Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1)

by Patricia Ryan

  “Look, Ronald—”

  “Zara, you know how I feel about you.”

  “Sorry, but I’m running late.” She turned and ran.

  “Would it kill you to give me a shot at you?” he called after her.

  No, but it might hurt her. She punched the button for the elevator; it opened right away. “Sorry!” The doors closed. She caught her breath as she rode down to the lobby.

  The doorman looked at her. He smiled politely as he held the door open, but his eyes flickered with something almost... primitive... as they gave her a swift and surreptitious once-over. Men on the street turned to give her that look. The Uber driver kept checking her out in the rearview mirror, which made her wonder whether it had been a mistake letting her mother do her makeup. Liquid eyeliner, for God’s sake. And her lips were baboon’s-butt red. On the one hand, Emma felt like a fraud; if this wasn’t false advertising, what was? On the other, she felt...

  Powerful.

  Emma smiled with heady feminine awareness as she got out of the car and negotiated the revolving glass door of the building that housed Zara’s agency. So this was what it felt like to turn men on.

  She stopped at the security desk, but the guard just grinned and waved her through. Of course, she thought as she covertly searched around for the elevators. He thinks you’re Zara. That’s the point, right?

  Alone for a few blessed moments in the elevator, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She felt Zara’s long, heavy earrings tickle her throat. She felt the lining of the leather suit, silky smooth against her nearly bare skin. She felt the weight of the garter belt on her hips and the tension in the little straps that held her stockings up. She felt her legs, stretched like a Barbie doll’s as she stood on tiptoe in her Barbie shoes.

  She felt fabulous.

  She got out on the seventh floor and sucked in another deep breath before pushing open the glass door labeled Zara Sutcliffe Literary Agency.

  “Zara!” The pert, redheaded receptionist leapt to her feet. “I thought you were still in Australia.”

  Emma rummaged in her mind for an appropriate response. “I came back early,” she said, uninspired.

  “So I see. Did you settle that business with Maxine Moore?”

  The girl spoke about twice as fast as Emma could think, and in an abnormally high, squeaky voice. She again rummaged frantically. “I’m not sure.”

  The little redhead blinked at Emma’s hair. “How’d your hair get so long all of a sudden?” A lightbulb went on in her eyes. “Are those extensions?” Before Emma could answer, she said, “Sweet.”

  “Thanks—” Emma cut a glance to the nameplate on the reception desk “—Tina.”

  Tina grabbed a stack of pink phone-message slips and thrust them into her hand. “I put the ones that need to be returned on top.”

  Emma took the slips with unsteady fingers. “Great. I’ll just go to my office now.” Wherever that is.

  Tina headed briskly up a hallway, rattling on about phone calls and lunches and meetings, sounding like an uncannily efficient Alvin the Chipmunk, and Emma followed her, thinking, I don’t believe I’m pulling this off. At one point, the receptionist glanced behind her with a bemused expression and said, “New bag?”

  Emma looked down at her big, overstuffed shoulder bag, which she’d made years ago out of antique quilt squares. It was homey and a little silly, and somewhat frayed around the edges, but it was her security blanket. In addition, it held an enormous collection of items she might need at any time, which she kept on a written list so she wouldn’t ever forget anything:

  1. Phone

  2. Wallet

  3. Keys

  4. Notebook and pen

  5. Hair Brush

  6. Miniature first-aid kit

  7. Miniature sewing kit

  8. Swiss Army knife

  9. Sunglasses

  10. Pepper spray

  11. Granola bar

  12. Bottled water

  13. Ear buds

  14. Kindle…

  Among other things. These items being essential to her well-being and peace of mind, Emma had defied her mother and accessorized the hip little yellow suit with the decidedly unhip quilt bag.

  “I called and canceled your appointments, like you told me to when you phoned.” Tina hesitated in front of a door labeled Zara Sutcliffe. “Except for your three o’clock.”

  “That’s all right.” Emma opened the door to Zara’s spacious, book-lined office and stepped inside. Get rid of Tina, get the gun and get out.

