“And I clearly remember you ducking into elevators and broom closets to avoid him for months after the breakup.”
“Oh, right. Well, then he moved to a new job, so no more ducking and dodging. And once I dated that guy from the public relations department.”
“The spank-me guy—I remember him. How do you work with a guy after you’ve spanked him and asked him, ‘Who’s your mama?’”
Cass shrugged. “We only saw each other in passing after we broke up, and pretty soon he left the company, too. Nobody stays at the same job that long these days.”
Yasmine examined a nearby rack of leather gloves, wallets and key fobs. Lousy gifts, all.
“Well, maybe everyone is moving to new jobs to escape old lovers. Maybe sleeping with him would make him leave the company, and then I could focus on my work again.”
Or maybe she should just do what she secretly longed to do and declare her naughty intentions through her gift. She could give him some sensual massage oils or a cute pair of boxers or some toy handcuffs. Or a super-size box of condoms.
Too bad she’d learned the hard way that to get by in life, she had to control her rebellious impulses, no matter how tempting they might be.
She was in control now. Cursed to walk the straight and narrow path. Secure that her life would be boring but free from controversy for as long as she could help it.
A year in juvie prison would do that to a girl.
“Did I mention he asked me to be his date for the office Christmas party?”
Cass’s jaw dropped. “And you said yes, I hope.”
“Of course. But what if I can’t stop staring at him or something?”
“Sounds like you just need to get laid.”
“Maybe,” Yasmine said, moving to a display of gifts for men, the usual prefab boxes of useless stuff no guy would ever buy for himself. She eyed a golf-themed desk set. “What are the chances he plays golf?”
“Sexual frustration can cloud good judgment,” Cass said, “both for gift giving and choosing your dates.”
“Maybe I should buy him a paper bag to wear over his head so I can concentrate on work.”
Cass shrugged. “Or some See’s chocolates. Who doesn’t love those?”
One thought of See’s chocolates and Yasmine’s mind was made up, if for no other reason than setting foot in the store meant getting a free sample. “Done.”
They headed across the mall, and five minutes later they were standing in the horrendous line that snaked through the small, stark-white store and out into the mall. It took fifteen minutes to finally make it to the front of the line.
Yasmine requested a sample of her favorite food on earth, a See’s raspberry cream. “Mmm,” she moaned when she bit into it. “Chocolate-covered sex.”
The clerk behind the counter gave Yasmine a put-upon look, and since the line behind her was growing impatient to buy their yearly gift boxes and get the hell out of the mall, she said, “I’ll take a pound of these.”
Cass smiled. “You’re buying him a whole pound of nothing but chocolate-covered sex?”
“It’s a litmus test. If he gets what a great gift it is, then I take it as a sign he might be good in bed.”
Her eyes lit up. “I should start doing that with all my dates.”
And if all signs pointed to yes, then what? Did Yasmine sleep with the office hunk and risk ruining her long streak of good behavior?
She paid for her box of chocolates and headed out of the crowded store with Cass. “This is kind of a chintzy gift, though. Maybe I need a little something that declares my intentions subtly but clearly to go with it.”
“Right. Something that could be interpreted as completely innocent or down and dirty, depending on your mind-set.”
“What, like a jar of Vaseline?” Yasmine joked.
“Ew. On second thought, guys are kind of dense. Maybe you need to be loud and clear about your intentions. Maybe throw in a cute sex toy, and he’ll get the hint.”
“A nice big dildo?”
“Would you be serious for five seconds? I know a little sex shop a few blocks from here. How about a pair of furry handcuffs?”
Yasmine smiled. A quivery feeling was growing in her belly. It was the wild streak, rearing its stubborn head. And just this one time, she wanted to take out her long-ignored pet and play with it instead of keeping it hidden in the closet.
After so many years of being in control, Yasmine wasn’t sure she could deny herself one hot, adventurous night of rebellion.
CASS HOLBROOK had never thought of herself as being destined for a corner office with a view, but over the years somehow, without her having completely realized it until now, she’d become respectable. She’d learned how to command attention without taking off her clothes.
So as she and Yasmine approached the mall Santa, on their way to the car, Cass was a little shocked to realize she hadn’t done one of her infamous Santa stunts in years. She stopped a few feet from the velvet ropes that formed a line for waiting kids, and Yasmine turned, wearing a puzzled expression.
“What’s wrong?”
“Have you told Santa what you want for Christmas?”
She was looking at Cass as if she’d lost it now. “Um, no.”
“Then how do you expect to get what you want?”
“Have you been smoking something?”
“Don’t you remember in college how we used to stand in line to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him our naughty Christmas lists?”
Yasmine looked from Cass to the large man clad in red, and back again. “We were in college, and we were stupid.”
Cass headed for the back of the line, which was only about ten kids deep. “So maybe we need to do more stupid things.”
“Or not.”
She waved Yasmine over, but she stood her ground.
“Come on, don’t you want to see Santa’s expression when I ask him for a—”
“Stop it! There are underaged people present,” Yasmine said as she grabbed Cass’s hand, and started tugging her away from the line.
