With her eyes closed, she pressed the book to her chest. She wasn’t swearing off men, just foolish dating of the wrong sort of man. Her door was wide open to Mr. Right. Absolutely. And if she met a guy with Mr. Right potential, they’d just have to take it slow and steady. That might leave her frustrated, but that was a state of being Joan could take care of on her own. And with a book like this…
Her fingers caressed the book as her mind wandered. It would be so easy. To take the book upstairs. To curl up naked under the crisp, cool sheets. And then to slowly, so slowly, open the book and drink in the pages.
She sighed, her body heating with anticipation. She knew this book. Every word, every nuance. Knew which passages were written with a light, almost humorous, hand, and which passages spoke to her soul, enticing her to stroke her breasts, her belly, and then dip her fingers down, down, down.
She shivered, and then, pulling herself together, firmly returned the book to its place on the shelf. It was almost dawn. She needed her rest. She did not need to lose herself in the steamy heat of erotic prose.
Still…
She paused, her hand hovering near the book. The store was closed on Sunday, so she could rest all day if she wanted to. Besides, she wasn’t sleepy. Just the opposite. She was wired. And the delicious prose was a distraction. Practically a necessity. After all, she’d sworn off casual sex and random dating. No little touches on the dance floor, no tickling of toes under the back booth at Xylo’s. And absolutely no doing the wild thing. Definitely torture.
If she had the company of a warm book, though…well, a book and her imagination could make all the difference in the world.
Convinced, Joan slipped The Pleasures of a Young Woman back off the shelf. With a little sigh, she held it close, and then headed up the stairs to her apartment and to her bed.
A glass of wine, the faint strains of music and the pages of this book. Heaven. Or, at least, as close as she could get to heaven by herself.
“NOW THERE’S a looker,” Leo said, pointing across the smoke-filled SoHo bar at a sultry redhead in too-tight Lycra who looked like she’d paid mightily for hair, tits and ass. “Bet she’d be a tiger between the sheets.”
Bryce shot his attorney a frown, swirling the glass in his hand so that the ice rattled against the side. He took a sip, letting his gaze skim down the woman as the Scotch did a slow burn down his throat. “Not bad,” he said, but without much enthusiasm.
“What’s the matter?” Leo prompted. “Not your type?”
“I don’t have a type,” Bryce said. If a woman struck his fancy, he was more than willing to schedule time for her between the sheets. But a type? What was the point? Besides, he wasn’t on the lookout for a woman to take up permanent residence in his life. He didn’t have the time or the inclination, and he sure as hell didn’t need the distraction.
“You ought to consider settling down,” Leo said. “It would be good for your image.”
“And she’s the kind of woman I should install in a house in the suburbs?” Bryce asked, nodding toward the redhead.
Leo scowled. “No, she’s the kind of woman you screw.”
Bryce had to laugh. Leave it to Leo to get to the heart of the matter. Hell, that was what made him such a damn good attorney.
“Get it out of your system,” Leo said, “and then come talk to me. Marjorie knows a lot of nice women who’d love to land you as a husband.”
Bryce shook his head, interested in neither landing nor being landed. He didn’t have the time for the sort of real relationship that would provide a solid foundation for marriage. Of course, considering his own parents’ marriage, Bryce had wondered if that mythical solid foundation even existed. He’d thought they’d figured it out. And then ten years ago their idyllic life had crashed and burned. His mother had been having an affair. A long-standing one, apparently, and she’d run off with her lover. All along, she’d put up the perfect front, projected the perfect illusion. And Bryce had never even had a clue.
He didn’t intend to let history repeat itself.
“What do you say?” Leo prodded. “The media’s been all over this Carpenter Shipping deal. Three hundred jobs, Bryce. That’s a lot of folks out of work. They’re saying you don’t care about the little people.”
Bryce ran a hand through his hair. “I know what they say, Leo. I also know what they don’t say—that whenever I buy a company and trim the fat, the business increases its efficiency by over twenty percent. That’s a lot of extra cash in the investors’ pockets, you know.”
Leo raised a hand. “I know.”
But Bryce wasn’t to be placated. “And why doesn’t the press ever report how we try to help the folks who end up out of work? No one ever does a story on how much severance we pay or about the people we’ve helped find jobs.”
He knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t help it. He’d worked his way up in the world, and no one had handed him any breaks. He’d bought his first building at nineteen, when he was just a kid earning a living doing construction. The ramshackle building in the warehouse district of Austin, Texas, had caught his eye—some hidden potential had been peeking out from under the grime and calling to him. He’d taken on extra jobs, pushing himself to the brink of exhaustion just so he could scrape together the down payment.
Two years later, he’d fixed the place up, sold it, and turned a tidy profit. He’d liked the cash, but, even more, he’d liked the thrill of putting the deal together. He’d reinvested his profits, turned a few more land deals, expanded into Dallas and Houston, and made his first million nine days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. A small-town boy done good. And he’d just kept moving up from there.
Now Worthington Industries bought and sold companies. He had offices in Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and New York, and spent more time traveling than he did in his own house. As president and CEO, Bryce would find a company with a good product and a solid core of staff, but one that was weighted down with debt and excessive overhead. He’d buy it cheap, clean it up, and then sell it again, often to the employee-investors, who ended up buying a company that was more streamlined and profitable than the one they’d started with.
Yes, some people lost jobs, but that was the nature of the beast. And business wasn’t a charity. The point was to make as much money as possible for as many people as possible.
“I’m just saying that image is everything,” Leo said. “And your image would be a lot softer if you had a woman in the kitchen and a few kiddos playing in the backyard.”
“I’m paying you to be my attorney, Leo,” Bryce said, an edge to his voice, “not my public relations guru. And certainly not my social director.”
“Marj has been on my case for years about finding you a nice girl,” Leo said, ignoring Bryce’s gibes.
“Who says I’m interested in nice?” Bryce retorted, mostly to egg Leo on. “Besides, my image is fine.” At thirty-six, Bryce was one of the wealthiest and most eligible men in America. He had a love-hate relationship with the press, who—if they weren’t busy reporting that his latest deal was a threat to the civilized world—tended to fawn all over him because of his looks and his money. Considering how many magazine
