A Whisper Of Wanting

by Jamie Sobrato

  A WHISPER OF WANTING

  Jamie Sobrato

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  To Colleen and Carrie,

  my fellow Lust Potion girls

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Coming Next Month

  1

  “CRAZY PASSION, hot sex, multiple orgasms—you can have it all.”

  The whispered male voice came from somewhere in the vicinity of Ethan Ramsey’s left elbow. He turned toward the sound and did a double take at the person standing next to him. It was a tiny lizard of a man, five feet tall at most. Raisin eyes and leathery skin framed a beak of a nose, and his bald head shone as if it had been waxed.

  “You want crazy-passion-hot-sex-multiple-orgasms?” the man hissed again, his voice a little bolder now, but still reminiscent of the drug dealers in Amsterdam whispering “Ecstasy, ecstasy” on every street corner.

  The raisin-eyed gaze darted between Ethan and his two co-workers standing a few feet away. The three had wandered into the little tourist trap shop called Jag’s on their way back to the office from lunch, and this man, presumably, was Jag.

  Maybe Ethan shouldn’t have had that martini at lunch. He couldn’t possibly have heard the man correctly. But he looked at Zoe Aberdeen and Kathryn Walters, both of whom were staring at the man as if they’d heard the same thing he had, and he knew he couldn’t blame this weird tableau on vodka.

  “Excuse me?” Ethan said, figuring he might as well know the truth of it.

  “You, the two ladies,” the man said, then glanced over each shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being overheard, “you want crazy-passion-hot-sex-multiple-orgasms.”

  Kathryn and Zoe were still staring, jaws agape now. The three of them had heard rumors that the place was hawking a fake aphrodisiac to tourists at an exorbitant price. Being the naturally curious journalists they were, they figured they’d better investigate, and since Zoe had claimed to be in search of a voodoo doll, here they were.

  Yet somehow, this lizard of a man had still managed to catch them by surprise. He was like the human version of an Internet pop-up ad, the promise of the impossible in a tiny, annoying package.

  Ethan cleared his throat and tried to think of an appropriate response to the idea of his having multiple orgasms with his heretofore platonic co-workers. Not that he hadn’t engaged in his share of fantasies starring each of them, but hell, he’d also fantasized about having sex with pretty much every attractive female he knew. That didn’t mean he was going to act on it.

  Before he could respond though, the lizard man spoke again. “Balam K’am-bi—it’s the love potion of the Gods. From deep in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula comes this elixir that brings the world’s greatest sexual experiences to the person who dares to use it.”

  Ethan glanced from Zoe to Kathryn again and caught them trying not to laugh. He wasn’t the only one who’d had a martini with lunch—Zoe had, too. But Kathryn, as usual, had abstained.

  “So what do you think, girls?” Ethan said. “Multiple orgasms for all?”

  Zoe shot him an in-your-dreams look, then to the storekeeper she said, “How much for a bottle?”

  “For a lovely lady like you, only fifty dollars.”

  Her perfectly arched brows shot up. “I’ll give you ten bucks, tops.”

  The lizard man held up his hands and shook his head. “That’s impossible. I pay forty dollars just to get one bottle into the U.S. I’m a working man, I have to—”

  He lost his train of thought when he seemed to spot something over Zoe’s left shoulder. Ethan followed the man’s gaze to a police cruiser parking in front of the shop.

  At that moment, Kathryn glanced at her watch. “Whoa, we’re due back from lunch in, like, thirty seconds.”

  The shopkeeper instantly lost interest in trying to sell them his fake love potion. His gaze darting between them and the cops climbing out of the cruiser, he edged his way back as Ethan and his co-workers headed for the door.

  “Oh, wait a sec, guys—I wanted to buy that voodoo doll with the pointy boobies,” Zoe said, stopping as they reached the door.

  Ethan and Kathryn loitered in the doorway, watching as two police officers surveyed the storefront, then headed for the entrance. By the time the cops reached the door, Zoe was hurrying after them with her bag containing the voodoo doll, and the three of them headed back to work, leaving the shopkeeper to deal with the cops.

  “That little guy was seriously weird,” Zoe said, inspecting the contents of her bag as they walked.

  Kathryn shuddered. “There was something creepy about him. He reminded me of…”

  “Lew from marketing?” Ethan offered, recalling the similarity between the two men’s appearances.

  “Yes!” the two women said simultaneously.

  “I bet he has a forked tongue,” Zoe said.

  “Lew asked me out once,” Kathryn said, wincing. “He wanted me to go to open mike night at some coffeehouse and listen to him read his haiku about global warming or something. It was bizarre.”

  “And you didn’t jump on that fabulous opportunity? Are you insane?” Zoe said and laughed.

  “Wow, the ‘come listen to my haiku’ pitch—I haven’t tried that one yet,” Ethan said, pretending to be impressed with the idea.

  “Don’t,” Kathryn said. “It’s not exactly a turn-on.”

