Twenty Times Tempted: A Sexy Contemporary Romance Collection

by Petrova, Em

  With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, in successful real estate offices and at times in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are unique and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete casts of characters that will delight, frustrate and linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.

  Don’t ever ask her for anything “like a Budweiser” or risk bodily injury.

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  MY EX IS STALKING ME

  J W Hunter

  June 2016

  “Is your name Lisa Something-Or-the-Other?” came an African American voice with a snap and a well-calculated condescending tone.

  “Who is this?” Lisa frowned.

  “Gal, can you just answer the damn question? Is your name Lisa?”

  Concluding that this was not a potential client but a stranger with some issues, Lisa replied: “Who wants to know?”

  “Who wants to know?” the voice echoed in a lilting black girl’s tone. “Can I do the asking and you do the answering? You don’t wanna make me mad, honey, I promise you that.”

  Lisa sat upright, her frown deepening. “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve got the wrong Lisa.”

  “If you are the Lisa my man is screwing, then damn right I’ve got the right Lisa.”

  “Who is your man? And could you please switch to polite mode?” Lisa demanded, getting annoyed and letting go of all professional pretense.

  Nick was listening keenly to this conversation, and could faintly hear the voice at the other end, but he was relying on what he heard from Lisa’s side, and it sounded like a non-business exchange, and he was curious.

  “My man,” the saucy voice said with slow emphasis, “is Nick Banks, and if I’m correctly informed, you are one desperate bitch clinging to him like glue.”

  “So why don’t you call your man instead of calling me? Isn’t he the one you should be asking why he’s with me?”

  The woman at the other end snorted. “Listen to me, motormouth, just know that you are in my place and I want you to move.”

  Lisa had been dozing off when the telephone on the desk shrilled in her ear and brought her to her senses with a jerk. It was the third day in this new branch, and they were still trying to get used to the new Long Beach office. She was ready to stand by Nick in whatever he did, especially considering that he had just told her that he loved her five days ago and she had said she loved him back. They had not said anything beyond that, but that was a new beginning for them, after dating casually for four months. And now she was with him at the new Long Beach branch, and they would be here for three months before Nick, who was a bit senior would have to go back to the downtown Los Angeles head office, something he had assured her that he was not looking forward to in the least.

  “Unfortunately I’m so educated and well-trained that I have to be at the head office overseeing fifteen branches, so this is a temporary branch assignment. You will be the assistant branch manager after the new branch manager comes in when I leave, so my return to head office will actually work in your favor on the job side. But I’ll try to fight to have you installed as full branch manager, even if I have to have the branch manager kidnapped.”

  They had had a good laugh about that.

  Lisa and Nick were in the two glass offices tinted in blue that faced the ocean on one side and the city on the other side. Depending on which side of the room you looked, you were treated either to the tantalizing sight of the sea or the green and blue-grey hue in the direction of Beverly Hills and Hollywood in the distance or the high-rise downtown Los Angeles or the eastern L.A. landscape. But then the smoky fog of smoke from traffic ruined the landscape, especially on the busier side of the city.

  Below this full-scale glass office was the room where the cartons of juice concentrate shipped from East Africa were received, repackaged and tagged as orders came in for delivery to various homes and hotels and stores.

  “It was a mistake to advertise full-scale,” Nick had complained the day before. “Now we have orders totaling up to sixteen thousand cans of concentrate juice, and only three thousand in inventory, and our next shipment is not due at port for three days.”

  “Are you saying that our success is choking us?” Lisa had spoken with light sarcasm.

  “Talking of choking, my lovely, yesterday you damn near choked me in the act of kissing. Be easy on my neck when you kiss me, okay?”

  Lisa was sitting at the edge of his desk, and she gave him a sideways look when he said this. “Are you, Nick Banks, trying to imply that Lisa Coleman is too aggressive when it comes to kissing?”

