Blush Read online

  Amazingly, she’d fallen asleep exactly as he’d left her. Legs dangling over the edge of the counter, a buffet for his dining pleasure. And holy God, had he dined!

  Dined and dashed apparently. There was no sign of him. And it wasn’t as though she could yell his name. Mia had no frigging idea what it was.

  Her only nod to being dressed was having an arm in one sleeve of her silk robe. One hundred percent vanilla all the way, in her whole life she’d never had sex anywhere but in her bed, lights off. Never done anything more adventurous sexually than receive oral. Once. She was a missionary position woman. As for oral—she preferred being the giver than the receiver. She liked to be the one in control. And a woman was never more in control than when she had a guy’s penis in her mouth.

  She liked sex. Sex was good. Hence hiring someone to take care of the needs a BOB just couldn’t meet. She’d wanted heat. The friction of skin.

  She’d gotten that. In spades.

  Last night had been . . . incredible, shocking, incendiary. But last night she’d been on the receiving end, and she’d been so aroused, so turned on by him, there hadn’t been time to be embarrassed or have second thoughts about her loss of control.

  It took one split second with him inside her for her to get over the anger he had inspired. Once she was over it she’d been receptive to anything and everything he did. Dear Lord, the man knew how to give, and obtain, pleasure.

  She’d never felt more vulnerable in her life. Exposed, wanting. Needing. Her, all but naked, and him, merely unzipping his jeans before taking her. She’d somehow just given him all the power, and God! It had been liberating, and a powerful release of all her inhibitions.

  Now, as she rolled off the center island in the brightly lit kitchen, Mia felt both embarrassed and shocked at how uninhibited she’d been. Now she had third and fourth thoughts about hiring him.

  She was supposed to call the shots. She always called the shots. With him in power, she felt more alive, more aware of her body, than she’d ever felt in her life. The guy knew his way around a woman’s body. He was a professional, after all.

  As she ran lightly up the stairs, she debated calling him back. He could teach her things she didn’t know she wanted to learn.

  “Of course,” Mia mused as she turned on the leaky shower in the master bedroom, postponing the cleanup downstairs for after she’d showered and had at least two cups of coffee, “when would I have the opportunity to use what I learn?” Showers right now were fast. The house needed a new hot-water tank, and the water came out in a lukewarm drizzle, necessitating speed.

  “But why wait for an opportunity? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is?” She smiled as she dressed, a first. Usually not a lot of smiles in her mornings. Most days she got ready listening to the stock reports, or to one of her assistants somewhere in Blush’s worldwide offices giving her the day’s agenda, or . . . business. Always business first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

  Now that she was away, she had to trust that her business was in capable hands, because she had only one contact right now, her right-hand man, Todd. So, with no business to consume her every waking hour, she had other things on her mind.

  A very, very long to-do list to work on, for one, and he had just helped her accomplish a very important item.

  Number seventeen. SWAS. Sex with a stranger. A dangerous stranger at that. Cross that off her list. Several times.

  After putting on a large pot of coffee, Mia clasped her hair back in a stubby tail with a giant shocking-pink plastic clip purchased at Walmart. That trip had been number fourteen on her list. An eye-opening experience, too much fun to have missed. There was a whole other world out here that she’d never been exposed to. Walmart. Driving. Filling her new truck with gas, number five. Simple things that everybody took for granted.

  She’d call Bon Temps later and have a do-over. She hadn’t given them her number. Only one person had that, and that was Todd. “A do-me-over.” She smiled, wiping her hands as she looked out of the window toward the broad, majestic Spanish moss–draped oaks bordering the swampy wet edges of the bayou. From there the water glistened between patches of water hyacinths and the trunks of the cypresses.

  The grass was overgrown and gone to seed, heavy heads sparkling as the sun broke through the rain clouds that had come in last night. That lazy old alligator was still there, sunning himself, which made her loath to go to the bayou side of the house to start clearing ten years of crap off the lawn. Fortunately, Marcel Latour, recommended by the clerk at the local hardware store, was a gardener, and he would be over later to start the massive cleanup necessary on the property. There were things Mia was willing to give a shot, but yanking out a snake-infested jungle single-handedly was not one of them. She’d hired him to do the things she wasn’t interested in learning.

