Taking the Boss to Bed

by Joss Wood

  Jesus. He’d kissed his oldest friend’s baby sister.

  Ryan rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger. With everything else going on in his life, he’d completely forgotten that she was moving here and that Neil had asked him to make contact with her. He’d intended to once his schedule lightened but he never expected her to be at this post-awards function. And he certainly hadn’t expected the shy teenager to have morphed into this stunningly beautiful, incredibly sexy woman; a woman who had his nerve endings buzzing. On the big screen in his head he could see them in their own private movie. She’d be naked and up against a wall, her legs around his waist and her head tipped back as he feasted on that soft spot where her neck and shoulders met...

  Ryan blew out a breath. He was a movie producer, had dabbled in directing and he often envisioned scenes in his head, but never had one been so sexual, so sensual. And one starring his best and oldest friend’s kid sister? That was just plain weird.

  Sexy.

  But still weird.

  As if she could feel his eyes on her, Jaci turned her head and looked directly at him. The challenging lift of her eyebrow suggested that she’d realized that he’d connected the dots and that she was wondering what he intended to do about it.

  Nothing, he decided, breaking their long, sexually charged stare. He was going to do jack about it because his sudden and very unwelcome attraction to Jaci was something he didn’t have time to deal with, something he didn’t want to deal with. His life was complicated enough without adding another level of crazy to it.

  Frankly, he’d had enough crazy to last a lifetime.

  * * *

  Jaci stumbled through the doors to Starfish Films at five past nine the next morning, juggling her tote bag, her mobile, two scripts and a mega-latte, and decided that she couldn’t function on less than three hours of sleep anymore. If someone looked up the definition of cranky in the dictionary, her picture next to the word would explain it all.

  It hadn’t helped that she’d spent most of the night reluctantly reliving that most excellent kiss, recalling the strength of that masculine, muscular body, the fresh, sexy smell of Ryan’s skin. It had been a long time since she’d lost any sleep over a man—even during the worst of their troubles she’d never sacrificed any REMs for Clive—and she didn’t like it. Ryan was sex on a side plate but she wasn’t going to see him again. Ever. Besides, she hadn’t relocated cities to dally with hot men, or any men. This job was what was important, the only thing that was important.

  This was her opportunity to carve out a space for herself in the film industry, to find her little light to shine in. It might not be as bold or as bright as her mother’s but it would be hers.

  Frowning at the empty offices, she stepped up to her desk and dropped the scripts to the seat of her chair. This was the right choice to make, she told herself. She could’ve stayed in London; it was familiar and she knew how to tread water. Except that she felt the deep urge to swim...to do more and be more. She had been given an opportunity to change her life and, although she was soul-deep scared, she was going to run with it. She was going to prove, to herself and to her family, that she wasn’t as rudderless, as directionless—as useless—as they thought she was.

  This time, this job, was her one chance to try something different, something totally out of her comfort zone. This was her time, her life, her dream, and nothing would distract her from her goal of writing the best damn scripts she could.

  Especially not a man with blue-gray eyes and a body that made her hormones hum.

  Shona peeked into their office and jerked her head. “Not the best day to be late, sunshine. A meeting has started in the conference room and I suggest you get there.”

  “Meeting?” Jaci yelped. She was a writer. She didn’t do meetings.

  “The boss men are back and they want to touch base,” Shona explained, tapping a rolled-up newspaper against her thigh. “Let’s go.”

  A few minutes later, Shona pushed through the door at the top of the stairs and turned right down the identical hallway to the floor below. Corporate office buildings were all the same, Jaci thought, though she did like the framed movie posters from the 1940s and 1950s that broke up the relentless white walls.

  Shona sighed and covered her mouth as she yawned. “We’re all, including the boss men, a little tired and a lot hungover. Why we have to have a meeting first thing in the morning is beyond me. Jax should know better. Expect a lot of barking.”

