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Instead, he could only think of pinning her to the shower wall and burying himself deep inside her. To hell with propriety, to hell with everyone’s expectations—he could do something wild and improper for once in his life, couldn’t he?
Couldn’t he?
Apparently not.
“I’ve shocked you speechless, I can see.” She slid the shower curtain closed again. “I’ll be finished in a minute, if you want to wait in the living room.”
Travis closed the bathroom door, then leaned against it, barely resisting the urge to bang his head on the wall. His inability to seize the moment was so typical, so thoroughly Travis Roth, it made him want to yell.
Everything he’d accomplished in life had been through careful study and hard work. Never risk taking. His lack of daring had slowly brought the family investment firm out of a slump and into steady profitability, but as his little brother frequently pointed out, the risk takers were the ones who dominated the business world. Calculated risk, their father had always preached, was the hallmark of success. Since he’d been the man who’d built the family fortune, he had the right to preach.
And here was Travis, presented with the erotic invitation of a lifetime, and he couldn’t take it. But so what? Business and personal matters weren’t the same, and risk taking had entirely different kinds of repercussions for each. He wasn’t going to beat himself up for not hopping into a shower with a woman he’d only just met. Getting involved sexually with Jenna would be a huge mistake anyway.
He glanced around again at the mess of her apartment, finally remembering why he’d rushed into the bathroom in the first place. At least he knew now that she was unharmed, but that didn’t explain the chaos in her apartment.
Was she just the world’s lousiest housekeeper? Was she mentally unstable? That could explain the shower incident, too…. Yet he had the feeling this was definitely a mess someone else had made.
On the other side of the door, the water cut off, and he heard the shower curtain slide open. Travis pushed aside thoughts of Jenna’s naked, wet body and walked across the room to look at the books strewn around the bookcase. He bent and picked up some of them, placing each one on a shelf after reading the title. Classics, mysteries, biographies, romance novels, memoirs, philosophy—Jenna seemed to read it all.
He supposed he shouldn’t have found that surprising, since she was a freelance journalist. That career suggested a certain intelligence and curiosity, both traits Travis had to admit he considered incongruous with her wild image.
He’d just bent to pick up a copy of the Atlantic Monthly— definitely not typical vixen reading material—when Jenna emerged from the bathroom dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a white sleeveless top that laced up the sides. Her damp hair had been pulled back into a sleek ponytail, and her face was scrubbed clean of makeup except for a hint of red on her lips.
Her gaze lingered on him, and rather than looking embarrassed by the shower incident, as Travis imagined he did, Jenna seemed amused.
“I guess Mrs. Lupinski let you in, no problem?”
“She offered to play me like an accordion, but yes, she let me in.” He winced at the image and held out the key that was still in his hand. “Here’s your key back.”
“Thanks. Don’t worry, my place doesn’t normally look like this.”
“What happened?” He was almost afraid to ask.
“While we were having lunch today, someone came in the open window and ransacked it. They stole my laptop and all my backed-up files.”
A sense of outrage rose up in his chest on behalf of Jenna. “I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
“But why would someone take all your files? Do you have other copies anywhere?”
“It’s a long story, and yes, I do have some hard copies and disks of some of my work, but a lot of the newer stuff is lost. I’d hidden emergency backups in my closet, but I wasn’t very methodical about backing up regularly.”
“We’ve got a long drive ahead, so you can tell me on the way why someone would want to steal your files.”
“A long drive where?”
“To Napa. My family has a country home there, a private place where we can get you up to speed on impersonating Kathryn.”
“We haven’t even discussed my condition for helping you yet.”
Up until a few minutes ago, he’d been pretty sure whatever she wanted wouldn’t be a problem, but now he knew firsthand that Jenna could be…unpredictable. Outrageous. Wild.
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
She stepped over a mangled couch cushion and sat on the arm of the sofa next to him. He could smell the fruity shampoo scent from her hair, and that, combined with her proximity, was intoxicating.
“First, I want to apologize for my behavior in the bathroom.”
She certainly could have done worse. “Apology accepted.”
“I have these sort of urges when I get stressed out.”
“Urges?” He couldn’t wait to hear her explanation.
“Yeah, urges.” She paused, giving him a once-over. “Whenever life gets stressful, I tend to react by following my impulses, which can lead to rather outrageous behavior, as you saw in the bathroom.”
Travis shrugged. “No harm done.” Other than the image of her lush body burned in his memory for eternity.
“I’m getting this vibe about you.”
“What sort of vibe?”
Her eyes sparked mischief. “An uptight one.”
“Thanks, that’s just the impression I was going for.”
“You strike me as one of those guys who’s going to die at an early age from a heart attack or a stroke, before you ever get to relax and enjoy life.”
Travis ignored the protests of his ego and bypassed her insult. “I’m still waiting for your condition on the deal.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You and I, we have a mutual need. I’m stressed out by crazy people stalking me, and you’re stressed out by your job or my sister’s wedding or whatever. We both need to let off some steam.”
He thought of the way he’d snapped at his brother that very morning before coming to meet Jenna. Blake had simply been acting like his usual irresponsible self, turning in a report late, and even though Travis always set artificial deadlines for his brother to make sure the work really got to him when he needed it, he’d exploded right there in the office, in front of his secretary—which meant the entire office building knew about it by now.
Yeah, he definitely needed to let off some steam.
“So what does that have to do with the deal?”
“I’ll impersonate Kathryn starting next week. But until then, I’m Jenna. You can coach me on acting like Kathryn, but after hours, I’m still me. All weekend long, we work on unwinding.”
