Some Like It Sizzling

“Gee, you look like you’re all of what? Twenty-four, twenty-five years old? I’d say you better invest in a burial plot now before it’s too late.”

She laughed softly. “You get paid to say nice things like that.”

“So how old are you?”

“Twenty-nine, as of tomorrow.”

“Why the bad attitude?” He heard the sound of more champagne being poured into her glass. “I’m almost thirty-one, and trust me, it’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“This is sort of a forced celebration. I wasn’t planning to go on the trip, even after I found you handcuffed to my headboard.”

He hadn’t been a tempting-enough invitation? Judd considered that his first impression of her as a wild party girl might not have been totally accurate. Some of the facts formed a different picture—Lucy’s sedately decorated apartment, her worry over whether to pack vitamins, her affection for her two overweight cats. The contrasts formed a puzzle he could hardly wait to solve.

“Your friend Claire’s the enforcer?”

“Yep.”

“What made you change your mind and come with me?”

She was silent for several moments, and he began to think she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said with a little laugh, “The cats. Definitely the cats.”

“I guarantee you won’t regret coming.” What the hell did he say that for? He made it sound as if he personally was going to ensure that she had a great time.

“How did you get involved in this field?” she asked.

“This field?”

“I mean, did you set out to work at a resort?”

“No, I just sort of stumbled on the job. Mason offered it, and I accepted.”

She probably thought he was an air-headed male bimbo using his body to get by in life. He wasn’t sure why that bothered him so much, but it did. He’d worked hard to make his private investigation business a success and was a damn good cop before that. Whatever he accomplished in life, he didn’t want to do it relying on his looks.

Judd took a mental inventory of all the ridiculous things Mason had told him would be part of his “duties.” To be able to watch Lucy in a variety of settings, his brother had given him the job of fill-in, which meant he went wherever help was needed, or more accurately, wherever Mason decided he would be needed at the moment.

Mostly, he was supposed to hover nearby in the guise of making sure Lucy was happy, watching her for clues of her involvement in a plot to ruin the ranch. During the times when she wanted to be left to herself, he had to keep up the facade of being a regular employee by performing a few of the other duties. Duties he’d hotly protested, such as leading karaoke, making sure the nightclub stayed hopping at all hours of the night and joining in the “wet boxers” contest when there weren’t enough entrants…Judd gripped the leather steering wheel tighter as his temper flared.

When Mason had bought a failing resort and claimed he’d wanted to turn it into an adults-only playground, Judd thought it was a stupid idea. But his brother was confident that the Fantasy Ranch would be a sure moneymaker, and he’d been right. Judd still couldn’t understand the appeal of the place, especially not when things got out of hand as often as they did. Mason, however, thrived on the constant challenge.

It quickly became clear that Lucy wasn’t much of a drinker. The champagne had gone straight to her head, and now when she spoke, her words slurred together slightly. When he’d glanced over at her a few minutes earlier, she’d been listing to the right in her seat, as if they were going around a sharp curve, but the road was dead straight. Judd was about to ask her if she’d had enough to drink when a low, soft moan came from her side of the Suburban. And another moan, this time louder.

His body responded primitively, and he shifted in his seat, afraid to look over to see what exactly was the cause of the moaning.

“This is incredible,” she said, a little breathless.

Judd took a quick mental inventory. The leather seats? They were comfortable, but not moan-worthy. The scenery? It was pitch-black outside. Must have been the champagne then. But why the delayed reaction?

And then he caught the scent of chocolate in the air. She’d tried another one, and as he glanced over, he saw her head tilt back and her eyes close in silent rapture. She had a streak of chocolate on her lower lip.

“You’re a big chocolate fan, huh?”

“I am now.” She bit into another truffle and groaned deep in her throat.

“Something special about those chocolates?”

“It’s just that,” she said with her mouth full, pausing to swallow, “I really never eat chocolate. So many empty calories, such high fat content—”

“So you’re one of those health fanatics?”

“I’m not a fanatic, I just believe in proper nutrition.”

“Even on vacation?”

“Mmm, raspberry,” she moaned, ignoring his question. “Oh, this is so good, why can’t carrots come with raspberry filling? Want to try one?”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Hmm?”

“Never mind.” He shook his head, smiling in spite of himself.

She must have finished the box, because a few moments later Judd heard it hit the floor with a soft thud.

“You know, chocolate, I think, is like sex for a woman, only better.”

Judd raised an eyebrow. “This from a woman who claims never to eat chocolate?”

“Hey, I just ate a whole box of the stuff, didn’t I? Besides, I have friends who eat it all the time, and I see what it does for them.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

She emitted an inexplicable gush of giggles. Once she recovered, she said, “It’s pure pleasure without the frustration. Like getting an orgasm every time. No worry about whether he’s going to be too fast, or too distracted, or too self-absorbed…”

“I think you’ve had a little too much to drink. And you’ve definitely been meeting the wrong kind of guys.”