  “I’m sorry.” Tina’s hands fluttered nervously. “He was en route when I tried to cancel, and I couldn’t get in touch with him.” She glanced into the office. “He’s been waiting for a long—”

  “It’s okay, really.” Emma, too preoccupied with her mission to absorb Tina’s mile-a-minute yammering, slowly closed the door as the receptionist craned to peek through from the hallway.

  “He’s really mad,” Tina whispered. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Emma whispered back. “It’s really okay.” The door clicked shut. The air went out of her body, and she rested her forehead on the cool wood of the door. I don’t believe I’m doing this.

  It was 4:40, according to the clock on Zara’s desk, which meant she had twenty minutes to get the ray gun and get to SoHo. Wheeling around, she zeroed in on the credenza next to the book-strewn desk and went to it, yanking open the double doors.

  “Ah.” There it was, propped up diagonally in the dark compartment, a gleaming chrome caricature of a deadly weapon. The ray gun that had whacked the Atomic Bride during her second and last celluloid incarnation was about the size and shape of a rifle, but sprouted a dizzying array of knobs, buttons and levers. Its futuristically fussy ornamentation gave it an art-deco-meets-steampunk look that had always appealed to Emma. Obviously, it appealed to someone else, too—someone willing to pay two million in cool, hard U.S. currency for it There was something decidedly surreal about this whole transaction. What kind of a lunatic, regardless of how rich he was, would part with that kind of green for an old movie prop? It didn’t make any sense, and that made her extremely uneasy.

  Dumping her quilt bag on the desk, she hefted the ray gun in her hands, finding it to be remarkably heavy. The flared business end of the barrel housed several dozen little colored lightbulbs in concentric circles.

  Turning, Emma lifted the ray gun to her shoulder and peered through the scope.

  And saw a man. Sitting on a sofa in the corner with his feet on a coffee table and his hands in the air.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EMMA FROZE. Think fast. But she was incapable of thinking fast. Her mind seized up when she was under pressure, just as it was doing now.

  “You want to aim that thing somewhere else, ma’am?” His deep, gravelly voice was seasoned with a down-home, Southern drawl. Sprawled as he was all over her sister’s office furniture, she could see that he was long and tall, with the kind of rugged home-on-the-range looks you didn’t expect to come across in Manhattan. His wire-rimmed glasses and the open book in his lap detracted slightly from the image, but the scuffed cowboy boots and worn leather jacket made up the difference. He looked vaguely familiar to her, but she knew she’d never met him.

  “I said would you mind pointing that—” he squinted at the ray gun “—weapon in another direction?” Slowly lowering one hand, he slid off his glasses, folded them and tucked them beneath his jacket into a shirt pocket, all the while keeping his eyes trained on the ray gun. They must have been reading glasses, because he appeared to focus better on the gun without them; his increasingly mystified expression attested to that.

  “I’m gonna get up slowly.” Putting the book aside, he drew up his long, jean-clad legs and set his booted feet on the floor one after the other. “Just do me a favor and take your finger off the trigger.”

  Emma looked at the ray gun and then at the man rising carefully from the sofa and stepping away from the coffee tab
le, his hands still in the air. A little gasp of disbelieving laughter escaped her as she lowered the gun and pressed the trigger to show him it was just a harmless—

  “Shit!” He ducked and rolled, then lunged for her. Grabbing her by the waist, he threw her to the carpeted floor, pinning her beneath him. She felt paralyzed with shock, overwhelmed by the weight of him on top of her, by his hands on her, prying open her fingers to wrest the gun from her grip. She gulped for air as he leapt to his feet.

  Emma sat up on the floor, shaken and reeling. In her entire life, no one had ever handled her so roughly.

  He stood in the corner by the sofa, inspecting the weapon in his hands with obvious puzzlement, his short brown hair in disarray. “What the Sam Hill...?”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she rasped as she tidied her hair with trembling fingers.