  Jaci shrugged, not particularly perturbed. She’d lived with volatile people her entire life and had learned how to fly under the radar. Shona stopped in front of an open door, placed her hand between Jaci’s shoulder blades and pushed her into the room. Jaci stumbled forward and knocked the arm of a man walking past. His coffee cup flew out of his hand toward his chest, and his cream dress shirt, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, bloomed with patches of espresso.

  He dropped a couple of blue curses. “This is all I freakin’ need.”

  Jaci froze to the floor as her eyes traveled up his coffee-soaked chest, past that stubborn, stubble-covered chin to that sensual mouth she’d kissed last night. She stopped at his scowling eyes, heavy brows pulled together. Oh, jeez...no.

  Just no.

  “Jaci?” Coffee droplets fell from his wrist and hand to the floor. “What the hell?”

  “Jax, this is JC Brookes, our new scriptwriter,” Thom said from across the room, his feet on the boardroom table and a cup of coffee resting on his flat stomach. “Jaci, Ryan ‘Jax’ Jackson.”

  * * *

  He needed a box of aspirin, to clean up—the paper napkins Shona handed him weren’t any match for a full cup of coffee—and to climb out of the rabbit hole he’d climbed into. He’d spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about that slim body under his hands, the scent of her light, refreshing perfume still in his nose, the dazzling heat and spice of her mouth.

  He’d finally dozed off, irritated and frustrated, hours after he climbed into bed, and his few hours of sleep, starring a naked Jaci, hadn’t been restful at all. As a result, he didn’t feel as if he had the mental stamina to deal with the fact that the woman starring in his pornographic dreams last night was not only his friend’s younger sister but also the screenwriter for his latest project.

  Seriously? Why was life jerking his chain?

  His mind working at warp speed, he flicked Jaci a narrowed-eyed look. “JC Brookes? You’re him? Her?”

  Jaci folded her arms across her chest and tapped one booted foot. How could she look so sexy in the city’s uniform of basic black? Black turtleneck and black wide-leg pants... It would be boring as hell but she’d wrapped an aqua cotton scarf around her neck, and blue-shaded bracelets covered half her arm. He shouldn’t be thinking about her clothes—or what they covered—right now, but he couldn’t help himself. She looked, despite the shadows under those hypnotically brown eyes, as hot as hell. Simply fantastic. Ryan swallowed, remembering how feminine she felt in his arms, her warm, silky mouth, the way she melted into him.

  Focus, Jackson.

  “What the hell? You’re a scriptwriter?” Ryan demanded, trying to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. “I didn’t know that you write!”

  Jaci frowned. “Why should you? We haven’t seen each other for twelve years.”

  “Neil didn’t tell me.” Ryan, still holding his head, kneaded his temples with his thumb and index finger. “He should’ve told me.”

  Now he sounded like a whining child. Freakin’ perfect.

  “He doesn’t know about the scriptwriting,” Jaci muttered, and Ryan, despite his fuzzy shock, heard the tinge of hurt in her voice. “I just told him and the rest of my family that I was relocating to New York for a bit.”

  Ryan pulled his sticky shirt off his chest and looked at Thom again. “And she got the
job how?”

  Thom sent him a what-the-hell look. “Her agent submitted her script, our freelance reader read it, then Wes, then me, then you read the script. We all liked it but you fell in love with it! Light coming on yet?”

  Ryan looked toward the window, unable to refute Thom’s words. He’d loved Jaci’s script, had read it over and over, feeling that tingle of excitement every time. It was an action comedy but one with heart; it felt familiar and fresh, funny and emotional.

  And Jaci, his old friend’s little sister, the woman he’d kissed the hell out of last night, was—thanks to fate screwing with him—the creator of his latest, and most expensive, project to date.

  And his biggest and only investor, Leroy Banks, had hit on her and now thought that she was his girlfriend.

  Oh, and just for kicks and giggles, he really wanted to do her six ways to Sunday.