She succumbed to another giggling fit, and Judd took note of her laughter. It sounded…nice. Not at all the throaty seductress laugh he’d imagine her having.

“I have, haven’t I?”

He decided not to ask if she was agreeing to one of his statements or both.

“I bet you get a lot of crazy drunks at the ranch.” She pushed herself up in her seat and deposited an empty champagne flute in the nearest cup holder. “That must make your job more interesting—or difficult.”

Judd had heard his brother’s stories of the guests’ antics, some of which were legendary. “Well, there was the time a woman somehow managed to get her head stuck between the legs of the cowboy statue in the cactus garden. She was, um, not wearing any clothes at the time.”

“Not even underwear?”

“Not even a smile.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, that’s what the firemen said when they got there. And that’s how the cowboy statue came to be known as One-Legged Joe.”

They rode in a silence occasionally broken by Lucy’s drunken giggles as Judd turned off the highway and drove along the road that led to the resort. But around the last bend they were forced to stop in the middle of the road to accommodate a pair of lovers who’d sprawled themselves across it in a sort of From Here to Eternity scene, minus the beach.

“What the—” Lucy muttered.

Judd wasn’t sure if she’d want to know that such occurrences were quite common, so he tapped the horn lightly and waited for the lovers to vacate the road. Instead, they kept kissing as if they hadn’t heard the blare of the horn. Judd tried again. No reaction.

He put the vehicle in park and stepped out, approaching the couple warily in case they mistook him for a willing third party.

“Excuse me.”

They stopped kissing and looked at him as if he’d appeared out of nowhere.

“I need to get past, and I’m sure you’d be more comfortable on one of the ranch’s many king-size beds,” he said with a cheesy, customer-service smile, repeating the response Mason had taught him for any situation in which a couple was getting out of hand in public.

Without responding, the couple looked at one another and giggled, then crawled up off the road and wandered hand in hand toward the desert.

Judd climbed back into the Suburban and gave Lucy an apologetic grin. “I think they’re about to give the coyotes an X-rated show.”

Lucy’s eyes widened for a moment. “Does this sort of thing happen often here?”

The wonder in her voice caught him off guard. “It isn’t called Fantasy Ranch for nothing.”

Before Judd could put the Suburban back into drive, he heard a nervous giggle only a few inches from his ear. He turned to find Lucy leaning toward him, her face next to his, and her bleary gaze focused on his mouth. She let out a little hiccup and Judd caught the scent of champagne and chocolate on her breath.

Her sudden nearness set his nerve endings on alert.

“So I guess with all the crazy stuff that goes on here, you wouldn’t be surprised if I did this.”

And that was when she kissed him.

3

SHE WAS DOOMED before she even began. He tasted like manliness and fire and sin, and his lips—once he got past the initial shock of her planting one on him—were strong, the way she imagined a cowboy’s lips would be. She felt herself melting, spinning, falling, sinking in—and it wasn’t just the alcohol.

His five o’clock shadow created a friction on her upper lip and chin, and she could imagine that she still smelled the dust of the trail on him as she inhaled. She was finally kissing a cowboy. It was the best kiss she’d ever had.

Drunken bliss only lasted a few seconds, though.

He may have responded with his mouth, but he didn’t touch her with his hands, and after a moment she got the vague feeling that she was behaving like a complete jerk. She pulled away. Averted her eyes. Stared intently at an air-conditioning vent. Her head swirled, but this time she feared it was the alcohol.

A merciful darkness descended.

When she came to, she had no idea how much time had elapsed, but it must not have been long because they’d only made it to the resort parking lot. And Judd must not have been too disturbed by her bad behavior because he was talking to her as if she were just another VIP guest. He was giving her an introductory tour, she guessed. She heard words like “facilities” and “Olympic-size pool” and “fifteen hot tubs,” but her brain was too foggy to follow it all, so she simply wobbled dutifully behind him as he carried her bag along a stone path through the gates of the resort.

They passed cacti and other artfully arranged landscaping, faux rugged wood fences, low-slung Santa Fe-style stucco buildings. Here and there couples wandered through the warm desert night, and Lucy felt a pang of loneliness at being on vacation alone, tipsy from alcohol and having just made an inexcusable pass at her paid escort.

Through the champagne haze, she had one painfully coherent thought—tomorrow was her birthday.

JUDD SPRAWLED ACROSS the bed and eyeballed the cold beer just out of his reach on the nightstand. Nothing like handcuffing himself to a stranger’s bed and impersonating the local Don Juan all night to make him too tired to lift an arm.

