He wanted to kiss her. He’d never wanted to do anything more. If he was sweet…she was that, too, and so much else besides. Sweet, and warm, and curvy, and so bloody sexy. Her embarrassment, and her passion, defending her mother. The way she’d blushed, the way he’d seen her breath coming a bit faster, there at dinner, when he’d looked at her. He’d known that if he’d put his palm on her chest, just above that wide vee of neckline, he’d have felt her heart galloping, and the need to do it had pulled at him. Was still pulling at him.
So, yes, he wanted to kiss her. But he didn’t. “Your mum’s right,” he said instead, and felt the wrench of it, the twist in his gut. “I’m a player. I’m chocolate cheesecake. And I’m leaving in less than three weeks.”
“Yes. You are.”
He looked at her there in the dark. She wasn’t looking at him, was staring out through the windshield, her hands still on the wheel despite the fact that they weren’t going anywhere at all, and her expression was so…so troubled. So sad, and it was making him sad, too.
“I’m never noble,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have said I had a clue how to be. I’m doing my best, though. I’m leaving, and I don’t stick anyway. So I’m going to get out of this truck, and I’m not even going to kiss you goodnight, because I like you too much. And I don’t want to muck that up.”
He did it, too. He got out of the truck with her, walked her to her door in silence, and watched her put the key into the lock.
“Goodnight, Faith,” he told her.
She looked up at him, unsmiling, her eyes steady on him. “Goodnight, Will.”
She shut the door behind her, and he was alone.
And why was it, he wondered as he walked down the hall to his empty apartment, that doing the right thing had to feel so wrong?
True Confessions
Cold Days, Hot Nights at the Roundup
Faith sat at her little dining-room table, typed the headline, then stared at it for a minute, her fingers hovering over the keys. The weather outside might be frightful, she wrote. Well, it had rained that one day. But the entertainment at the Roundup is always smoking-hot.
She inserted an image of Sheila, one of the casino’s dancers, riding the mechanical bull in a pair of chaps, a G-string, and nothing else, with Robert, the principal boy dancer, up behind her, looking like he was ready to take over.
What was she thinking? She’d get fired. Too many sexy pictures, too much looking at a half-naked Will. Too much fantasizing about a half-naked Will. She substituted the PG version, the one where Sheila was wearing a sparkly vest.
As a valued VIP, you and your guest will have a front-row seat on opening night of our brand-new show, Lassoed. Afterwards, you’re invited to an exclusive backstage meet-and-greet with our talented dancers.
And you’re not invited to feel up Sheila, she didn’t write. Last time, the dancers had complained.
“Tell them not to hug me!” Sheila had said, storming into the Marketing Department during what had become the most interesting meeting Faith had ever attended. “I don’t get paid enough for that, and the next nasty old guy that tries it? He gets a knee.”
Faith sighed, now, and looked out the window at a slightly unkempt palm. She needed to do some pruning. She should clean the gutters, too.
Inspiration really wasn’t coming today, if cleaning the gutters sounded better than writing the February copy for the Winners’ Circle. She stared at the palm a minute longer without really seeing it, then opened a new document. Maybe just for five minutes. Just to clear her head.
The problem was, it wasn’t Sheila and Robert taking up all her available brain-space, or the dirty-old-man members of the high rollers’ club, either. It was Gretchen and Will, from the day before.
Not really, though. It was Hope and Hemi.
Hope in a pale-pink bra and a filmy white shirt that was falling open, because Hemi’s hands were unbuttoning it from behind, his mouth just grazing her neck, his jaw dark with the barest hint of stubble. Faith had had to set up a box for Gretchen in order for Will to reach her, had had to keep adjusting angles so Calvin could get the shot, with Charlotte in there redoing Gretchen’s makeup, spraying Will down again while Faith crawled on the floor.
