“Right. She got us here and the blonde met us at the door with cinnamon rolls.”
Lacey smiled. “Anna. She’s my best friend in Boston.”
“Well, she’s a good one.” He searched her gaze, appearing satisfied with what he saw. “Anyway, we got you changed and I finally chased them out with assurances I wouldn’t molest you in your own bed.” He lifted a dark, sardonic brow, and Lacey felt her cheeks burn. She dropped her gaze, but he just reached out and lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Not yet, anyway.”
They stared at each other, suspended for just a moment, and Lacey didn’t know what to do. She still felt a little woozy, out of sorts—but at the same time she wanted to kiss Dante so badly her entire body hummed with desire. Then again, she was a professional. He was her client. And she would never—
“Oh!” She pulled away from him as a flood of memories suddenly assaulted her. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “I took my clothes off in front of you!” Her gaze shot to the open door, and forced her voice to drop down several decibels. “Tell me they’re not standing right outside the door.”
Dante shook his head, but he didn’t lean back. His gaze had turned just a little hungry, and his smile had a determined cast. “How much about tonight do you remember, Lacey?” he asked. His words were almost a purr, and Lacey felt her cheeks flush. Instantly she realized her mistake. This would go much better for her if she played dumb and forgetful, but she could no more stop her blush than she could stop breathing.
“I—we—you were signing contracts,” she said finally, her voice little more than a tortured whisper. Then as another realization struck her, she looked around wildly. “My God, the contracts!” she blurted. “I need to have those delivered—”
“They’ll be couriered over to IMO first thing this morning,” Dante said easily, pushing Lacey back onto her pillows. “We’ll get your car to you, too, as soon as you tell us where you parked it.”
“I took a cab,” she said, distracted by his warmth, his body, his nearness.
Dante grinned. “Even better.”
He leaned toward her then, and it was like his words suddenly vanished between them, and she was left with just the reality of him sitting there, on her bed, in her room, acting like having a conversation with her was the most natural thing in the world. She stared at him, mesmerized, and knew the exact moment when he caught her watching his perfectly sculpted lips—since they then eased into a full, teasing smile. Her gaze darted back up to meet his eyes, and she vaguely realized that he was wearing the same buttery-soft trousers he’d had on when she’d entered his rooms. At least one of them had kept their clothes on the whole time. Only, that made her start thinking about what his chest looked like under that loose and flowing shirt, open at the neck with just a hint of his bronzed and tattooed skin showing through, and pinup calendar after pinup calendar from aged fourteen on rocketed through her brain, images of Dante growing from cutest boy bander ever into this sleek, dangerous, and devastatingly sexual man who was sitting right in front of her and—
“Lacey,” Dante said, and from the tone of his voice she suspected he maybe just might have possibly perhaps have said her name more than once.
“Of course. Yes,” Lacey said sternly, once again all professional. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking.” She looked toward the open door then squeaked as Dante dropped his mouth to the exposed column of her neck.
“You never made good on your last dare,” Dante murmured, nuzzling the sensitive skin with his lips as he spoke the words against Lacey’s throat. Beneath him, she held herself perfectly still, unable to move, unable to breathe, her entire world focused on the touch of his lips against her as tiny little whorls of sensation exploded with every word. “You told me you’d—well, you know what you told me you’d do if I signed your last contract.”
What she would do? Dante’s lips were now trailing over Lacey’s collarbone, dangerously close to her breasts, which were doing their level best to burst free from Hello Kitty’s embrace. This was good, because it meant Dante couldn’t see her eyes widening in abject horror, confusion, and mortification even as her body was quickly turning into Sterno fluid. “I—um—,” she began ineffectively, and his soft chuckle against her shoulder just about killed her.
“It’s okay,” he said, lifting his gaze back up to meet Lacey’s. His mouth was right there again, right there at her lips, and she managed to hold his gaze with Herculean effort, hoping desperately he couldn’t hear her heart hammering. “I’ll settle for a kiss.”
