Text copyright 2018 Rosalind James
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc., http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com/
Formatting by Polgarus Studio, http://www.polgarusstudio.com
Once bitten, twice shy.
Rafe Blackstone may play the sexiest werewolf superhero to ever melt a woman’s…heart…on the big screen, but Lily Hollander has already been bitten once by an actor, and once was enough. When she’s fooled all over again, it’s time to put that wayward heart in lockdown mode, especially once Rafe starts aiming his overprotective streak at her identical twin. Lily may seem like the softer side of the twinship, but nobody messes with her sister.
There’s nothing she can do about Rafe being her temporary neighbor in the mountains above Sinful, Montana, or about being forced to witness the least impressive feats of horsemanship known to man. That doesn’t mean she has to let him into her lingerie store, her heart, or any other part of her anatomy. He can just take his silver-blue wolf eyes, his rueful smile, and the rest of his gorgeous self, and…Wait, where was she again?
Oh, yeah. Are you allowed to hate your future almost-brother-in-law, if you do it really, really quietly?
Mann traoch, Gott Lauch.
Man plans, God laughs.
- Yiddish proverb
Table of Contents
1 - Like a Lion
2 - Mr. Irresistible
3 - Champagne Fizz
4 - Heart Beat
5 - An Eerie Connection
6 - Down to Zero
7 - Tables Turned
8 - Hold the Ham
9 - Best-Laid Plans
10 - Makeover. Do-Over. Whatever.
11 - Every Woman’s Type
12 - A World Full of Wonder
13 - A Survivor
14 - Disaster Calling
15 - The Porno Store
16 - Country Directions
17 - Male Perspective
18 - Fire and Ice
19 - Once Bitten, Twice Shy
20 - Unbreakable
21 - Man Card
22 - Eight Plus Three
23 - Warmer Than Wine
24 - Darkness, Devoured
25 - A Loving Heart
26 - Not the Laundromat
27 - Wild Kingdom
28 - Touch the Sky
29 - Warding Off Bears
30 - What Matters Most
31 - Bubble, Burst
32 - Best Supporting
33 - Not the Next Scene
34 - Yin to Your Yang
35 - Sliding Away
36 - Animal Battles
37 - Missing
38 - Movie Star
39 - Full Disclosure
40 - Superpowers
41 - One Starfish
42 - The Luxury of the Unexpected
43 - The Land Down Under
44 - The Black Dog Rises
45 - Butterfly, Settling
46 - Huckleberries
47 - Mates
48 - Starlight
49 - Bet Your Heart
50 - I Believe
Links
By Rosalind James
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Note: This book begins three weeks before the Epilogue of GUILTY AS SIN.
Rafe Blackstone wasn’t a prima donna, dammit. He could handle real life just fine.
You tell yourself that, mate. The windshield wipers of the midsize SUV were working their hardest, but they couldn’t keep up with the sheets of wind-driven rain battering the car, which meant that he couldn’t see a thing. He followed their motion with his eyes anyway and turned the radio up another notch, because it was preferable to the alternative: wondering whether his emergency flashers were doing the business and contemplating a possibly fiery death on the shoulder of a San Francisco freeway.
If these were his final minutes, he should be thinking something of a more elevated nature. Reflections on whether he’d made the best use of his time on Earth—the answer was probably “no”—or loving concern for his brother, who would go ahead and propose to the wrong woman in barely three weeks unless Rafe made it to Sausalito right now to persuade him that he was being a bloody fool. Instead, he sat in drenched jeans in a crippled SUV, his body rocked by the windblast from each much-too-close bus and tractor-trailer, listened to a bloke who’d clearly been smoking too much telling him that he shouldn’t worry, he should be happy, and wondered how long the car rental firm’s roadside assistance could possibly take. It had already been forty-five minutes.
Bugger that. Time to summon a little more Aussie bloke and a little less pampered actor. He stabbed at the radio’s preset button, got a blast of eighties pop, and reached over for his laptop bag. Which was why he jumped at the flash of orange light and the knock at the window. Not because he was freaked out.
He took a moment, called on thirteen years of being cool for a living, and then rolled the window down.
A fluorescent yellow rain jacket and trousers ringed with reflective stripes, a red ball cap with Bayside Automotive spelled out in white, and a stolid face fringed by brown beard. The bloke had to yell some to be heard over the rain and the roar of passing traffic. “Hey, brother,” he said. “Looks like you’ve got a problem.”
You think? Rafe thought. “Yeah,” he said. The tow truck was behind him, its lights flashing reassuringly, warding off his violent death until another day. “You could say that. I heard a clunk. Had just enough power to get to the shoulder, and then she died.”
“Uh-huh,” Ball Cap said. “See, you got your driveshaft lying under the truck. U-joint’s broke, probably. Can’t go anywhere like that.”
Rafe hauled on his patience hard. “Thanks. I saw that when I got out.”
“Rental company’s on its way with a new car,” his new mate said. “They told me to hustle, even. You’re lucky. It can take a lot longer than this. March came in like a lion for sure, huh? Come sit in the truck while I get ’er hooked up. Safer.” He peered at Rafe more closely. “Wait. Oh, hell, no. You’re kidding me. You’re what’s his name. The Beast, from those Urban Decay movies. Aren’t you? You have to be. You got those freaky wolf eyes and all.”
