by Chant, Zoe
Okay, that much had worked. Then, to make double sure, she pulled out her cell and checked the camera, though she was confident that she’d gotten at least a couple good shots of Haskell with Patrice.
But when she scrolled through, to her horror she discovered that not one of them was any good—dancers obscured either one or the other, or both, and in the one clear shot of Patrice, Haskell was bent away, only a shoulder visible. He could have been anyone. Meanwhile she had about twenty-five shots of Red Hot.
Inside her, the poodle practically wiggled with joy, and she held her breath to keep her dog from popping out again. She groaned, disgusted with herself. All of a sudden, acting like a teenager with her first crush—on a job?
Back to work.
She needed at least one clear shot of Haskell with Patrice, and from the sound of it, Patrice was on her way out. So Mindy hurried into her dress, pulled on her sandals, and snatched up her purse. She walked as quickly as she could to the stair exit, tying her hair up as she did. She made it to the entry to the suite, at the end of a short, discreet corridor, with seconds to spare—from behind the big double doors came Patrice’s shrill tones clashing with Haskell’s snarl.
Mindy nipped her cell out of her purse, heart banging against her ribs. She tapped the camera app—made certain the flash was off—and held the phone up to her ear a second before the suite door opened. She began gabbling as if talking to someone and turned her head sideways, finger pressing hard on the camera button in hopes that one shot could capture the man and woman emerging.
At the sight of Mindy both Patrice and Haskell shut up. And in the sudden silence, the click of the camera was faintly audible.
Oh God oh God oh God—
Someone rounded the corner and stepped into the hall outside the suite.
It was Red Hot.
“Hey,” Haskell began, glowering at Mindy. “Who are you—”
There was only one thing to do. “Darling! There you are,” Mindy cried, turning her back on Haskell, and threw herself into Red Hot’s arms.
“Huh?” he said, then nothing more because Mindy, still clutching her phone, reached up (whoa, he was tall, and he smelled so incredible), laced her fingers behind his neck, and pulled him down for a kiss.
She meant to freeze there until Haskell was safely past, then apologize and pretend that she was drunk and had mistaken him for someone else. But the surprised hand that gripped her shoulder her drifted down her back, heating her skin to a tingle. The hard thing that pressed inside her hip—That was not his cane!—shifted into the hollow between her thighs as the lips mashed against hers opened.
And her lips opened.
And every cell in her body shot straight into the sun.
Chapter Two
Two seconds after Dennis entered the hall leading to Haskell’s suite, an armful of woman landed softly against him. “Darling!” she said.
It was her! Fragrant, curly chocolate-colored hair brushed his chest as she cooed, “There you are!” and the next thing he knew, the hottest, sexiest pair of lips in the history of the universe short-circuited his brain.
He was vaguely aware of Haskell blabbing something, but he was too busy exploring the softest, sweetest, loveliest mouth he had ever kissed, tongues teasing and dueling—hot, shaky breath mingling.
Somehow the key card he’d been carrying fumbled the door open, and somehow he tossed the card this way and his cane that way and she did something magical with those killer hips of hers, and he fitted up and tight right where it counted.
His brain was still back out there going WTF? But his body had already tabled that discussion as one heel kicked the door shut behind him. Thump, thump, her cell phone and purse fell to the carpet to join his key card and cane.
He took a step backward toward the bed, nearly stumbled, then caught himself as she fell against him. His arms filled with deliciously curvy woman, smelling of some kind of perfume that drove him wild.
Not the man to question miracles, he bent, closed his hands under her hips, and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around him, her sandals thumping to the floor as those amazing hips of hers did something that made his dick jump painfully in pants suddenly fifty sizes too small.
The backs of his knees found the bed, and they fell, with her landing on top of him.
When they broke for breath, a single brain cell wandered back and he gasped, “Who are you?”
“Call me . . . Payton,” she muttered into his lips.
What was she doing here? Besides driving him batshit wild.
