Delicious

by Jami Alden

  It occurred to her for about a millisecond that Craig could be behind the notes. He was bitter, no doubt about it.

  She dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it came. If Craig wanted to sabotage her career, he’d bad-mouth her in the open.

  As Natalie dropped Reggie at her door, she reminded Reggie of their appointment tomorrow with Adrienne’s brother. For the first time since Natalie had suggested it, Reggie didn’t dread meeting her new security consultant.

  At three forty-five the following afternoon, Reggie was pacing around her kitchen, fidgeting with utensils and glancing at the door every two seconds. “Are you sure he said three?”

  Natalie grabbed Reggie’s wrist so she could see her watch. “He had a meeting this morning and was going to catch a one o’clock flight from L.A., and in case of traffic we made the appointment for three.”

  Reggie opened the refrigerator for the millionth time, hoping something delicious would suddenly materialize.

  Natalie rattled her magazine page in exasperation. “God, would you just settle down?”

  “Nat, I have so much work to get done, and now this joker has wasted almost an hour of my time. I knew this was a bad idea”

  “Why don’t you go write or something?”

  Reggie started pulling items out of the pantry and rearranging them by food category. Veggies on the third shelf down, right side. Soups in the middle on the same shelf. Cereal on top, along with other grain products. “I can’t focus if I know I’m about to be interrupted.” Despite what Natalie thought, recipes didn’t just spring fully formed from her head. Rather, they existed as scraps of notes and inexact measurements that she had to translate into easy-to-follow directions, and then add spirited commentary about the inspiration for each dish.

  As much as she loved it, sometimes the writing process was absolutely mind-numbing.

  She was busily wiping down the counters when a knock finally sounded at the door. “Can you get that?” God, she must be PMSing or something. It wasn’t like her to be this crabby, even under these circumstances. Lots of her television appearances required a hurry up and wait mentality, and she’d forced herself to overcome her natural tendency to leap from one task into another. Until this precise moment, she thought she’d adapted pretty well.

  “I’m very sorry I’m late,” a masculine voice rumbled from the entryway. Low, deep, with the barest hint of a Southern accent. “I hope you got my message.”

  A gasp from Natalie. “Oh no! I must have turned off my phone.” Natalie invited him in, the click of her stiletto boots on Reggie’s hardwood floors echoing up to the crown molding.

  “You think someone may be stalking you?”

  Something about that voice…familiar but escaping her reach. Like a subtle spice she couldn’t taste but knew a recipe would be ruined without….

  “Actually it’s my sister who has a problem. Reg! Adrienne’s brother, Gabe, is here.”

  Gabe. No. It had to be a coincidence. The world couldn’t possibly be that small.

  Natalie gestured to the man in her living room. “Reggie, this is Gabe Bankovic, your personal security consultant.”

  Her first look at him froze the air in her lungs.

  No way.

  But there he was in her living room, looking every bit as big and darkly delicious as the last time she’d seen him nearly a year and a half ago.

  Except then he’d been naked in a tangle of bedsheets, sleeping the exhausted sleep of a man who had spent the last several hours showing her all the ways he knew to bring a woman to a soul-screaming orgasm.

  “Gina?” Her name flew out of Gabe’s mouth before he had a chance to think about it.

  The woman who had introduced herself as the client’s sister shot him a puzzled look. “This is Reggie, my sister, the victim I guess you could say.”

  Gabe closed his eyes and prayed. But she was still there when he opened them. Yep, that was Gina, or Reggie as she called herself now, with the glossy shoulder-length brown hair, big Bambi brown eyes to match, and a wide red mouth that brought heat to his crotch just looking at it.

  What were the fucking odds that she would be his only client?

  Somewhere, someone was having a huge belly laugh at his expense.

  He deliberately schooled his features into a neutral expression and offered her his hand to shake.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” he said quietly. A single touch of her small, capable hand sent a jolt straight to his groin, and his head flooded with images of those slender, pale fingers tracing down his chest, digging short nails into his ass as he sank into her deep and hard. He forced himself to let go almost immediately, afraid if he held on for one more second he’d have her pinned to the couch and damn his professional reputation.

  Natalie looked between them in puzzlement. “You two know each other?”

  “Your sister and I met some time ago while we were both on vacation.” There, that sounded nice and neutral.

  Obviously not neutral enough. Natalie looked at her sister in open-mouthed astonishment. “Is this the guy who—”

  Reggie cut her off with a look that would curdle milk.

  Natalie pressed her lips together and slyly ran her eyes down every inch of his six-foot-three frame. “Small world.”

  Gabe wanted to howl like an angry baby. Under any other circumstances, he would have been overjoyed to see her again. First, he’d let her know how angry he was that she left without a word after showing him the most fun he’d ever had naked. Then he’d give her an itemized list off all the things she could do to apologize for sneaking out while he slept.

  Steeling his resolve, he knew he had no choice but to put personal desires aside. No matter how badly he wanted to get his hands on that luscious ass beautifully displayed in tight black pants, there was no way in hell he was getting involved with another client.

  “Why don’t you start by walking me through what’s happened so far?”