Rafe considered denying it, but it wasn’t going to work, not while he was still sporting the Beast’s trademark shaggy dark hair and scruff of black beard, because he’d come riding to his big brother’s rescue in the middle of filming. Denial would be a dick move anyway, after the bloke had come out in the rain.
He should’ve gone with the driver and limo. Sometimes, trying not to be an entitled bastard didn’t work out so well.
Material, he told himself, as he always did when things got dicey. Also: life. Aloud, he said, “Guilty,” grabbed his bags from the back seat, and stepped out into the deluge, where he was instantly drenched in a spray of water and blasted with the horn of another tractor-trailer. And did not jump.
His rescuer led the way to the safer side of the freeway’s shoulder and opened the passenger door of the tow truck, its roof lights turning the sheets of rain a ghastly orange. “My kid loves all that stuff,” he informed Rafe. “We should do a selfie. He’d go crazy. And hey. Get this.” His genial face shifted into a snarl. ‘I don’t have a problem. You have a problem.’ Then he laughed again and said, “Except right now, you actually do. I won’t tell my kid, though. I’ll tell him you were cool.”
/> Lily Hollander’s twin told her, “Seriously, you should stick around. We can watch a movie or something. Do some rainy-day relaxing. Except that I don’t want a manicure, so don’t ask.”
“Don’t worry,” Lily said. “I’m not going to force you into hideous beauty rituals, partly because I have another plan. This is my big chance to do some stealth comparison shopping.” She’d snatched a few midweek days away from her lingerie shop in Sinful, Montana, fleeing a storm that would close the late-season ski lifts, to visit Paige and her new partner in Sausalito. Of course, she’d only traded snow for rain, and it was still a relatively busy time of year for Sinful Desires, but…sometimes, you needed your twin, that was all. Some nights, the dark closed around you too hard.
There was only one problem. Despite having seen Paige and Jace at Christmas, she hadn’t fully grasped the extent of the change that a mere nine months had wrought in her sister’s life. It had been a while since Paige had been blissfully involved with anybody. Or Lily could admit the truth, that even though they’d both been married before, neither of them had ever had anybody look at her the way Jace was looking at Paige right now. Which was, of course, wonderful. As was the fact that Paige’s tiny, bare, no-view Outer Sunset apartment didn’t seem to be seeing much of her anymore, because she was all but moved into Jace’s luxurious houseboat. Although Jace, being Jace, was wisely not making a big deal of that.
That wasn’t the reason Lily was going shopping today, though. The real issue was that Paige had come off a four-day, forty-six-hour police workweek looking too fragile, and Lily would have bet her next La Perla shipment that all her twin wanted to do this afternoon was to have Jace take her back to bed, hold her close, and do some slow, sweet dancing to the rhythm of the rain.
Normally, it would be creepy to see that far into somebody else’s mind. But normally, that somebody wasn’t your identical twin, and you hadn’t been seeing her mind almost as clearly as your own for more than thirty years.
Lily was happy for her sister. How could she be jealous of the person she loved best in the world? Right now, that love meant getting out of Paige’s way. “We’ll spend time together tomorrow,” she told Paige, “like we planned, which will be perfect. Although, if you want to come lingerie shopping with me…”
Paige made a face, as Lily had known she would, and Lily laughed. Paige said, “While you examine the stitching on the hems and make me try everything on? Yeah, not so much.”
“Having you try things on works for me, baby,” Jace said. “As long as you bring them home.”
“Except that I wouldn’t,” Paige said. “That’s why she wants me, because she can see how the thing looks better than she could if she tried it on herself. I’m a mannequin, that’s all. And even if it was the sexiest, most gorgeous whatever-it-is you’d ever seen, all she’d do was take notes so she could get it for the shop, then send it to me two months later, once she’d bought it wholesale. Get her on the subject of retail markups sometime. You wonder why I don’t shop? Well, obviously because I hate to, but besides that.”
“Never mind,” Lily said. “You don’t have to go. That means I don’t have to listen to you whine, and also that I can have a lovely afternoon and the kind of sophisticated evening that’s hard to come by in Montana. I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll bring something back for you, something extra-special enough to pay retail for. Call it my hostess gift. Any requests?” She didn’t ask Paige, since Paige’s answer was bound to be completely unsatisfactory. She asked Jace. She’d bet he could come up with an idea.
Paige stood up, and Tobias, Jace’s enormous Ridgeback, raised his handsome head from his paws and looked alert. He’d gone for a run in the rain this morning with Paige and Jace, but he was clearly hoping for more. “I’m going to do the dishes,” Paige said, and Tobias sighed and put his head back down again. “Don’t ask Jace that in front of me. You’re supposed to be the tactful one.”
“That wasn’t tactful? I meant favorite color,” Lily lied. “I help men choose what to buy women every day. That’s my job, to help men and women please each other.”
“Ugh,” Paige said. “You sound like a sex therapist.”