But it didn’t matter that she knew what was really happening behind the scenes. The images were still there, exactly as if they were real. The two of them kneeling, Hemi’s arm, bare now, around Hope, his hand on the zipper of her unbuttoned jeans, his other hand pulling her blond hair back, his mouth near her ear.
Faith’s fingers were moving despite herself, despite every better intention.
Hope pushed the button for the seventy-third floor. The sleek elevator doors whispered shut, and as she ascended, impossibly quickly, she ran a hand nervously over the waistband of her severe black skirt, made sure her white blouse was still neatly tucked in, and wished the ride would take a little longer. She needed to breathe, to get this right, because too much was at stake.
She still couldn’t believe her luck. After all the resumes she’d sent out, every one of which had been met with a deafening silence, she’d thought she’d be stuck working for Vincent forever. Submitting to his tirades, having him tell her how stupid she was, how clumsy she’d been, every time he made a mistake. Because it couldn’t be his fault, and there she was, available to take the blame, because she had nowhere else to go, and she needed the job too much to quit.
Everybody wanted somebody with a college degree, that was the problem. There was no place on their forms to explain that when other young women had been going to parties and studying for finals, Hope had been raising her sister. That college had been a luxury she couldn’t afford, an indulgence she’d only been able to dream of. She would work harder than anybody they could hire. She learned fast, and she never made the same mistake twice. But they wouldn’t even give her the chance. They just saw her associates degree—earned at night, one painfully-scratched-together semester’s worth of tuition at a time—and threw her application away. What did a person have to do?
And now, out of the blue, she’d been offered the interview for the publicity department at Te Mana, a glamour position beyond her wildest dreams. Maybe she’d impressed somebody from the company at the shoot, as unlikely as that seemed. Or maybe Vincent wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe he had recommended her.
She’d been told that she forgave too easily, and she supposed it was true. But surely that was better than going through the world angry, holding a grudge.
The elevator stopped on the fifty-first floor, and her heart slammed against her chest. Because he was getting in, his glance flicking over her just as it had that day the week before, a little smile on his beautiful lips.
“You’re here,” he said. “Looking forward to your interview?”
She was staring. At his shirt, open at the neck to reveal a triangle of smooth brown skin, glimpsed for a single glorious instant before he turned to stand beside her. At the perfectly tailored black suit jacket that clung to his broad shoulders, narrowed to his trim waist.
It took her a moment to realize what he had said, because of the accent. She’d heard it in interviews, the clipped tones, the New Zealand vowels falling strangely on her ear. All uttered in a low voice as creamy as chocolate, as deep and rich as his skin.
“How did you know?” she asked, struggling to focus on what he was saying.
“Oh,” he said, “I make it my business to know everything. Because it is my business.”
The elevator came to a stop, the doors glided open, and he put a hand out to hold them. “Here you are,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Wish me luck.” Then she could have kicked herself. Why was she talking to him like that? Like he was…anybody?
A faint smile warmed his brown eyes for just a moment, lightened his expression so he wasn’t the cold, forbidding figure he had seemed at the shoot, and then the mask had slipped back into place, and her heart was fluttering, beating out a fierce tattoo.
> “I don’t think you’ll need luck,” he told her. “I have a feeling you’re going to knock them dead.”
***
Shoot, Faith thought. Shoot, shoot, shoot. This wasn’t paying her own bills. And she was fresh out of inspiration for the Roundup. She just couldn’t get excited about simulated sex on the mechanical bull, not when she had simulated sex of her own to write about.
Because hers had a story, that was why, and it was a story that was itching to be told. Who was Hemi, underneath? And who knew that Hope had a sister? Faith did, that was who.
An hour later, she’d given up on the Roundup, but at least she was working on something practical again. And she was sweating.
“Don’t you have somebody to do that?” she heard from behind her. That same dark-chocolate voice, and too bad she wasn’t in an elevator, and that he wasn’t about to make all her financial worries go away.
“I do.” She continued to saw, because she needed to finish this, now that she had started. She still had one more tree to go. “Me.”