  “Could this situation be any more messed up?” Ryan grabbed the back of the closest chair and dropped his head, ignoring the puddles of coffee on the floor. He groaned aloud. Banks thought that his pseudo girlfriend was the hottest thing on two legs. Ryan understood why. He also thought she was as sexy as hell.

  She was also now the girlfriend he couldn’t break up with because she was his damned scriptwriter, one of—how had Banks put it?—his key people!

  “I have no idea why you are foaming at the mouth, dude,” Thom complained, dropping his feet to the floor. He shrugged. “You and Jaci knew each other way back when, so what? She was employed by us on her merits, with none of us knowing of her connection to you. End of story. So can we just get on with this damn meeting so that I can go back to my office and get horizontal on my couch?”

  “Uh...no, I suggest you wait until after I’ve dropped the next bombshell.” Shona tossed the open newspaper onto the boardroom table and it slid across the polished top. As it passed, Ryan slapped his hand on it to stop its flight. His heart stumbled, stopped, and when it resumed its beat was erratic.

  In bold color and filling half the page was a picture taken last night in the reception area outside the ballroom of the Forrester-Graham. One of his hands cradled a bright blond head, the other palmed a very excellent butt. Jaci’s arms were tight around his neck, her mouth was under his, and her long lashes were smudges on her cheek.

  The headline screamed Passion for Award-Winning Producer!

  Someone had snapped them? When? And why hadn’t he noticed? Ryan moved his hand to read the small amount of text below the picture.

  Ryan Jackson, award-winning producer of Stand Alone—the sci-fi box office hit that is enthralling audiences across the country—celebrates in the arms of JC Brookes at the Television and Film Awards after-party last night. JC Brookes is a scriptwriter employed by Starfish Films and is very well-known in England as the younger daughter of Fleet Street editor Archie Brookes-Lyon and his multi-award-winning author wife, Priscilla. She recently broke off her longstanding engagement to Clive Egglestone, projected to be a future prime minister of England, after he was implicated in a series of sexual scandals.

  What engagement? What sexual scandals? More news that his ever-neglectful friend had failed to share. Jaci had been engaged to a politician? Ryan just couldn’t see it. But that wasn’t important now.

  Ryan pushed the newspaper down the table to Thom. When his friend lifted his eyes to meet his again, his worry and horror were reflected in Thom’s expression. “Well, hell,” he said.

  Ryan looked around the room at the nosy faces of his most trusted staff before pulling a chair away from the table and dropping into it. It wasn’t in his nature to explain himself but this one time he supposed, very reluctantly, that it was necessary. “Jaci and I know each other. She’s an old friend’s younger sister. We are not in a relationship.”

  “Doesn’t explain the kiss,” Thom laconically stated.

  “Jaci, on impulse, kissed me because Leroy was hitting on her and she needed an escape plan.”

  That explained her first kiss. It certainly didn’t explain why he went back for a second, and hotter, taste. But neither Thom nor his staff needed to know that little piece of information. Ever.

  “I told him that she was my girlfriend and that we hadn’t seen each other for a while.” Ryan kept his attention on Thom. “I had it all planned. When next we met and if Leroy asked about her, I was going to tell him that we’d had a fight and that she’d packed her bags and returned to the UK. I did not consider the possibility that my five-minute girlfriend would also be my new scriptwriter.”

  Thom shrugged. “This isn’t a big deal. Tell him that you fought and that she left. How is he going to know?”

  Ryan pulled in a deep breath. “Oh, maybe because he told me, last night, that he wants to meet the key staff involved in the project, and that includes the damned scriptwriter.”

  Thom groaned. “Oh, God.”

  “Not sure how much help he is going to be.” Ryan turned around and looked at a rather bewildered Jaci, who had yet to move away from the door. “My office. Now.”

  Well, hell, he thought as he marched down the hallway to his office. It seemed that his morning could, after all, slide further downhill than he’d expected.

