“What is it?”
“I’ve got some news about your community center.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s come under new management.”
She cocked her head to the side, trying to interpret his meaning.
“Just listen and let me tell you,” he said with a smile. “Me and Brett have decided, and with contributions from the rest of The Brotherhood, Collins/Fischer is dedicating ten million a year for a foundation to help the people of Las Vegas. We’ve bought your community center. We’re making the building bigger and upgrading the facilities. It’s going to be amazing. And we want you to run it.”
Maria blinked. “Wait, what?” She almost had whiplash as she tried to process what he was telling her. “You’re piling a lot of information on me right now.”
“You know the issues that affect the city, and the people who need help. You’ll be on the ground, the front lines, not the office, allocating funds and raising awareness where you need to. Jessica has already committed city hall resources and staff to help you with outreach.”
Maria was stunned. Suddenly, within just a few short minutes, she had everything she’d ever wanted. The man she loved and a job that made a difference. She didn’t want to move for fear that she was caught in some dream world, and if she woke up, she would be alone in her bed, sad and frustrated at her fantasies.
“Are you serious?”
“Completely.”
“Yes,” she said, almost breathless. “Yes, to everything. I want to marry you. I want to run your foundation. I want everything to do with you.” She leaped over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, and he held her by her waist and lifted her to a standing position. Maria pulled back. “I love you, Alex.”
“I love you, too.”
Maria looked into his eyes, and then around the full club. He’d almost made her forget where they were. “We’d better get back to the party. We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”
* * *
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Boardroom Sins
Sins of the Flesh
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Getting Naughty
by Avril Tremayne
CHAPTER ONE
TEAGUE STRETCHED HIS arms over his head and sucked in a lungful of summer air as he peered at Frankie’s doll-sized cottage, which was situated at the end of a long driveway that ran alongside a squat redbrick apartment building.
It was so small he’d probably have to duck to fit under the lintel.
If she invited him in.
If she even heard him knock, given it was barely eight o’clock on a Sunday morning.
His memory of Frankie’s Saturday nights was that they were big and wild, so unless she’d changed drastically in the ten years since he’d last seen her, chances were that at this precise moment she’d be either comatose or contemplating the walk of shame from wherever she’d ended up after work last night.
And it was too bad he chose now to remember that instead of thirty minutes ago, when he’d gotten into the taxi at Sydney Airport. At that point, he could have done as his best friend Matt had suggested during those chaotic last moments at Heathrow: gone to his hotel, gotten some sleep, and called Frankie at a civilized hour to arrange a time to meet for the handover.
Handover! Like he was doing some illicit drug deal.
Not that dealers dragged their supplies around with them in wheeled suitcases. Or maybe they did. What did he know? He was a corporate lawyer, not a criminal one.
Whatever. It was too late to change his mind because he’d let the taxi go and stranded himself.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, get it over with,” he ordered himself, and trudged up the path, stopping at a ratty-looking welcome mat that announced, You Have Arrived at Your Destination.
“I don’t think so, Frankie Lee,” he scoffed, stepping up to the door.
He tugged at the collar of his shirt to make sure it was sitting straight, ran a hand over his hair, dragged in another lungful of air and knocked.
Unsurprisingly, there was no answer.
He knocked again, just so he could say he’d really tried.
Waited for proof of life.
Nothing.
Okay, three strikes and you’re out a-a-and knock.
Silence.
He looked back down the driveway, picturing Frankie in one of her vintage dresses, black hair disheveled, makeup smeared, humming a satisfied tune and swinging her shoes from one hand as she meandered up the path as though she owned the world and all its contents.
Ha! Walk of shame? Not likely. Swagger of pride was more her style.
But, of course, there’d be no sign of her yet. At eight o’clock she’d still be in bed with...well, whomever she’d gone to bed with.
Teague tried to picture a likely “whomever” but that wasn’t so easy to visualize. For all Frankie’s brazen sex appeal, Teague could only recall one identifiable boyfriend from that year she’d spent in Washington, DC. Kyle. Big, burly, covered in tattoos. Kyle hadn’t been around long enough for Teague to get more of a handle on him than that; Frankie had dumped him within a month of their arrival together in DC, after he’d pitched a fit over her taking a second job.
