by Eve Black
Unexpected
Manhattan Magic #1
Eve Black
Copyright © 2019 by Eve Black
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Eve Black
Chapter 1
Pragmatic, practical, and plump Diana Bluth wished she had an ounce of her best friend’s brazen sensuality—and her lady cojones.
“I still can’t believe you actually went home with him,” she remarked as she sat facing her best friend in their favorite—and crowded—coffee spot, Perk Me Up, just two blocks from their shared office building. Diana worked at one law firm, the prestigious Kilgore, Ayers, Beecham, and her best friend, Margie, worked at another. It was a typical Friday, where the end of the week felt like it had dragged you through every hell known to man, and the only thing that would save you from total destruction by 5PM was caffeine.
“You’re usually the chill one, the one who doesn’t make impulsive decisions.” She just barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes at her sarcastic remark.
Margie laughed, nearly spitting out her double mocha latte, and pinned Diana with an incredulous look. She swallowed her latte and blurted, “Me? I’m the chill one? My God, Diana, I haven’t seen you even look at a guy since high school!”
That wasn’t entirely true. She looked at a lot of men…they just didn’t look back. Besides, that thing in high school was a look-but-can’t-touch situation. He’d been the cousin of one of her chess club co-captains, and he’d been willing to take her to the homecoming dance. For a price. She’d forked over her collection of Pokémon cards and regretted it the rest of the year. It would probably always be that way; her giving up something sacred to someone who didn’t deserve it, and then spending the rest of her life regretting it.
At twenty-four, she knew it was a cold, hard fact. She’d die a virgin; never having known an orgasm she hadn’t given to herself via Mr. Rabbit. Her clit had been getting overtime loving lately, and the releases were getting less and less…relieving. But she wasn’t willing to just hand “it” over to someone who didn’t see it for what it was…her utmost trust. Call her old fashioned if you wanted, but at least she didn’t have a string of bad decisions to face.
Scrunching up her nose, she sighed. “I’m not chill—”
Margie grunted, tearing off a piece of her chocolate-filled croissant. “Then what are you?”
Diana shrugged. “I don’t know…cautious, I guess.”
Choking on her croissant, Margie washed that bite down with another sip of her latte.
“Cautious! Diana, you’d have to have taken a risk before to be cautious now. Cautious about what? You live with your mother in the house you grew up in, you still wear footie pajamas, and you stick your nose in books all day—you aren’t cautious, you’re cloistered. Like a nun. Hail Mary, full of grace—”
Diana reached across the small café table and flicked Margie on the nose. “Stop it. I am not cloistered. I go out on dates…when I have the time.”
Margie arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “When was your last date?”
Sitting back, Diana pulled at the hem of her pencil skirt, which had the knack of sliding up her thighs whenever she sat down. It didn’t help that she filled out the skirt to nearly bursting, or that she couldn’t get enough of the chocolate espresso brownies at Millie’s Mocha Menagerie, or that she broke out in sweat whenever she spotted an elliptical machine.
Nope. She wasn’t made for thinness. So, she just lived with her thickness, and was still learning to love it. Fuck you, tight pencil skirts! Get used to it!
Margie drew Diana back to the moment with a tap of her fingernail on the table.
“My last date was…” Diana chewed her lip, thinking back to her last one-on-one date with a man. “November.” She’d treaded into the uncharted seas of Match.com and accepted a date with some guy from Edison. But he’d spent the whole evening, nose glued to his phone, answering comments on Reddit. The night ended when he’d asked if she had a cuter, smaller sister.
She’d flipped him off, finished her vodka cocktail, and left him with the bill. The ass.
“November!” Margie practically bellowed into the tiny coffee shop, making heads turn in their direction. “November was six months ago, Diana.”
Her face heating, Diana motioned for Margie to keep her voice down, but her bestie just wouldn’t take the hint.
“Will you shut it? And besides, I don’t stick my nose in books all day—I’m a paralegal! It’s my job to look through tomes of legal precedents to determine a course of action for my boss’s cases.”
“Uh huh,” Margie murmured, then shoved the last of her croissant in her mouth. She chewed slowly, her gaze never leaving Diana’s face. If they’d hadn’t been best friends since breastfeeding, she’d have felt disconcerted, even a little frustrated. But she knew Margie, and that Margie was mostly harmless. Mostly.
“What? Do I have something on my face?” she asked, full of snark, her lips quirking. She lifted her cup to her mouth, preparing to take a sip.
Margie nodded. “Yup. The look of someone who has never been laid.”
She shouldn’t have been shocked by Margie’s response but she was, choking on her mocha latte, spitting the now tepid brew all over her once crisp beige blouse. “Dammit!” She stared down at the mess she’d made of her only dress shirt—well, the only one she had with her. Usually, on Fridays, she would bring an extra set of clothes into the city so she could stay at Margie’s apartment over the weekend, but with Margie’s upcoming “all-nighter” with the sexy stranger she met at the park, Diana didn’t feel comfortable making Margie nix any plans she had with the guy. So, she decided against staying the weekend, which meant she had no clothes into which she could change, which meant she was stuck wearing that damn shirt back to the office.