  Three

  Jaci waited in the doorway to Ryan’s office, unsure whether she should step into his chaotic space—desks and chairs were covered in folders, scripts and stacks of papers—or whether she should she just stay where she was. He was in his private bathroom and she could hear a tap running and, more worrying, the steady stream of inventive cursing.

  Okay, crazy, crazy morning and she had no idea what had just happened. It felt as if everyone in that office had been speaking in subtext and that she was the only one who did not know the language. All she knew for sure was that Jax was Ryan and Ryan was Neil’s friend—and her new boss—and that he was superpissed.

  And judging by their collective horror, she also knew that Banks’s clumsy pass and her kissing Ryan had consequences bigger than she’d imagined.

  Ryan walked out of the bathroom, shirtless and holding another dress shirt, pale green this time, in his right hand. He was coffee-free and that torso, Jaci thought on an appreciative, silent sigh, could grace the cover of any male fitness magazine. His shoulders were broad and strongly muscled as were his biceps and his pecs. And that stomach, sinuously ridged, was a work of art. Jaci felt that low buzz in her stomach, the tingling spreading across her skin, and wondered why it had taken her nearly twenty-eight years to feel true attraction, pure lust. Ryan Jackson just had to breathe to make her quiver...

  “You used to be Ryan Bradshaw. Why Jackson?” Jaci blurted. It was all she could think of to say apart from “Kiss me like you did last night.” Since she was already in trouble, she decided to utter the only other thought she had to break the tense, sexually saturated silence.

  Ryan blinked, frowned and then shook his shirt out, pulling the fabric over one arm. “You heard that Chad was my father, that Ben was my brother, and you assumed that I used the same surname. I don’t,” Ryan said in a cool voice.

  She stepped inside and shut the door. “Why not?”

  “I met Chad for the first time when I was fourteen, when the court appointed me to live with him after my mother’s death. He dumped my mother two seconds after she told him she was pregnant and her name appeared on my birth certificate. I’d just lost her, and I wasn’t about to lose her name, as well.” Ryan machine-gunned his words and Jaci tried to keep up.

  Ryan rubbed his hand over his face. “God, what does that have to do with anything? Moving rapidly on...”

  Pity, Jaci thought. She would’ve liked to hear more about his childhood, about his relationship with his famous brother and father, which was, judging by his pain-filled and frustrated eyes, not a happy story.

  “Getting back to the here and now, how the hell am I going to fix this?
” Ryan demanded, and Jaci wasn’t sure whether he was asking the question of her or himself.

  “Look, I’m really sorry that I caused trouble for you by kissing you. It was an impulsive action to get away from Frog Man.”

  Ryan shoved his other arm into his sleeve and pulled the edges of his shirt together, found the buttons and their corresponding holes without dropping his eyes from her face.

  “He was persistent. And slimy. And he wouldn’t take the hint!” Jaci continued. “I’m sorry that the kiss was captured on camera. I know what an invasion of your privacy that can be.”

  Ryan glanced at the paper that he’d dropped onto his desk. “You seem to know what you’re talking about.” Ryan tipped his head. “Sexual scandals? Engaged?”

  “All that and more.” Jaci tossed her head in defiance and held his eyes. “You can find it all online if you want some spicy bedtime reading.”

  “I don’t read trash.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell you what happened,” Jaci stated, her tone not encouraging any argument.

  “Did I ask you to?”

  Hell, he hadn’t, Jaci realized, as a red tide crept up her neck. Jeez, catch a clue. The guy kissed you. That doesn’t mean he’s interested in your history.

  Time to retreat. What had they been talking about? Ah, their kiss. “Look, if you need me to apologize to your girlfriend or wife, then I will.” She thought about adding “I won’t even tell her that you initiated the second kiss” but decided not to fan the flames.

  “I’m not involved with anyone, which is about the only silver lining there is.”

  Jaci pushed her long bangs to one side. “Then I really don’t understand what the drama is all about. We’re both single, we kissed. Yeah, it landed up in the papers, but who cares?”