“Well,” Lily said, “in a way, I suppose I am. Beautiful lingerie makes a woman feel like she deserves pleasure, and buying it for her lets a man tell her that he feels the same way.”
“No,” Paige said. “Just no. Dishes.” Jace, though, was smiling.
“All right,” Lily said when they heard the water running. “Tell me.”
“She always seems embarrassed,” he said. “Like she doesn’t want to admit she tried. Maybe if you choose it, though, so I’m sure it’s right for her…” He pulled his wallet out of his jeans and started extracting twenties. Why, Lily wondered, in the age of debit, did men still always have cash, and women almost never? Because men were less afraid of being robbed? Or was it a power thing?
This particular powerful man handed over two hundred dollars and said, “I like her best in the sweet stuff. Although if it was short, sort of a silky type of, uh, slip, I guess, like for under a pretty dress, and if there was a garter belt under it…What is it about a garter belt?”
Lily could have told him that undressing a woman ranked high on most men’s list of good times, and that the more decadently different it was from undressing himself and the more fragile the layers he took off, the more of a rush it was. She also knew that the tougher the man, the more delicate he liked his lady’s lingerie. Knowing things like that was part of her job, and she loved her job. On the other hand, there were limits on what you discussed with your sister’s boyfriend, even if you were an expert. “Peach,” she contented herself with saying. “Apricot. Cream. Very sheer stockings. Something along those lines?”
She could swear his eyes were glazing over, and it wasn’t because he was looking at her. “Silk,” he said. “Lace.”
She smiled. “I think I’ve got it. And this present is from you?”
“Too right it is.” He stood up like he’d forgotten she was there and headed into the kitchen, and Lily thought, Time to go.
By the time two car rental employees had showed up at the repair shop with a new car for him and another to take them back to the office, Rafe was freezing cold, soaking wet, and thoroughly narky. If he wasn’t shivering, that was because he was working hard at it. He posed for selfies, shook hands all around, and drove off with a wave out the window that invited yet more freezing rain to run under the sleeve of his jacket.
All right, so it wasn’t bravery under fire. And, yes, he may have become a bit spoiled. The realization wasn’t making him any happier. He pulled into a McDonalds parking lot once he was out of sight of the garage, got out his phone, and did some online navigation and calling. His assistant of four years, Martin Avondale, could have done it in a quarter of the time, but Martin was on his own holiday in Colorado.
“Four words,” he’d informed Rafe yesterday. “Telluride Gay Ski Week. Tunisia has done absolutely nothing for either my skin or my social life, and if I’m sweating anytime in the next four days, it’s going to be because I’m in the hot tub or otherwise enjoying myself. Also, so we get this out of the way? Much as I love my job, I don’t care if I never see a camel again.” Which was fine. Rafe wasn’t so far gone that he had to interrupt Martin’s brief holiday because he couldn’t make his own hotel booking.
It was going to be a booking rather than surprising Jace today like he’d planned, though, because he was more than three hours behind schedule by now, thanks to a delayed flight and the buggered car. He was also still jet-lagged by nine hours, and worn down by three weeks of twelve-hour-plus days on location in the desert, the last week of it enlivened by a brutal heat wave. He needed to be sharper than he felt right now for this next step. He’d get his mojo back, and then they’d see.
He’d texted his brother yesterday morning on his way to the condo. Back in LA. Break coming up. Where are you in the book? That last had come from hard experience.
For the final few weeks of writing, Jace would barely know you were there. No point turning up then.
Jace had answered, Making progress. All good, which hadn’t told Rafe much. On the other hand, he’d actually answered, so he hadn’t fully entered Book World yet.
So why hadn’t Rafe told him he was coming? Because he didn’t want Paige Hollander’s shields up, that was why. He needed to know who she really was and how she really felt, and however tough Jace thought he was—in the Land of So-Called Love, Rafe had him beat.
The plan had been forming for a while. As soon as he’d rung off after that other call, in fact.
“I’m going to need you in Queensland at the end of March,” Jace had said on the phone a few weeks ago. When Rafe had already been in Tunisia, unfortunately, or he’d have been on the next plane to San Francisco as soon as he’d heard his brother say, “I’m proposing to Paige, mate,” like a kid looking forward to Christmas. “And I scheduled it for the break in your shooting schedule, so don’t let me down. She doesn’t have any family other than her sister, and her sister’s too far away. I need her to know she has all of mine.”
“Mate,” Rafe had said, “you’re joking. No. You met her in, what? May? June? It’s not even March. Have you even seen her without makeup yet? Never tell me she’s moved in. ‘Caution’ isn’t just a road sign, you know.”
Silence for a moment, and when Jace spoke, his voice was hard. “I didn’t ask your opinion. I asked you to come and be there for me.”
“Too bad,” Rafe said, “because you’re getting my opinion anyway. You haven’t been rich long enough to know how it changes things. And does the word ‘rebound’ mean nothing to you? You don’t get serious about the woman you meet six months after your wife walks out on you.”
“You may not,” Jace said. “Fortunately, I’m not you. Serial monogamy isn’t really my thing, much less coloring outside the lines. I’m looking for monogamy, full stop.”
Tempting as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 2) Page 1