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My Secret Life
Lori Wilde
Sassy heroines and irresistible heroes embark on sizzling sexual adventures as they play the game of modern love and lust. Expect fast paced reads with plenty of steamy encounters.She who dares wins! Graphic artist Katie Winfield is pretty, privileged…and a complete disaster when it comes to men! Determined to take charge of her romantic life, Katie accepts an invitation to join the racy Martinis and Bikinis club – a group that specialises in very naughty dares! Following their shared night of passion at a masquerade ball Katie chooses gorgeous tycoon Liam James as her unwitting accomplice. After all, the spark between them is undeniably hot.However, Liam is her newest client…and he still doesn’t know Katie’s real identity or the truth about the sizzling secret they share!
With a toss of her head, Katie marched to the front of the room and drew her first dare.
She slipped the red velvet ribbon from the crisp parchment, unrolled it and read out loud to the room. “You have drawn a three-part dare. Each of your dares is to be completed within one week’s time. The second and third dares will be mailed to you by the Thursday of each week. For this week, your dare is to make love to the man of your fantasies in a forbidden place.”
Stunned, Katie turned to gape at the women of the M & B club. It was as if the dare had been tailor-made for her. Correction: tailor-made for the old Katie. The one who used to do foolish things like make love to strangers in closets.
“Ball’s in your court, Katie,” said Lindsay, the club’s president, with a wry smirk on her face. “Are you all talk? Or do you dare?”
LORI WILDE
is the author of thirty-nine books. She’s been nominated for a RITA® Award and four RomanticTimes BOOKreviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards. Her books have been excerpted in Cosmopolitan. Also Lori teaches writing online through Ed2go. She’s an RN trained in forensics, and volunteers at a battered women’s shelter.
Dear Reader,
Welcome to THE MARTINI DARES series. We hope you’ll love meeting and getting to know the Winfield sisters and the very sexy men who turn their oh-so-ordered lives upside down.
First up is the youngest sister – impetuous, sexually adventurous Katie Winfield, who’s secretly longing to settle down but doesn’t exactly know how to go about it. She’s always been the wild child of the family and she wonders exactly who she’ll be if she dares to let go of that role.
Enter Liam James, an ambitious, hardworking real estate mogul on the verge of making his first cool billion. He’s in need of a good time as badly as Katie needs emotional security. But he’s not about to admit it, even though he’s wildly attracted to the high-society graphic artist he’s just hired to run his new advertising campaign.
Then Katie joins the mysterious Martinis & Bikinis, a club formed to help empower women by issuing them provocative dares. All bets are off as Katie performs one sexy Martini Dare after another on an unsuspecting Liam, loosening him and reforming his workaholic ways.
But can a very bad girl find happiness with a very good man?
Don’t miss the next book in the series, My FrontPage Scandal by Carrie Alexander, available in December. You might just find yourself wanting to do a Martini Dare or two of your very own.
Happy reading!
Lori Wilde
MY SECRET LIFE
BY
LORI WILDE
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For April Birchell
Thanks so much for the inside scoop on
graphic artists and for sharing your own secret
life story with me. You’re living proof that
daring to follow your heart is worth the risk.
1
KATIE WINFIELD plotted the seduction with military precision.
Exactitude wasn’t her typical modus operandi. On the contrary, she was usually quite spontaneous and, in fact, had a reputation as something of a free spirit. But she and Richard had been flirting for weeks with no forward motion in their relationship. Tonight would thrust them toward a whole new level of intimacy.
Embracing the advance planning she normally eschewed, Katie picked up a pencil and ticked off the items on her To Do list.
Facial and pedicure. Check.
Sexy French-maid costume. Check.
Tantalizing new perfume. Check.
Catch-me, do-me stilettos. Check.
Auburn wig. Check.
Black silk stockings. Check.
Push-up bra. Check.
Erotic face mask. Check.
Lots and lots of condoms. Check.
Just reading over the list made her feel all warm and tingly and soft inside. This evening—during the ultra-posh Boston Ladies League charity costume ball thrown annually on the Friday before Labor Day weekend—she intended on bedazzling the pants off Richard Montgomery Hancock the III.
Katie had spent her lunch hour shopping. She’d just returned to work fifteen minutes late and out of breath. Furtively, she kicked the loot farther underneath her desk, and then darted a glance over her shoulder to see if her boss had noticed her tardiness.
“What didja buy?” asked her office mate, Tanisha Taylor, as she sauntered through the door, grande soy latte in hand.
Katie shrugged. “Nothing much.”
At five-nine, Tanisha towered over Katie’s own five feet three inches. They were both twenty-four and they’d started working as graphic artists at Sharper Designs on the very same day ten months earlier. It was the longest Katie had ever worked anywhere and she was starting to feel the strain of being in one place too long.
With her radiant, caramel complexion and deep chocolate-brown eyes, Tanisha was drop-dead beautiful. She wore her hair in a tightly braided shoulder-length style that made her narrow face look even thinner. She possessed the lean muscular build of a dancer, quite the opposite of Katie’s well-rounded, non-athletic figure. They made for an unusual looking pair.
Today her coworker was dressed in a lavender blouse made of pure silk that she wore tucked into a pair of straight-legged, black slacks and sensible black flats. But Katie knew from the wild nights they’d recently spent closing down bars that beneath the buttoned-down attire lurked the adventuresome soul of a Nubian goddess.
