Girl's Guide to Hunting & Kissing

4

Sensual inspiration may ambush you when you least expect it.

“I MISS the hot-tub meetings,” Summer groused to her co-owners the next afternoon in one of their frequent executive sessions. Today they were taking care of business in the vacant and half-finished Sensualist’s Suite. At least, she’d be taking care of business for another couple of hours before she saw Jackson again. “How come we’ve created one of the most hedonistic playgrounds on South Beach and now we’re relegated to the rooms that still have scaffolding and paint brushes?”

Lainie Reynolds, an attorney with shrewd business sense and a thirst to take revenge on her cheating ex-husband by turning his former club into a raging success, tossed Summer a spiral notebook with a pen wedged in the wire coil. “Because now we’re open for business. We can’t indulge ourselves in the hot tubs anymore. Personally, I’m not in any hurry to put my thirty-year-old bod on display beside the swarm of European models and twenty-one-year-old party monsters in tangas by the downstairs pool.”

Summer cracked open the spiral notebook with a huff. “Please. You could give them all lessons with your silk cover-up and your high heels.” She spared a glance for her sleek blond partner as Lainie passed out notebooks to their co-owners as the other women entered the suite. Lainie’s black robe had a fire-breathing dragon embroidered on the back, her toes painted the same fire-engine red shade as the mythical creature stitched across her shoulders. “You’ve got some sort of Grace Kelly meets Grace Jones thing going on there. I think you could hold your own with the beach babes by the pool.”

“Still mad we can’t sit in the hot tubs anymore?” Brianne Wolcott strode into the partially renovated suite, her auburn hair a sharp contrast to her cool gray skirt and neatly tucked white blouse. She slid off one high heel to plunge her toe in the man-made brook that streamed through the exotic room. “Why don’t you just dip your feet in the stream for your water fix?”

Summer didn’t mention that her water fix was going to come from another source today. She’d never been the type to keep secrets about the men she dated before, but something about this date with Jackson struck her as more tenuous than her one-night interludes with surfer studs in the past. “Putting my feet in the water isn’t the same. I just don’t want our group to turn into some rigid corporate crowd where we feel like we need to sit around a conference table wearing power suits.”

Giselle Cesare, the fiery Italian head chef and fourth owner of Club Paradise, patted Summer’s shoulder as she waved a pink pastry box under her nose. “But at least if we ever do sit around a conference table, I can personally guarantee you we’ll still be munching on erotic confections to keep things lively.”

Summer’s spirits lifted slightly. She wasn’t joking about her fear of going corporate. She’d never be able to make it in a job where she couldn’t occasionally don overalls and do a little spackling and tiling on her own walls, damn it.

“Really?” She reached for the pastry box as both Lainie and Brianne hovered closer. “And just what naughty treat do you have for us today?”

Giselle’s only response was a sly smile, urging Summer’s fingers to flick open the box and see for herself.

And there, nestled on a bed of wax paper and covered in delicate frosting, were the chef’s prize delectable… “Kama Sutra cookies.” Brianne and Summer breathed the words with similar hushed reverence.

Even Lainie let out a momentary sigh of longing before she asked, “Shouldn’t we save these for guests?”

“No. These are actually a few of the flawed ones. You’ll note the extra arm on one of them, the anatomically impossible position on another, and one cookie depicts a very huge male member thanks to a slip of my wrist while painting.” She rolled her eyes as she began handing out the cookies. “I finally found time to make a batch despite my brothers being underfoot all week trying to convince me the club is no place for an innocent young lady like me. Can you imagine? So I finally decided to put them to work as long as they were here. I made Renzo clean the kitchen and Nico organize the pantry, which gave me tons of time to paint my cookies.”

Summer gazed down at the sweet in her hand, which depicted a woman kneeling before a man as she pleasured him. Sure enough, there was an extra arm in there, but the work remained lovely. The woman’s long dark hair fell over her shoulder to graze the man’s thigh while the man’s head fell back in sensual abandon. “Damn, but you are a genius, Giselle. If you ever decide to try painting on canvas instead of sugar cookies, I’ll be the first in line to buy up all your artwork.”

And how. The simple picture was enough to give a woman sweet shivers. Especially if she already had a virile, gorgeous man on her mind.

Lucky for her, Jackson had said he was ready to go a little wild with her, and she had managed to shuffle her day off so she could take full advantage of their time on the boat today. Would he be amenable to letting her try out the sensual position depicted on her cookie, she wondered?

Perhaps the sexy thoughts were catching because Lainie was fanning herself as she stared down at her treat. “I think I’m going to frame mine just in case I forget how it’s done. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be divorced…” Her eye lingered on Giselle for a moment, making them all tense since Giselle had unwittingly had an affair with Lainie’s husband in an earlier lifetime. “…but the lack of sex is less appealing.”

Clearing her throat, Summer removed the cap from her pen before a catfight broke out in the Sensualist’s Suite. She needed to get her mind off Jackson anyway and focus on the business she’d worked so hard to bring to life. “Maybe we should get down to the work at hand then?”

She really shouldn’t be letting Jackson Taggart dominate her thoughts. She’d undertaken the mission of Club Paradise to prove to herself that she could be successful and have fun doing it. No way would she let a man overshadow that dream already.

