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How To Host A Seduction
Jeanie London
Step 1 - Know the target. After Ellen Talbot walks out his door, Christopher Sinclair vows to get her back in his bed. He remembers everything about their three incredible months together - all of her sexual fantasies and longings. Now he's using that to tempt her….Step 2 - Set the stage. What should have been a simple corporate training session turns intense when Ellen discovers her partner is the one man whose sexy memory she can't forget. And being with Christopher again just stirs up all that incredible heat…. Step 3 - Don't retreat. She can't resist him when he starts using his intimate knowledge about her to entice her again. So she'll indulge herself for these few days, then walk away at the end. But Ellen doesn't count on his determination to have her…for keeps!
“You’re brilliant.”
Christopher complimented Ellen. Then he kissed her. One solid kiss on the lips before he shot her that dimpled grin. That grin that made her stomach flip-flop. That grin that made her realize just how much she liked having him kiss her.
That craving again.
Leaning across the table, she kissed him back.
Christopher’s reaction was much more impressive than hers had been. Before she could back away he’d driven his fingers into her hair, locking her against him so he could kiss her once more. A real kiss.
His tongue plunged into her mouth, stealing her breath. Her insides swooped again and her thighs tingled. The only thing she could say was that kissing him back sparked her craving as if she’d tossed a lighted match into a puddle of gas.
Their tongues tangled with urgency. She grew dizzier and giddier as the tabletop cut into her rib cage. Or perhaps it was only his kiss that crushed the breath from her lungs. Either way, Ellen knew she had to have him…now.
Dear Reader,
I lived half my life quite happily north of the Mason-Dixon Line and even have the accent to prove it, which most people catch when I ask for a cup of coffee. Then I moved south and discovered that while I may be a Yankee by birth, I’m a Southern belle at heart. Something about the Deep South just captivates me…and writing One-Night Man, Blaze #42, set in the Big Easy, only sparked my desire to write a romance that took me into the sultry bayous south of New Orleans.
Enter Ellen and Christopher. Ellen is a romance editor who doesn’t believe heroes exist off the written page. Christopher Sinclair is a savvy businessman…a real-live hero who is determined to prove her wrong. To make his case, he has developed a strategy that breaks all the rules, a strategy he calls red-hot pursuit….
Blaze is the place to explore spicy romance, a place where you’ll find steamy journeys to happily ever after. I hope How To Host a Seduction brings you to happily-ever-after, too. Let me know. Drop me a line in care of Harlequin Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada, or visit my Web site at www.jeanielondon.com.
Very truly yours,
Jeanie London
How to Host a Seduction
Jeanie London
For the gypsy.
Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Prologue
SEX HAD ONLY CLINCHED THE DEAL.
Making love to Ellen Talbot had just proven what Christopher Sinclair had suspected since first meeting this remarkable romance editor at a friend’s wedding—no woman had ever affected him like she did. No woman had ever come close.
Ellen left his heart thundering, his muscles vibrating so hard that he collapsed against the sheets, unable to do much more than press his shell-shocked erection into the cradle of her warm thighs and try to catch his breath. His thoughts raced with the singularity of the event and just how shattering making love to her had been. Their first time. Damn.
Locking his arms around her, Christopher savored the feel of her bare curves, her long, long legs tangled with his, their skin clinging in a thin sheen of sweat. He’d never even realized he could feel the way he felt when he was with her.
The lack had nothing to do with experience. He’d just celebrated his thirty-third birthday and could honestly say he’d lived most of those years, had explored the challenges life tossed his way and added a few variations of his own. He’d experienced his share of incredible lovemaking and mind-blowing orgasms with some very lovely ladies.
Not one of those women had ever left him like this, so demolished he could only hang on tight until he recovered. And he needed to recover to gauge the effect he’d had on Ellen.
Pulling her closer, he inhaled the fresh scent of her hair, a shiny sheet of sable that cascaded over his arm and the pillow, cool silk to the touch. Her full breasts pressed against his chest, the tips he’d explored so thoroughly earlier sealed to his skin as if an extension of him. The lines had blurred. Christopher wasn’t quite sure where he ended and Ellen began.
