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“An ad? Why didn’t you just say that?” So much for being turned on.
“It wouldn’t have worked. I had to catch you off guard to see what your legs would do. Can you imagine what a shot that would be for your Faustini ad? Think print campaign, maybe even billboards.”
He gestured toward her chair and the door, setting the scene. “You’re sitting there, like that, but the camera’s outside the doors, which are open just enough to show your legs levitating.”
She sat forward. “What are you talking about?”
“Imagine someone standing outside these doors, looking in. What would they see through that opening? Your legs, right? Your boots, Faustini boots. It’s the perfect tease.”
“Actually, they wouldn’t. These aren’t the Faustinis. I changed for dinner.”
His brow furrowed. “For the sake of argument, they are, okay? And that innocent bystander out there can’t see anything but your boots. She can’t see me, or what’s going on in here, but she knows damn well by the way your boots are behaving that you’re not taking dictation. What does that say to her?”
“Wear Faustini and people will sexually assault you?”
“Wear Faustini and life will surprise you.”
“There are some surprises I could do without.” Tess got up and whipped her skirt around the right way. She was done playing along. “All of this was about Faustini? My account?”
“Yes, but you don’t have to thank me.”
She emitted a sound of disgust, and he actually cracked a grin. “What are you, eight years old?” she asked.
They locked stares, engaged in a steamy visual battle. After a moment or two, Tess began to feel a little ridiculous. Maybe he wasn’t the only one being childish. But as she glared at him, she noticed something she hadn’t seen before, a small crescent scar on his upper lip, near the bow. Her stomach dipped, and something even deeper fluttered in the most pleasurable way. Damn. The scar turned his mouth into a sensual wonderland. It was wicked. You couldn’t see a mouth like that and not think about sex.
What would that feel like?
Not a question Tess wanted to contemplate. Thank God, she was highly skilled in the art of denial. Give her a couple more seconds, and it shouldn’t be a problem.
Perhaps, though, she could create a little problem for him. She smoothed her outfit into place, remembering why she’d come here. Someone needed to catch this man off guard and show him how it felt.
“Are you checking me out?” he asked. “Because I could swear you were checking me out.”
“Murderball must be dangerous,” she said, walking over to him. She touched his scar with her fingertips. If she was nervous it didn’t show, and that was all she cared about at the moment.
“You’re dangerous,” he said.
“You aren’t kidding.” Tess angled in for a kiss, but he stopped her. He gripped her arms and held her off, staring at her as if she’d gone crazy. She could almost hear those droplets of energy sizzling on his skin. She may even have caught their scent, a fiery male essence that made her throat ache. Something about all this thrilled her. Maybe it was taking a chance, calling his bluff, if that’s what he was doing, bluffing.
“Okay,” he said softly, “let’s get dangerous.” He yanked her close and kissed her.
The flutter in Tess’s gut turned bright and sharp. In her mind, she could see that damn sexy scar, but she couldn’t feel it on her lips. The only rough sensation was his hands, molesting her arms. His mouth was soft and hot. It was luscious. The sound vibrating inside her was a growl. A tiny voracious growl.
A startling hunger overtook her. She wanted her hands free, not to break away, but to clutch him. It didn’t seem possible that she was suddenly greedy for more. For something wild and deep. As deep as the sea. A kiss that would drag her under and drown her.
Her nipples brushed against his chest, and again, hardened uncontrollably. A sensation she hadn’t felt in months flared in the pit of her belly. God help her, that was hot.
In her mind, she saw the two of them spinning in the chair, whirling like tops, her facing him with her legs spread over the chair arms and him beneath her, anchoring her with his brick wall of an erection, thrusting madly, fucking like bunnies—
What? Was she crazy?
Was it the tea? Mitzi’s psychotropic tea?
Her fantasies hadn’t been that energetic in her college years, had they?
The questions brought her back to reality. Somehow Gabriel had turned her around, all while kissing her ardently. Clearly he was going to take this further. Next, he would be scooping her up in his arms and laying her out on the conference table.
She gave his shin a sharp little kick.
He swore and released her.
She stepped back, panting. “You kiss good,” she said.
“Jesus, so do you. I’m coming to that dinner tonight. In fact, I’m taking you home from that dinner tonight.”
