by Julie Leto
Leo didn’t hesitate. “You’re on. What’s the stakes?”
Drew eyed Leo’s sports car, but thought better of it. “If you win, I fly you and your lady love to any destination in the continental U.S. for an uninterrupted weekend of bliss.”
“Can we join the mile-high?”
“What you do in the back while I’m flying is none of my business.”
“And if you win?”
Drew closed his eyes, thought hard, then smiled as if he’d just conjured up a particularly decadent daydream. “One weekend around the Turks and Caicos on your best rig.”
Leo laughed, shook the kid’s hand and allowed himself a split second to imagine making love to Jessie in the sky. “You’re on.”
3
IF JESSIE were to select recipes to describe Bianca’s family, the Brightons would have been some exotic dish that included rare Kobe beef, saffron handpicked from crocus plants in southern Spain and truffles extracted by the nosiest pigs in Piedmont, Italy. The Martinez clan, on the other hand, were more like chicken and yellow rice with black beans—exotic to people who didn’t live in the tropics, but rather ordinary to everyone else. As the matriarch, Celia Martinez did not entertain wild ideas, nor did she gamble, take risks or do anything that might cause someone to get hurt. Most particularly, her daughters.
Knowing this, Jessie wasn’t entirely sure how her mother would react to her announcement that in a little less than twenty minutes, she was taking off from her above-the-garage apartment adjacent to her mother’s house with the man who’d once broken her heart into a million pieces. It was probably safe to confess that they planned to transform their former love nest into a honeymoon destination for their best friends—but her recently added decision to seduce Leo while they worked she’d keep to herself.
Jessie had never really been a lemons-to-lemonade kind of girl, but maybe the time had come for her to change. She was going to be stuck with Leo whether she liked it or not. The love they’d once shared had turned to bitter loathing, but as far as she could tell, their mutual attraction hadn’t dissolved one iota. Her body flared with heat the minute she laid eyes on him. She’d caught herself staring at him more than once tonight—at the way he charmed the waitress with nothing more than his smile or how he savored every bite of his decadent pepperoni-and-sausage pizza as if it were the finest cuisine in the world.
Bianca’s mother might have appreciated the irony and the great adventure. She might even have helped Jessie plan the ultimate act of sexual revenge. Unfortunately, Mrs. Brighton was busy planning her daughter’s out-of-the-blue nuptials…and, apparently, so was Celia Martinez, who was sitting at her kitchen table, poring over her best recipes.
“Hey, Ma,” Jessie said, closing the kitchen door behind her and, on automatic, heeling off her shoes and lining them up on a rack beside the refrigerator.
“Oh, Jessie! Thank God you’re here. Did you hear about the wedding? Oh, of course you’ve heard. Alina called an hour ago. I don’t know how we’re going to pull this all off in less than a week? What was that…man…thinking?”
Jessie glanced at the clock. She was pretty sure her mother had wanted to use a much more colorful word to describe Leo, but in keeping with her rather strict dictates regarding proper language, she’d refrained. Still, she had a way of making the word man sound as if Jessie should, in a complete role reversal, demand her mother wash her mouth out with soap.
“It’s the only way to get Bianca and Coop married,” Jessie said. “And they deserve a cool surprise wedding planned by the people who know and love them best.”
“You’re right, but there is so much to do! Take these,” she said, sliding a pile of recipes across the table, “and call our suppliers to make sure we have everything by tomorrow morning. I know it’s late, but—”
“I can’t, Ma.”
Her mother’s dark eyebrows knitted together. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I’m the maid of honor,” Jessie explained, suddenly not sure why she’d come inside to tell her mother about her trip in person. What were cell phones for, anyway? “I’ve got my own things to do. Or thing, anyway. But you can’t do this alone. Call Deborah.”
