by Ruby Laska
The little voice quit protesting, drowned out by the sheer force of her longing. She vowed not to think about Luna for the rest of the night. Just this one night, just this one time, she wanted something that her sister had taken for granted, and tossed aside.
Suddenly she was lifted abruptly into the air a second time.
This time Tad broke the kiss, settling her in his arms as though she was no heavier than a sack of groceries. He carried her up the beach, up the wooden stairs. “Shoes,” Mandy protested faintly as he stepped over them without even slowing.
He didn’t answer.
Down the paved path, nearly jogging. Mandy relaxed, letting her arms trail languidly and her feet sway gently as Tad strode barefoot past palm trees and stone benches, bungalows and exotic flowering bushes.
“Key’s in my pocket,” he muttered as he swerved toward a bungalow set back from the others behind a white picket fence. He took all three porch stairs in one long stride as Mandy reached into his pocket and brushed against quite a bit more than a key on a seashell keychain.
Tad set her down gently and kissed her again, nipping her lip between his teeth. Mandy still had her hand in his pocket, but she forced herself to hand over the key while she reached for the top button of his shirt with her other hand. Dimly, in the back of her mind, the little voice changed course. Now, it was noting rather frantically that this was not how Mandy Leif conducted herself on dates, even third dates, when it was well established that a bedroom escapade might ensue. Back when she had third dates, before she ever moved to L.A.
“I don’t do things like this,” she murmured, as Tad pulled away from her to open the door to the bungalow.
“You do now,” he pointed out, grabbing her hand and pulling her into a tiled room that smelled of cloves and linen, then slamming the door shut and backing her up against it. “At least, with me you do. Do you know how long I’ve been wanting to do this?”
“You have?” Mandy said in amazement, searching her memory for an occasion when Tad had looked at her with an expression that conveyed anything other than profound boredom. Most of the time he barely looked at her at all. Maybe he was having some sort of complicated post-traumatic-breakup reaction. Or maybe he was having a stroke. In which case she’d better enjoy him, fast, before he collapsed and she had to call for help rather than running her fingers along those astonishing shoulder blades, and the muscles of his back and chest.
“Amanda.” He said her name slowly, savoring it as though each syllable gave him deep pleasure. “Oh, Amanda,” he said again, a whisper that turned into a kiss, and she decided that from now on, even if Tad was the only one who ever said it out loud, she would reclaim Amanda as her real name.
She felt him grow even harder against her as his hands pushed gently under her top, sliding across her feverish skin, brushing against her nipples. She moaned and threw her head back and clutched Tad around the neck, wrapping her legs around his waist.
“Right here?” he asked softly, tracing a path down her throat with kisses. “Because I’ll take you to bed if you’d rather. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Here,” she said, tightening her grip on him as he lifted her up against him. “Now,” she added, and though that probably settled it, there was one more thing she had to say, and that was his name.
“Tad,” she whispered, adding an unspoken plea that she’d never allowed herself to think until tonight, that she’d forbidden herself because he had always belonged to her sister.
Be mine.
Tad, veteran of hundreds of changing rooms, thousands of designer garments, made short work of his clothes, stepping out of his pants with the agility of a dancer, never letting go of her. He was almost naked now, and Mandy moved against him, needing him closer, needing him inside her. She shrugged off her top and threw it on the floor, then skimmed off her pants. Next she snapped her bra clasp and let it fall open.
“Let me,” Tad murmured, his hands stroking her, kneading her, finding her hollows and nerve endings and making her gasp with pleasure. “Let me take my time with you.”
But Mandy couldn’t wait. Because the longer she waited, the greater the chance this would all end, a beautiful fantasy intruded upon by reality, a reckless adventure brought to a screeching halt. Surely, Tad would come to his senses. He’d realize this was all a reaction to losing the real love of his life, even if Luna didn’t love him back.
And Mandy wanted this. Even if it was nothing but a delicious dream.