That second job was as a dancer in a gentlemen’s club, so Teague had some sympathy for the guy. Or he would have had, if Kyle hadn’t already worked himself into a lather over Frankie working as a server at Flick’s, which marked the guy as more proprietary asshole than concerned boyfriend. Because come on, Flick’s? Seriously?
Flick’s was a grungy, student-hangout bar/restaurant. None of its patrons had ever stood a chance with Frankie. Hell, most of them were underage, and Frankie might have only been nineteen, but the rolling confidence of her walk flashed a warning that she’d already seen—and enjoyed—everything life had to offer, so they shouldn’t bother approaching her unless they were packing something more interesting than a fake ID. Teague had been under no illusions that he was in the running, despite being two years older than her and probably the only legal drinker in the place. She could fluster him by doing nothing more than breathing in his general direction. The only guy she hadn’t flustered had been Matt—but then, those two were like spirit animals.
So, okay, maybe it wasn’t so hard to envisage the guy whose bed Frankie was in. Someone like Matt.
Teague sighed. He loved Matt like a brother, but sometimes it sucked playing running back to Matt’s star quarterback. And after a twenty-three-hour flight Teague decided he was too tired to receive yet another handoff. So enough! The end! There’d be no call to arrange a time with Frankie. Teague would slip the damn thing under her door, then delete the number Matt had punched into his phone and go have his vacation.
He bent low, assessing the size of the gap...heard a faint rustle. What the—? Uh-oh.
Shit!
The door opened before he could move. He heard his name—“Teague?”—and closed his eyes. Fuck. Just fucking brilliant, to be caught with his head level with Frankie’s crotch.
“Are you coming up anytime soon?” she asked in her sleepily amused Australian drawl, as though a guy bowing down for her on her doorstep was par for the course. Which it probably was.
Slowly he unbent, eyes traveling up the length of a silky cream-colored robe covered in bold red flowers. An outfit deserving of a smokily sinful bordello.
And then his eyes reached her face, and she smiled at him in that how-about-it? way she had, and it killed him that despite the fact he was now thirty-two years old, with a megasuccessful career, property in three countries and billions in the bank, she still had the power to make him feel like a schoolboy with a crush on his teacher. And he didn’t even have a crush on her. He’d never let himself have one, because she was too—too much for him, too dangerous. Hadn’t that been the whole damn point of keeping his distance all those years ago?
“Hello, Frankie,” he said, blinking a little at her hair, which was hacked off halfway between her ears and her shoulders, the depthless black of it livened up with an inch-wide band of electric blue across the blunt ends. Everything else about her was as he remembered. The gold-tinged skin, the swollen-looking lips that seemed permanently stained a shade of almost red, the pale gray eyes—the left one turned in very slightly, an imperfection that was mystifyingly, profoundly, vulnerably alluring. The haughty black eyebrows that started low over the inner corners of her eyes and ended in a late arch, and heavy black lashes so thick they framed her eyes like eyeliner. She wasn’t beautiful but she was so vibrantly alive it had always been an effort not to stare and stare and stare at her.
“Come on in,” she said and stepped back.
“My suitcase...”
“A suitcase?” She laughed—a suggestively throaty chuckle. “Does that mean you want to stay with me?”
“No!” Jesus! “No, no. No.”
“So that’s a no, then, is it?” She smiled again as she hitched up her slipping robe at one shoulder. “Pity.” One beat, two, as she pursed her lips, assessing him like he was a side of meat hanging at the butcher. As she turned away, she added, “Ah, well, bring it in anyway.”
By the time Teague stepped over the threshold, she was disappearing through an archway at the end of the room.
He closed the door, then just stood there as a riot of color dueled with his eyes. Red couch, big enough for two people to sit on—or it would have been, if not for a basket taking up one half. The basket was overflowing with wool in too many shades to count and had at least six sets of knitting needles sticking out of it, and it boggled his mind because...Frankie? Knitting? There was an exotic rug in reds, browns and indigos taking up most of the wall behind the couch, and the floorboards were covered by a similarly styled rug in variegated creams, ochres and olives. A low coffee table in dark green sat on the rug in front of the couch, and a table at one end of the couch served as a display plinth for a small sculpture—an abstract twist of glass.
