“Besides, it’s a morning show, on the air during school hours. Who’d see it?”
“My father?”
“Does he even own a TV?”
No, but that wasn’t the point.
“Ahem.”
Both women turned startled glances to the tall, angular man standing by their table glaring at the mess the waiter had yet to clear. He turned his glare to Delaney. His eyes widened briefly, then narrowed with consideration.
Delaney grimaced. Professor Belkin. Then she glanced past him and felt herself turn pale. Her father. She’d been avoiding him, easy enough now that the spring semester was over. This wasn’t how she’d intended to tell him about the makeover.
She forced a smile on her suddenly stiff lips, but he didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at her, so engrossed was he in his discussion with a physics professor. Two feet away, and she was invisible to her own father. As usual.
“Ms. Adams, Professor. Perhaps they can bring you a bib,” Belkin said, his tone stiff and annoyed as he stepped over the scattered croutons.
He was obviously not impressed with her makeover, and even less with her dining skills. Delaney wanted to pick up a tomato and throw it at his departing head. Bet that would get his attention. It’d blow her ever-narrowing shot at the promotion, too. So she choked back her temper with a deep breath.
“TV?” she asked Mindy, blinking away the frustrated tears as she watched her father depart.
“Keep using your pseudonym,” Mindy advised. “Let Delaney Madison become the woman you’ve always wanted to be. Imagine the shock value when you waltz into the hiring meeting and wow them all with your newly acquired charisma and command of the room.”
The woman she’d always wanted to be? Her ultimate fantasy was to be a woman like the kind she loved to read about. Sexy, powerful, confident. The kind who could handle the most arrogant snobs and the hottest guys with the same panache.
Delaney knew there were a million reasons why TV was a crazy idea. But this was to improve her chances of getting the promotion. She’d thought the makeup would be enough, that it’d make her stand out. Obviously she needed a little more than a costume. She needed to learn to command attention. So she’d do TV and become Delaney Madison. Super Reviewer. Savvy, sexy and commanding.
Nobody was ruining this for her. No way, no how.
“SEX IS SECONDARY,” Delaney insisted to Sean Logan, host of the morning show Wake Up California. Despite the fact that she was almost hyperventilating with nerves, she managed a quick smile and strong, assured tone. Nothing like a good literary argument to put her at ease. After three weeks of her weekly fifteen-minute segment on “Critic’s Corner,” she still hadn’t gotten past the terror of being on camera.
“Yes, I want to be invested in a hot, wild love scene,” she continued. “I want to feel just as turned-on as they are when I read the character’s actions. But unless I care about them, unless I’ve already developed a connection to them, it’s just…well, bodies. Often messy, rarely appealing.”
“So what you’re saying is you want emotionally driven love scenes when you read?” Sean, the epitome of the all-American boy grown up, asked as he shifted in his chair.
“I’m saying all stories, to really draw in the reader, benefit from an emotional depth the reader can empathize with,” Delaney clarified.
While Sean tugged his bottom lip and nodded, she shifted in the hard wood chair, wishing she could take a deep breath. She assured herself it wasn’t nerves—after three shows, she had to be getting over those by now, didn’t she?—but it was just the bite of leather where her belt snugged around her waist. Why couldn’t fashion and comfort be synonymous? According to Mindy, her skirt was the “latest fashion,” which apparently meant uncomfortably short and tight.
“Tell me the truth, Delaney,” Sean said with a schmoozy smile, leaning toward her like an old friend about to share a secret. “Do you really buy in to all that romance…stuff?”
Delaney grinned at the last-second correction. Halfway through her first segment, she and Sean had gotten past the formal Q&A they’d started with, and relaxed into a casual conversation. Used to his technique now, she knew this was the sign to wrap up the chosen topic for this week’s segment—the romance genre.
“Romance is what makes the world go ’round,” she paraphrased. “The excitement of falling in love in all its varieties, the quest for happily ever after.”
“You really believe that? That romance has that much of an impact on the world?”
“Relationships, by whatever terms they are defined, are what drive literature. Both period and modern,” Delaney said, warming to her subject. “Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, they’re all examples of romances that have strongly impacted our literary history.”
Caught by something offstage, Sean’s eyes went wide.
Delaney noted the muted explosion of murmurs and rustles. Well used to impatient students, she continued her lecture on romance novels through the ages without a hitch, but let her gaze shift to the ruckus on the main set.
Oh. My. God. Could a woman have an orgasm at just the sight of a man? Delaney tried to catch her breath, but she couldn’t stop her racing thoughts long enough to remember how. Gorgeous. Pure male perfection.
Midnight hair, so black there were hints of blue from the bright studio lights, waved back from a face that would do a romance writer proud. Piercing eyes, a clear blue that made her feel as if he could see through her carefully applied mask all the way to her squirming insecure soul, narrowed when they met hers.
Delaney swallowed, sure the zap of sexual energy was just some weird reaction to the camera and lights. Or maybe an allergic reaction to the makeup. Did gel bras have a toxic effect when the skin got overheated?
“Well, well.” With a quick look at the producer, Sean gave a little nod, then said, “We have an unexpected guest joining us today. Ladies and gentlemen, Nick Angel.”
Delaney barely kept her jaw from dropping. Her gaze shot back to the hunk joining them onstage. She stifled a little gasp as his eyes met hers, energy zinging between them like lightning.
No, she assured herself. Not between them. It had to be just her reaction. Men never got zingy around her.
When he joined them her stomach took a nosedive. All the zing on her side or not, it still scared the hell out of her. She had no idea how to channel this level of sexual attraction.
So she fell back on the tried and true, and pretended her body didn’t exist. Shifting into brainiac mode, she processed his appearance, which consisted of jeans, a dress shirt and a black leather jacket, his attitude—defiance wrapped in charm—and his body language, which suggested “watch out, someone’s gonna get it.”
Damned if she didn’t wish it were her.
3
DELANEY MENTALLY RECITED the works of early American poets to keep from drooling at the sight of Nick Angel, master of erotic suspense, just inches from her. If she’d