She drew herself up. “No, no you’re not. Tonight is about my work, and my work is not about kissing, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
He nodded, but she had a feeling he would have agreed with anything she said at that moment. He seemed far more interested in her mouth than her point. There was a time, not so terribly long ago, when Tess would have succumbed in a New York second to the charms of a man like Danny Gabriel. Make that a nanosecond. She’d been a total pushover, a wuss in every way. Of course, that had to stay her secret. She was stronger now. She’d had a lot of practice not having sex. The denial thing.
And more important, she hadn’t made her point yet.
“Canceling out on the dinner,” she told him, “was petty and insulting, Mr. Gabriel. I guess I may have you on the run, hmm? Otherwise, why would a man of your stature have to lie your way out of my dinner?”
He started to speak, but she overrode him. “I may not be a genius, but I’m damn good at what I do, and I deserve respect.”
He began to shake his head, but she wasn’t listening to any lame apologies. “I think we’re finished here, at least I am.” She tweaked the lapel of her jacket, shot him a burning stare, and turned to find a distinguished-looking man in an immaculately tailored suit standing in the doorway. Obviously he’d heard every word.
Gabriel spoke from behind her. “Tess Wakefield, meet Oliver Handel, the vice president of international marketing for the Kashogi Corporation.”
Shit. It looked as if Gabriel had told the truth. She was staring at his deadline. Possibly, her inner-life coach might have some advice for her at this inopportune moment?
Don’t ever let them see you sweat, Tess.
The self-talk that most people called an inner voice had always come to Tess in the form of old television commercials. It was probably what had led her into advertising. And in this case, it was exactly what she needed to hear.
She made no attempt to make herself presentable. That would have drawn more attention to the fact that she wasn’t. She walked straight over and took the man’s hand, shaking it firmly. “Mr. Handel, how do you do, sir? Such an honor, really. It’s a great pleasure to meet you.”
Handel returned her grip. He smiled, chuckling aloud. “You have my utmost respect, Tess, if I may call you that. I’m sure Daniel deserved every word of that lecture.”
Tess smiled knowingly. “He’s just brilliant, isn’t he?” she said, deciding to take the high road. She’d already expressed herself to her complete satisfaction, and maybe it was karma that Gabriel’s client had shown up. “And now, I’ll leave you two to your meeting.”
Tess turned to Gabriel. “We’ll miss you at dinner,” she said with a wicked little lilt in her voice.
“I’m sure.” His response was as dry as dust.
On the way back to her office, she retraced her path through the deep-sea aquarium. Pleased with herself, she grinned. Maybe now she’d be able to get some work done. She had an ad campaign to come up with, but it damn sure wasn’t going to feature levitating boots.
Chapter Four
Hewas down on one knee, rearranging her legs and inadvertently brushing against her bare skin. He’d removed her boots, leaving her legs and feet exposed. Why had he done that? He didn’t seem to understand that his fingers tickled like feather fringe, and his skin was the richest shade of tequila gold she’d ever seen. He touched her ankle, innocently positioning it, and streamers of light shot up her thighs, straight to her sex.
No, straight to her pussy, she thought, giving in to a wicked urge to use the bad-girl word. The words and images assaulting her overheated brain were bordering on lewd, but they might be the only way to get this man’s attention.
He cupped her calf with his palm, and her pulse raced out of control. His hands were warm, strong, smooth against her flesh. He was going to wreck her. Now he was playing with the back of her knee, lingering in that secret, unbearablysensitive spot. If he went higher, she’d faint. If he didn’t, she’d explode.
Fainting was less dangerous.
“Danny,” she whispered. She drew up his head, gazed at the crescent scar on his lip—and didn’t know whether to kiss him or slap him silly. How could he not know what he was doing?
Desperate, she inched up her skirt, letting him see that she wore no panties. “See that?” she whispered. “It’s a pussy, in case you were wondering. Help yourself, for heaven’s sake. Stop making me crazy and make me co—”
Tess slapped the desk with her palm. This had to stop. Her eyes snapped open, and she breathed out an exasperated sigh. She’d been drifting off into crazy X-rated fantasies all morning. And they all revolved around her spread-eagle legs—and him. He didn’t get all the credit, though. This was at least partly biological. Could doctors induce periods the way they induced labor? Her never-ending PMS was killing her.
And, she’d figured it out. Now she knew who he reminded her of with his cut-you-like-a-knife eyes. Tess prided herself on having left her past behind, but there was one man who’d touched a chord that wouldn’t stop resonating in some darkened corner of her mind. If every woman had her indelible bad-boy experience, then Professor Jonathan Wiley, her theater arts instructor in college, was Tess’s, except that he wasn’t a boy. He’d been her phantom of the opera, in a manner of speaking, but without all the soaring romance—and his image had come to her during her fantasies about Gabriel.