So she shook her head and wrapped herself more tightly around him, and when he found his rhythm she tugged aside the scrap of silk panties she still wore, and guided him where she needed him. Her cry of pleasure urged him onward and he rocked her against the wall, her hands on his back seizing and scratching, trying to take him as deeply as she could. She was in his arms and against the wall and twisting and writhing and more needful than she had ever felt in her life, and she gave up trying to muffle her own cries, she stopped thinking about the way her body moved, and just let herself go. Higher, further, hotter, she bucked and demanded and seized and Tad met every thrust with his own, every cry with a guttural response, until she finally crested the heights.
On, and on, and on, wave after wave of sensation and need washed over her, moon-dusted and clove-scented against the sound of her name on his lips. Finally, after what might have been an eternity, she had nothing left; she lay against him, cradled in his arms, like a limp rag doll.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, rocking her gently, as if they were slow dancing. “You’re amazing.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that. If she spoke, Mandy knew she would only remind him of the truth, that she wasn’t amazing, actually, she was only rather ordinary. The plain sister, the smart one, the reliable one—and the nice one, of course, but what man would settle for nice after having someone like Luna?
“I’m taking you to bed now,” Tad murmured, already moving, walking across the tiled floor to the bedroom alcove lit by a single flickering lantern. Someone had been here earlier to light the candle, protected by the hurricane glass, which now cast flickering shadows around the cozy small room. White linens had been folded back invitingly on the bed, and Tad laid Mandy down gently before pulling the cotton sheet up over her.
But before he let the fabric fall against her body, he looked at her long and hard. “You,” he said softly, his gaze lingering on her softly rounded curves. “Gorgeous.”
Mandy knew she should protest. Knew he was lying, or at least, being polite in a way that stretched the truth beyond credibility, but she was suddenly in some sort of sated near-coma. Every cell in her body hummed with pleasure; every muscle was relaxed almost to the point of paralysis. Her hair spread out on the pillow and the white sheets drifted down like feathers.
Tad got into the bed next to her and she rolled against him without a thought, into his arms, into the warmth of his skin. She tucked her head under his chin and twined her legs with his. He slid his hand along her back until it came to rest on her hip, claiming her.
I really ought to leave, Mandy meant to say, but somehow the barrier blurred between what she should do and what she really wanted. Her eyelashes fluttered against his chest as her eyes drifted shut. Her breathing slowed in time to his. She really ought to leave, but she wanted nothing more in the world than to stay, and her last thought before slipping into a dream was that maybe she’d done the right thing for far too long.
CHAPTER SIX
Mandy awoke to the muffled sound of Bach’s oboe sonata in C Major. Her own personal alarm tone, a favorite since she’d been third chair oboe in the Willingham High School band.
Mandy extricated herself carefully from the bed, refusing to look over at the slumbering figure on the other side, and padded across the bungalow to where her purse lay abandoned on the floor. She turned off her phone alarm and made her way back gingerly to the bed, the events of the prior evening rushing back to her. Six-thirty in the morning on Cupid I
sland, and she was naked as the day she was born, shivering and wondering exactly what had gotten into her the night before.
It had to be some sort of island madness. She’d slept with her sister’s boyfriend. Tad Eckholm, he of the perfect proportions and thousand-yard-stare, the face behind the Clarity For Men skincare line and the Drive Like You Mean It campaign for an Italian sports sedan. Mandy had the tousled hair, the pleasant throb, and the love bites on her neck to prove that she’d done something reckless and rash on the eve of an important shoot, and now she had to get out of here fast, before Tad woke up and came to his senses.
All that mattered right now was the shoot. Later, much later, like on the plane back to California—perhaps Mandy could get out on an earlier flight, once the shoot was wrapped up—she could let herself dwell on how absurdly she had behaved. Not to mention figure out what momentary lapse of sanity had caused Tad to make love to her in the first place. And then would come the mortification of their working relationship, and confessing to Luna, and…and all of that.
