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Feels Like the First Time
Tawny Weber
Hello, hot blast from the past!Zoe Gaston must survive her dreaded school reunion – and the fancy dress party that opens it. But Zoe, once voted Girl Most Likely to Die a Virgin, thanks to a costume mix-up, comes dressed as a leather-clad dominatrix…whip and all! Her scandalous outfit catches a secret lover. He seems so deliciously familiar under his disguise…But Zoe is shocked to discover the sexy body she’s been so thoroughly enjoying belongs to Dexter Drake – her oldest friend! And he’s hiding something bigger than just his identity…Dressed to Thrill – The best part of dressing up is taking it off!
Praise for Tawny Weber
“Double Dare establishes Tawny Weber as a new force in the Blaze
lineup.” —CataRomance
“Does She Dare? is another sinfully spicy and chocolate sweet read by the highly entertaining and creative Tawny Weber.” —Romance Junkies
“A great setup, sizzling attraction and wonderful
characters all make Risqué Business, by Tawny Weber, impossible to put down.” RT Book Reviews
“Tawny Weber weaves her magic with
Coming on Strong, another blazing-hot tale of betrayal, love and passion … With Coming on Strong, Tawny Weber will quickly rise to the top of many auto buy lists.” —CataRomance
About the Author
TAWNY WEBER is usually found dreaming up stories in her California home, surrounded by dogs, cats and kids. When she’s not writing hot, spicy stories for Blaze®, she’s testing her latest margarita recipe, shopping for the perfect pair of boots or drooling over Johnny Depp pictures (when her husband isn’t looking, of course). When she’s not doing any of that, she spends her time scrapbooking and playing in the garden. She’d love to hear from readers, so drop by her home on the web, www.TawnyWeber.com.
Dear Reader,
I had so much fun working with Sam, Karen and Lisa on this series, brainstorming all the ways a costume could open the door to so many secret fantasies. And I admit I went a little overboard with it. Because both my hero and heroine end up in disguise … and playing “what’s-my-fantasy” is fantastic foreplay!
After spending her entire adult life avoiding her past, Zoe is forced to go back home in search of the one man who can save her brother’s business. All she wants to do is get in, find the guy and get out with her dignity intact. When her costume turns out to be completely different from her order, she ends up attending her school reunion wearing leather and studs. Lucky for her, there’s one guy who isn’t intimidated at all by her dominatrix getup. In fact, he’s begging for more …
If you’re on the web, feel free to drop by my website at www.TawnyWeber.com and let me know what you think of Zoe and Dex’s story. While you’re there, check out my blog, vote for the hunk of the month, or enter my current contest. I’d love to hear from you.
Enjoy!
Tawny Weber
Feels Like
the First Time
Tawny Weber
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Samantha Hunter, Karen Foley and
Lisa Renee Jones.
Ladies, this was a pleasure!
Prologue
SURROUNDED BY the makings of a million fantasies, Josie propped her chin on her fist and stared out the plate-glass window at her very own daydream—a hottie in a brown uniform, his name was Tom and he delivered thrills by the truckload. Of course, the thrills were actually costumes, and he didn’t realize he was the star of all of her hottest dreams.
And at this rate, he never would.
“Another delivery for Dressed to Thrill,” Tom said as he wheeled a loaded hand truck into the shop. “Hiya, Josie.”
“Tom,” she said softly, silently cursing her shyness. He was even cuter close-up. Wavy brown hair, bright-blue eyes and shoulders to die for. She always regretted September, since it meant he switched from shorts to long pants and covered those sexy legs.
Josie cast around for something clever to say, some conversation starter. But as always when she was around him, her mind went blank.
“How’s business?” he asked as he stacked the boxes by the counter then handed her the electronic board to sign.
“Giving thrills is always good business,” she responded automatically. His brown eyes widened. Josie realized what she said and blushed. Good thing her hands were full with the board and pen or she’d have slapped them over her mouth.
Then he grinned. “That’s the store’s tagline, isn’t it? I’ve seen it on the labels. It must fit. This is definitely the place to go to make fantasies come true, huh?”
Conversation. Wow. Don’t drop the ball now, she warned herself. Josie gave a hesitant smile back and nodded so fast, her blond bangs flew in her eyes. “Definitely. I’ll show you.”
Glad to finally have his interest as well as an excuse to keep him here a little longer, she grabbed a box opener and cut through the tape on the top carton.
“We get a lot of requests,” she explained. “People want to live out their wildest desires, you know?”
She’d spent the past two months wondering what his desires were. Maybe now she’d find out?
Flipping back the tissue paper, she grabbed the first costume and pulled it out without looking. Her eyes were locked with Tom’s, her mind giddy at finally having his attention.
“Can’t you see how sexy this could be?” she asked. “Is it the kind of thing you might fantasize about?”
At the same time, they both glanced at the costume in her hands. A bunny rabbit. White, fluffy, sexless.
Josie’s cheeks burned. She gripped the costume so tightly, she’d probably find fur under her fingernails.
Tom laughed and shook his head. “I don’t know, Josie. I think bunnies have to be wearing bow ties to be considered sexy.” With that and a friendly wave, he left. Just like that.