  Outside in the bright Southern California sunshine, Ethan felt a short pang of longing for London, where he’d grown up. It was mid-October for chrissake, and barely a hint of autumn taking hold. Not that he could complain about all the lovely bare-skinned American girls he got to admire in the warm weather.

  And then another pang—a ridiculous wish that he’d grabbed that bottle of lust potion when he’d had the chance. Why he wanted it, he didn’t dare guess.

  Normally, Ethan didn’t have to rely on much more than his crooked smile and a little old-fashioned Brit charm to get pretty much any girl he pleased out of her knickers, so he wasn’t about to jump all over the offer of crazy-passion-hot-sex-multiple-orgasms in a bottle, but hey, he had to keep his journalistic interests in mind too. He’d love to have known what the hell was in the little bottle.

  Probably a nice cocktail of tap water and piss.

  “You’re looking awfully mischievous all of a sudden,” Kathryn said to him as they rounded the corner headed toward the newspaper offices.

  Ethan shook himself out of his lust-potion-induced thoughts and shrugged. “Just wondering what it would be like to have a real lust potion. Imagine the trouble we could get into….”

  “I don’t want to imagine,” Kathryn said. “A lust potion is the last thing I need right now, with my nonexistent love life.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have dissed Lew from marketing so quickly,” Ethan offered, then stepped aside to avoid getting hit by a flailing female hand.

  “That’s exactly why you need something like that,” Zoe said. “So you can relax and get laid!”

  The trio made it back to work in record time thanks to Kathryn’s type-A, hard-charging fast-walk, and they squeaked into their respective o
ffices without anyone so much as noticing their tardiness. Ethan went to work hunting down sources for a drug-deal-gone-bad story he had due into production by six o’clock.

  He prided himself on never getting a fact wrong and never turning in a story late. If he was easygoing and congenial in his personal life, he was the exact opposite in his professional life. As a journalist, he’d been called relentless, ruthless, even cutthroat. He was willing to go pretty damn far in the pursuit of the truth. It was one of those values he respected above all else—the only thing he’d ever found in life that he could see himself dying for.

  Okay, so that sounded a little overdramatic. But on even the most routine stories such as the one he was working on today, lives could be saved with the truth. The more the public knew about the illegal drug trade in San Diego, the more they could protect themselves against it. The more scumbags who had the light shone on their activities, the fewer of them who’d have an easy time of dealing in the future.

  He believed in the power of truth and the written word, and he wrote his hundredth drug deal story with the same passion he’d have put into any other story. They were all important, so long as they were true.

  His work was his life. He’d yet to meet a woman who could accept that, and so the women came and went from his bed rather quickly. And for the most part that was okay with Ethan. For the most part.

  Looking over his notes, he came to a place where he couldn’t understand what he’d scrawled on his notepad while interviewing a source. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he’d written at the top of the page. After a few rings, a man picked up with a surly “Hello.”

  “Kevin Brenner?” Ethan asked.

  “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “This is Ethan Ramsey at the San Diego Times. We talked yesterday about the story I’m writing, and I just need to clarify one thing from your comments.”

  Silence for a moment too long, and then, “Look man, my ass is on the line from talking to you once. I ain’t doing it again.”

  Ethan bit his lip to keep from muttering a curse. He took a guess at what he’d scrawled on the paper. It wasn’t like him to make messy notes.

  “My notes say Dorado wasn’t present at the time of the deal. Is that correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Now don’t call me again.”

  Ethan heard a click on the line, and then he was disconnected. He hung up his phone and rewrote his illegible note carefully this time. Even with the thought still in his head, he always kept his original notes filed away to cover his ass later, just in case. But he had a gut sense about when people were telling the truth and when they were lying, and his gut never steered him wrong. He could hammer at a person relentlessly with his questions until he was sure he’d gotten every last detail they knew. He’d yet to need his filed-away notes, but he kept them nonetheless.

  Three hours later, he was finishing up a rough draft of the story when Zoe appeared at his desk, wearing an inscrutable expression.

  “Remember the guy from that tourist trap shop?” she asked.

  Ethan shook himself out of his writing-mode trance. He hadn’t given that creepy little man a thought since they’d left. “Mr. Hot-Sex-Multiple-Orgasm?”

  “Check this out.” She held up a small corked bottle identical to the one the man had tried to sell them. “He must have planted it on me. I found it in my purse just now when I was looking for some gum.”

  “Guess he knew a woman in desperate need of a lust potion when he saw one, eh?”

  “Lust potion my ass.”

  “Love it when you talk dirty to me, babe.”

  “Could you be serious for a minute? Why would he stick this stuff he was trying to sell us a few minutes before in my bag? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Ethan pondered that for a moment. “You think it had something to do with the police showing up? Maybe to remove the evidence of his scam from the premises?”

  Zoe shrugged. “Beats me, but that was my first guess. Or maybe he took pity on us, thinking we all had such obviously lousy love lives—”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re such a guy. Maybe we should turn this bottle over to the police, you think?”