“Mmm.” She breathed the sound on a sigh.
Even annihilated from the most awesome sex he’d ever had, Christopher managed a smile at the pleasure in her voice.
“Mmm, yourself,” he said.
Forcing his fingers from where they’d been idly threading through her hair, he hooked a knuckle beneath her chin and coaxed her to look at him.
She lifted her gaze…and his heart pounded impossibly harder. Her hazel eyes reminded him of a forest in autumn, a sultry, mysterious place where woodsy greens, browns and golds met in a striking clash of color he’d thought about often in the months since they’d started dating.
But now he found himself staring into eyes he didn’t recognize, eyes that seemed more golden than before, more mysterious. Eyes that reflected how contented Ellen was. And damn if he didn’t have the ridiculous urge to pound his chest in pride that he’d leveled her with their sex as much as she’d leveled him.
This was another singular sensation, and Christopher found himself grinning as her lashes feathered over those incredible eyes and she rested her cheek on his shoulder with another sigh, a breath that expelled across his skin in a soft burst.
He pressed a kiss to her brow, wanted to drift off with the scent of her filling his nostrils, to the whisper of her breathing. “Go to sleep. I want to wake you up with my mouth and make love to you while you’re still half asleep.”
Just the thought of this drowsy eyed beauty unfolding beneath him, of sinking into her moist heat in the quiet of late night, made his blood surge in a valiant effort at recovery.
But Ellen went rigid. The melting softness of her warm curves suddenly vanished, and before his orgasm-soaked brain could even register what was happening, she slid out of the bed.
“I never spend the night with anyone.”
In one fluid move she stood, every glorious naked inch of her bathed in the silvery moonlight streaming through windows that overlooked the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The sight of her, almost unreal with her long slim curves and pale loveliness, distracted him. By the time he’d thought to grab her, she was halfway across the room.
Christopher shook his head to clear it, then forced himself up on an elbow to watch her snag her hose from where he’d draped them over the armoire after he’d savored the pleasure of peeling them off her shapely legs.
“Really?” Here was an interesting turn of events. “Never?”
“Never,” she shot back.
Flipping her hair over her shoulder, she sent it flowing down her back, then scooped up her cocktail dress from a chair. The black beads caught a moonbeam, glinted in the darkness. Every perfunctory motion belied the repletion she’d just demonstrated in his arms.
He recognized what was happening—Ellen was tossing up invisible walls and putting miles of distance between them.
“Why don’t you ever spend the night with anyone, love?”
Plucking her bra from where it had landed on the floor, she glanced up at him from beneath that incredible fall of hair and said, “Relationship rule number one—Senators’ daughters do not get caught sneaking out of anyone’s bed the morning after.”
Christopher watched her sashay toward the bathroom, an awesome display of moon-glazed skin and lithe motion, before she disappeared inside. The door closed. The lock clicked with a note of finality that echoed through his bedroom. Through him.
He sank back against the pillows, smiled. “Well, Ms. Talbot, damn good thing I’m not just anyone.”
And he wasn’t. He was a man who knew what he wanted.
Ellen.
As Senator Talbot’s youngest daughter, she had to weigh consequences more carefully than a woman from a less visible family. He understood and respected her situation, which had meant easing into their relationship slowly. No problem. Ellen was definitely worth the wait. And three months of dating, and waiting, had only heightened the chemistry between them, had let them become acquainted through very imaginative foreplay.
But Christopher was also a man who’d made a career of seeing possibilities where others saw dead ends, of turning impossibilities into successes. The solution to this problem was a no-brainer. Just like always, he’d meet a challenge with a challenge, play the odds, take the risks and get what he wanted.
Ellen.
When she emerged from the bathroom, completely dressed and coolly distant, he was ready.
“Marry me.”
She stopped short in the doorway, lifted her gaze, those fascinating eyes still glimmering with golden lights.
