Sultry Pleasure

“You’re welcome.” Her smile was just about blinding.

He felt her eyes on his back as he let himself out. Marcus turned to look back at the building’s plain facade that was not at all indicative of its interior, not unlike Diana. Then he turned to walk back to his car. As he closed the gate behind him, one of the young men gathered a couple of houses away called out to him.

“Nice car, man.”

“Thanks.” Marcus tipped his head in the young man’s direction, then after looking again at Diana’s building, got in the Mercedes and drove away.

Chapter 5

Diana unlocked her front door and walked inside, briefcase and mail in hand. She was emotionally exhausted. The day at work had been long—not because of the actual work but because the entire time she had fielded speculating looks and questions about Marcus Stanfield. It seemed as if the entire office knew she had left the Prism party with him. Or maybe they read the society pages, like her mother.

But no matter how much she’d told her boss, her secretary, even Trish, that the night with Marcus would lead to nothing, they didn’t seem to believe her.

She dropped her briefcase on the couch and the mail on the coffee table and kicked off her shoes. In the kitchen, her eyes went to the newspaper she’d left on the counter. It was open to the photograph of Marcus and his father. A reminder.

She passed the paper and grabbed a pitcher of juice instead of the margarita she really wanted. Marcus. Even though she was determined to dismiss him from her mind, he crept into her consciousness again and again.

At work, as she sat at her desk going over the financial reports, the memory of his kiss had nearly overwhelmed her. His full mouth on hers. The hot crush of his body pressing her into the wall at Gillespie’s. During lunch, while she sprinkled the packet of dried cranberries and almonds over her salad, she remembered the sound of his voice in her ear. How he had said her name. And the night. The night before had been plagued by dreams of what might have been. Hotter kisses. The cool sheets at her back and his muscled body at her front as he made love to her.

Diana drew a quick breath. The universe was a cruel place, she thought. Why else would the only man she’d been interested in in months also be the same one whose father had driven hers to suicide? Her hand tightened around the glass as she thought of her father, a powerfully built but emotionally delicate man who had left his family more wrecked after his suicide than Quentin Stanfield had with his trickery and lies.

The sound of the doorbell jolted her from her thoughts. She put down her half-finished juice and went to see who it was.

“Damn, I’ve been out here forever!” Her brother stood on her front step, hands in his pockets, a crooked smile on his handsome face that looked so much like their father’s. “You have a man in there?”

In faded jeans and a T-shirt with a drawing of Darwin’s ape-to-man evolution as stick figures, Jason looked very much as she’d seen him a few hours before. Full of energy. In complete possession of their father’s wide-shouldered, copper-skinned masculine beauty. Unconquerable. Like he’d just woken up from spending the night with the gold-toothed girl he’d met in Coconut Grove.

Diana briefly wondered if she had been so optimistic about the world when she was in college. As quickly as the thought came, she dismissed it. In college, she had been worried about her family. About providing for them and making sure that her mother’s emotional health remained strong. About the regret she had for going to a Miami college instead of the university in Madrid.

Diana opened the door wider for her brother and invited him in. “What’s up, Jason?” She didn’t even bother to address his comment about her having a man in her house. He’d only rung the bell once.

“Can I borrow your car for a while?” He passed her at the door, dropping a kiss on her cheek before flopping down on her couch and throwing his feet up on her coffee table. Right on top of her mail.

She looked at him. After a brief staring contest, he took his feet from the coffee table and dropped them to the floor with a solid thump.

“So can you lend me the car?” He gave her his puppy-dog face. “You walk to work every day, and the grocery store is just down the street.”

Her house was on the very edge of a neighborhood that had been gentrified only a few years before. The explosion of high-rent condos, gourmet markets, eateries, dry cleaners and accompanying high taxes hadn’t completely pushed out the original residents. At least not yet.

“That’s not the point, Jason. What if I need to go to South Beach or something? It’s not like I only go to work and the grocery store. My life is a little bigger than that.” But not by much.

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