“You’ve turned into such a prude,” she said, letting herself be pulled toward the mall entrance.
Much as she loved Yasmine, Cass couldn’t deny that her friend had taken her attempts to be a good girl to the extreme. The result was a sort of constipated life, a life wasted worrying too much about what was the right thing to do, a life that gave up interest to avoid risk. Cass had always seen herself as the answer to Yasmine’s self-imposed uptightness, but now she realized she’d become just as uptight herself. Just as repressed. Not so much by shame over past misdeeds—although there were plenty—but by her focus on success. She’d been working so hard, she’d forgotten to have fun.
Now that Cass was coming out of the fog of her last dumping, she was beginning to notice some things about her life. Such as the fact that she was nearing the big four-oh and had managed to not acquire most of the traditional trappings of success: no husband, no kids, no house in the suburbs. Sure, she had a great career, a cute apartment and a fabulous wardrobe, but wasn’t she supposed to want something more?
Where the hell was her ticking biological clock?
They reached the exit and Yasmine sighed as she held the door open. “What is going on with you?”
“Am I a freak of nature?”
“I thought that was a long-established fact,” she said, but her smile softened the statement.
They walked out into the bustling sidewalk traffic outside the downtown mall and headed west toward the little upscale sex shop where Yasmine was sure to find any and every sexy gift imaginable. At the corner they stopped to wait for the light to change.
“I mean, aren’t women of a certain age supposed to, you know, start wanting to settle down and be normal and stuff?” Cass said.
“There’s no such thing as normal, and you’re way too young to be worried about settling down, anyway.”
Cass felt a stab of guilt for ever having lied to her own best friend ab
out her age, but it was a lie she’d told years ago, when they’d first met, and she’d never quite gotten up the nerve to tell the truth until today. Anyway, it was sweet of Yasmine to still put her in the young category, even if it wasn’t true.
Still, Cass felt liberated by having told the truth. And honestly, she was a little surprised to realize she was fine with turning forty.
“I guess you’re right,” she said as they crossed the street.
A cold breeze blew between the tall buildings, and Cass wrapped her long red scarf a few times around her neck and buttoned her white wool coat. They picked up their pace, and in a matter of minutes were at the sex shop.
Inside, seventies dance tunes played over the speakers, and aisle after aisle of every sex toy, accessory and undergarment imaginable stood on display. Yasmine hesitated at the entrance. Cass grabbed Yasmine’s hand and tugged her toward the vibrator section.
Cass picked up a large, nubby hot-pink one from the top shelf and weighed it in her hand. “Might not be the greatest gift for a guy, but I, for one, would love to find this baby in my stocking.”
“I’m not buying you a sex toy for Christmas,” Yasmine said.
“And that’s the difference between you and me. I would buy one for you,” Cass said as seriously as if she were offering to donate a vital organ.
“That’s touching.”
“No, honey, that’s vibrating.” She clicked the on button, and the toy in her hand hummed to life.
At practically the same moment, a new song came on, and suddenly Donna Summer was singing about her last dance of the night. Cass adored Donna Summer. In fact, it was pretty much a rule that no matter the time or place, if any of her songs came on, Cass felt compelled to launch into a full-fledged lip sync and dance routine.
Yasmine cast a wary look in her direction and started edging away toward the lingerie section. “You’re not going to—”
Too late. “To-night,” Cass belted out in time with the song, the vibrator held to her mouth like a microphone. Screw lip syncing. She knew this one by heart, so she could sing along for real.
She shimmied her hips to the music, dancing down the aisle, singing, the star of her own impromptu concert. This was the kind of craziness that had been missing from her life lately. This was what she needed to reclaim. It felt good…and right…and utterly silly.
Across the store from her now, Yasmine was trying hard to pretend they weren’t together, but deep down, Cass knew Yasmine was loving every minute of it. The laughter she was struggling with told the real story. In a different life, without that old shadow of her year in juvenile detention hanging over her, she might have been the one belting out Donna Summer tunes into a dildo right now, and that was one of the things Cass loved about her. Yasmine had the heart of a wild child, even if she was living the life of an old lady.
Around Cass, other customers were taking notice. How could they not? Some smiled, some pretended she wasn’t there, and some bee-bopped a little themselves as they shopped. The clerk who was working the store knew Cass and therefore understood her performance wasn’t cause to call the cops.
As the song wound down and her routine came to an end, Cass replaced the vibrator on the shelf and went on shopping as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Really, nothing had. She’d just gotten in touch with her true self, the side of her personality she loved most.
Yasmine was still across the store inspecting a rack of S & M apparel. But Cass was by herself and happy.
Happy, damn it. So what if she was happy? Could that ever really be a bad thing? So what if her boyfriend had dumped her and she’d had to pretend to not care about it?
She had her vibrator, her friends, her yearly trips to Cancun and her job, which she adored. Maybe there wasn’t even room in her life for a serious relationship, and maybe…maybe she needed to stop feeling guilty about that.
Maybe she needed to accept, finally, at the age of almost-forty, that she was happy in every sense of the word.