Her face hot with mortification, Mandy tugged her clothes on, finding her bra under a wicker chair and her pants against the bedroom wall. She searched for her shoes for a full minute before remembering that they’d left them on the wooden stairs to the beach last night.
She took a last look at Tad. He was sleeping soundly, his arm slung across the bed where, only moments earlier, Mandy had been. He had a sweet, innocent expression on his face, a faint smile that seemed to suggest he was having a pleasant dream.
Mandy shuddered, her body torn between misgiving and a sudden surge of longing. Damn her traitorous libido, she wanted him all over again. Good thing the head ruled the heart, she told herself sternly, then let herself carefully out the front door, closing it gently so that it wouldn’t slam.
There, on the porch, their shoes were lined up in a neat row. As Mandy was trying to figure out how on earth anyone had known where to return the abandoned shoes, she slipped hers on and started walking down the path in the direction of Jayde’s and Sylvie’s bungalows. Whipping out her phone, she texted “on my way,” and wondered if she could possibly ask to borrow a toothbrush without either of them suspecting what she’d been up to. The fact that she was in yesterday’s clothes wouldn’t help her case.
Except no one in her right mind would ever suspect Mandy of having been with Tad. It was simply too much of a mismatch. His rebound relationship was destined to be with someone as beautiful as Luna. Heck, maybe Sylvie had been waiting for a chance with him. Mandy tried to remember—had there been any sparks between the two? No matter; even if the girls didn’t buy the story she was trying to come up with while she walked, they would never guess at the truth.
By the time Mandy got to Jayde’s bungalow, she’d tugged a comb through her hair and pinched her cheeks and sprayed herself with hydrating spray and slicked on neutral lip gloss, using all the tricks she knew to fake a fresh face. If today’s shoot was for any other client than Lark, she’d risk the girls showing up a bit late. But Lark was a stickler for keeping to a schedule.
The front door of Jayde’s bungalow wasn’t closed all the way. From inside, Mandy heard faint snoring. An empty champagne bottle lay on its side on the front porch.
Not good. Mandy let herself in, then gasped to see a huddled figure lying on the couch under a throw blanket. In the bed, Mandy saw Jayde’s platinum blonde hair poking out from the covers. As her mind raced through the disastrous possibilities, the figure on the sofa sneezed and sat up, the blanket sliding to the floor.
Sylvie. Relief flooded Mandy even as she realized it was rather hypocritical of her to worry about her models hooking up when she herself had just stumbled from a man’s room.
“Girls,” she said sternly, “I don’t want to know how late you were out last night, I just want you up and dressed pronto.”
She went to the kitchen and opened cabinets until she found two large tumblers, and filled them with water. She handed one to Sylvie, who managed only a grunt, and was taking the other to the bed when Jayde sat up and the sheets slipped to her waist.
Mandy shrieked and almost dropped the water.
“What…have you done?”
Jayde yawned and then looked down at herself where Mandy was pointing. Emblazoned across her collarbones, barely obscured by her tank top and extending out onto her shoulders, was a tattooed branch covered with pink flowers.
“Oh,” Jayde said in surprise. “I kind of forgot about that.” She touched a lush inked blossom and giggled.
“Please tell me it’s temporary.” Mandy’s heart was pounding so hard she could almost hear it.
“Nope.” Sylvie sounded smug. “It’s real. I told her you’d be mad.”
“I’m sorry, Mandy,” Jayde said. “But I had to do it.”
“You—you can’t—” Mandy sputtered.
“I told her it was the end of her career,” Sylvie said, in a long-suffering voice.
“I don’t want to model anymore, anyway.” Jayde said. “You were right, Mandy.”
“I was right?” Shock was quickly turning to panic. In half an hour, Mandy was going to have to explain to Lark why he was one model short for his shoot, because there was no way they could photograph the revealing gowns on a model whose fresh ink showed from every angle. “Please explain to me exactly how I was right?”
“When you said Jonas wasn’t good enough for me. When you said I should stand up for myself.”