There was a doorway at the end of the room, to the right of the arch through which Frankie had disappeared. The door was ajar, so he could see into the room beyond. Rose-pink walls, a section of bed—rumpled white sheets, no coverlet. He pictured Frankie on those sheets—gold, crimson, gray, black, electric blue—and his heart started to thump uncomfortably.
“Teague?” she called. “You like whiskey when you’re straight off a flight, don’t you? So this is me, offering whiskey if you’ll come on through!”
He took a jolting step toward the archway, toward her voice, and then she added, “Or whatever else you want...” and he stopped, waiting, because he knew it was a pause, not an end. “Because all you need to do is name it and it’s yours!”
Name it. Name it?
And it was there—the answer. You, I want you.
His pulse zoomed up so fast, he thought the top of his head was going to fly off. He didn’t want her. And even if he did—okay, okay he did, he always had, but so what, every guy did—it made no difference. She didn’t mean he could have her, that was just—just the way she talked. She’d never meant any of those things she used to say, those things he hadn’t had the knack for laughing off because he didn’t flirt. Ever.
A hot flash of memory—the first time he’d seen her in Flick’s. She’d smiled at Matt, whom she obviously already knew, from across the room, then zeroed in on him—probably having felt his awestruck eyes on her. She’d headed toward them, carrying an overstacked tray of empty beer glasses and conducting an effortless flirtation with at least three separate groups of guys en route. She’d asked him if he liked what he saw. He’d said no, causing her to look at him like he was an alien life-form, and he’d stumbled out something about her being too young—like what the fuck? He’d meant she was too young to be working at Flick’s, because of course she wasn’t. He was simply trying to impress her with his intelligence and legalese seemed the quickest way—a launching pad to talk to her, since her accent told him she was Australian and he knew licensing laws were different in Australia. And she’d chosen a different interpretation of “too young” and told him she was three years over the age of consent, and if he was interested, to ask Matt for her number.
And the pattern had been set. Frankie giving him the come-on every time she saw him, him fucking up the responses.
How good does a girl have to be to score a date with you, Mr. Perfect? Um, er, huh?
I’d ask you to get the eyelash out of my eye for me, Mr. Perfect, if putting your hands on me wouldn’t give you a heart attack—not that I wouldn’t enjoy giving you mouth-to-mouth. I, um, huh?
If you decide to get naughty and come watch me dance at Club DeeCee, Mr. Perfect, I’ll give you a free lap dance.
Er, um, no, no! Followed by an actual recoil, during which he’d spilled his beer. He’d rushed on to say it wasn’t that he disapproved, at which point Matt had stepped in, calmly suggesting Teague leave things there because Frankie didn’t need anyone’s approval, she needed money or she’d have to fly home. So Teague, smooth operator, had reached for his wallet—like, fuck!—and she’d kind of frozen as she’d looked at the wallet in his hand and he’d found himself holding his breath. And then she’d said if she’d wanted to turn tricks, she would have stayed in Sydney, and the next second she was gone.
The invitation to Club DeeCee had not been repeated.
“Hey!” she called out from beyond the arch, bringing him back to the present. “Come on in, Mr. Perfect! I promise not to bite—unless you ask me nicely.”
And he felt something snap. Mr. Perfect. He was fucking tired of being Mr. Fucking Perfect.
Mr. Perfect Boyfriend to Romy—sure, Romy, we’ll go as slow as you like. Mr. Perfect Friend to Matt—sure, Matt, take the girl I love. Mr. Perfect Son for his parents—sure, Mom and Dad, I’ll be careful, I won’t do that, won’t go there, won’t take any more risks.
He wanted to not go slow. Wanted to win the girl. Wanted to take a risk again.
Wanted to tell Frankie, Sure, bring it! A pity he wasn’t staying with her? Then okay, he’d stay, as long as it was in her bed. Wanted to throw her down on those white sheets and lick every inch of her until she screamed for him. Tell her to go ahead and bite him, bite him anywhere she wanted, put her mouth all over him, do whatever she wanted to him. He’d take the damn dare, and not think about the consequences for once, and—and know, dammit. Know what it was like to be the man she wanted and not some fucking cautious, stuck-up, Victorian-era prig doing things the right way and giving everyone what they wanted except himself.
He took a step—he was so ready for this!—and then “I was joking!” floated out to him. “It’s just whiskey waiting in here, I’m not going to molest you!”
Sweet as Sin Page 16