ALEX FELT LIKE losing his lunch. For months he’d been preparing for this night, and he couldn’t let a case of nerves blow his chance to gain Yasmine’s trust.
He sat on the couch with his laptop and stared at his notes on Yasmine’s case, the details of which had become as familiar to him as if they were events from his own life. But he needed to review them again to help himself remember why he was doing what he was doing. He had to keep his focus on her criminal record and off her more alluring attributes.
At the age of sixteen, going by the cybername Digital Diva, she’d broken into military computer databases and gotten caught, resulting in a one-year sentence in a juvenile detention center and a two-thousand-dollar fine.
For several years after her release, her Internet activities were under close watch by the FBI, but as she proved herself reformed, they’d backed off. As far as Alex could tell, she’d walked the straight and narrow path her entire adult life.
And while she’d stayed clean technically, during her senior year in college, she’d been targeted by the FBI as a possible member of a hacking ring known as The Underground that was suspected of being based at her university campus.
Alex had headed up the investigation of the group’s illegal Internet activities, which had started out as petty vandalism but had escalated to more serious system intrusion jobs over a two-year period.
He’d never found any solid evidence that Yasmine was involved, but several of his colleagues, including his partner, Ty, had been sure she was a suspect to watch, and so he’d kept her on his radar.
Just as he’d thought he was making headway in the case, all of his files had been stolen, the FBI network had been hacked into and disabled and messages had been sent to all the top FBI authorities saying, “Down with the feds. Stop sending your hounds to sniff us out.”
With his case against the hacker ring gone and headquarters in a huff, Alex had been the whipping boy. And when one of his co-workers reported comments he’d made about finding Yasmine attractive, his integrity had been called into question. He’d been accused of being lax in his investigation because of his attraction to her, and in the cloudy uncertainty of hindsight, he often feared the accusation could be true.
In the fallout, he couldn’t stop thinking about Yasmine, couldn’t stop wondering if he’d been right or wrong and couldn’t resist putting himself in a position to investigate her up close and personal.
The case was basically cold now—for him, anyway, since he didn’t have access to FBI files anymore. But his investigator’s instincts told him he’d missed something big, and he couldn’t go about his normal life in peace until he knew for sure what it was he’d missed. The case haunted him, or perhaps more accurately, Yasmine haunted him.
Now what? He glanced at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Still fifteen minutes before she was due to arrive at his house. He was keyed up about his first real chance to get close to her, to possibly gain her confidence. The only complication was his all-too-real attraction to her.
He needed to keep his mind off her physical beauty and focused on the fact that she potentially had the moral conscience of a reptile. She’d cost the government thousands of dollars with her juvenile crimes alone, and she’d never shown the slightest remorse for her actions.
He scrolled down the page of notes to a photo of her imbedded in the document. Yasmine, at seventeen, newly released from the detention center, caught on film by a local journalist. Her story had been plastered all over the news, mainly because she was young, brilliant, female and beautiful, as opposed to the typical gawky male hackers the public expected.
But one glance at her wide mouth, her soulful eyes, her satin skin, and his groin stirred. He was in a world of trouble if that’s the amount of self-control he could muster for her. An image of her strutting around the office in slim-fitting pants came to mind, and he got a full-on erection.
Maybe he needed to go into the bathroom and take care of himself before she
arrived, make sure his self-control was intact for his first evening with her.
But then the doorbell rang. Alex scrambled to save and close his document, then shut the laptop and went to the door. A glance through the window confirmed that it was Yasmine.
He adjusted himself in his pants, willed the woody to disappear—no luck there—and opened the door.
He’d dressed earlier in his best black suit and tie, but had been surprised to discover that his jacket had gotten a little too tight from his recent haunting of the gym. So he’d been forced to settle for a black vest instead. In the land that invented California casual, he was pretty sure no one would give a damn.
Yasmine surveyed his appearance and smiled. He hoped like hell she hadn’t spotted the erection. His life had turned into a bad sitcom.
“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I’m a little early. I had good traffic karma.”
“Hey, yourself. You look great.” His gaze dropped straight to her cleavage. She wore a crimson velvet dress that dipped in a low vee at her chest, exposing the lush upper halves of her breasts, surprisingly full for her small frame. Yeah, he was being crude by staring.
He surveyed the rest of her, from her narrow waist to her long, firm legs exposed below her knee-length skirt, then lower to her feet adorned by a pair of do-me high heels. When he met her gaze again, she looked amused rather than annoyed.
“Thanks,” she said. “Are you ready?”
Was he? If he could establish, at the very least, a friendship with Yasmine, eventually he could find out what he needed to know. But his body ached for a hell of a lot more than friendship.
“Yeah.” He took off out the door with her.
Outside, the night had grown cool, and the sounds of the Inner Sunset neighborhood where he’d lived for the past five years filled the air with a cacophonic music he’d learned to love. He’d moved to San Francisco from Virginia for his first FBI assignment, and now he never wanted to leave.
He crammed himself into the passenger seat of her red Volkswagen Cabriolet, and when she got in on the driver’s side, she looked at his knees pressed against the dashboard and laughed.
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