Not good, she thought. Nothing about this was good.
She drew herself up and surveyed the chaos on her desk. It was Saturday, but she and her entire team were working this weekend in order to be ready for the pitch to the Faustini brass next week. Even Erica Summers had agreed to make herself available, probably to set an example for the troops.
Tess’s desk was strewn with eight-by-ten glossies that had been sent to her by casting directors. She’d spread them out hoping that photos of fit young male and female models would inspire a killer idea for the Faustini promotion, but no such luck. Some of the women were promising, but the guys reminded her of southern California’s yuppie bikers, who dressed up in black leather and swore off shaving for the weekend. A couple of them were cute, but definitely not the millennium outlaw with the soul of a poet she had in mind.
Tess sorted through the glossies one more time, creating a stack of hopefuls. Too bad she couldn’t blame her fantasy trips on pictures of buff bikers. Unfortunately, Danny Gabriel’s sneak attack had triggered the daydreams, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate worth a damn since.
The welcome dinner with the board last night had gone as predicted. Gabriel was conspicuous by his absence and probably on everyone’s mind the whole time. Certainly he was on hers, the snake. Sure, he’d been acting as if he wanted to help her with the campaign, but she had to wonder if that wasn’t about hiding his real intentions. He was a saboteur at heart. And she didn’t need one of those. She was doing well enough on her own.
What had happened to that headlock she was supposed to have on her emotions? More than likely, she was suffering from simple estrogen overload. In theory, the human body was like a hydroelectric dam, which overflowed if left untended, and she was definitely untended. All she needed to do was open the sluice gates a little, and the quickest way to do that was with some good old-fashioned masturbation—or what her mother had called “naughty fingers” when Tess was growing up.
The Queen of Euphemisms, her mother. “In the family way” meant pregnant and the birth was a “happy event.” The bathroom was “the smallest room in the house,” and a woman’s period was “a visiting friend.” Tess’s favorite—“tired and overemotional”—was how her mother described her father when he got carried away with the communion wine.
God bless them, her parents could never have been accused of neglect. Tess was a desperately wanted only child, and her mother had anxiously attempted to control every aspect of her daughter’s existence. All in an effort to protect her, of course—from life’s pain, from its ridicule and shame. Sad that her mother had resorted to ridicule and shame, herself.
Tess had been shy and overweight, and her parents had tried to embarrass her out of both. Her mother had weighed Tess before every meal, bought her clothes that were too small and put her on her first medically supervised diet at five. Five? Mom, what were you thinking? The debating team and the glee club had been Dad’s idea. Under all the pressure, Tess had developed a stutter.
Fortunately, she’d outgrown it and the weight, which had turned out to be a combination of baby fat and adolescent rebellion. But when she’d slimmed down in college—and started getting attention from boys—she’d gone a little crazy. Enter the wild-child phase. She’d been looking for love in all the wrong places, needing to prove to herself again and again that she was desirable to men when what she’d really wanted was the love and acceptance she didn’t get as a kid.
Most of the boys she was with couldn’t handle the sex part, much less provide any sensitivity toward her emotional needs, which even she wasn’t aware of at the time. Tess could barely remember the encounters, probably because she didn’t want to think about all that furtive groping in hallway alcoves and the sweaty fumbling in parked cars. But there was one guy she did remember.
What a wicked kinky dude Jonathan Wiley was. Not a boy, a man—and maybe a demon escaped from her id, if anything Freud had said was true. Wiley had quietly insisted that she had talent and could have a big acting career, if she wanted. Yeah, sure. She’d barely heard that part, given the blazingly erotic stuff he’d whispered in her ear during their after-hours coaching sessions.
Tess remembered his suggestions in far too much detail: If I had you where I want you right now—naked with your bottom in the air—I wouldn’t know whether to swat you or lick you like an ice cream cone.
He’d talked about restraining her with the ropes that hung from the stage rigging, freeing her from her clothing—and her inhibitions—and arousing her until she fainted dead away. He’d been particularly obsessed with her ass, and all the amazing things he could do to it, including love bites and erotic discipline. Spanking, to be exact. He’d whispered about disciplining her in ways that had made her hair stand on end, but only to bring her the most intense pleasure, of course.
Honestly, he’d frightened the hell out of her, and she’d run for her life. She was only eighteen. But much of what he’d said and done had stayed with her, and as she’d matured into her twenties, the fear had faded, and she’d become secretly fascinated with some of his suggestions, especially the darker ones.