  “Can we have another demonstration before I answer that question, Your Honor?” Nick asked as he leaned towards Lisa, but just then Maggie the blond cashier burst in through the door from the warehouse office below. Lisa slid off the desk and grabbed a stapler from Nick’s desk, while Nick tried to catch an invisible insect where Lisa had been. Maggie rolled her eyes. She had already told Janice the receptionist that these two were in love and should not bother hiding it.

  “In that case I need to break them up,” Janice had said. “I want Nick to myself.”

  Lisa was 42% black, 28% Caucasian and 22% Native American according to DNA results, and she couldn’t recall the makeup of the other 8% but she hoped it wasn’t alien. When you looked at her, besides these traits you also noticed that she was strikingly beautiful, five foot six, and had lovely legs and body. She wished her breasts were bigger though, even though Nick insisted that big breasts turned him off.

  “I don’t need them for you, I need them for me,” she had explained.

  Now as she held the receiver, Lisa beckoned to Nick, but before he could reach the desk, the caller had hung up. “Damn it, I wanted you to hear her voice, Nick. Your ex is very furious that you are now with me. Too bad she didn’t give her name, and I doubt that she would have if I had asked her.”

  Nick frowned as Lisa related to him the entire conversation. “My ex,” he frowned.

  Lisa looked at him with that ‘from under her eyelashes’ look. “Nick Banks, are you trying to tell me that you have no exes, or you do not remember a single one of them?”

  Nick shrugged. “Of course I have exes. I hope I remember all of them.”

  Lisa looked horrified. “You have so many exes you don’t remember them all? Is that it?”

  “I have four exes, but how can you be sure this was one of them? Perhaps this was a crazy woman who believes in her mind that I’m her ex.”

  “You mean for some reason she thinks she’s your ex? How is that possible?”

  Nick shrugged. “Maybe she wanted to hook up with me, created a relationship in her mind, and now that we are out of contact, she believes that our imaginary relationship is in the past. But the fact is it never existed.”

  “Why does it have to be so complicated? Can’t she just be your ex? Somebody you dated, somebody you were an item with for some time?”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “That’s the most likely scenario,” Lisa said. “That has to be the most likely possibility, and you know it. Which one of your four true exes would act that way, now that she hung up before you could get to the phone?”

  Nick frowned. “I need to think.”

  “Why don’t we call them up, all of them?”

  “Two were married last time I heard,” Nick said.

  “Does this mean you have been in touch with your exes, Nick?”

  Nick held Lisa by the shoulders, a slight smile on his lips. “What’s this? Our first quarrel? As far as my exes are concerned, I have nothing to hide. Maybe it’s your exes we have to worry about.”

  “Well, my exes aren’t calling you with threats,” Lisa snapped.

  “Your first snap,” Nick observed.

  “Nick, this is not a freakin’ joke! That woman just stopped short of threatening me!”

  �
��If she wants me back so bad, she’ll call again,” Nick said sensibly. “Then we’ll try to find out who she is. No way she has your cell phone number.”

  “How did she even know that you are here and I’m with you after only three days in this office? She could be much closer in location than we may think.”

  “You are right. But don’t worry about it. Just one woman who couldn’t resist me, and there have been many.”

  “Oh, really?” Lisa crossed her hands on her chest and cocked her head to one side. “Am I classified as one of them?”

  Nick shook his head. “Unfortunately no. But I wish you were. You didn’t seem desperate to get me nor as interested as I wanted you to be. Who knows, you could be playacting.”

  “To what gain? Just grow up and stop being irresistible to stalking psychos out there.”

  “Talking of stalkers, I need a bodyguard, Lisa. How about we move in together so you can watch me all the time?”

  Nick was easy to watch, she thought. With his dark looks that still betrayed some inheritance from his mother’s half-Mexican half black and his Dad’s pure African American tone, he was six foot two, athletic in build, and very handsome, or so she and many women thought, from his eyes to his chin. Whom did he remind her of again? A little bit of Nate Parker, one of her favorite actors.