“You do the gardening? That’s pretty heavy work.”
The thin-bladed, long-handled wooden saw bit through the final bit of tough, spiky stem, and she leaned back. “Watch it,” she warned. “Sharp edges.”
The heavy frond fell to the ground to join its fellows, the wicked teeth along its edges missing him as he jumped back.
“I don’t do all the gardening,” she said, turning on her stepladder to look at him. He was in a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, a damp vee of sweat darkening the light-gray fabric down his broad chest, but she wasn’t looking at that. Well, hardly at all. “I have a service to do the grass and the basic stuff. But this is too expensive. And, hey. It’s a whole lot worse when it’s 110 out.”
“So…” He kicked at the pile of fronds at the base of the tree, looked around at the two others she had already pruned. “Need a hand?”
“No, thanks. Besides, you already worked out today.”
“Do me a favor.” He sounded pained. “I think I could manage that without straining myself.”
“I don’t have gloves that would fit you,” she said, eyeing his hands. Which, as Calvin had already noted, were big. The better to hold you with. “And my insurance won’t cover it if you get hurt. No.”
He sighed in obvious exasperation. “What d’you do with all these? The fronds?”
“Put them in my truck,” she said reluctantly. “Take them to the dump. There you go. My afternoon plan, at least part of it, before I get back to my real job.”
“We aren’t shooting until tomorrow.”
“Marketing for a casino, remember? My other job, I guess I should say.”
“Then let me help you,” he said. “Let me just run up and change, and then I’ll bung these things into the truck, how’s that? And I’ll go with you, too.”
“You do not want to go to the dump. Plus, I have another errand afterwards.”
He shrugged. “Why don’t I want to go to the dump? I don’t have anything else to do.”
Which was why he was sitting next to her in the truck at the Waste Management site on West Sahara an hour later, having just grabbed the gloves from her despite her protests, wrestled them as far onto his hands as he’d been able to manage, and tossed the wickedly sharp palm fronds onto the trash pile in the concrete bay.
“All I can say is,” she said when he’d hopped in to join her again, “star athletes must live differently in New Zealand.”
“Not too differently from anybody else.” He pulled off the leather gloves and setting them on the dash. “Because we don’t make nearly as much money as they do here, probably. Maybe a tenth, if we’re lucky. Makes it harder to set yourself up as some rich boofhead.”
“What’s a boofhead?” That was a new one. And a tenth? Wow.
He grinned. “Dickhead, more or less. I was being polite.”
The startled a laugh out of her, but she quickly sobered as the thought struck her. “You didn’t—”
“Didn’t what? What have you dreamed up now?”
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. “You took the modeling job because you needed to,” she realized. “And living in Mrs. Ferguson’s place— You’re not—”
“Oh, bloody hell,” he sighed. “What am I not? Go on and finish a sentence. Are we back to the felon idea?”
She wasn’t sure how to ask. “That you came to Las Vegas. Do you have a…a problem? You’re not…broke?” Good thing she’d got the rent up front.
She cast a hasty glance across at him, saw him looking chagrined, and her heart sank. He was in trouble. She’d known it.
Silence reigned for a few pregnant moments before he spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know. I do have a problem. I need to get it sorted, I know it. I kept thinking I could keep it under control, that I could stop. But when I bet my house…” He looked away, staring at nothing, at blank concrete. “Afterwards, it was like a…like it had been some kind of bad dream. I ducked out of the hotel that day without paying, too. I didn’t want you to know, but it’s on my conscience.” He swung around to her again, his dark gaze earnest. “I’m planning to pay it back, though,” he assured her, “soon as I get the next payment from Calvin. That’s why I agreed to it, the modeling, even though it’s…” He swallowed. “Degrading. But it’s what your mum said. You do what you have to do.”