That had scared her a little. Still did. Especially given that just thinking about it made her hot and twitchy. Like now.
“Enough, Tess,” she warned. “You’re not a college kid anymore, and Danny Gabriel is not an incarnation of Wiley.” Despite the sensual features and the seductive ways. All Gabriel did was kiss her.
She got up from her desk and went over to the water dispenser, hoping a cold drink would put out the fire. On the way she passed the Messerschmitt mounted on the wall. “Give it your best shot,” she said softly. “I’m pretty fast.”
She drank several tiny paper cups of water and went back to her desk. This wasn’t her first time dealing with sluice gates. She was a healthy thirty-two-year-old woman, who’d been celibate for a very long time, and she’d had to find creative ways to deal with the situation. Quite by accident, she’d discovered a certain yoga position that had brought about some spontaneous relief. It might even have made the Cosmo orgasm quiz.
She needed to start doing yoga again. Quickly.
She was thinking fondly about her version of the full lotus position when the phone rang. It was the landline, which reminded her that her PDA was still missing. She’d looked everywhere, including the lost and found in the coffee lounge. She’d stopped by security this morning and reported it. She’d also picked up a replacement phone, but it contained none of her vital information, of course.
She went back to studying the glossies as she picked up the receiver. “Tess Wakefield,” she said.
“I know who you are. I just don’t know why you’re not here.”
Tess had a moment of confusion. The male voice struck a familiar chord, but she didn’t know how to respond. It had to be Danny. “Where are you?”
“Waiting for you down here in the Sandbox.”
“The Sandbox? Why are you there?”
“Tess, hello! It’s Andy. We’re all waiting for you down here in the sandbox. You called a team meeting this morning, remember?”
Tess fell back in her chair. Suddenly her heart was pounding when before it had been utterly still. She’d just daydreamed her way through fifteen minutes of the session she’d scheduled with her team. And after all the peptalking she’d done, trying to impress upon them how important it was for them to be prepared. Oh, yes, she definitely needed to get busy with those naughty fingers.
“Okay, this is major,” Carlotta told the team. “We choose one man and one woman with tremendous potential, and we call them Faustini spokesmodels. We create images for them that are totally distinctive, maybe something like Darth Vader for the man.”
Tess had been hoping for something other than Darth Vader, but Carlotta clearly loved the idea. Her expression said she was waiting for affirmation, applause, something. Her shapely butt was perched in a belt swing that hung from the ceiling on chains. Andy had taken the other swing, right next to her, and the rest of the team was sitting around the conference table, which was an old-fashioned picnic table.
Of all the agency’s themed conference rooms, the Sandbox was the favorite, probably because it suggested a day at the beach. Only a wall-size wipe board and a flip chart said business as usual. Otherwise, the wedge-shaped room was lined with real bamboo in naturalistic planter boxes, and the floor was exotic pink sand, imported from somewhere in the South Pacific. The rustic table could have been found at any state park, and the ceiling was painted sky blue. Several large skylights washed the room in sunny yellow.
Natural light, bare feet and sifting sands were supposed to inspire greatness, apparently. Mostly, they inspired Tess to nap like a cat in the sunshine, but that was about it. All this outer pressure and inner tension was getting to her.
“Batman and Catwoman?” Andy suggested.
“That’s distinctive?” Carlotta’s tone dismissed him. “With my idea, we save the client money because the spokesmodels do the entire campaign, and we create magnificent brand identification.”
“Only if the models are magnificent,” Tess countered.
“They will be—”
“Listen to this,” Brad cut in. He rose from the picnic table, his bare feet squishing in the sand. “We set the photo shoot in one of those hot new S&M clubs in the city. We’ll find ourselves the fucking Prince of Darkness and outfit him in Faustini.”
“I love it!” Carlotta squealed.
Tess wasn’t thrilled with the concept, nor did she think Faustini would be, but she was curious where her team might take it. “What about the woman?”
“Streetwalker chic? Gothic glam?” Brad offered his suggestions with a shrug. “I disagree that we need to be distinctive. Faustini already is distinctive. We need to get low-down and dirty. Make people notice.”
“What’s wrong with pulling women’s underwear out of a briefcase?” Andy said, apparently referring to his idea from yesterday.
Tess reached for her tote, where she’d put the manila envelope with the glossies. A moment later she had the pictures fanned across the picnic table like a large deck of cards.