  “Not yet and not soon,” Lisa said firmly. “I like to watch my men from a distance before I can decide to move in with them. And if they are living with their Mama when I meet them, no chance.”

  August, 2014

  He had been following her for five days. Some people would call it stalking, but he considered it as “shadowing.” Yes, that sounded professional. Shadowing. Like some CIA agent or private detective. That was it!

  “I’ve been following her for five days,” he mused. “And she has no idea I’m following her! That makes me a pro, without a shadow of doubt! Only amateurs get caught. She is a very good-looking girl, too. Now that I know what she likes and where she goes, I will be able to approach her without any trouble. I always knew my soul-mate would be a computer-geek but I didn’t know she’d be this good!”

  He had been paid to follow her, but now he had an inexplicable attraction to the girl. He didn’t know why he had been paid to stalk her, and what they would do once they had all the info about Lisa’s lifestyle and daily habits. Anybody who paid you to stalk somebody else had to be dangerous, or just creepy.

  She seemed to have a haphazard lifestyle without any strictly set rules, but she seemed to stick to some daily routines. She could leave home any time between eight A.M. and noon...no rules there. But she did have a daily rule about attending some classes at Marymount California University, San Pedro. She was attending the Oceanview Campus branch, Palos Verdes, that faced the sea, set in a breath-taking scenery. She certainly was strict about her college classes, as everyday at four P.M. she drove that way, to head back home on West 37th Street at seven P.M.

  Alex felt like a part of her life now. He knew her so well! He felt like a CIA agent. Or a detective. The word stalker had a bad taste, and he had no intention of imagining himself as a stalker.

  First, he had been watching her on social media, facebook and twitter, but had never sent her a friend request or followed her twitter account. He was playing it by ear. If things worked out as he hoped they would and he ended up as her friend, he would then ask to befriend her on social media. After spying a lot on her social activity, including her very active blog and website on Monday and Tuesday, he had on Wednesday waited for her at a convenient place as she drove her red Nissan Juke and had followed her car to the campus, and at seven watched her car drive past. Sometimes her facebook page helped him know her location, sometimes she updated her page like a diary. But he had to use Jerry’s page to read her wall, and that was when Jerry was off work. “This milkshake is so sweet I have to upload a pic of it for preservation.” And the post would show something like, Snack King, South Leland Street, L.A. He had managed to avoid following her by car except on two occasions: once to the campus and once to Snack King, a place she seemed to love and where she met friends, some of them campus buddies. He was content in watching her leave or arrive home. Now he could conclude that she didn’t move around much: either from home to Snack King to campus, or from there to some address on W30th Street that seemed to be the biggest computer shop Alex had ever seen. Yours Digitally seemed to sell computers, accessories, had a huge cyber that occupied over fifty feet, and generally seemed like you were lost in computer-land. Heck, there was even a big ten-foot high flat-screen computer designed outside Yours Digitally.

  It was Friday, half past three P.M. as Alex gathered courage, trying to ignore his thumping heart. Come on, don’t be scared of meeting the lady. She can ignore you or turn your advances down, but she can’t eat you!

  Her name was Lisa , he knew. He knew that even before he began to follow her on Monday. She had worked at Yours Digitally for two months, but he had only been there once before she left. His friend Jerry Walsh worked there, and he knew Lisa well.

  “She’s a genius, man,” Jerry had said. “I tried to ask her out to see if brains can be transferred by sharing a drink together.” Jerry had winked as Alex burst into laughter. “But she was not amused. Said just because we were working together it does not justify a date.”

  Alex had patted Jerry on the back. “Hang in there, pal. You can’t get them all.”

  “I’m not getting one, leave alone all!” Jerry had snapped. “But she’s amazing, dude. She has her own website, makes plenty of money on affiliate businesses online.

  “I’ve always wanted to date a genius,” Alex had said. “And she’s hot, dude, don’t you forget that!”