Josie managed to wait until the door closed before she groaned. As usual, she couldn’t even manage a simple flirtation with the guy.
Of course, head-to-toe white fur didn’t help matters.
“Definitely not fantasy material.” She sighed and shook out the bunny costume before sliding it onto a hanger. “At least it wasn’t a Smurf costume.”
The next box of new costumes was better. A revealing slave-girl outfit, like something Princess Leia would have worn. A gorgeous cabaret getup. And, Josie sighed, a new Marilyn Monroe costume. All very sexy.
Unlike forest creatures and space aliens. She rolled her eyes. She’d blown it. What a dork, trying to flirt like that. She should have known better. She could no more flirt than she could just ask Tom out. Just imagining how bad she’d mess that up, her cheeks burned again in humiliation. But maybe she could drop a couple of hints next time he was in?
Contemplating different hints she could give without sounding stupid, Josie started to package costumes.
She glanced at the stack of Internet orders that needed to be shipped. A dominatrix for New York. A Betty Boop for Idaho. Sexy pirate in Pittsburgh. Gathering outfits for the already labeled boxes, she hummed a little tune. She frowned as she pulled the dominatrix costume from the rack. Could she ever find the nerve to wear something like this?
“Josie?”
She spun around, one hand still holding the other on her chest to calm her pounding heart.
“Tom?” She hoped he’d take her breathlessness as surprise instead of nerves. “What’s up? I thought you’d already left.”
He gave her a sheepish, little-boy grin that melted her insides. “I forgot to deliver one package.”
He held out a small box. But he was staring at the costume in her hands. He eyed the skimpy leather, then shifted his gaze to Josie. Interest sparkled, a naughty smile quirking one corner of his mouth.
“Now that’s an interesting getup,” he said. “I don’t suppose …”
Josie glanced at the leather in her hand, then back at Tom. Her eyes widened. Was he asking if she liked to play naughty? Color washed over her cheeks.
“The best thing about working at Dressed to Thrill is being able to role-play,” she told him. Then she hesitated and with a deep breath said, “Like our slogan says, ‘Bring us your fantasies, we’ll make them come true.’“
Tom smiled, but before he could respond, the phone rang. With a shrug, he said, “We’d better get back to work. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Josie didn’t even pout when he left. Listening to her boss take the call, she grinned and gave a little dance and skip as she returned to the packing counter. He’d see her tomorrow. He’d said it like he was looking forward to it. Maybe tomorrow was the day he’d ask her out? Head filled with daydreams of Tom, she folded the dominatrix costume into the box heading for Idaho.
Wasn’t love grand? She patted the black leather and smiled. She sure hoped this costume brought the wearer as much luck as it had brought her.
1
“THE GIRL VOTED most likely to die a virgin.” “So unpopular, she attended her prom alone.” “The queen of geek chic.”
Zoe Gaston sneered at the labels people had scribbled under her senior picture. She hated labels. Although, she sighed as she glanced at the photo, sometimes it was hard to deny them. An ode to the dark side, she’d called her teen years. Black spiked hair, black-lined eyes, black glossy lips. She’d been a pudgy-cheeked brainy Goth-girl.
In other words, a total misfit.
“You think I should attend my ten-year reunion … why?” she asked Meghan with a grimace.
“To relive happy high-school memories and reconnect with all your friends, of course.”
Zoe’s sister-in-law actually believed that. She was the kind of gal who’d liked school. Plenty of friends, good times, general acceptance. The total opposite of Zoe’s experience. Other than one brief weekend when the hottie football star she’d crushed on had seemed to return her interest, she’d spent her high-school years as persona non grata.
“Oh, yeah, the good ol’ days.” Zoe squinted at Meghan and nodded sagely. “That would be when the cheerleaders hated me, the jocks were terrified of me and the teachers, ah, yes, the teachers. They were just as happy when I cut class as when I showed up.”
Meghan shrugged and snatched the yearbook away, obviously sensing the trip down memory lane wasn’t helping her argument any. She tossed it on Zoe’s electric-blue couch, the glossy cover swooshing across the slick leather.
“You publicly mocked the cheerleaders,” she pointed out with a dirty look.
Oops. Zoe bit her lip to hold back a laugh as she realized perky Meghan probably had a pair of bronzed pom-poms hidden away somewhere.
“Zach told me you kicked the quarterback in the balls,” Meghan continued, sounding shocked and irritated. Zoe raised her brow as if to ask what was wrong with that, but managed to keep her mouth shut as the other woman continued. “And he said you regularly argued with the teachers.”
A quick grin escaped. Okay, so her school days hadn’t totally sucked. “Exactly. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. And nobody wanted me to try to fit in. So why on earth would I go back?”
“To show them all how hot you are, how successful you are and how wrong they were about you.”
“Sure. Because I still don’t look like a Kewpie doll, I change jobs more often than most people change hairstyles and it’s been so long since I had sex that I might as well be the lifelong virgin they dubbed me.”
“So what? Those things don’t mean they were right about you, do they? And it’s not like you have to fill out some sexual-activity roster if you attend.”