  She licked her lips, the small gesture making it almost impossible for him not to lean over and suck her soft pink tongue into his mouth.

  What was it about her that was so damned alluring? She wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Sure, she was attractive, in a wholesome, girl-next-door kind of way.

  Except for her mouth. There was nothing wholesome about those full, succulent lips and how they’d felt sliding along his rock-hard dick.

  But that wasn’t enough to explain why merely looking at her had him hard as a spike and seriously contemplating abandoning all his self-imposed rules against dating clients.

  He glanced around her apartment, trying to focus on something, anything that might distract him from the memory of Reggie’s lips and tongue tracing a moist path up his inner thigh.

  Thankfully, she distracted him with a rundown of the correspondence she’d received thus far, while he attempted to view her with the same emotional detachment he would have for a sixty-year-old software CEO.

  If he was going to get through this job with his sanity and professional credibility in tact, he had to keep his distance.

  God knew he’d learned that the hard way.

  Natalie held out the photocopy Reggie had received earlier that week.

  It never ceased to amaze him, the workings of the male mind. Himself, he appreciated his own balls, but he’d never once considered that a woman might be impressed with a close-up shot.

  Reggie’s voice broke the silence. “Takes a lot of balls to send something like that.”

  Natalie groaned at the horrible pun while Reggie laughed at her own joke. Damn, she had a great smile. It was the first thing he had noticed about her in that restaurant in Maui. It was so wide it completely took over the bottom half of her face, suffusing it in unabashed delight. And when she turned it in his direction, he felt it like a goddamn force of nature.

  Suddenly her living room with its big bay windows and overstuffed furniture was way too small. He had to get away from her, even for a few second
s. “Mind if I look around a little? I need to see what’s involved for the alarm system we install.”

  Thankfully, the phone rang, so she didn’t follow. He walked down the hall and did a quick tour of the office, making a mental note to ask Reggie to show him the suspicious e-mail.

  The apartment suited her, or what little he knew of her, anyway. Decorated in warm tones with splashes of bright color, it was warm, comfortable, and inviting. Just like the woman he’d met in that bar in Maui.

  Business, Gabe. You’re supposed to be looking for points of vulnerability. He noted that the office windows were large enough to allow a man to crawl through.

  The bathroom was typical of an old San Francisco Victorian, with the shower, bath, and sink separate from a closet-size room that housed the toilet. The bathroom windows were small and high enough off the ground to pose a significant challenge to an intruder, but he’d make sure they were wired nonetheless.

  He made a right and entered what could only be her bedroom. Like the rest of the apartment, it was comfortable, cozy, decorated in deep reds, midnight blues, and rich browns. Not a hint of pastel or a square of lace in sight.

  It was the kind of room only a woman could put together—no guy had that many throw pillows—but it wasn’t so feminine as to send him running for the closest sports bar. The king-size sleigh bed with its dark red down comforter and oversize pillows elicited all kinds of images of him and Reggie, naked in a sweaty tangle making damn good use of every inch of mattress space.

  Shaking his head before he got too carried away, he moved to the window. He ran his fingers along the sides and tested the all but useless latch. She was on the second story, but anyone could sneak a ladder around through the alley and climb right up here. That was, if this stalker of hers was as determined as her sister seemed to think.

  This was exactly the type of job he hated. Grunt work. Half the time these celebrities so overestimated their own importance to their fans that they overreacted to what amounted to nothing more than inappropriate fan mail. Disconcerting as it was to receive, more often than not there was no threat behind it.

  His gut told him Reggie wasn’t a woman with an over-inflated ego, but his gut had been so wrong recently, he’d all but stopped giving it credit.

  Just because he knew exactly what the silky skin of Reggie’s inner thighs tasted like, just because the look on her face as she came had saturated his dreams for the past year and a half, didn’t mean he knew a damn thing about her character.

  He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, wishing he had an ice pack to shove down the front of his pants.

  Once again, he cursed the ridiculous coincidence that had landed him here in San Francisco, less than twenty feet from the woman who’d made him come so hard he’d nearly had a stroke.

  What he really wanted—needed, actually—was a full-scale corporate security consulting job, or even work that involved protecting high-level executives. That was where the real money was, and it would only take a few referrals to bring him a steady stream of business.

  Unfortunately, since a romantic entanglement with his last high-profile celebrity client had nearly annihilated his career as a security specialist, business had barely built to a trickle. As his assistant-cum-adopted mother Marjorie reminded him almost hourly, he was in no position to turn down any work, even if it meant walking little old ladies across the street for a dollar each.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, finger-combing his hair and straightening his tie. So what if his new client was the sweetly sexy woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his head for over a year? He had bills to pay and a professional reputation to rebuild. No matter how badly he wanted to get back into Reggie Caldwell’s pants, he had no choice but to get this job done as quickly, thoroughly, and professionally as possible.

  Chapter Three

  Reggie perched on the couch and pretended to read a magazine as she waited for Gabe to finish his inspection. Her leg jiggled nervously as she anxiously watched for him down the hall.