  His gaze lit on her, traveling from her face to her chest, where it paused briefly, to her legs, where it lingered with frank interest. She recognized that look. She’d seen it in the eyes of the doorman and the cabdriver and a dozen other men since she’d transformed herself into Zara Sutcliffe.

  Looking down at her legs, she saw that her skirt had ridden up in the scuffle, exposing the lacy bands at the tops of her stockings as well as the little fasteners that connected them to the garter belt. Sucking in a breath, she tugged her skirt down. When she stole another glance at him, her cheeks stinging, she noted a trace of amusement in his eyes.

  He stepped toward her and, holding the ray gun out of reach, extended a hand to help her up. She automatically shrank back before gathering her wits and gingerly accepting his offer. His hand was huge and rough, his grip strong. He brought her easily to her feet and then released her without taking his eyes off her face.

  She took a step back and nodded toward the gun. “It’s not a real one.”

  He regarded it with a dubious expression. “Not a real what?”

  “Ray gun.”

  He cocked his head. “Ray gun.” He turned the movie prop over in his hands, studying it from all angles. “This is a ray gun?”

  “No—I told you. It’s not a real one.” Holding out her hand to take it, she said, “Do you mind?”

  He impaled her with a look that made her shiver. “Oh, there’s been a great deal to mind today,” he drawled. “What, in particular, are you curious about my minding right now?”

  His laid-back wrath gave Emma pause. “Would you... mind giving me the ray gun?”

  He rested the gun on his shoulder and looked around. “What ray gun? I don’t see any ray gun here.”

  Emma checked her watch—4:47—and looked up at him beseechingly. “Please—I have to be somewhere with that gun in thirteen minutes. This is really important.”

  He seemed suddenly more alert. “Oh, it’s important.” He strode toward her. She stumbled back until she hit the desk; he stood over her, way too close. “Forgive me, Ms. Sutcliffe, I didn’t understand you actually had important business today. I just thought you just had appointments you didn’t mind missing. Like mine.”

  His eyes spat blue fire. Emma tried to tear her gaze away from them, but couldn’t. “You’re the three o’clock.”

  “Yes. I’m the three o’clock. I’m the three o’clock who flew all the way from nice, civilized Arkansas to this miserable, stinking seventh level of hell because—and this is the really funny part—you begged me to.”

  “I... I begged—”

  “You weren’t the only one, you know,” he assured her, backing off a step. “Every agent in this godforsaken city put the moves on me after Incision made the New York Times list. But you, you were so all-fired persistent—stubborn as a fly.”

  “Incision?” she said. “The medical thriller? Omigod, you’re Gage Foster!”

  “You’re just now figuring that out?”

  That was why he looked so familiar, she realized. The jacket of the copy of Incision that she’d taken out of the library had featured a photo of him standing with two bloodhounds on the porch of a massive log house. She remembered thinking how craggily attractive he looked. “That was a great book!”

  “Can’t really see what all the fuss is about, myself.”

  “Wow! You’re him. You’re Gage Foster!”

  THIS CONVERSATION was giving Gage Foster a pain behind his eyeballs.

  “You did know I was coming,” he said. “I’m your three o’clock—you said so yourself. You do remember all those months you pestered me to let you represent me? All those phone calls filled with promises about promotion campaigns and movie deals? You must have said ‘seven figures’ at least fifty times.”

  She just stared at him, like some big-eyed night thing frozen in a flashlight beam. It was the same poleaxed expression she’d worn while she was holding that toy gun on him. Almost made him feel sorry for her.

  “Here.” He handed her back the gun. She closed her eyes in relief, cradling the weapon to her chest.

  Now there was a sight, he thought, taking a mental picture of it for perusal later. She looked like a caricature of a Bad Girl from the Big City, which was entirely in keeping with what he’d been led to expect of Zara Sutcliffe. From what he’d heard, she was a real piece of work—a shark in her business dealings, the life of the party on her off-hours.

  Her wardrobe was certainly Big City. That yellow leather fit her like the hide on a milk-fed calf. Then there were those nonstop legs ending in those prancey little Bad Girl shoes. That brief glimpse of garter belt had made him wish, for the first time since he was twelve, for the miracle of X-ray vision.