Zoe smirked, then picked up her margarita glass and took a sip. Before she could come up with a clever response, Meghan puffed up her cheeks so she looked like an angry blond chipmunk, then blew out a gust of air. “If you don’t go, they’re all going to think they were right. Are you going to let them win?”
Zoe opened her mouth to say she didn’t care if they won or not. Then she sighed and shut it again. She couldn’t deny it. She did love to win. It was almost an irresistible need in her, that inability to step away from a competition, the compulsion to try to get the last word, to fight to the often-bitter end. It’d been the only thing that’d kept her in school after her parents’ deaths—that need to prove all the gossips wrong.
Of course, as soon as the challenge was met and she’d won, she lost all interest. Boredom was Zoe’s major downfall.
“I can overcome my need to win if I don’t step up to play,” she muttered, adding a silent maybe. She picked up the flashy neon invitation to the weeklong reunion and grimaced. “And returning to Central High’s school of torture is good incentive to stay out of the game.”
“And a rotten excuse for being afraid they might be right.”
Zoe glared, but didn’t respond to the direct hit.
“Why are you pushing this, really?” she asked, turning the tables. Zoe pointed to the bright reunion invitation that Meghan had brought over with an explanation that it’d been mailed to Zoe’s brother when the committee hadn’t been able to track her down. “You don’t care if I relive my teen years or not, so what’s behind it? The truth this time.”
Meghan picked up a fuchsia pillow and ran her fingers through the fringe, her diamond wedding band sparkling. Finally, she looked up at Zoe with puppy-dog eyes and said, “Zach’s in trouble.”
Zoe sat upright so fast, her margarita sloshed over the edge of her glass. She ignored the icy stickiness trickling down her fingers and grabbed Meghan’s arm. “What’s wrong? What happened to Zach? Is he sick?”
“Nothing like that,” Meghan hastened to assure her, her blue eyes wide and shocked at the vehement response. Zoe realized she might have overreacted a smidge, but Zach was all she had. “He’s fine. Overworked and overstressed, as usual. It’s not his health that’s the problem. It’s his business.”
The fear slowly released its hold on her muscles. Zoe forced herself to breathe. Once, twice, then a deep, relieved sigh.
“Z-Tech?” she asked, referring to Zach’s company. When the dot-com boom had gone belly-up, Zach had struck out on his own, creating a video-game company that catered to niche markets. Since she specialized in business consulting, Zoe had advised him more than once to expand his horizons, but Zach had always claimed he liked the cozy feel of specializing. He had decided last year to risk it all on his own platform. To compete with the likes of Sony and Microsoft, he’d gone with the concept of cheap, functional and expandable.
“Is his new system having problems?”
Meghan nodded. “He’d be furious if he knew I was telling you, but yeah. He sank everything, all our money, into this idea and now nobody is interested in the system. Not without something extra. If it doesn’t take off, Z-Tech won’t survive through the end of the year.”
“Damn,” Zoe breathed, sinking back in her chair.
Z-Tech was everything to Zach. Oh, sure, he adored his wife. But he’d loved that company first. He’d talked about starting it, had planned it way back when they were kids. Their parents had moved to Bradford, Idaho, when Zoe was fifteen. Zach, at eighteen, had stayed behind to try his luck in Silicon Valley. When their parents had died, he’d set aside his dreams, moved to the small Idaho town to let Zoe finish high school and gone to work in the dot-com industry to support his sister.
Zach had given up everything for her. Zoe never forgot that. She owed him. Owed him for keeping her in school, for pushing her to excel instead of curling up in a ball of misery. Owed him for reminding her what family was, and what it meant to be loved when the whole world as she’d known it had turned into an upside-down hell. Not that he saw it that way. The few times she’d tried to express gratitude, he’d rolled his eyes and changed the subject.
Three years ago, after she’d quit yet another job, it’d been Zach who’d suggested Zoe pile all her qualifications into a portfolio and call herself a consultant. She could step in, boss people around, fix their problems, then leave before she got bored. Specializing in startups with growing pains, she evaluated, assessed and created business plans to help companies move to the next level. Or, a lot of times, to realize that they’d tapped out their market, in which case she pointed out options to reinvent themselves. It’d turned into the perfect—and very successful—solution to all of Zoe’s career woes.
And now her brother, who’d essentially given her her career, was losing his own company. She set her glass on the side table with a frown. Nothing like the heavy taste of debt to ruin a perfectly good margarita.
“He had this idea, though,” Meghan said, her tone hushed as though she was sharing secrets. “Zach was saying if he could get a hook, something special, he’d be able to make it work.”
“Something to convince buyers to try his system? That they could only get with it?” Zoe clarified.
“Exactly.”
“That’s a great idea.” Something Zoe had actually tried to suggest a few months back, but Zach had been in a weird macho I-can-succeed-my self-and-prove-I’m-not-a-loser mood so it hadn’t sunk in. If his business was in this bad shape, that probably accounted for his attitude, she realized now. What boredom was to her, failure was to her brother—pure hell. “What’s the problem?”