“You—” she began. The sweetness she’d seen in him, the rare flashes of vulnerability. This was why? She’d forgotten she was still sitting in the trash bay, backed up to a mountain of junk, because he was staring sightlessly out into the yard now, watching a garbage truck roll slowly by. As she watched, he swallowed, the Adam’s apple moving in his strong brown throat.
And then she saw the telltale twitch at the corner of his mouth. “You’re messing with me,” she realized. “You are totally—” He lost the battle, started to laugh, and she slugged him hard in the upper arm. “You jerk.”
He grabbed her hand in a flash, tugged her towards him. “I’m a jerk?” he asked, smiling into her eyes. “Me? I’m not the one slagging off somebody’s character.”
His hand was hard and warm around hers, and she couldn’t have said if she was leaning into him, or if he was doing the leaning, but her eyes were fluttering closed, and his lips were brushing over hers, his other hand coming up to cup her cheek.
It was all warm, and sweet, and soft. Then he was kissing her again, his lips a little firmer now, and every single nerve in her body was springing to life. She heard herself making a little whimpering sound that didn’t even sound like her, and his hand was behind her head, his other arm going around her, pulling her close.
“Oh, hell, no.” The voice was rough. Pained. “That’s just sad.”
Her eyes sprang open, and she was jerking back from Will, because a burly man in stained coveralls and a goatee was bent over, peering into the truck’s window beside her.
“I’d say get a room, but damn, man,” he told Will, “that’s desperate. At the fu— the friggin’ dump? We got people waiting, dude. Get out of here.”
Dress Rehearsal
He’d just kissed a woman in a rubbish tip. Worse, he’d kissed Faith there. What was next? He was going to make his big move at the cemetery?
She cleared her throat, shoved the truck into gear, and started off with a jolt. A little rough on the clutch, but he couldn’t blame her. He was still shaken. Her soft, responsive mouth, her sweet, warm body…at the dump.
“So…” he said as she made a right onto Sahara, then moved on over through the late-afternoon traffic into the left lane. “Not my smoothest moment.”
She laughed in surprise, and he grinned at her, and she laughed some more, and then they were both laughing, because they couldn’t help it.
“I am so tempted,” she told him, pulling to a stop at a light and raising a hand to swipe at her eyes, “to tell my mom.”
He leaned his head back and groaned. “T
he worst. That would be the worst. Could we start again? I do a pretty fair line in dark, dangerous grabbing, I’m told, if you give me a bit of rehearsal and some coaching.”
“No,” she said, that smile trying to peep through. “Probably my fault, though,” she added generously, because that was how Faith was. “I mean, with your gambling addiction and all.”
“And losing all my money,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget that. I don’t gamble, actually. I may have put a quarter or two into one of those pokies machines, can’t promise I haven’t, but a sportsman can’t afford to be a gambler.”
“One of those what?”
“Pokies. You know.” He made the motion. “Ching-ching-ching?”
“Ah. Slot machines. Boy, you talk funny.”
The light had turned green, and she was headed south on Valley View. “But I kiss all right,” he said, and grinned at her again. “At least that’s what they say.” And then he could have kicked himself. He wasn’t meant to be doing casual. He should have been romantic or something. He’d felt romantic, back there. When she’d been melting against him, he’d wanted to lay her down, touch her, kiss her everywhere, and murmur…things. When she’d made that little whimpering noise into his mouth…he’d been gone. But he’d said he wouldn’t push it, and he had the feeling that no matter what he said or how he said it, she wasn’t going to be playing.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll bet they do. And no. We’re taking that right off the table.” Which made him sigh again.
“Right. Friends, eh. And not with benefits.”
“You want benefits,” she said, sounding a little more sure of herself again, “go find some other girl. But…this is awkward.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to be all businesslike about this whole thing. The photography, I mean. I thought, people do this all the time, right? The sexy pictures? No big deal. But I wasn’t expecting it to be…you. I thought it’d just be some model, and I’ve worked with a lot of models.”
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