  The burner phone rang as she swept up the dead cookies littered around the island. Todd. They’d been raised from toddler age on all things Blush. They were more like brother and sister than cousins, and he was her best friend and trusted confidant.

  Mia grabbed the receiver out of the sugar canister. “Hi.”

  “You sound very chirpy for a woman afraid for her life who’s hiding out somewhere beachy and sunny and looking hot in a bikini—unless it’s a nudist beach, in which case, go you.” Todd didn’t waste time taking a breath when he talked. Even when talking, he was always go, go, go.

  Mia didn’t correct him. Fat drops of rain played a musical score as it plopped into the buckets and on the tin roof, and the only beach around was the muddy strip of sand her gator friend slept on. Tucking the phone between ear and shoulder, she picked up the large chunks of broken crystal and used her toe to open the trash can so she could dispose of the evidence of last night’s passion. Her skin felt hot.

  “No one knows where I am.” She poured a large mug of steaming coffee, and doctored it standing by the sink. “Not even you.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way until we figure this out, ’k?”

  Suddenly chilled, Mia dropped down onto a ladder-back chair beside the glass table in front of the window, bare feet crunching on broken cookies and flower stems still scattered on the floor. Someone had attempted to kill her. Several times. Blush’s security had yet to nail down any solid suspects.

  “Clearly an incompetent killer, since he didn’t pull it off,” she muttered, righting a bar stool she’d kicked over as she climaxed the second time. The time she straddled and rode him, at his urging, as though there were no tomorrow. The irony had been lost upon her as she spent long, long moments clenching her thighs and relishing the slide of him in and out of her, but now, in the daylight, the meaning of no tomorrow brought reality back with a bang.

  Someone wanted her dead. The first clue was a drive-by shooting six months earlier, which had scared the crap out of her. The scar on her upper arm was from the second shooting, late at night, in her San Francisco office.

  A month later the brake line on the Mercedes was cut. Hardly original. And she hadn’t even been in the car when Carlos, her driver, crashed. He and her assistant who’d been with him in the car had both had minor scrapes and bruises, and the car was totaled. She’d wanted it in red anyway.

  The elevator “accident,” at least, was somewhat creative. But only Beverly in Accounting had broken her arm. Amelia had just been shaken and annoyed.

  The sniper shot through her office window had been the last straw.

  Todd Wentworth, her trusted cousin/best friend/VP of marketing, was sure she had an angel on her shoulder. Which would be kind of creepy. No, the would-be assassin was an idiot, or she just had exceptionally good luck.

  Probably both.

  But as Todd pointed out—repeatedly—even an idiot could get lucky. It would only take once. Not that she planned on being dead anytime in the next, say, fifty years. But both Todd and Blush’s head of security, Miles Basson, had, in no uncertain terms, encouraged her to disappear under deep cover until
they could figure out who wanted her dead. A woman with her wealth, connections, and power made enemies. That was the nature of owning an international multibillion-dollar cosmetics company like Blush.

  “There’s news?” She placed her ankle on her knee to brush crumbs off her bare foot. “Who—”

  “No, sorry. No new developments. Miles is working on it. He’s good, you know he is. He’ll figure this out and we’ll bring you home soon. All you’ll have to show for this experience is a great tan and a few extra pounds.”

  Todd and Miles were bending over backward to figure out the who and why. In the meantime she was to keep a low profile and pretend she was on the vacation the rest of the world had been told she was on.

  With cash, and strong motivation, Amelia had taken a circuitous route from San Francisco to Switzerland, where she’d procured a new identity. The papers weren’t that good, but the guy she found in Prague did a better job, and the woman in London an even better one. She returned to the States and changed her identity once again. Now she was Mia Hayward. Apropos of nothing and nowhere. Nothing to connect her to Amelia Wentworth.

