hands fell to her sides. “Why? I never did anything to her.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t get it. You’re too smart to play dumb.”
“Oh, you think she hates me because I’m successful? Because people listen to me?”
“That. And the other.”
She wasn’t about to ask what he meant. This whole conversation was going poorly, and the smart thing to do would be to stop right here, right now, and get Chase and his number-one fan the hell out of here.
She put her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to tell him to leave, but before the words came out, his gaze moved from her face to her chest. As he blatantly stared, his face changed. He smiled. Devilish, wicked, hungry. She felt her nipples harden and poke at her flimsy T-shirt.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice low and seductive.
She turned away, crossing her arms once more. “Please leave. And take the box with you.”
Max stepped outside the door, leaving her with Chase. She wanted him gone, too, even as his compliment swirled inside her head. He thought she was beautiful. It wasn’t that she saw herself as ugly…but beautiful? That wasn’t what mattered about her. She was smart, and she was ambitious, and she was able to talk to people. She’d never gone after beauty. Oh, she’d had compliments before, but as her mother was so fond of saying, beauty was the shallow refuge of incompetence.
He came up behind her, and her heart beat so hard she thought it might burst. When his hand touched her shoulder, her knees weakened and she forgot how to breathe.
It was nuts. Crazy. Why was she feeling like this? Chase was just a man. No big deal.
He turned her around until she faced him. Her arms were still covering her breasts, but from the way he looked at her, it was too little, too late. He’d seen her reaction. She closed her eyes.
“Jamie.”
She shook her head. “Please, go.”
“Jamie, look at me.”
She didn’t want to. But she couldn’t help it. Her eyes opened to find him closer still, close enough for her to see the gold in his dark brown eyes.
“I was going to call it off,” he whispered. “Then I started thinking about you. By the time I got here, I’d changed my mind.”
“Why?”
He smiled, and her tummy got tight with a wave of desire. “There’s something about you.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I find out.”
“You don’t have to. The hell with Whittaker and her magazine. I don’t care what she says about me.”
“Neither do I. But I do want to spend the next two weeks getting to know you, magazine or no magazine.”
“I don’t see why. You’re a big-shot racing guy. You date movie stars. You live a different kind of life than me. Frankly, I’d bore you silly.”
“You let me be the judge of that.”
“What if I don’t want to see you?”
He leaned forward until their lips almost touched, pausing for an instant, and then he captured her lower lip between his front teeth. A second later, he let her go, only to steal her breath with a kiss, his soft lips on hers, his tongue teasing her mouth open. Her eyes fluttered closed and her arms moved from her chest to his back. With gentle pressure, he rubbed his chest against hers, sweeping against her nipples. Pleasure and heat flowed from her breasts down to her stomach, and then lower still. She squeezed her thigh muscles, but the feeling didn’t go away.
He did something terribly wicked with his tongue, thrusting it inside her, then pulling back, as if showing her what he wanted to do to her body. Goose bumps covered her flesh as vivid pictures came to mind. Him, naked—oh lordy—thrusting into her, making her scream.
She whimpered. He moved his lips from her mouth to her ear. “I’m going to explore every inch of you, Jamie,” he whispered, his hot breath making her shiver. “I’m going to know you better than you know yourself. And I’m going to give you pleasure you’ve never even dreamed of.”
Then he stepped away, and, before she could catch her breath, she heard the front door close.
When she got it together enough to walk, she went to the couch and took off the top of the gold box. Two dozen red roses were flared beautifully, the long stems stripped of any thorns. She picked up the small card lying to the side of the flowers: “Dear Jamie, I dreamed about us. You had roses. See you tonight, Chase.”
She picked up the box and brought it to her face so she could smell the flowers. His scent lingered, despite the sweet aroma of the gift. She could still feel his hard chest, his big hands, his soft, talented mouth.
Oh boy. She was in trouble. Bad trouble. She headed for the kitchen and a vase. Her first flowers, ever. And they were from a man who was from a completely foreign world, a man with enough experience to host his own radio sex show.
She put the box on the counter and stared out her window. The view from here sucked. It was just another building. And when she looked down, all she saw was a walkway where no one ever walked.
She couldn’t let him into her life, not even for a moment. He was dangerous. He did scary things to her body. To her mind. Given even the slightest opportunity, he’d find out. Even if he never touched her down there, he’d know. He’d see it in her eyes, feel it when she trembled in his arms. And if he found out—the rest of the world would find out, and where would she be then?
No one had ever given her roses before. Because no one had ever been close enough before. She’d been busy with school, with the radio show. She’d never dreamed things would happen so quickly for her, or so publicly. But they had, and here she was.
Whittaker was right. She was a fraud. The honorable thing to do would be to quit. But that would kill her. She’d never loved anything the way she loved her show, loved its callers. And she knew she was helping. Honestly.
There was just the one problem, the one that could ruin everything if it ever got out. The fact that she was, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, a virgin.
4
JAMIE GOT to the station a little after five-thirty. Determined not to dig herself in deeper, she had spent the day trying to figure out a way to extricate herself from this mess without ending up fired. Unfortunately, all the ideas she’d come up with so far required either some form of magic or breaking several major laws.
She stopped at the reception desk, where the night guy, Geoffrey, smiled broadly as he gathered her mail. Over six foot five and thin as a rail, the twenty-year-old had neon-orange hair and more piercings than her aunt Emma’s pin cushion. The pierced body parts were offset, of course, by tattoos ranging from the sublime (a perfect, tiny red heart at the base of his neck) to the ridiculous (Bart Simpson, bent over, pants down, eyes drawn on the buttocks).
She