“Shit. This is the only work blouse I have with me,” she grumbled, trying to wipe at the mess with a napkin.
Margie stood up and used a napkin to clean the coffee from the table, tossing the remaining trash in the waste bin.
“Damn…sorry about that, Di. I didn’t mean to make you mess up your shirt.” Margie had the good sense to look guilty, but Diana couldn’t stay mad at her friend, especially when said friend was pouting like she had back in the fourth grade. The minx.
Sighing heavily, she offered Margie a slight smile. “You’re forgiven—but what am I supposed to do? I’m expected back in the office at one. I can’t let Mr. Ayers see me in this blouse. The man once narrowed his eyes at me for wearing Minnie Mouse earrings on Halloween. This Rorschach test on my chest will earn me a boo-hiss.”
Margie chuckled. “Well, we’ll just have to make sure you aren’t wearing that shirt when you go back to wo
rk,” she supplied, making Diana roll her eyes. As if it were that easy.
“I think Ayers would fire me on the spot if I showed up wearing only my Cacique bra.”
Giggling again, Margie led the way out the door of the coffee shop and stopped by the curb.
“There are lots of boutiques on this street. At least two in walking distance. Why not hit up one of those?”
She shook her head, snorting. “Boutiques? In Manhattan? Where it costs two hundred dollars for a pair of socks? No thanks! And, besides, I only have another fifteen minutes to get back before my lunch break officially ends and I have to be at Ayers’s beck and call.”
Margie quirked an eyebrow. “What’s he got you doing now?” Margie, an environmental attorney at a firm on the floor just below Diana’s, knew how demanding Diana’s boss could be. Hell, the whole building took a collective breath when Mr. Richard Ayers stepped inside.
Groaning, she answered, “He has some client—his name hasn’t been released among the employees—coming in to discuss some paternity suit. Apparently, the guy is suing his ex-fiancée for defamation and fraud. And the only reason I know that is because Janet loves a juicy bit of gossip—though she is devilishly tight-lipped when it comes to details.” Grunting as the coffee on her shirt began to dry into sticky patterns against her skin, she cursed. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I can’t go back to work in this shirt.”
A light went on in Margie’s eyes. “Why don’t we switch shirts?”
Diana snorted—a terrible habit really—and slapped Margie on the arm. “Girl, you are a size smaller than me, and your tits are oranges whereas mine are cantaloupes. I’d bust out of that blouse on my first inhale.” She remembered sixth grade well; it was the year she’d blossomed into womanhood. Started her period, got terrible acne, and grew a pair of tits that seemed to collect the gawking stares of teenaged boys. Those tits turned into torpedoes as she aged, and now they were the bane of her back, her bra budget, and that patch of skin right beneath her boobs where the sweat gathered on hot summer days.
Boob sweat was about as sexy as sweatpants.
Margie rolled her eyes at her. “My tits are easily grapefruits—thank you very much. I have another shirt in my office I can change into, and I have my coat on, so no one would see your messy shirt on me. A quick change in my office and no one’s the wiser.”
Diana shook her head and turned away from the street to hide her shirt from oncomers who were, thankfully, too into their devices to spare her a glance.
“Come on! What other option do you have?”
Diana stopped, spinning on her pump heel to face her friend who was looking at her like she’d just swallowed a firefly. Dammit! Margie was right. She couldn’t take the chance of meeting the mysterious client while wearing her afternoon coffee.
Letting her shoulders slump, she ground out, “Fine. We can change in the café bathroom.”
Margie reentered the café with Diana on her heels, and in less than five minutes, both of them were headed back to the office building, with Diana far more stiff and uncomfortable than Margie, who was wearing a shirt that would fit two of her. Thank God Margie was wearing a coat that covered all but the bottom of Diana’s shirt, where the coffee hadn’t stained it.
Glancing down at the shirt she’d squeezed into, Diana just barely stopped herself from groaning. On Margie, the shirt was smooth, the buttons lined up perfectly from neck to navel. But, on her…well, the buttons looked like they were being choked to death by the button holes as the fabric pulled on them, leaving gaps in the blouse right where the globes of her tits touched. If she’d been wearing a more practical bra instead of the pink plunge bra she’d put on during a flight of fancy that morning, no one would have been able to see it.
Talk about a shit show.
A tit show?
Either way, she was showing more of herself to people than anyone—besides herself—had seen in…forever. Modesty was a thing for her, so it would take some balls—tits—to walk through the city, into work, and face a man known for killing lesser beings with a look.