The recent memory of a certain champagne-induced kiss spurred him into action. He grabbed the beer and took a deep swig, trying hard not to think about how his body had responded so readily to Lucy’s come-on. Somehow he had to keep his mind on the investigation.

Instead, memories of Lucy kept invading his head. Her lips coaxing him, her chocolate-flavored tongue tempting and teasing him…Damn it if he hadn’t wanted to take her right there in the front seat of the Fantasy Ranch VIP vehicle.

And then there was her oddly awkward, utterly endearing reaction to the kiss. Her eyes the size of full moons, she’d sputtered and stammered an apology, expelled an hysterical string of giggles, and then passed out briefly. By the time Judd had gotten around to her side of the SUV to get her out, she was awake again, barely able to walk with him as he led her to her room. However much she looked like a party girl, she sure didn’t handle her liquor like one.

The contrasts intrigued him. And her kiss had a tempting innocence about it that nearly drove him wild. Stop it! Stop thinking about her.

Judd cursed and dragged himself up off the bed and to the table where he kept his laptop and the files on his investigation—or lack of one. All he had was one sexy-as-hell suspect and no evidence to suggest her guilt, other than her employment at the travel agency.

He booted up the computer and opened the file entitled Sunny Horizons Employees. In it he’d listed all the agents who’d stayed at the Fantasy Ranch since the incidents of sabotage began. With the steep travel agent discounts they received, and the agency’s proximity to the ranch, it wasn’t necessarily unusual that five out of nine agents had visited there in the past three months.

He’d listed each one in order of the dates of their stay at the ranch, along with the lengths of stay and the instances of sabotage that occurred while each was there. It could have been coincidence, because acts of sabotage had been going on pretty steadily, sometimes while Sunny Horizons employees were present and sometimes when they weren’t.

What he had was no evidence. He muttered another curse and took another swig of beer.

Only three of them, Frank Wiley, Rowena Kramer and Darren Ullrich, were there when more than one act of sabotage occurred. Maybe that meant something and maybe it didn’t.

A hunch kept nagging at him. Mason’s theory that this was all tied to Natasha Kendrick, his ex-girlfriend, was beginning to make more and more sense. It was just too convenient that she happened to be the CEO of Sunset Enterprises, and Sunny Horizons Travel was a direct subsidiary of Sunset. Were Lucy and her coworkers acting as Natasha’s pawns? Were they getting paid to help ruin Mason’s business?

Even that theory didn’t explain all the instances of sabotage, though. There was still a big hole in the investigation.

He glared at the computer screen, willing it to produce some answers, willing himself not to think about one particularly cute suspect.

LUCY PREFERRED to sleep in flannel pajamas. In fact, she had a nice pair of gray plaid ones at home in her top dresser drawer. But last night she’d been forced to sleep in nothing but her cotton panties, because Claire had neglected to pack any sleepwear. Sure, there was that black lacy thing that looked more like a Victorian torture device than a woman’s garment, but Lucy was quite sure it had not been designed to be slept in. And besides, she’d been a little too tipsy to work all the snaps and straps on the thing.

Apparently her friend didn’t include pajamas on her list of life’s little necessities.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Claire had filled the suitcase with items Lucy blushed just thinking about—thong underwear, lacy push-up bras, slinky dresses that left nothing to the imagination and, worst of all, a colossal box of condoms. It was just like that evil woman to embarrass Lucy with her warped sense of humor—and it did take a sense of humor to even suggest that Lucinda Jane Connors would ever need a hundred-pack of condoms for a one-week trip.

Lucy smiled at her friend’s packing job in spite of herself. That was what she loved about Claire; they were such opposites. Although Claire was often infuriating, Lucy admired her and wished more than a little bit that she could be so outrageous.

This week was her chance. Her chance to find out what it would be like to ignore her every boring instinct—even do the opposite of what the nagging voice in her head automatically told her to do.

Now she had to force herself not to succumb to the urge to cover herself with the nearest napkin as she sat at the poolside bar in nothing but a shameful little black string bikini and a tight, sheer, black cover-up that covered up nothing at all. This, she reminded herself, is what the new Lucy would choose to wear. But the old Lucy missed her navy-blue one-piece with its low-cut hips and high-cut neckline. It might not have drawn stares from the opposite sex, but at least she could rest assured it would keep all the important parts covered when she took a dive into the pool.

Except, she wouldn’t be diving into the pool with the highlights she’d just had put in her hair this morning at the Fantasy Salon, and not with the forty-dollar makeup job she’d had done to conceal the effects of her hangover. It was her birthday today, and she’d treated herself. Aside from the obvious benefits, Lucy hoped her outward transformation would help provide the impetus for a more significant inner transformation. One not influenced by the effects of too much champagne.