“A kiss,” Lacey managed, and he was so close to her lips that when she spoke it was almost as if they were kissing already, their lips brushing with a zing of electricity and the promise of a million volts of desire, if only she would go for it, take it, press her mouth to his and demand from him what he already seemed so willing to give.
Watching her with half-lidded eyes that would have seemed lazy except for the intensity of his stare, Dante seemed to vibrate with the barely checked hold he had on his instincts to move, to act, to take. He was clearly waiting for her to do something, and Lacey felt every nerve ending stand up and cheer in her body, even as her brain struggled to process clear rational logic and she thought—insanely, ridiculously—that they really should have taught college students something about how to handle this exact situation when your client offers you the chance merely to kiss him rather than strip bare-ass naked in front of him and have sex.
Wait. Had she offered to have—
The rest of the night came back to Lacey in a rush.
“I propositioned you!” she squeaked, even as she heard the unmistakable sound of distant motorcycles revving, shattering the early-morning silence. Other than the local unofficial bike-repair shop at the end of the street, hers was a tree-lined boulevard of pretty little brownstones, old money, and quiet lives. And she’d gone and brought a rock star home.
A rock star who was still in her bed.
“You did proposition me,” that rock star said now, his voice challenging her with sensual promise, and she found herself staring at his lips again. They were really … amazing lips. “You gonna tell me now that it was just the drugs talking?”
“What? No! I never planned to do that!” Lacey looked up at Dante, horrified, then realized what she was saying. Was she seriously denying her attraction to the man she’d lusted for her entire teen and adult life? “I mean, of course you’re attractive. Don’t be silly. But—I should never have … said what I did. You’re my client! I never intended … I mean—”
“Shhh,” Dante said, but she didn’t miss his intense smile, or the heat in his gaze. “I’ll try to put it out of my mind. But I’m not sure I can let go of the idea of holding you naked in my arms, tasting your skin, exploring every inch of your body until I know it better than my own.” He reached out and tilted up Lacey’s chin again. But instead of brushing against her lips, he drifted a soft kiss over her forehead, then lowered his mouth to the sensitive curve of her ear, hovering there as she quivered in a reaction she couldn’t control. “So be careful what you promise, Lacey. Because the thing you should know about me is, I always collect.”
Chapter Seven
The knock on the door of Lacey’s bedroom fairly jolted her out of her skin, but Dante barely registered the interruption. He’d learned what he wanted to know. He sat back and grinned as Anna poked her head in the room. “Um—I thought I heard voices. I wanted to make sure Lacey didn’t need anything.”
Lacey just blinked at Anna, but Dante stood, shifting out of the way to hide his semi as Anna hustled past. “Should she sleep?” Anna asked him, before turning to Lacey. “Are you hungry, honey? Are you okay?”
“Doc said she’d probably need to eat, and she’s already slept for a few hours, but—”
“I’m fine,” Lacey said stiffly. “You don’t need to worry about me, seriously.”
“Whatever. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck,” Anna snapped. Lacey winced and Dante did his best to look
serious. “I have rolls downstairs. You want to come down? Everyone wants to see how you’re—there you go, sweetie, easy does it—”
Dante watched with amusement as Anna commandeered Lacey like a general and ushered her downstairs, giving him the time he needed to get his own reactions under control. Rage flicked to life again within him when he thought of what Lacey had endured. When he tracked down whoever spiked his champagne, there would be hell to pay.
“I’m fine,” Lacey was protesting, but they were already to the foyer of the Victorian brownstone when Erin, the pixie-ish young woman he knew as Lacey’s landlady, burst in through the back hallway, her paint-spattered Red Sox ball cap shoved on her head, her hair looped in a ponytail through its back. “Please—both of you, come back to the kitchen. Anna has—” She paused as she took in Lacey. “Are you okay?” When Lacey didn’t respond quickly enough she tried again, turning her attention to Dante. “Is she okay?”
Dante smiled, and Erin drew up short, blinking at him. He was used to having this effect on women, but then she tilted her head and frowned. “You need soul rest,” she said, and then turned around just as quickly, rushing toward the back of the brownstone in a blur of worn denim overalls and a T-shirt that looked slept in.