“Come on, Di, it isn’t so bad,” Margie insisted, taking Diana’s hand. “It isn’t like you meet with clients. Hide yourself in your office until you can get out of there, then head home and change.”
“Now that I’ve seen it, I think I should have just kept the stained shirt on,” she groused, making Margie chuckle.
“Too late to change your mind now, Di. Just keep a low profile—the work day is almost over. You can handle some boob spillage until then.”
Margie made it sound so easy… And that’s why she felt a twinge of apprehension brush along the base of her neck. Right?
Chapter 2
David Brenner eyed the man before him, tension coiling in his shoulders.
Fuck. He hated his reason for being there, and he hated more the fact that he had to put his friend through all that shit. It didn’t matter that he was paying him millions to do just that.
“This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen, Rick,” David drawled, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose where a headache was forming. “Rinna has already stalled proceedings in an effort to drag this out until I give in to her demands.”
Richard Ayers, long-time friend but first-time attorney for him, leaned forward and tapped a document on his desk.
“Schrecther has asked to postpone depositions until the first of June.”
Fucking Schrecther and his dubious strategies. David had done his due diligence with that case, looking into each of the lawyers Rinna had hired in her attempt to milk him for all the money she could.
He sneered. Another two months. Like hell he’d wait another two months to be rid of the bitch who’d dared to lie to him—to everyone—just for a piece of his empire. Fuck her.
“Reject it. I want this done with by the end of this month. Bring in whoever you have to.”
Rick gave a terse nod. “You know I will, though, I will tell you that the PI you suggested is certainly pulling his weight.”
Interest piqued, he replied, “Oh?” Greg Astor, former NYPD blue collar crimes detective, was another piece of the puzzle that was worth every bit of the money he charged for his services. It had been a risk to get him involved—David never liked to dirty his hands with dealing in private investigators who spent their time stalking cheating spouses, but this guy came highly recommended. He hadn’t disappointed David yet.
“Yes. It was one of the reasons I wanted this face-to-face before you left tomorrow.” Rick leaned down, opening the bottom drawer of his desk. He pulled out a large envelope and slid it across the rich mahogany surface. “Inside are photos, statements from medical professionals, close friends, and even her own mother.”
A dark chuckle escaped David’s throat. Of course, Rinna’s own mother was against her daughter’s exploits—Rinna seemed to have spent her adult life creating connections, soaking in the fame, the notoriety, the money, and then using her wiles to make herself seem the most innocent of victims rather than the evil witch she truly was. It had taken him three years to finally see through the façade, and it had nearly cost him his soul.
Not much of that left anymore…
He’d met Rinna at a charity event in Sydney. She was gorgeous with her long, silky black hair, her decadent caramel eyes, and her sultry smile. She’d been dressed as a seductress, and he’d fallen for her act like only a fool could. The sex had been hard and fast, and he’d found himself returning to her bed even after their affair in Australia ended. As busy as he was, Rinna still found ways to infiltrate his world, showing up at the same functions, befriending the same people, drawing him in until he found himself asking her to move in with him.
The biggest damn mistake of his life. And he still didn’t know why he’d done it. Perhaps it was the desire to keep her close, to watch her every move. Perhaps even in the beginning, he’d been suspicious of her, his subconscious wary. Perhaps he’d been a lonely fuck who’d grasped onto her like s
he was a lifeline in a sea of empty relationships.
Of course, she jumped at the chance to live in the lap of luxury, on his arm, near his wallet. By then, though, she’d already begun spending his money like it was nothing, purchasing clothes, shoes, bags, jewels, vacation homes on the Amalfi Coast and in Bali, and taking herself and her “friends” on all the exotic trips her heart desired.
He’d tolerated a lot from her, thinking that his lack of experience in committed relationships was to blame for the yawning boredom, the suddenly frigid sex, and the utter loss of compatibility. That wasn’t the truth, of course. The problem wasn’t with him, it was with the lying, scheming bitch he’d trusted and allowed into parts of his life where no one else had ever tread.
God, he wished he’d listened to that still, small voice that had hissed in his ear that first night, the night she’d flashed her eyes at him. And now, he was paying the price—literally—for his weakness. In the beginning of the fallout, he’d felt betrayed, and it twisted what he thought he had felt for her. Then…once the truth began to take root, he’d realized that whatever he had felt for her had been as false as what she had felt for him. They’d both been pretending. But at least he’d been faithful to her. Now, all he felt was anger. Bitter, cold rage. And once the legal shit was over, he’d feel nothing.
Nothing.
He would never allow a woman to fool him again.
Never again.
The very first time he’d caught Rinna in bed with another man, he’d left, telling her their relationship was over—he refused to tolerate betrayal, but then…she’d thrown the final straw on the camel’s back, playing her trump card. She’d claimed she was pregnant with his baby, begging for him to reconsider, to take her back, to be one big happy family.