He closed his hands over the silky smooth skin of her shoulders and forced a little distance between them, though he was nearly drowning in those big brown eyes the color of dark amber. “Do I . . . know you?” he said stupidly, trying hard to claw his way back to sanity.
“Who cares?” she said breathlessly.
“Right.” The preliminaries over, he pulled her in for another kiss.
It was even hotter than the first.
* * *
This is crazy, a voice wailed at the back of her mind.
All right, then I’m going crazy, she told it, as her poodle wiggled inside her with frantic joy.
And she kissed him again, her bones melting as he took possession of her mouth, exploring it with dizzying extravagance. And when he paused for air, she did what she discovered she had been wanting to do since the first moment she saw him in the bar: she bit that sexy lower lip of his, and laved it slowly with her tongue. He tasted like Scotch and wood smoke and him.
He groaned, his fingers feverishly tugging at the knot of her halter at the back of her neck. Bits of her thick mass of hair got caught under his fingers and she winced.
“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, the low growl of his voice like the purr of a predator cat. Her melted bones blazed up in smoke, and she sat up, knees on either side of his hips, and yanked the ties herself.
He growled deep in his chest as the top half of her dress fell, loosing her breasts. She arched her back as his hands came up to caress them, and he thumbed her nipples. Heat shot straight down to her core—and she gave her hips a roll over the rock-hard cock captured in the hollow between her legs.
Want radiated out—his breath caught—and he lifted her and flipped her over as if she weighed no more than a feather. He rained frantic kisses from her lips to her chin, her neck, collarbones and down to the tops of her breasts. “What is that perfume you’re wearing?” he muttered.
“Nothing,” she muttered, writhing underneath him. “Scentless s-s-soap—”
Then she couldn’t talk because he’d meshed his fingers with hers and pressed the backs of her hands above her head on the pillow as he laved her aching nipples with his rough tongue, and nipped, and sucked.
Her back arched and her head turned from side to side with the Grand Canyon-sized need growing in her. She felt herself nearly at the brink—no, not yet.
She tugged at his fingers, and he released her hands. She snatched at the buttons of his shirt, but the swelling, yawning need inside her made her too impatient and she sat up, hair flying as she pushed him back flat and yanked the zipper of his pants.
His cock sprang free. “Wow,” she said, admiring his magnificent length with a spike of anticipation. “Why don’t you use that instead of the cane?”
He choked on a laugh, falling back against the pillow as she threw a thigh over his leg, and bent to lick all around the head of his cock like it was an ice cream cone.
He groaned.
She opened her teeth, and gently—deliberately—nipped the tip.
He shot upright. She shoved him flat again, and he growled, “I’m going to come in about two seconds . . .”
“Oh no, you aren’t,” she said. “Not until that gorgeous thing is in me.” And she pulled her dress over her head.
His lips parted. “Damn, I so love a woman who goes commando.” His rough voice vibrated with 100 % sincerity.
She rose to her knees, crossed her arms over her
head, her hair clouding around her head—she knew she was going to have bedhead of the century, but right now she didn’t give a hoot.
She twirled her hips invitingly.
He lunged at the nightstand drawer and pulled out a condom. She snatched it away, ripped it open with her teeth, and scratched her nails down his cock before she rolled the condom on.
“Hoo yeah,” he growled as he closed his big hands around her waist.
Mindy was five eight, and never in her life had been included in the small column, but she felt like a twig when he caught her up, whirled her onto her back, and landed between her parted legs.
“Let’s dance,” she breathed.
With one stroke he buried himself inside her.
“Oh, yes.” She gave her hips a shimmy to bring him deeper in.
His eyelids shuttered, eyelashes hiding those smoldering yellow eyes, and the yawning cavern of need inside her boiled up into liquid heat. He thrust with hard, strong strokes and she found his rhythm, working her hips so that every thrust slid against her clit like sheet lightning, the need now a towering wave of white-hot lava.