“Sorry,” Anna said cheerfully. “Erin is wonderful, but she’s an artist. You get used to it.”
“Hi there, handsome.” Another woman had come around the corner from the brownstone’s living room and was now leaning against the doorframe, cradling an oversized cup of coffee in her hands. Dante took in yoga pants and a Clash T-shirt so old it was almost see-through, and so large it hung off her slender frame. But unlike Erin, this roommate wasn’t tiny. Dante couldn’t place her ethnicity—Hispanic, maybe? Italian?—but the woman was long and lean and almost feral looking, and she watched Dante with a detached interest as if she’d seen his type before. He smiled at her and she smiled back—not warm, but friendly enough. Two outsiders recognizing a kindred spirit.
Dante made a note to make sure he still had his money clip when he left.
Lacey was already making mumbling noises for him to leave, but Erin drew them ahead to the kitchen, where he already knew from his first encounter with the blonde dervish Anna that coffee and hot buttered heaven awaited. The light spilled out from the kitchen into the hallway, and Dante stopped, momentarily arrested at the vision before him. Lacey’s pajamas did a piss-poor job covering her with the backlight, and her body was silhouetted like she was some sort of vision out of a porn movie. Dante felt all the blood in his body rush to his groin, and when they turned around to talk to him, he waved them both into the kitchen, grateful that the hellcat behind him in the living room couldn’t see his reaction.
“C’mon, you need to eat something, Lacey.” The voice from the kitchen was the blonde—Anna, the best friend—and Dante’s brain came back online as Lacey finally consented to be dragged into the kitchen and out of his line of sight. By the time he rounded the corner, Anna was back at the countertop, doling out whatever she’d just baked. “I’ve got to get ready for work.”
Dante frowned at the wall clock, and cocked an eye at her. “At four A.M.?”
“Workaholic,” muttered Lacey. She’d picked up a roll, at least, and Dante smiled at that. So many women he knew didn’t eat. But when Lacey took a bite and groaned in sheer, unadulterated pleasure, the sound hit him straight in the gut. Again. What was wrong with him? Pull it together, he admonished himself, and took a long, unsteady breath.
“Yo! Your lackey up here wants access!” The woman from the foyer had a voice that could stop traffic, and Dante turned as Erin looked up.
“That’s probably my driver—,” he said, but before he could move Erin was already out of the kitchen and bustling down the hall officiously as if she wasn’t the size of a lawn ornament.
“You’ve been out there all this time? Come in! Dani, quit accosting the poor man!” Erin’s soft voice climbed several octaves as she apparently attempted to intercede between Dante’s unfortunate employee and the brownstone’s self-appointed guard. Dante looked over to Lacey and grinned as she looked suddenly away, clearly caught watching him. He knew he made her nervous, but there was also something so direct about her interest in him. There were clearly two sides to Lacey Dawes, and he was looking forward to unsettling both of them.
“I should probably go,” he drawled, and the approaching Anna abruptly changed direction midstride and slid her cinnamon roll platter onto the counter, not the table.
“No problem at all, Mr. Falcone—”
“Call me Dante.”
“Dante,” Anna said smoothly. “I’m so glad you got Lacey back to us safe and sound.” In no time flat she had popped out a clear plastic container and had lined it with a paper towel. She was settling two rolls in its base by the time Dante raised a hand to protest. “For your driver,” she said. “Assuming Dani hasn’t knocked his teeth out. She’s a little …”
“Unrestrained,” Lacey said from the table. “Thanks, Anna.” She’d regained her color, and she lifted her chin slightly as Dante watched her. “And thank you, Dante, for, um—for bringing me home.”
At her quiet words his heart tugged a little. It was definitely time to go, but he was already wondering when he would see Lacey again. That hadn’t happened in—longer than he could remember. There was just something about her knowing eyes and wistful smile, hinting at secrets she kept locked up in her head. There would be time, he told himself, to learn everything there was to know about Lacey Dawes. “Well, you’re the one who is due thanks,” he said now, quirking a smile. “I appreciate you keeping my naked ass off of YouTube.”