Celia shook her head, her mouth set in a stubborn moue. “Deborah has babies. She can’t help at this late—”
Jessie groaned. Her older sister’s “babies” were now twelve and thirteen. Deb, who’d been working for their mother’s catering company just as long as Jessie, was always given a pass whenever emergencies came up—and not by choice. Despite the fact that Celia had worked full-time while her children were young, Jessie’s mom had weird beliefs when it came to other working mothers. As in, they shouldn’t work unless completely necessary. This meant Deb, who was undeniably more capable than Jessie, rarely got a chance to shine.
Well, Jessie hoped her sister was ready to go supernova, because not even the most skilled guilt trip from her mother was going to keep her from going to Key West with Leo.
On the drive home, she’d been angry at how he’d manipulated her into spending time alone in the very house where they’d first made love. She’d nearly driven off the road twice while contemplating how she was going to tolerate an hour on her own with him, much less almost an entire week. For the better part of the last decade, she’d either avoided him or frozen him out, trying to forget how willfully and carelessly he’d torn apart her trust.
But as she’d cruised the familiar streets of her neighborhood where she’d learned how to ride a bike, shake off a scraped knee and navigate the stormy waters of adolescence, she’d realized that she could either whine about the situation or take control. Leo’s presence, if nothing else, sparked the Jessie she used to be—the girl brimming with sass and direction and desire. She could not blame Leo entirely for those qualities falling to the background, but she didn’t mind giving him a bit of credit for stirring them again.
Bianca had told Jessie years ago that Leo wanted her back. She’d confided how he regretted cheating on her back in college with a girl who’d climbed into his bed one drunken night whom he’d believed—or so she’d been told—to be Jessie. Leo had never denied that he’d had sex with the girl, some tramp from his dorm who’d had her eyes on him for months. Too drunk to tell the difference had just been an extra insult she simply couldn’t overcome.
Yet if Leo fancied this week as an opportunity to force their reunion, he was mistaken. They’d get “back together” only long enough to have amazing, mind-blowing sex. And this time, when she walked away, it would be on her terms and not because he balled some other girl whose name he probably didn’t remember.
This surprise wedding presented her with a chance to not only make Leo pay for what he’d put her through, but also to purge the man from her system once and for all. She’d tried just about everything—she’d been bitchy to him and cold. She’d insulted him under the guise of humor and he’d always greeted her animosity or indifference with his signature roguish grin or flirtation.
He was incorrigible.
Which made him utterly irresistible.
To offset his lasting effects on her psyche and libido, she’d tried dating men who were his polar opposite—steady, staid and boring—as well as guys just like him: players with endless capacities for fun and irreverence. She’d been engaged to one of each. And yet, neither of them cleansed him from her soul.
No, she was going to have to fight fire with fire. Her plan was just as insane as his to throw a surprise wedding, but perhaps the results would turn out just as spectacular.
“Deb has been waiting for a chance like this, Ma,” Jessie declared. She couldn’t go off for a few days of decadence if she thought she was leaving her mother to contend with cooking dinner for two hundred people without any help. “She wants to prove she’s got the stuff to take over this business when you retire.”
“I’ll die before I retire,” her mother muttered.
“Probably, but don’t you want to leave your legacy to som
eone at some point?”
Celia frowned. “Deb has a husband. Children. I want to leave the business to you, so you can—”
Jessie cut her mother off with a weary sigh. “Have something to occupy my lonely nights?”
Celia scooped up her recipes and shuffled the order, but without much focus. This wasn’t a conversation either wanted to have again, not when they’d fought this fight so many times already. In the end, they’d simply be so angry with one another that they wouldn’t speak for a week. Jessie didn’t have the energy. Not when she had a seduction to look forward to instead.
Jessie knew she should have never joined the catering business in the first place. She’d done so strictly out of comfort and familiarity. Having acted as her mother’s gofer for years, she appreciated the thrill of pulling off a spectacular event. But she wasn’t a good cook, and her eye for design was limited to expertly recreating what someone else had put together. She’d told herself over and over that working in the family business was just a layover—a bridge until she figured out what she really wanted to do.