  Turning her back on him, she reached for the big, funky shoulder bag she’d dumped on the desk. It looked like an old quilt all cut up and sewn back together again. Kind of goofy, but he liked it.

  She tried to cram the ray gun into the bag, but it was obviously too full of other stuff. Peering over her shoulder, he saw a first-aid kit, a bottle of water, a Swiss Army knife....

  “You plannin’ on doin’ some survival camping?” he asked her.

  She didn’t answer, just edged away from him. He edged closer, breathing in the scents of leather and baby powder. The baby powder surprised him. He would have expected some kind of musky, high-priced perfume.

  “Take some of that stuff out,” he suggested as she pawed urgently through the contents of her bag. “That’s the only way that thing’s gonna fit in there.”

  “I need this stuff.”

  “You need all of that? You haul that big passel of useless crap around with you—”

  “It’s not useless.” She turned to face him, the picture of righteous indignation. “I need all of it.” She sighed heavily. “Guess I’ll just have to carry the gun.”

  “Openly?” He chuckled. “I don’t know much about the local firearm statutes, but my guess is New York’s finest will be on you like a cat on a copperhead before you can make it to the corner. Might screw up your schedule some.”

  Her elegant black eyebrows drew together as she contemplated that. She was pretty as hell despite all the makeup and that come-hither getup. He was partial to brown-eyed brunettes, and she was a good one, slender but curvy, with milky skin and delicate features—catlike eyes, high cheekbones, a nice, wide mouth and a cleft in her sharp little chin that he kept wanting to rub with his thumb.

  Right. He’d best keep his thumbs off of Zara Sutcliffe. She was trouble. She’d already proven that, showing up an hour and forty minutes late for a meeting he’d flown all the way from Arkansas for. Come to think of it, she seemed to be fixing to stand him up altogether, without so much as a grudging “I’m sorry, but...” Where he came from, they’d run you out of town for that.

  “About our appointment,” he began, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was staring at the coatrack near the door. One item hung on it—a shiny gold raincoat. He kept an eye on her as she crossed to the rack, grabbed the coat and returned. Sweeping aside a pile of books on the desk, she spread out the coat with the inside facing up.

  �
�Did you hear me?” he prodded. “I mean for you to keep that appointment you were so all-fired eager to set up.” But she obviously didn’t hear him, preoccupied as she was with sorting furiously through that big bag of hers.

  “Ah.” She pulled out a small plastic case and snapped it open. Gage saw two little screwdrivers, a wrench, a pair of pliers....

  “You know,” he said, “this disorder probably has a name. You could get professional help for it.”

  She didn’t acknowledge the comment as she withdrew a small roll of black electrical tape and a utility knife from the little toolbox. Positioning the ray gun lengthwise inside the raincoat, she proceeded to slice off sections of tape and press them down over the gun.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped,” Gage muttered as she adhered the gun securely to the inner surface of the coat When she was done, she hastily packed up, then donned the coat—beneath which the mock weapon was entirely invisible.

  “I’m impressed,” Gage admitted.

  She shot him one of those smart-ass, nyah-nyah grins that should have looked obnoxious, but didn’t. Not by a long shot. Her whole face ignited with pleasure in her own resourcefulness, like a little girl who’d done something clever beyond her years. It wasn’t a look he would have expected to see on the face of Zara Sutcliffe, and it surprised him. Hell, it ambushed him. Snuck up and whopped him upside the head.

  No, he told himself. This is not going to happen. You don’t like her. You like her fucking handbag. That’s not the same thing.

  She checked her watch. “I’m gonna be late,” she moaned, clutching her bag and crossing to the door.

  “Whoa.” He overtook her as she reached for the knob. Gripping her by the shoulders, he spun her around and pressed her back against the door. “I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

  She stilled momentarily, her eyes widening in evident panic. “I—I have to go.” She tried to squirm out of his grip.

  “Not until we’ve had our meeting.”