  Really, all that running from pillar to post, all the name changes, all the freaking skulking, had become exhausting. She’d found the house in this small town in Louisiana online, bought it sight unseen, and was quite prepared to make it charming and livable for the foreseeable future. Or until her cousin told her it was safe to return to San Francisco.

  It was difficult being Mia Hayward. No goals, no purpose, no action. Hence the long list. What did people who were married to their jobs do all day if not their jobs? She was finding out. This had been the longest freaking month of her life. There was a reason why she rarely took vacations. She was a workaholic, always had been. The thought of spending days lazing on a beach made her antsy. She needed projects. Deadlines. Challenges.

  “How are Stephanie and her team doing on final tests?” she asked, switching feet to brush away yesterday’s cookies. She now had to add Sweep to the list. The kitchen floor was a shambles. Considering what he’d done to her right here, Mia was surprised her brain hadn’t been swept just as clean as the island.

  “Pretty much on target.”

  Pretty much on target was Todd’s shorthand for Something’s fucked-up. “Crap, what’s the delay?”

  Their first foray into the lower-end market. The ingenious 3-D printer would give Blush customers the ability to produce their own makeup, at minimal cost, from their home computers. It was going to revolutionize drugstore makeup purchases for the public, making the choice of colors unlimited and inexpensive. It might be gimmicky, but she knew it would bring in a fortune and, more important, bring those same drugstore customers up to the lux lines as they got older. Blush planned to offer the 3-D printers to its customers for home use by Christmas.

  “How are the lifeguards?” Todd asked innocently.

  She knew he had it handled. She had to stop the long-distance micromanaging. “Will we be able to go into production in less than the ninety days scheduled?”

  “Looks like,” Todd said. “Shipped the first of the sponge compacts out yesterday,” he added, switching gears. He knew her well.

  Mia didn’t like to be bogged down with details. She had competent people in key positions because she trusted them to do their jobs. Todd was her right-hand man, and everything was funneled through him before getting to her.

  “Department stores have all exceeded their initial projections. Offering a one-stop SPF of fifty, plus BB coverage—gold. Shiseido is going to pee their pants when they get wind of these new products.” Mia cut to the chase. “We’ll need gold to pull off this buyout. As good as it is, a twelve point three uptick in sales isn’t going to solve that problem.”

  “Yeah, well, the printer and this innovative compact are going to pull in half the gold. We’ll come up with something for the other half.”

  “We’ll have another fresh infusion with the twenty-eight-day antiaging kits,” Mia pointed out, even though they both knew she needed millions of dollars more to achieve the buyout. “They start rolling out tomorrow, two weeks early. Yay us. So we can add another eleven point six percent to our stash. Still not enough to fund the LBO without Davis and Kent backing me.”

  The investment firm was still deciding whether they were prepared to do the leverage buyout so that Mia/Amelia could go through with her plan to take the company private and buy out the rest of Blush’s shareholders. It was all hush-hush right now. The waiting was the hard part. She hated waiting for anything, but Mia’s strength was her ability to hold her cards close to her chest, and her infinite patience.

  “Maybe. But they haven’t said no, and these numbers will make you, and Blush, look a lot more attractive. I’m not worried.”

  Mia got to her feet and started picking up the broken plates and other items swept off the island in the heat of passion last night. Piling the shattered cookies on the broken plates, she carried the mess to dump in the trash under the chipped enamel sink, holding the phone under her chin. “Still not e—”

  “I know. We’re working on it. Are you okay? You sound out of breath.”

  “I had wild monkey sex last night.” She’d always had lists, but none like this. Those were all business related. This list was personal. As Mia Hayward, Amelia now had the opportunity, and unprecedented time, to indulge her every fantasy. None of which had anything to do with Blush.

  So, for the moment, she had complete anonymity to work her way up and down her list in any damn order she felt like. Not systematically or in logical order, as she usually did things, but in a wildly exciting, out-of-order, spontaneous, fun way, as things came to her.

  Spontaneity was number one on the list. Check. Check. And check.

  She’d jumped from number eight, Bake cookies, to number seventeen, Sex with a stranger. Fast and furious sex in the bright light of her kitchen. And the stranger had earned every damned penny of his fee.