“Marry me, love.”
She blinked as though he must be some sort of mirage and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Marry you?”
“Yes.”
She continued to stare, a frown slipping beneath her composure, the slightest crease between arched brows—a slip she’d never have made if not truly shocked by his proposal. “We’ve only been dating three months…we’ve only slept together once.”
“I’m ready to peel off that dress and go for round two.”
That seemed to wake her up again. “Christopher!”
“We’re right together.” Covering the distance between them, he reached out to trace her lower lip, was pleased when she shivered in reply. “Do you doubt that after tonight?”
For an instant, she looked as if the wind had been knocked out of her, but then she backed away so fast she stumbled. He reached out to steady her, but she shrugged him off.
“You’re crazy. No one gets married after sleeping together once. That’s against all the rules.”
He stared hard into those beautiful eyes, hoped she recognized how determined he was. “I’m not just anyone, love. And we need to establish right here and now that rules were meant to be broken.”
1
New Orleans—three months later
CRADLING THE CELL PHONE between her shoulder and ear, Ellen Talbot hitched up the hem of her beaded cocktail dress—a dress she hadn’t worn since he’d stripped it off her the night they’d made love. Of course, that had also been the night she’d received his marriage proposal and ended their relationship.
One very eventful evening.
But as she’d left him two thousand miles away in New York, Ellen deemed it safe to wear the dress again. Protecting her hose from snagging the beaded fabric, she sank into a chair in the bar of the Château Royal, the historic hotel in New Orleans’s French Quarter that was hosting the annual romance writers’ convention.
“Thanks for checking in with me.” She spoke into the receiver. “Have a safe trip home.”
She said goodbye to her mother, disconnected and flipped her phone shut. It might be three in the morning in this time zone, but her mother was currently in Bosnia, where she’d just concluded a breakfast with the Goodwill delegates from several foreign countries. As her mother wasn’t only a loving parent who stayed in touch with all four of her grown children but a United States Senator, phone calls often came at odd hours.
Ellen didn’t mind. She hadn’t been sleeping. Far from it, as she’d just broken free of a post-award ceremony party where both the winners and the nominees had gathered to celebrate. But now the party was over and, for the first time since she’d arrived in New Orleans, Ellen was practically alone. She checked to make sure her battery wasn’t running low, returned the phone to her purse and willed herself to relax.
The muted glow of chandeliers sparked off the floor-to-ceiling windows that reflected the city beyond, shadowed by a black velvet night. Only a few guests still milled through the bar and the adjoining front lobby—stragglers from the award ceremony, she guessed by their formal wear. Ellen closed her eyes and let the calming hush filter through her. She could finally lose this smile that had been plastered on her face since she’d left her hotel room at 7:57 a.m. yesterday morning.
Exhaling slowly, she allowed her smile to fade, felt the tightness in her cheeks begin to ease.
Ah…
As an editor for the Brant Publishing Group, a corporation that published mass-market romance novels, the thick single-title historicals that readers devoured, Ellen’s workdays didn’t usually involve the spotlight or never-ending smiles. Her days involved meetings with the editorial, marketing and art departments. When she wasn’t in meetings, she spent time on the telephone with any one of her thirty authors. Or reading through manuscripts that demanded her skill at recognizing story potential and writing pithy cover copy to entice readers into picking up a book from an already crowded shelf and buying it.
But during these industry conventions, smiling was as fundamental as breathing, because Ellen was a hot commodity—a romance editor with buying power. She spent her days conducting appointments with eager writers, presenting publishing-related topics to rooms filled to capacity, and socializing with people she only recognized by their name tags.
She preferred life out of the spotlight, so this moment alone was welcomed, would have been perfect if not for the thoughts of him that kept intruding on her overworked brain. She sighed. Maybe she shouldn’t have worn this dress, after all.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, her mother was fond of saying.
Ellen heartily agreed. Had she had clearer vision about him, she’d have turned down his first invitation for a date and saved herself a lot of heartache.
Marriage.