Faster and faster, until she felt him cresting, and she clenched with all her strength.
“Oh yeah,” he growled, jackknifing into her as he came hard—which brought her cascading down and down in a throbbing shower of stars.
He collapsed on her, and she lay for a long, sweet moment with her limbs entangled with his, their slick, sweaty skin gently cooling, as they fought to control shuddering breath.
With her breath came sanity. She had to get out of there. Fast.
With a hmmm of sated pleasure he pulled out, and as he slid himself out of the condom and turned to tie it off, she slipped off the bed, swept up her dress, purse, scarf, phone, and shoes and tiptoed to the curtain-covered French doors. A quick glance back. He was leaning over to toss the condom into the trash.
An intense wave of regret gripped her, the strength of it taking her completely by surprise. Her poodle howled inside her, and she shut the dog down hard.
No. It was so much better this way. No lies, no regrets, clean break. She slipped out into the cool summer air. The only sound was the soft richet-richet of the sprinklers, which had just come on.
She heard his voice a second after she slid the door shut.
She dove into her ferny shelter. It took her mere seconds to fit the sandals around her rolled dress, and wrap that sausage in her scarf. She slid it and the phone into the soft purse alongside the recorder. Then she turned the purse handle inside out, revealing the diamante side.
She laid it on the mossy ground, crouched with her fists tight against her chest. Her body rippled and she steadied herself on her four paws, a poodle again. She scooped her muzzle into the purse handle, and shrugged it over her back.
She trotted out of the ferns and started up a trail out of sight of Red’s room as she heard the door slide open again. The dog’s emotions were stronger now, and Mindy could not keep herself from pausing to glance back longingly between sheltering ferns. Red Hot stood tousle-haired and barefoot in the doorway, his pants up and zipped, his shirt hanging open.
“Payton?” he called.
The purr was gone, his voice husky with disbelief.
A woman stopped in the middle of the path, unsteadily blinking down at Mindy. “Oh my God, look at that darling doggie backpack!”
“Are you lost, little poodle?” her companion said.
Mindy whimpered, ducked under the reaching hands and stretched her paws into a run.
* * *
She was gone. Vanished, like she’d never been there.
Inside Dennis, his tiger struggled to break free, and Dennis smashed him down again, breathing hard as he stood barefoot just outside his room. He looked around, ignoring the splash of the sprinklers on his toes until a couple of people ran along the path, whooping breathlessly. None of them were her.
He spun around and withdrew inside his room, where he sat on the bed, hands dangling between his knees.
His head spun. What had just happened? It wasn’t the suddenness, though that was part of it. There were plenty of quick booty calls in his life, especially when he was on the road. It was the intensity, waking his damn tiger. Scentless soap? No freaking way.
What did he know about her? Name Payton. “Who cares?”
Well, obviously she didn’t. And he didn’t have a word to say to it, because he may as well have that tattooed across his ass as far as his own relationship style was concerned. So why did his tiger poke up inside him like that? He never did that after sex. Has it been too long since we shifted, buddy?
Dennis wrestled out of his clothes, got up and padded into the bathroom to turn the shower on. Then he stood there, reluctant to get in—to lose the smell of her on his skin, the taste of her in his mouth, the feel of her silky skin on his hands.
He shook his head. He felt like a teenager after his first lay. Except that this wasn’t his first, not by a long shot. It was just the best. That was it. She was the best, the way she’d fitted to him, rode him, the way she’d filled all his senses, and those eyes.
He stepped into the spray and struck his fist against the bathroom wall. Crap. Three Scotches and he was losing it. Of course he’d find her again, he thought as hot water pounded his face. She was one of that group of women who’d been drinking up half the bar. They’d been way too blitzed to be driving down the mountain. Had to be spending the night at the resort. He’d see her at the brunch in the morning.