  Which was still in the envelope shoved to the back of the counter by their energetic exertions. Insertions. She smiled. God. She couldn’t believe what she’d done the night before. Couldn’t believe she’d let herself be swept away without her usual inhibitions or caution. Dear Lord. It had been liberating. Exciting. Mind-blowing. There was a lot to be said for anonymous, uncomplicated sex. A hell of a lot.

  “Holy shit, woman,” Todd said. “Don’t stop in the middle of a sentence like that! Spill!”

  She smiled. “Number seventeen on the list. Sex with a stranger. Done, done, and oh my God—done again.”

  There was a pause, before he said, with rude incredulity, “Say what? I thought you just said you had sex last night.”

  “Multiple times, and multiple O’s.” The breathy quality of her voice gave way to a long pause as her cousin thought about that.

  “Jesus. Are you having sex right now?”

  Mia laughed as she dropped back into the chair and swung her bare feet up on the table. Another first. “I wish. No. Just cleaning up all the crap he swept to the floor when he did me on the kitchen counter last night.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t kidding.”

  A blush she thought herself incapable of bloomed as her face heated. “Apparently this place employs very qualified staff. Very qualified.”

  “He was a rent-a-fuck? Who are you, and what have you done with my favorite cousin?”

  “I’m fully embracing Mi—my new persona.”

  Todd breathed out a whistle. “I love this chick.”

  She grinned, then swung her feet to the floor. “I’m starting to, too. It was”—she closed her eyes—“amazing.”

  “What did he look like? Hot and sexy, or homely, diligent, and excellent at his job?”

  “About six three, dark, shoulder-length hair, five-o’clock shadow, superdark brown eyes. Not an ounce of body fat. Broad shoulders, rock-hard . . . abs, strong hands. And big . . . feet.”

  “Are you making him up? This is a real guy, right? You aren’t anthr
opomorphizing BOB, are you? Quite understandable, of course; we all do it.”

  Mia plucked a crumb from between her toes. Her new pinkie toe ring glinted as she rotated her foot to admire it. Maybe she’d get a tattoo. . . . “A real, heart-pounding, flesh-and-blood man of gigantic proportions.”

  “Judas! Be still, my jealous heart. Not to be prurient, but what size condom did he wear? Tell me it was a Highway to Heaven?”

  “Oh, shit!” She suddenly remembered the enormous box of condoms in the drawer in her bedside table. Condoms had been the last thing on her mind because he’d driven her mindless in the damned kitchen, and the first time he’d finally used his penis, he hadn’t given her warning. She made a mental note to keep a handful in every room of the house from now on. “You just made that up.”

  “No, actually, I— Holy crap, Louise! You rode this stud bareback?”

  Mia shook her head with a combo of amazement and appreciation, and felt a rush of residual heat. She ached in places she’d never ached before, her breasts felt tight, her nipples hard with arousal just thinking about the hot, wet suckle of his mouth on her sensitized body. “He didn’t give me time to think of anything other than what he . . . gave me.”

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “My first screaming orgasm. One of many.”

  “Jesus!”

  “That name came up several times,” Mia told him, voice dry. “Yesterday, I must admit, was a red-letter day. I baked cookies last night. Number four on my list. And while the fruits of my labor were a casualty of kitchen counter sex, I consider them a win. Today, number five: Following a recipe with more than six ingredients. Hear me roar.”

  Todd didn’t comment on her change of subject. “All the way here in San Francisco, babe. I’m proud of you. You’ll bring all these news skills home with you soon.”

  “By the time this is all over, I’ll weigh three times what I weighed before I left.”

  “You can afford a few extra pounds. What’s on your schedule today?”

  The sun had vanished in the last few minutes, and rain pounded the windows, making musical notes on the tin roof, and not-so-musical notes as it filled the strategically placed buckets throughout the house. “Remodeling the kitchen is top priority. I’ll hire someone to tackle that. I have a company coming to replace the roof in a couple of weeks. And I need to figure out if I want to tackle the porch myself or hire out—”