Tanisha spied the red-and-black striped bag from Fetching Fantasies and dove for it before Katie could block her. Tanisha set down her latte, perched on the edge of Katie’s desk and peeked inside the bag.
“Oo-la-la, what have we here? Parlez-vousfrançais?” she teased.
Katie snatched the bag away and clutched it to her chest. “Just a costume for the Ladies League masquerade party. No biggie.”
Tanisha grinned. “You are going to be the hussy of the ball in that getup.”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Spill it. Who’ve you got lined up in your crosshairs?”
Returning Tanisha’s sly grin, Katie slowly shook her head.
“Don’t give me that. I know you’ve got something up your sleeve.”
Katie tilted her head, lowered her eyelashes and slanted Tanisha a sideways glance. “Do you know Richard Hancock?”
“Everyone in town knows Richard. What are you trying to do? Ruffle all the blue-blood feathers in Boston?”
That comment pulled her up short. Why did she suddenly feel as if her conscience were the target and Tanisha’s accusation a straight flying arrow?
Bull’s-eye.
“What makes you say that?”
“Why else would you want to hook up with Richard ‘The Dick’ Hancock? He’s sooo not your type.” Tanisha hopped off Katie’s desk and plopped down in front of her drafting board.
“What do you mean? Richard is a very handsome guy.”
“I’m not talking about his looks.”
“What’s wrong with Richard?”
“Nothing is wrong with Richard. What’s wrong is that you’re plotting to seduce him at the Ladies League ball.” Tanisha clicked her tongue.
“What’s so bad about that?”
“Face it, Katie. You’ve got a knack for causing a stir.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“How so?”
“Who got caught kissing the CEO’s son under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party, hmm?”
“Hey,” Katie said defensively. “How was I supposed to know he’d just gotten engaged?”
“That’smy point, K. You don’t always take the time to ask the right questions and it often lands you in hot water. Subconsciously, I think you enjoy causing a scandal.”
“I do not.” Did she?
“Either that or you’re into self-sabotage. Which is it?”
“Neither.”
“If you say so.” Tanisha sounded skeptical.
“I say so.”
“And the Nile is just a river in Egypt.” Tanisha snorted.
Was she sabotaging herself? As the youngest of three sisters growing up in a household run by their loving mother and strict naval-officer father, Katie had done a little acting out for attention, but so what?
She’d played hooky a few times in high school. Once or twice, she’d gotten caught sneaking out her bedroom window to meet a boyfriend. She enjoyed making Great-Aunt Josephine’s upper-crust nose wrinkle in disapproval by listening to hip-hop, using street slang and wearing jeans to family gatherings. Honestly, she’d never done anything too radical. Katie just liked having fun. Her motives were no more complicated than a Cyndi Lauper song.
Well, okay, maybe sometimes it got stifling with her two older, oh-so-perfect sisters. Brooke was the beautiful caregiver, Joey the smart go-getter and they were both as good as gold. By default, that left Katie with the title of wild child. But everyone had a family label, right? And she chose to wear hers proudly.
To be honest, even after their father had passed away five years ago, she and her sisters had still lived a fairy-tale life. They’d been lucky, blessed, until this past year when their world had totally collapsed.
Katie didn’t want to think about it, but the rush of memories overwhelmed her and she felt herself caught in a tornado of emotion that squeezed the breath from her lungs. She forced a smile, determined not to let Tanisha know about the sorrow knotting up inside her.
But a smile couldn’t stop the sad feelings.
In January, Katie and her sisters had received the horrible news that their beloved mother, Daisy, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Katie denied it for as long as she could. She’d pretended it was all a big mistake, that their mother was fine. But each day Daisy Winfield grew weaker and sicker until Katie could deny it no longer.
After that, she’d gotten angry. When Brooke had told her that she was stuck in the second stage of grief, the comment had pissed her off. Sainted Brooke, who never did anything wrong apparently leapfrogged right over the five stages of grief. She’d quickly skimmed from denial to anger to depression and bargaining straight on through to acceptance.
Katie, according to Brooke, had never gotten past anger.
Maybe she hadn’t. But how was she supposed to get past it? Her mother had only been fifty-three when she passed away in July, only four months after she’d been diagnosed. There hadn’t been nearly enough time to say goodbye.
It wasn’t fair.
Katie closed her eyes and inhaled sharply at the pain of remembering that awful night when their mother had died.
She’d been restless, feverish and babbling about a lost baby. Daisy had clutched her daughters’ hands and begged them to find the baby girl. They had no idea what baby she was talking about. The hospice nurse had assured them it was just the effects of the heavy pain medication she was on, but it had been upsetting to see her mother so distressed during her last minutes on Earth.
Involuntarily, Katie laid a hand across her heart and felt a solid ache for the loss of her mother.
“Katie?” Tanisha’s voice snapped her out of the past and back into the present.
She opened her eyes.
Tanisha had an odd expression on her face. She canted her head and a dark braid fell against her chiseled cheekbone. “Are you all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t look all right.”
“I am.”
Tanisha nodded at the shopping bags crammed underneath Katie’s desk. “Does this shopping spree and Ladies League seduction, and other crazy behavior have anything to do with losing your mother?”
Her coworker was more perceptive than she imagined. Tanisha’s party-girl personality gave the impression that she wasn’t the type to pry into people’s deep, dark secrets, which was probably one of the reasons Katie had been drawn to her. Katie herself was not a fan of digging into her own psyche.
