why not say so?’

  And Daniel sighed.

  Very much as if he thought Jenny was being unreasonable in some way. Hysterical and overwrought. It was not a good sigh. Or a guilty one.

  ‘Who said I wanted to break up?’ He shook his head at her, as if she was some sort of child who needed slow, careful explanations to obvious things and he was reluctantly obliging. ‘I like sex, Jen. A lot of it. And with you it always has to be a bloody big production.’ When she stared at him in disbelief, he sighed again, and it was even more offensive the second time. ‘The talking, the cuddling. All of that malarkey. Sometimes I just want a shag. This has nothing to do with you.’

  And suddenly, so many things made sense. His ‘visits home’ that he took so often, yet that one time she’d heard him taking a call from his mother he’d spent it apologizing for being out of touch for so long. The way some of his friends looked at her like she was a bit dim, which she’d thought was simply the usual response to Being American Abroad. His ex-girlfriend who came up a shade or two too often, who was a wealthy banker who liked to throw her money around and who was also, now that Jenny thought about it, blonde.

  How could she have been such an idiot?

  But she’d have ample time to think that through. Right now she had to get away from Daniel before she broke down and sobbed, which, she understood on a deep level that was practically animal, would be a humiliation too far.

  Jenny waved her hand up and down, drawing his attention to her state of near-nudity. She watched his expression go a bit slack as he took it all in. The deep pink bra framing her breasts, the little scrap of lace and silk below. He actually licked his lips, the pig.

  ‘Just as this has nothing to do with you,’ she told him, because while their entire relationship had obviously been a complete lie, the pleasure Daniel had taken in her body had never been feigned. She knew that much. ‘Ever again.’

  She was pleased that she sounded so cold as she said it. So in control. So powerful, just as she’d imagined before.

  Careful what you wish for, her mother back in South Dakota would have told her.

  ‘Come on, Jenny,’ Daniel said with a sigh. ‘Don’t be such a child.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ she suggested, almost pleasantly, were it not for the chilly edge to her voice. ‘And by all means, sleep with whoever you want. But don’t ever speak to me again, Daniel. I mean it.’

  And then she turned and started off down the hall, her head held high—only to realise, when she’d taken a few too many long, confident strides to emphasise how powerful she wished she felt, that she’d left her trench coat on the floor outside his room.

  As she would rather die than turn around, slink back, and grab it when she knew he was standing there watching her and probably waiting for her to do exactly that, Jenny was forced to keep right on walking like she had all the confidence in the world—down the elegant and storied halls of the Chatsfield London in nothing but a thong and a push-up bra.

  Chapter Three

  Brax Tsoukatos leaned back in the sauna and let the steam ease the jet lag from his tired bones.

  He hardly knew what time zone he was in. He’d been in Melbourne, Vancouver and New York in the past three weeks for his work in the family shipping business, and only the particular luxuriousness of his surroundings made it clear that he’d made it back to London and his favourite hotel.

  He was just settling into the heat when he heard the door open. He didn’t know what made him glance over, but he was feeling so pleasantly lazy he barely opened his eyes to do it. He saw a flash of a deep, enticing magenta encasing a pair of perfect breasts through the steam, and then the sauna door slid shut.

  Possibly, probably, he was hallucinating.

  He’d been determined to prove himself on this trip, which meant he’d spent all of his time working and none of it relaxing. His older brother Theo got to laze about and do as he liked because he was the heir to the company, but Brax didn’t have that luxury. He had to distinguish himself. There’d been no partying of any kind and no women at all in these past weeks, which was unlike him. Maybe that was why he got up and moved over to the door, easing it open in time to see a woman with a glossy fall of long, dark hair that cascaded over her shoulders and did things to his balance, buttoning up his shirt over her otherwise naked body.

  The body did other things to his balance. And to the more insistent parts of his anatomy.

  She smoothed her hands over the front of the shirt as if she was wishing it covered more of her, and then she marched towards the door of the spa without a single backward glance.

  She was stealing his shirt.

  For a moment Brax only stared, still not convinced he wasn’t simply imagining this. He had the impression of her curves—and the memory of those luscious breasts pressing against cups of deep magenta and a touch of lace—and there was that bottom of hers that switched back and forth as she walked in a manner that made him want to howl at the night sky. His shirt was much too big for her, hanging halfway down her lovely thighs and showing off the rest of her long and exquisitely formed legs.

  And, because he had obviously done something right with his life though he hadn’t realised how right until this moment, she was wearing a deliciously high pair of heels in a scandalous shade of red.

  He was so mesmerised by this picture that he almost let her walk right off with a bespoke shirt and what remained of his sanity.

  ‘I think you’re heading in the wrong direction,’ he said when her hand was on the door handle that would lead her out into the rest of the hotel.

  She jumped. Actually jumped at least a centimetre in the air and then whirled around, and Brax felt knocked in the head. Hard. Everything contracted, then focused, hot and tight.

  She was so pretty. There was a blush high on her cheekbones and her eyes were a shade lighter than her hair and he was glad he had a towel wrapped around him so she couldn’t see his most unmanageable parts.

  And he discovered he was suddenly wide awake. Alert, even. Like she was the good, rich Greek coffee his father made every morning of his life without fail.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Her voice was high-pitched from panic, he thought, and sounded American besides. Brax thought he could lose himself in her mouth, wide and full and much too tempting.

  ‘Usually when women wrap themselves in my shirt, they walk towards me,’ he said. ‘Not away. You appear to be headed in the wrong direction.’

  She scowled at him, which was notable as that was not an expression beautiful women generally made when they encountered him. He couldn’t have said why
he found that intriguing. Or why he felt a kind of gladness wash through him when she advanced on him, a grim look on that mouth of hers and murder in her eyes.

  ‘I’m tired of you,’ she threw at him.

  ‘I am famously irritating,’ Brax agreed, finding that he was amused by her when really, he should have been ringing security, ‘but that is usually something people discover after they meet me, not before.’

  ‘Your type,’ she clarified, those fantastic heels loud on the floor of the sauna antechamber. ‘All of you. Flinging yourselves in and out of any woman who happens by. Lying and cheating and for what? It’s just sex. Is it really worth all the pain it causes?’

  Brax caught a glimpse of that dark pink bra and the slope of her breast through the open space in his shirt, and lust slammed into him, hard and demanding. It really has been a long time, he thought. And he was deeply, surpassingly certain that sex would indeed be worth it, though he didn’t imagine that was the answer she was looking for.

  ‘You’re peering down my shirt right now, aren’t you?’ she asked, sounding furious and disgusted.

  ‘My shirt,’ he corrected mildly enough, though he could hear that Tsoukatos steel creep into his voice anyway, because he truly was his ruthless father’s son and was as wholly unaccustomed to such challenges. Who would dare? Brax smiled. ‘If you’d like me to stop staring at it, you can always give it back.’

  Chapter Four

  That suggestion hung there between them in the suddenly much too tense outer chamber of the sauna.

  Jenny took a deep breath. The red haze that had chased her down the hall from Daniel’s room and had then led her to creep into this swanky, absurdly lush spa area with the sole objective of stealing the clothing of whatever wealthy people might populate it faded away.

  Leaving her to come to reluctant grips with the fact that she was standing, hands on her hips and her head tilted at what could only be called a belligerent angle, scowling up at the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.