But nearly an hour later, Summer feared for her dream.

According to the dismal income figures Lainie had shared with them all, business wasn’t booming as much as they needed yet. Sure, the nightclub was hopping and the lines to enter the Moulin Rouge Lounge were impressive, but the hotel suites weren’t yet booked to capacity and the women were running on a thin margin for loss given how much they’d each strapped themselves to personally invest in Club Paradise.

To keep them financially solvent, they needed to fill every room every night and reserve them well into the next six months.

Of course, Lainie had a plan for a massive promotion campaign that included assignments for everyone. Hence the spiral notebooks.

“Brianne, you can call some of your contacts from the film industry and see if anyone wants to use the resort as a setting for a movie.” Lainie never asked questions. She issued orders.

“It can be difficult to—” Brianne started, but Lainie was already on to the next assignment.

“Giselle can muscle some of the food magazines about reviewing the restaurants at the club. We need a food critic in here—or several—so we can get some write-ups. And Summer has already contacted a travel magazine, so I’m sure we can expect a visit from them any day.” Lainie tapped her silver pen against her yellow legal pad as she perched on a corner of the scaffolding crowding the half-finished room. “We really need the positive press. We’ve been in the papers ever since the first Rat Pack embezzler was put behind bars. Mel Baxter’s trial has been calling into question the club’s reputation and making out-of-towners more leery of staying here. If we want to keep our heads above water this first year, we have to start fighting back.”

Lainie couldn’t have issued a more powerful call to action as far as Summer was concerned. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—fail in her first attempt to pour something of herself into her work. Always before she’d taken jobs to bide the time, jobs to make money, jobs to allow her to travel around and see the country.

Her work with Club Paradise was about more than that. She didn’t want to be a gypsy forever. She wanted to prove to herself that she could stay put long enough to accomplish something important, something special, something that contained a piece of her long after she’d gone.

So even though her nerves throbbed with expectation at the thought of seeing Jackson again, she needed to delay her trip to his boat until she placed another call to Wanderlust magazine. For that matter, she would need to delay the date if she couldn’t get business sewn up first.

Because no matter how much she wanted to get a little wild with South Beach’s hottest politician, her job had to come first.

“DON’T YOU THINK your career needs to come first, Jack?”

The voice of his future campaign manager rasped through Jackson’s cell phone, making a point he damn well didn’t want to hear. Fortunately, Jackson had walked through life masking annoyance for the sake of his family’s political ambitions many times and he smoothly lowered the small wooden gangplank on his sailboat while he set Lucky Adams straight.

“I’m still determining my next career move, so it’s actually always in the forefront of my mind.” Though that might be stretching the truth a bit, since he was keeping one eye on the pier for Summer’s long blond hair and tiny pink braids the whole time he prepped his boat to hit the water. “I’m not going to make a lot of campaign plans until I’m one-hundred-percent sure this is what I want.”

“Every day you wait, your chances of winning decrease.” Smooth-talking Lucky was a slick manager in his early thirties who’d already developed a reputation for building his clients into heavy hitters. He proceeded to launch into a well-articulated diatribe about the dire state of Jackson’s political future while Jackson checked the fuel tank and rolled up the canvas tarp covering the seats in the back of the boat.

He didn’t need to hear the tirade again to know he was taking chances with his future by putting off his announcement to run in the state legislature race. But he’d been in a tailspin ever since the scandal involving his father had been uncovered. Ever since he’d learned his father’s entire political career—from his stint as an FBI assistant director to his term as a high-powered judge—was based on lies and deception.

Sort of robbed the job of some of its sheen.

Add to that the fact that the media would dissect all his father’s mistakes in relation to Jackson’s campaign and the whole proposition became less enticing.

And then, there was Summer…

Jackson spied her just as she jumped into his mind. She strode down the pier and onto the long wooden dock, her high heels traded for a pair of bright white tennis shoes with no socks and endlessly long legs tucked into denim shorts. A tiny white T-shirt with a bright blue emblem for water—the astrological thing again—didn’t quite reach the hem of the shorts. In one hand she held a shiny chrome cell phone that she now tucked inside her purse.

The pink braids from last night had vanished without a trace. Today her hair was all blond and gathered in a loose ponytail which she had tossed over one shoulder.

She would have looked almost conventional if not for the silver sunglasses she sported. The frames around her eyes were shaped like seashells and coated with glitter.

His brain lost all focus as he absorbed the sight of her—sexy and eccentric, a definite original. Relief charged through him with as much force as anticipation, because up until that moment he hadn’t been entirely sure she would show.

Yet here she was.

“You there, Jackson?” The smooth-talking masculine voice on the other end of his phone jarred him.

“I need to head out now, Lucky.” The words fell off his lips with wooden heaviness, his brain on a totally different path that had nothing to do with forming words. “I’ll stop by there later tonight and we’ll figure out when to schedule the press conference.”

He disconnected the call and turned off the ringer for good measure. Jogging two steps down into the berth he tossed the phone on the bed in his stateroom. Out of sight, out of mind. He’d told Summer he would be impulsive today, hadn’t he? Taking time off from politics—both family and professional—would be a first for him.

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