“But what exactly does that—that thing have to do with it?” Mandy couldn’t bear to even look at the ruinous tattoo, even if it was rather beautiful and appeared to be expertly done.
“Well, it’s my spirit flower. The magnolia stands for purity and healing. I need to get Jonas out of my system, and reclaim my truth.”
“The tattoo girl explained it,” Sylvie chimed in. “She was real nice. She had this mobile tattoo cart—”
“But your career is over! You can’t model anymore!” Mandy shrieked. Had everyone besides her gone crazy?
“Oh, I know,” Jayde said calmly. “I need to focus on me now, and I can’t do that while I’m working, so I’m going to take some time off. But don’t worry. Sylvie figured out what to do. You can do the shoot in my place.”
“What?” Mandy sank onto a wicker divan upholstered in bright pink cotton. Her head was beginning to throb, and all the pleasant sensations from the evening before were lost to a burgeoning sense of nausea.
“Well, you’re a size twelve, right? All the sample plus-sized gowns are twelves. You’ve been over the mood boards. And all the layouts will feature me, anyway.” Sylvie shrugged matter-of-factly. “I’m the focus. You’ll just be window dressing, like Tad.”
Mandy sputtered in disbelief. Her plus-size model had just thrown away a perfectly good career, and now that Luna was gone, Sylvie was her top earner, and was evidently planning to single-handedly bring down the agency. “I can’t just sub in a different model, even if we had one,” she said. “I promised Lark that everything would go exactly according to plan.”
“Man plans…” Jayde said, in that same spooky calm voice. “…God laughs.”
“She’s gotten all new-agey,” Sylvie confided, sotto voce. “I think it’s the breakup.”
“I can’t believe you let her do that to herself!”
“Stop yelling at me, Mandy. I could have just left her last night when she was drunk. I made sure she got back here, didn’t I? I got her put to bed. And at least I talked her out of getting a jaguar on her neck.”
“Jaguar’s my spirit animal,” Jayde said, slipping out of bed and padding into the bathroom. They heard the sound of the shower being turned on.
Mandy moaned and covered her face with her hands. Some sort of crazy island mania seemed to have come over her employees since they arrived. Tad and Jayde had lost their minds, and Sylvie had somehow morphed into a responsible human being.
“So, look,” Sylvie said, folding the blanket and draping it over the couch. “You
can keep yelling at me or we can get over there and try to get through this damn shoot. Your call. But you did promise Lark we’d be clean so I’m going back to my bungalow for a shower. See you on the beach.”
Mandy watched her go, speechless, before catching a look at herself in the decorative mirror hung over the fireplace. Her hair was a disaster, her top was on inside out, but she did have a certain…glow about her this morning. She had no idea if she could pull off Sylvie’s harebrained plan. But for the sake of the agency, she had no choice but to try.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“She did what?” Lark was speaking in a deadly calm voice, but his face had gone beet red above his stiff starched linen shirt. Next to him, Deirdre King, the photographer, shot nervous glances from him to Mandy to Sylvie to Tad. Deirdre’s two assistants, a terribly thin man and woman dressed in black from head to toe, busied themselves with the light screens and props in the spot they had chosen on the beach, under the shade of a clump of palm trees. The wardrobe assistant sorted through a portable canvas wardrobe and the makeup artist was arranging her supplies in the cabana that had been set up with chairs and mirrors and lights.
Everything was ready for the shoot. Now all that remained to be seen was whether Lark would allow it to proceed with Mandy standing in for Jayde.
“She did have a recent breakup,” Mandy said lamely. “Her, um, mental health is in jeopardy.”
“I don’t care about her breakup. Don’t you have contract clauses for this sort of thing?”
Deirdre leaned close and murmured something to Lark. Mandy caught Tad’s eye, mostly by accident. She was determined to do her best to say as little as possible to him today. But he didn’t look the least bit chagrined. He’d been the last to appear, ambling down the beach at a minute before seven, his hair still wet from the shower. And now, in addition to looking well rested, he looked…amused. Happier, at any rate, than he’d looked in months.