  “You never told me you gave him a fake name. That’s so dirty and un-Reggie-like,” Natalie whispered, settled on the couch next to her and wearing an expression that screamed, “Dish, girlfriend!”

  “Can we talk about this later?” As Natalie knew very well, her one-night stand had been rather dirty and un-Reggie-like.

  But Craig’s dumping her a week before their trip to a beautiful Hawaiian resort had left her bruised. And when an astoundingly gorgeous hunk of male flesh had approached her, of all people, she hadn’t been able to quell the urge to be someone else. Someone seductive. Someone who had wild one-night stands with big, dark, dangerous-looking men and left them in the morning without saying good-bye.

  Even though the last thing she’d wanted to do was leave. But that was what you did with a one-night stand, right? At least that was what she’d thought at the time.

  But that hadn’t kept her from second-guessing herself a million and one times in the past several months. What if she’d left her phone number? Her e-mail? Her real name, for starters?

  Eighteen months ago, she’d told herself anonymity was the best course of action. Besides, it wasn’t like Gabe had indicated any desire to take it beyond one night of lust-filled fun. And with Simply Delicious about to start production, it wasn’t like she’d had time to start a long-distance romance.

  She’d accepted their encounter for what it was, a meaningless vacation fling with a gorgeous, dangerous-looking stranger.

  Who would ever believe he’d show up a year and a half later in her living room?

  Her face was so hot with embarrassment she could fry an egg on her forehead.

  This was just her luck. The one time she’d done something crazy and out of character, it came back to haunt her in the form of a six-foot-three, impossibly hot bodyguard who, judging from his standoffishness, clearly had no interest in renewing their acquaintance.

  Natalie didn’t give up. “But he’s the one, right? The guy you told me about?”

  “Yes,” Reggie hissed, kicking herself for giving Natalie even the sketchiest of details about her vacation fling. Trust Natalie, who could be flakier than phyllo dough about most details, to have a mind like a steel trap when it came to anything concerning a hot guy. She heard heavy footsteps coming down the hall. “Now, will you shut up?”

  Natalie shot off the couch and offered her seat to Gabe, who refused in favor of the leather club chair positioned a good five feet away.

  Talk about an ego boost.

  Natalie moved behind his chair and raked his wide shoulders with an exaggerated leer. “He’s so hot,” she mouthed.

  No kidding. Tall, at least a few inches over six feet, and brawny, he exuded the same barely restrained physical power she’d noticed the first time she saw him, across the restaurant at the Grand Wailea.

  And his face, which had haunted her for over a year. Not pretty at all, and not boyishly good-looking like Craig either. His face was strong, with a square jaw, high, slashing cheekbones, and dark, deep-set eyes.

  The only concessions to softness were his hair, which she remembered sliding like silk against her skin, and his mouth. His lower lip was lush, fuller than the top, which curved into an almost cupid’s bow shape. His chin negated its potential femininity, jutting out in a sharp, squared-off edge.

  Just remembering the firm, tender touch of those lips on her made her so hot she feared smoke might billow out of her waistband.

  She resisted the urge to fan herself and stretched her lips into a friendly smile. “So what can we do about my admirer?”

  Gabe ran a big, long-fingered hand through his hair. Dark brown and slightly wavy, it was cut much shorter than she remembered. Instead of waving back from his forehead, it lay close to his skull, betraying none of its tendency to curl. He fixed her with his dark, intense gaze, and she had a vivid flashback of him, buried deep inside her, eyes simmering with lust as he commanded her in his dark, smoky voice t
o look at him while she came.

  To her absolute mortification, a tiny, strangled moan lodged somewhere in the back of her throat. She tried to cover it up with a coughing fit, but judging by her sister’s smirk, she had fooled no one.

  A flash of heat appeared—just for a millisecond—in his sable eyes. But it was enough to spark an encouraging flutter between her thighs.

  But it was gone almost as it appeared, and he was once again one hundred percent business.

  “Can you think of anyone who might be upset with you, out to get you in some way?” He pulled out a little notepad and silver plate ballpoint pen.

  “Not off the top of my head. I’ve received some strange things from fans—letters, e-mails, gifts. Marriage proposals, less honorable requests, but nothing like this. And until the picture and the e-mail, everything was always forwarded through Max’s office or from Tyler.”

  “Max and Tyler?”

  “Max is my producer, and Tyler is my PR manager.”

  “So they would have access to your personal information.”

  “It couldn’t possibly be either of them. First of all, I’m pretty sure Max is gay.”

  Gabe quirked a thick dark eyebrow. “Pretty sure?”

  “He lives in Noe Valley, spitting distance from the Castro. He’s forty, never been married, and he’s the only reason my on-screen wardrobe is even moderately hip. And Tyler—”

  “Tyler gets more ass than a toilet seat,” Natalie snapped. “I can’t imagine the man risking his precious equipment in a copier machine, since it might leave him incapable of satisfying the female population of San Francisco.”

  Gabe made another note, quirking his full, firm mouth in that adorable half smile of his. Reggie barely suppressed an adolescent sigh. “I’ll want to talk to them, anyway. Maybe they can point to someone. Whoever is contacting you, he or she has access to your personal information.”