  Alex smiled as he entered the Snack King. Everything was going perfectly! Lisa was sitting near a window, and with the curtains pulled back on every one of the five French windows, the place was flooded with light from outside and the street outside was well visible to those on the inside, although the slight tint on the windows prevented those outside from seeing inside from outside. Alex stopped at Lisa’s table, where she had her iPad placed on the table beside the small bowl of vanilla chocolate.

  “Hi!” Alex grinned, his eyes full of recognition.

  Lisa looked up, and frowned, then smiled politely. “Let me guess,” she said. “Apparently I know you.”

  Alex laughed loudly. “At least I do,” he said. “Does the name Yours Digitally ring a bell?”

  “Oh yes!” Lisa grinned. “Come on, sit down. Were you a regular customer there? I know you didn’t work there...and yet you look a bit familiar.”

  That was because I spent many hours there talking to Jerry, Alex thought as he took a seat opposite her, but all he said was: “I was one of the people who bought so much there you had to keep reordering new stock!”

  Lisa laughed. “You are funny,” she said.

  “I know,” Alex said, and Lisa laughed some more. Alex was pleased with himself. No morale-booster like cracking two successful jokes within three minutes of meeting your intended date.

  “What would you like to order?” Lisa asked politely. She’s cute, no doubt, Alex thought. Worth all the stalking...no, shadowing.

  ***

  A waiter named Freddie appeared immediately. “You hijacked my question, Lisa,” he said with a brilliant smile. “It is but my duty to ask: what would you like to order?”

  “First and foremost, I heard you have this burger that tastes like coffee. I gotta try that,” Alex said.

  “We just sprinkle some coffee on it, and give you the illusion that there’s a mug of coffee near you,” Freddie said. “It keeps people coming back.”

  “Don’t ever do that to my burger unless I ask you to,” Lisa warned Freddie.

  “Your warning is my command,” Freddie bowed. He spoke to Alex as he wrote the order down. “You are a lucky guy. I’d give my best shirt to date Lisa.”

  Alex winked. “We can’t all be lucky.”

  Lis
a glared at Alex. “Now it’s a date? You love illusions, don’t you?”

  “Uh-oh,” Freddie said. He skipped off as Lisa turned to him with that look she gave people from under her eyelashes.

  “Sorry, Alex. I wanted to clarify that it’s not a date as such...we just met by chance inside Snack King.”

  “Let’s leave it open to possibilities,” Alex said, trying to remember some advice Jerry had given him on saying the right things, and especially how to handle Lisa Coleman. “One of these days we may go on an actual date.”

  “Yes we may,” Lisa said. “But let’s keep the possibilities open that that date may lead nowhere.”

  ***

  “Okay, that’s fair,” Alex said. “So how’s campus and your project?”

  Lisa almost choked. “How do you know about campus and my project?”

  Alex felt he was on thin ice. He could not tell her he had used Jerry’s profile three times this week, who was her friend on facebook, to read her updates. Her settings did not allow non-friends to see her updates and she didn’t tweet much. He thought very fast. “You happen to share classes with a friend of mine... You might know her, but you might have a million classmates and attend a million lectures. I wish I could switch places with her so I can be your classmate instead.”

  “Yes, I have over a thousand classmates attending lectures at different times, so I may not know even a quarter of them, but this friend of yours seems to know me well. So how did you two get around to discussing Lisa Coleman?”

  “Not so unlikely. Jerry knows you attend the Oceanview branch of Marymount University, and I have a friend who goes there too. And...Jerry and I used to hang out at Yours Digitally and I used to check you out, you know.”

  “You are the closest thing to a stalker I’ve ever met,” Lisa smiled. “But I suppose beneath your stalking ways lies a great guy. No, no need to give me your phone number. I have to rush to campus. If you have found out so much about me without a phone or social media, I’m terrified about letting you have my number.” She jumped up as his burger arrived.