But that argument was hard to maintain now that she was past her thirtieth birthday.
For the first time in forever, Jessie finally had a fire in her belly. She had a goal—an attainable ambition that could lead her to bigger and better things. She hadn’t realized until tonight how the memory of Leo and what he’d done to her acted like an impenetrable wall to her future life. She needed to break down that barrier, once and for all, by wiping all the “what ifs” with regard to Leo Sharpe out of her—mind, body and soul.
And if she could also give her best friend in the world the wedding of a lifetime in the process, so much the better.
“Ma, I already called Deb and she’s on her way. I love working with you, but this isn’t my dream. You’ve always known that.”
“What is your dream, then?”
Jessie swallowed her reply. It was too personal for her to voice out loud. She’d only just figured out she wanted to sleep with Leo again and she wasn’t ready to share her epiphany with anyone—especially not her mother.
“To throw Bianca the best wedding ever,” she answered, slipping her hands onto her mother’s shoulders and massaging out the tension. “She might travel the world on a whim, but she’s always been there for me. For us.”
Little by little, the tightness in her mother’s muscles melted away. Celia had started out as a cook in her husband’s Cuban restaurant, but that all changed the day Miguel Martinez unexpectedly contracted pneumonia and died. Too traumatized to reopen the restaurant, Celia had voiced the desire to do something else with the insurance money. Opening a catering business had been the top of her list, but she’d had no idea where to begin.
Luckily, Bianca’s well-to-do parents had stepped in and guided Celia, helping her choose a location for her headquarters, giving her advice on how to find employees, suppliers and customers. A dinner party for twenty hosted by the Brightons had been her first gig. Pulling off this wedding was only a small token toward paying them back.
“Bianca is like my third daughter and I want her to have a magical wedding day,” Celia agreed. “You do what you have to do, mijita.”
Jessie kissed her mother’s cheek and grinned when she heard her sister’s car pull into the driveway. “That’s what I intend to do, Ma. And then some.”
4
LEO’S LUNGS tightened and then burned. Instantly, sweat stung the corners of his eyes and his hands slipped on the steering wheel of his 1969 pickup. He’d exchanged his sports car for the truck not only to carry more gear, but also to impress Jessie with its rugged coolness. But now that he’d witnessed her strutting down the stairs from her walk-up apartment in a skirt so short it might as well have been a belt, he was the one impacted to his core. He shifted in the driver’s seat, his jeans suddenly snug around his package.
Great first impression, Sharpe. Greet the woman you once screwed over with a raging hard-on. That’ll make her trust you again.
He glanced away, but not before he caught a naughty grin slide across her lips, painted the color of the Caribbean sunset. What did she have to smile about? Only an hour and a half ago, her fury over his plan had been undeniable. What had changed?
Her clothes, for one thing. In college, Jessie had developed a real eye for clothes that drove him wild. Never quite trashy, but always on the edge. His memory swam with images of flesh-colored fishnet hose, leather pants and a particularly tricky lace-up bustier he’d become adept at removing in ten seconds flat.
Today, her look was a bit more subdued, but just as mouth-watering. She’d paired the white skirt with a peachy halter top that made her olive skin glisten in the setting sun. Her hair, long and dark, was pulled into a messy knot that reminded him of lazy mornings in bed after a particularly hot and sweaty night. Everything about her screamed sex—and not missionary sex, either. Hot-chick-on-top sex. Suck-me-till-I’m-dry sex. Loud, grunting, never-forget-me sex.
The kind of sex they used to have as often as possible before he’d thrown it all away.
On the morning she’d discovered him hung over and in bed with some girl he hardly knew, Jessie had made it perfectly clear that she would never forgive him. For months, he’d tried everything. Flowers. Chocolate. He’d even conned his fraternity brothers into an old-fashioned serenade under her window. She hadn’t even lifted the blinds.