  “Sure, why not. I could run it down to the precinct tonight, actually. I’ve got to stop there anyway to follow up on a story.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring it right back to you. I want to play a little joke on Kathryn first, pretend I bought it for her.”

  “Put it on her desk with a little note that says, ‘For you, multiple orgasms in a bottle.’”

  She flashed a devious smile and disappeared.

  A half hour later, he’d wrestled his story into a final draft when Kathryn appeared at his desk looking none too amused at the bottle she held in her hand.

  “Ha. Ha,” she said, deadpan. “I’m so amused.”

  He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It wasn’t me! Zoe’s the one you should be glaring at.”

  “Whomever’s to blame, you’re not funny. Not one little bit.”

  She dropped the bottle on his desk, then tromped off, her lovely ass shaking as she went.

  Alone, Ethan picked up the bottle and twirled it around, staring at the clear liquid within it. He removed the cork, which felt a little loose, and took a whiff of the stuff. It had no odor at all, which didn’t exactly reinforce his water and piss theory, but didn’t altogether refute it, either.

  If he’d been a gambling man, he’d douse some on and see what happened. But now he realized the little man hadn’t even told them how to use the stuff. Was the user supposed to drink it, wear it or sniff it? If it was a potion, didn’t that mean it had to be drunk?

  He hadn’t a freaking clue.

  And could he really blame his curiosity about the so-called potion on his journalistic interests alone?

  He needed to get a grip and take the bottle over to the crime lab before a certain hot little cop he wanted to drop in on left for the day.

  Nicole Arroyo—a woman he’d once had a chance with but had blown it in a huge way—haunted him. He’d always had a thing for women in positions of authority, starting with his nursery school teacher and getting more ambitious as he grew, but his attraction to Nicole was far more than that. And it was more than just the fact that she presented his biggest sexual challenge with her unwillingness to give him the time of day. It was that she was strong, and she didn’t take any shit from anyone, and more than any woman he’d ever met, she knew her convictions. She believed in her work, which in its own way was a pursuit of truth, going hand in hand with justice.

  Of all the women he’d have liked to impress, she was number one on his list, and yet she was probably less impressed with him than any other female in the known universe. Of course, he’d given her plenty of reason not to be impressed with him.

  After that night two years ago, the outrageous flirtation, the thrill of catching her interest, the one drink too many, the drunken fumbling, the wilted erection, the one-night stand gone all wrong, he’d always ached for a second chance to show Nicole that he actually was a great lover.

  That night had not been representative of his usual performance in bed—in fact it was the only time he’d ever not been able to get it up—and it had strictly been a side effect of the alcohol. He wanted her to know that, and to know that it had nothing to do with his arousal for her, which was primal and intense, but she’d never given him a second chance. Had barely ever given him even a second glance since that shitty night.

  He needed to prove to Nicole—and to himself—that he was worthy of her time. Worthy, if he was lucky, of a place in her bed. At least for a little while.

  Somehow, he would find a way to show her, finally, that he wasn’t the waste of space she thought he was. Maybe it would take a supernatural effort, but he’d do it. He’d find a way. Thoughts of lust potions had him feeling all inspired and mystical. And horny as hell.

  Nicole, his fantasy
in blue—here he came. Armed with the lust potion of the gods, no less.

  2

  “YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY BELIEVE that’s some kind of love potion.”

  Nicole Arroyo had heard a lot of bullshit in the three years since she’d made detective, but a magic love potion just about took the biggest-load-of-crap award. If the man standing next to her desk had been anyone else, she might have reacted with a little more diplomacy.

  “Not love potion,” Ethan said. “Lust potion.”

  Nicole didn’t suffer fools or devil-may-care Englishmen. Especially not when the Englishman went by the name Ethan Ramsey and had a bad habit of popping in on her unwelcome whenever he stopped by the precinct on one of his relentless information-gathering excursions. He may have been a tirelessly devoted journalist, but something about him bugged her, made her feel off-balance and a little too…impassioned, or something.

  The very fact that he could show up with something he claimed was a lust potion and she wasn’t laughing her ass off at him told her all she needed to know about how off-kilter he made her feel. She stared at the bottle in his hand, knowing without even considering its contents that it was fake, and that Ethan knew it was fake, too, but was there with the stuff just to screw with her.

  He was one of those guys she could tell spent a lot of time dancing around his bedroom in a pair of bikini briefs. He probably didn’t even need music.

  And his dark brown hair, the way it was ever so slightly in disarray—pulleaze. His appearance was always so carefully casual, so appealing yet a tad mussed, she knew he had to have worked hard to attain it. He clearly thought too much about the way he looked and was way too pleased with himself for being so absurdly attractive. How could a human being even have such impossibly blue eyes? He probably wore colored contacts.

  But, okay, she had to admit, what pissed her off the most about Ethan was not that he tried so hard to look hot, but that she fell for it. And so did other women. Wherever he went, women practically stripped off their panties in response to his walking into a room.

  Nicole would not ever again be one of those fools.