Yeah, that was it. He’d see her again, and they could . . . talk. Or more. Lots more. “Who cares?” She was just like him, after all. She wouldn’t put strings on him, and . . . and, well, he’d see her again. It was probably just the Scotch talking, but that had become important, and his tiger seemed to think so, too.
Meanwhile, he had this bozo Haskell to deal with. Time to get his head back in the game. He picked up his phone and made a fast report—keeping his mention of Payton confined to, “And she appeared outside Haskell’s suite then flirted with me before she took off, so I don’t know if she’s part of the scam or not.”
Agent Sloane accepted that with no comment, and he hung up.
His body felt euphoric, but his mind buzzed in a way that he knew would not let him sleep, so he shut off the shower, dried off, and lay naked on the bed flicking through History and Discovery Channel until the sounds of the hotel had settled into quiet. Then he slipped out, shifted to his tiger, and took off into the mountains above the resort for a long run.
* * *
Once Mindy got to her car, which she had parked at the extreme end of the lot, she trotted around the side away from the parking lot cam, shrugged off the purse, and shifted. She got out her keys, unlocked the car and slid in. Still sitting in darkness, she pulled the dress on, then checked her cell camera. Three blurry shots, but the fourth was perfect, dead on, Patrice and Haskell both looking equally pissed.
Case closed. Her inner folds pulsed gently with the aftermath of passion, and she couldn’t resist paging back through the photos to look at those shots of Red. Her poodle wriggled inside her.
Silly dog, she thought. It’s because of you that it’s always going to be one night stands.
She sighed as she started up the car and nosed away from the resort, toward the highway. But that was one to remember, all right. In its way, a first.
Below, Los Angeles spread, a glittering network of colored lights. Dating was a rarity for her, and a second or third even rarer. She was so cautious she rarely got all the way to sex.
Red hadn’t known who she was, which had set her completely free.
Was that why it had been so amazing?
Memory threw her back to her sophomore year in high school, sobbing in the garden from the pain of her first crush, Wendell Pinkerton. Her great-grandmother had said in her shaky old-woman voice, “You can do better for yourself. You will do better for yourself.”
“How?” she had sobbed.
&nbs
p; “The right one will see your beauty,” Great-Granny had assured her. “Look at me! I was no better-looking at twenty than I am now, but your great-grandfather thought I was the most beautiful girl in the world. For sixty-three years he thought it. From the very first time our hands touched.”
Mindy had long ago realized that love at first sight was a myth, and that the days of sixty-three-year marriages were long over. Those, like flapper dresses and marcelled hair, were part of a lost world.
Well, that romantic stuff was still myth, but she smiled in reminiscence, missing Great-Granny all over again. Gone at 98, she hadn’t exactly had her life cut short, but Mindy still missed her. “You would have been proud of me tonight,” she murmured as she turned off the mountain highway onto the 10 into L.A.
Or would she? Great-Granny had been old-fashioned, believing in marriage, in spite of her own children’s divorces, as well as their children’s. Mindy thought of her various half and step-brothers and sisters, some of them on second marriages and even third in two cases, and then there was Mindy whose rare flings were strictly ringless. Then she shook off that thought.
She’d rather think about Red, though the farther she got from the mountains, the more she found the entire experience surreal. She had never in her life jumped someone’s bones like that—and had never had such amazing sex. And the poodle had never, ever, paid any attention to Mindy’s rare dates.
“I’ll be grateful I had it once,” she stated firmly as she pulled into her garage.
A short time later, as she sank into steaming bathwater, it was Red’s wicked smile she saw behind her closed eyelids. That thick tawny hair, and those wonderful hands.
His wonderful everything.
It was much better this way, she told herself. That guy was a friend of Haskell’s, which meant he had to be another sleazebag.
So why was there this giant hole behind her ribs?
Chapter Three
“I feel obliged to remind you,” Mindy said the next day as she sat primly on a beautiful Chippendale chair, “that the recording might not be admissible in court.”