Travis didn’t quite see where she was going, but he played along. “Okay, I’ve always found the wine country to be relaxing. Slower pace, quiet—”
“That’s not what I mean. The most effective place I know to relieve stress—to really relieve it—is in bed, and I don’t mean sleeping.”
Travis blinked. He couldn’t argue with her there. Nothing like sex to put the spring back into his step. But he hadn’t even had a serious date lately, let alone—
She continued. “You’re single, I’m single, we’re attracted to each other, I think. No one will have to know.”
“Let me get this straight. You want to make a sexual relationship part of our business agreement?”
“Not when you put it like that. I’m just saying I need a little companionship this weekend, and I think you do, too.”
Travis frowned. A weekend alone, letting off steam, as Jenna put it, with one impossibly sexy woman. It was either the best idea he’d heard in a long time, or it was absolutely nuts.
3
JENNA SURVEYED THE apartment she’d called home for the past year, feeling yet another burst of anger at the person who’d invaded her privacy and stolen her most valued possessions. It took all her willpower not to kick something—more proof that she needed to unwind. She glanced down at the duffel bag and backpack that held everything she planned to take with her, then up at Travis Roth, who apparently was stunned silent by her proposition.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to…unwind,” he finally said, “but don’t you think it might be awkward?”
“If it is, we won’t do it. Just give it a chance tonight, and if it feels wrong, we’ll pretend we never had this conversation. Deal?”
If he turned her down, Jenna really was going to kick something. Namely, him. In the ass. Right out her door.
“Okay.” He smiled, and the sexy gaze he pinned her with warmed her body in all the right places. “You have a deal. I’d be crazy to turn you down, after all.”
She did a mental happy dance. Look out Travis Roth, you’re in for the weekend of a lifetime.
Jenna switched off all the lights except the one near the door, then started to pick up her bags, but Travis grabbed them first. After he took them out the door, she switched off the last light and locked up her tiny apartment, with the odd feeling that when she returned, her life was going to be very, very different.
While Travis loaded her bags into the trunk of his pristine silver Mercedes, Jenna settled back into the plush gray leather of the passenger seat and tried not to think too hard about what she’d just gotten herself into. She’d focus on the fun part for tonight—do a little flirting, find out what had put all that tension into her companion’s shoulders, and do her best to work it out.
It seemed her desire to focus on the positive was not to be fulfilled though. They’d barely been on the road for five minutes when Travis brought up the one subject she most wanted to forget for the weekend.
“Care to tell me why you think someone broke into your apartment and ransacked it?”
“I guess you won’t leave the subject alone until I do.”
“Probably not.”
“I’m researching a story that someone doesn’t want written. This was supposed to be the piece that established my reputation as a serious journalist.”
“What’s the subject?”
“An exposé on the beauty-pageant industry—on the exploitation and behind-the-scenes stuff most people don’t know.”
Travis nodded. “Sounds interesting. How can you be sure that’s why your apartment was broken into?”
“Pretty quickly after I began researching the story, I started receiving threatening phone calls, then other strange things started happening.”
“Like what?”
“I was nearly run down by a car earlier this week. It actually drove up onto the sidewalk where I was walking, and it didn’t have license plates on the front or back.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You don’t think it was an accident?”
“An almost identical accident happened with a different car the day before.”
“Who knew you were writing the article?”
Jenna pressed her fingers to her temples. Her left eye was starting to twitch, a sure sign that she was overstressed. “More than a few people. Let’s talk about this another time, okay? Right now, I just want to pretend I have a normal life.”
“So tell me why you and Kathryn don’t speak to each other.”
Yet another pleasant subject. Jenna stared out the window at the city lights passing by on the East Bay. The eye twitch was getting worse.
“I think I have a right to know what I’m dealing with here. Kathryn said she had no idea why you hated her so much, but I’m betting she wasn’t telling the whole story.”
“You’d win that bet.”
“She has a tendency to only remember stories that make her look favorable, doesn’t she?”
“Yep, that’s my sis.”
“So tell me your side.”
“My mother used to enter my sister and I in these horrible beauty pageants all the time—Little Miss Twin California, Little Miss Twin U.S.A., Little Miss Twin America—we did the whole circuit.” She scoffed. “I hated it, and Kathryn adored it. That basically sums up our differences.”
“You didn’t ever want to be Little Miss Twin America?”
“I hated dressing up, wearing makeup, being gawked at by crowds, the whole bit. By the time we were eight, we knew how to apply mascara flawlessly.”
“Makeup on an eight-year-old?”
“You think that’s young? I have photos of myself wearing lipstick at the age of three.”
“So that explains your interest in the beauty-pageant story.”
“I’ve wanted to do this story as long as I’ve been a journalist.”
Travis nodded. “I had no idea your mother was such a…”
“Wacko? That’s why I’m not exactly close to her, either.”
“Wacko is not quite the word I was looking for, but if you had the kind of mother who dressed you up in matching twin outfits, why not matching names, too, like Kelly and Nelly?”
“It’s almost as bad, Jenna Kathleen and Kathryn Jennifer.”
“Oh.” He fought a smile. “But these pageants were when you were kids, right? Why all the bad feelings after so many years?”
“That was just the beginning. Kathryn always resented me for dropping out of the pageant circuit during our freshman year in high school, thereby ruining her chances of being Miss Twin Anything. It was her big dream to win a pageant, and she never did.”
“And that made your mother angry, too?”
“She never said so in so many words, but I knew she was disappointed. She always identified more with Kathryn, and by the time we were teenagers, my sister and I had an all-out rivalry going. She stole my boyfriends, my favorite sweaters and my study notes.”
“So you rebelled?”