Lacey startled him with a quick grin of her own, those mysterious eyes now sparkling with mischief. “At least for another few nights anyway,” she said. “Then anyone with a laptop will have access to you twenty-four seven, remember?”
“We’ll see about that.” He nodded and headed out the door.
Lacey slumped back against the counter. Dante Falcone, the number one fantasy of her entire tween and teenage life—hell, her entire life up to this very second—had just walked out of her kitchen. But she’d hardly had time to process that amazing reality when Anna whirled on her, slapping both hands over her mouth.
“OhmygodohmygodohmyGOD!” Anna practically squealed through her fingers, as soon as the front door slammed shut. “That was Dante Falcone! The Dante Falcone! In our kitchen—eating cinnamon rolls! Lacey!”
She launched into a verbal assault, but try as she might, Lacey couldn’t quite lose her loopy grin long enough to get a word in edgewise. It could have been the drugs still wearing off. Or it could have been the Dante still wearing off. Either way she felt like something fundamental had shifted in her life, and she would never be the same girl again.
Anna was carrying on her monologue, as Anna did.
“That was Dante Falcone!” she concluded at last, her voice now pitched just under that of a squirrel’s. “How in God’s name did you get—and what did he mean about his bare ass on YouTube!” Her eyes rounded. “As in seriously his bare ass? As in something we can see on the Internet? Really!?”
“Really,” Lacey said. She’d just polished off a cinnamon roll as Erin and Dani came careening back into the kitchen, Erin to the fore but even Dani looking uncharacteristically intrigued.
“That was an extremely hot British chauffeur driving your rock star’s limo,” she announced, heading for the cinnamon rolls. “I didn’t even know they made men like that anymore.”
“So, tell us everything already, Lacey!” Erin prodded. She’d hopped up on the kitchen counter in a move that always looked like she’d been performing it since she was four, which she probably had. Now it had the additional benefit of giving her a slight height advantage, so she could stare at Lacey intently. “That is the guy you’re going to manage for the next few weeks?”
“He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who manages easily,” Dani put in, and Lacey groaned, her mental
faculties coming back into focus with each passing second.
“Tell me about it. He’s already thrown the whole agency in a tailspin by demanding that I be his manager for this tour, and we all know why that is.”
“Because he thinks you’re hot?” Erin asked.
“Because he thinks I’m easy. And not in that way.” Lacey glared at Dani, who had leaned over to inspect the cinnamon rolls even while scoffing her doubt. “He is pretty convinced that I’ll do whatever he asks, whether or not it’s good for the tour or good for the agency. And that’s just not going to happen, regardless of what just went down tonight. I’ve got this amazing chance to prove to everyone that not only can I handle a spoiled rock star, but I can make him do what he needs to do to fulfill the terms of his contract.” And get me a promotion, Lacey added silently. If she didn’t get out from under Brenda’s thumb, she wouldn’t last long at IMO, regardless.
“Why can’t I find a rock star to hang out with me for a weekend?” Anna moaned. “I can’t even find an ordinary guy to go out on a date with me.”
Lacey shot Anna a rueful glance. It was already June, and Anna was locked into being a bridesmaid at the mother of all society weddings at month’s end. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Anna had been working the story of an imaginary boyfriend for so long, even Lacey forgot that the sexy lover who was Anna’s constant excuse for missing weekend trips, evening parties, or pretty much anything more than a text exchange with her work and college pals wasn’t a real, live, flesh-and-blood man. But now Anna was going to have to produce said man to keep her tenaciously matchmaking friends from hooking her up with some loser at the upcoming wedding, and that … was going to be a trick. Since, you know, the guy didn’t exist.
“Dude, you haven’t even really looked for a date,” Dani pointed out now, drawing a scowl from Anna. “I keep offering to set you up at the bar, but you’re always working. Like night and day and night again. Makes it kind of hard to get busy.”
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