After graduation, he’d tried just to talk to her, but despite his determination to be charming, she’d either ignored him entirely or answered every comment he’d made with sarcasm or hostility.
Only after Bianca and Coop’s visits became less frequent did they call what could best be described as a grudging truce. They’d existed that way until, apparently, tonight. Because if Jessie wasn’t trying to cruelly torture him with her choice of sexy clothes and flaming lip color, he couldn’t imagine what she thought she was doing.
Leo met her on the cracked shell path that led from the garage to the driveway.
“You’re late,” she chastised, but without any of her usual annoyance. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time her voice had been so deep and smooth.
His blood supply rushed south yet again.
“Sorry,” he said, dizzy. “Had to get a couple of things…together.”
Without direction, his gaze dropped to her breasts, pressed up nicely by what he suspected was a dark bra, judging by the outline beneath her snug top.
He eyed her suspiciously. Better than anyone else, she knew his weaknesses. Some guys got all hot over naked tits. A few even liked those tasseled pasties that seemed all the rage in strip clubs. But to get Leo really raw, all a woman had to do was don black lace lingerie.
And the undergarments had their strongest effect when Jessie wore them.
“Are we all set, then?”
Again with the sultry voice.
“This all you’re taking?” he asked, gesturing toward her single backpack.
“We’re going to the Keys, right?” she asked, her face so angelic with innocence, his hackles…not to mention other parts of his anatomy…raised even higher. “It’s not like I need to pack a parka.”
She dropped the pack at his feet. He’d scooped it into his hands before he realized how he’d bowed down in front of her. She hadn’t moved except to shift one bare leg a half inch closer to him. He took his time standing, allowing his stare to slide up her body and appreciate each and every curve.
In college, she’d been slim from a constant diet of Ramen noodles and artificially sweetened coffee with no cream. Now she had curves in all the right places, particularly around her backside, where her incredible genetics had blessed her with a booty that could make a man weep. Before he broke down, he stood and gestured her toward the truck.
“What time is our flight?” she asked.
“We have a flexible departure,” he replied, opening the passenger door and helping her into the elevated vehicle. He placed her backpack at her feet and then, before he los
t himself in fantasies featuring those tanned legs, slammed her door shut and jogged around to the driver’s side.
“You hired a private plane?” she asked, her voice lilting with what he suspected was suppressed awe. “Not exactly.”
The truck roared to life and soon they were on the road, heading toward the marina where he berthed his favorite boat. He hadn’t yet told Jessie how they were traveling to the Keys. She’d sailed with him before and wasn’t afraid of the water, but it was bad enough that he had arranged for them to be on an essentially deserted island for two days. If he added a thirty-hour sail trip with no means of easy escape, she might balk entirely.
Having not yet put on her seat belt, she scooted closer to him, scooping up his smart phone and waterproof GPS system and sliding them onto the floor. Ten years ago, he would have rejoiced at the idea of her having maximum access to his body while he was driving down the road. He could remember several crazy nights struggling to keep his vehicle on the pavement while she’d wrapped her hands around his cock and tugged him into sheer delirium.
When, for a split second, he thought he caught the same wicked gleam in her eyes, he cleared his throat, pressed down the brake as they approached a red light and said, “Seat belt?”
“You don’t live on the edge anymore, Sharpe?” she asked.
He forced a confident grin. “I don’t want anything to happen to you on the way to paradise. Buckle up, babycakes, or we’re going to be sitting at this intersection for a while.”
She pouted prettily, but did as he asked, taking her time stretching the strap across her torso so her cleavage was even more enhanced. Jessie had never been overendowed, but she always knew how to make the most of her curves.
The ride to the marina was relatively short, punctuated by her confused look when he took the exit on the interstate that led him to Harbor Island rather than continuing on to the airport. Once she realized where they were going, though, she didn’t object. One moment of apparent uncertainty was followed by a quick smile and a brief “You’re full of surprises.”