Besides, until this morning, she hadn’t had a clue about hair and makeup, but now she had a vague idea of what styles worked well with her face and what makeup colors went with her own natural coloring. Whether or not she’d be able to reproduce today’s results was another matter entirely.

Xavier, the stylist and makeup artist, had spent two hours turning her into, in his words, “The woman she was meant to be.” Lucy hadn’t recognized the woman staring back at her when she’d looked into the mirror to examine Xavier’s handiwork, but whomever it was had fabulous blond highlights and glossy pink lips that were a lot more voluptuous than Lucy’s could possibly be.

She couldn’t help wondering if Xavier’s skill was what had been eliciting the stares of more than a few men since she’d taken her seat at the bar. It was either that or Claire’s R-rated joke of a bikini.

She heard a commotion on the other side of the bar and looked over to see a gaggle of women surrounding one muscle-bound mountain of a man.

The bartender noticed her interest and leaned on the bar near her to comment, “That’s Buck Samson, you know.”

That was the man Claire had intended to have handcuffed to her bed? Long, chestnut hair, a calendar-model face, a deep suntan, obscene muscle development, skintight T-shirt and jeans, he looked as though he’d just jumped off the stage of a strip club. She much preferred Judd’s natural good looks, and if she’d found the real Buck in her bedroom, she might have actually passed out from the shock. And she definitely never would have agreed to come to the ranch.

The Buck Samson fan club—women of every size, shape and age—followed him to the pool and settled on chairs all around him. Lucy turned to stare, but found several men staring back at her instead of the spectacle created by Buck.

To avoid making contact with any of the resident lounge and pool lizards, she focused her eyes on her drink. But that left her to contemplate the way she’d embarrassed herself last night. She could only hope she wouldn’t run into Judd today, even though part of her was dying to see him again. She could remember every detail of the night before with painful clarity, and the memories became clearer as the morning went on.

For heaven’s sake, she’d kissed him! It was the most outrageous, uncharacteristic, stupid, irresponsible, utterly exciting thing she’d ever done. And now she had her whole birthday to spend regretting it. Well, maybe she didn’t totally regret it, but she mostly did. After all, he hadn’t exactly seen it coming, and while he’d behaved graciously under the circumstances, she could tell he’d been thrown off guard by the kiss.

But there had been sparks. It couldn’t have just been the champagne talking, because she had seen in his eyes that he’d felt it, too. And he’d responded, answering her kiss with a little tentative exploration of his own. She’d been surprised by that, and a little empowered by it.

Mostly, she’d been blown away by it. The kiss, that is. Girls like Lucy didn’t go around kissing guys like Judd, but she wanted to do it again. And again and again and again.

She’d emptied her virgin piña colada and was asking the bartender for another one when Judd appeared at her side, trapping her before she could escape.

“You slipped out early this morning. I’ve been looking for—” He stopped midsentence and gawked at her in a most disturbing manner.

Oh, no, her makeup was melting and turning her face into a bad Picasso. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, it’s just that you’ve changed.”

She blushed under his scrutiny. “Oh, that. I found the salon brochure on my nightstand this morning and got an appointment.”

“I didn’t think you needed any beautifying.” He continued to stare, taking in her hair, her makeup, her too-skimpy swimsuit.

Lucy felt her cheeks redden even more from the compliment and the scrutiny. “You didn’t see the dark circles under my eyes this morning, or that lovely hangover glow I had.”

He grinned. “Well, you look great.”

She took a deep breath and turned to face him fully. “Judd, I need to apologize about last night. I never should have—”

“Don’t say another word. We’ll just pretend it never happened.”

It was the same thing he’d said last night at the door of her hotel room as she’d apologized to him over and over again. But last night she’d been giggling throughout her string of apologies, and this morning she was serious. So was he. As far as she could tell, the kiss really hadn’t bothered him.

Maybe that sort of thing happened to ranch employees all the time. The thought gave her a little queasy feeling, on top of the already queasy feeling she’d been dealing with all morning.

“Listen, I have some time off, and since today’s your first day at the ranch, how about we go exploring?”

“Thanks, but you really don’t need to keep me entertained,” she said, unable to imagine why he’d want to spend the day with her after last night.

And then a thought occurred to her. Could it be that he was accepting her come-on, that he was interested? Her stomach did a flip-flop. Impossible…or was it? If her suspicions were correct, that meant Judd really could be the one!

He could be her wild fling, her one-night stand, the guy with whom she used a couple of those condoms Claire had packed for her. He certainly qualified, with his male-bimbo good looks, his unattached lifestyle on the ranch, and his seeming interest in her. And of course there were those sparks…

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.