Cosmo Red-Hot Reads Box Set: CakeFearlessNaked SushiEverything You Need to Know

by Lauren Dane

  “But I have a couple of conditions,” he told her, his words slow and contemplative.

  Giddy, Gia took a sip of her wine before offering him an arch look. “And those would be?”

  “Fantasies. Lots of fantasies.”

  She set her glass aside so she could slide her hands behind his neck, pulling his head down for a delighted kiss.

  “Babe, I’m going to make your reality so hot, so sexy, so wild, that you won’t have room for fantasies.”

  Then, to seal the promise, she set out to do just that.

  Sexy, contemporary romance stories for today’s fun, fearless female.

  On sale October 15, 2013

  Everything You Need to Know by HelenKay Dimon

  Naked Sushi by Jina Bacarr

  On sale November 12, 2013

  Aftershock by New York Times bestselling author Sylvia Day

  Two Red-Hot Reads available in ebook format each month!

  Visit www.harlequin.com/Cosmo today.

  USA TODAY bestselling author Tawny Weber has been writing sassy, sexy romances since her first Harlequin Blaze book was published in 2007. A fan of Johnny Depp, cupcakes and color coordination, she spends a lot of her time shopping for cute shoes, scrapbooking and hanging out on Facebook.

  Come by and visit her website, at www.tawnyweber.com, for hunky contests, delicious recipes and lots of fun.

  Books by Tawny Weber

  HARLEQUIN BLAZE

  324—DOUBLE DARE

  372—DOES SHE DARE?

  418—RISQUÉ BUSINESS

  462—COMING ON STRONG

  468—GOING DOWN HARD

  492—FEELS LIKE THE FIRST TIME

  513—BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES, VOLUME III

  “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs…”

  564—RIDING THE WAVES

  579—IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE MISTLETOE…

  “A Babe in Toyland”

  592—BREAKING THE RULES

  612—JUST FOR THE NIGHT

  656—SEX, LIES AND MISTLETOE

  660—SEX, LIES AND MIDNIGHT

  688—BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES, VOLUME VII

  “Wild Thing”

  726—NICE & NAUGHTY

  738—A SEAL’S SEDUCTION

  739—A SEAL’S SURRENDER

  750—MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

  778—NAUGHTY CHRISTMAS NIGHTS

  To browse a current listing of all Tawny’s titles, please visit www.Harlequin.com.

  Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-4597-6

  FEARLESS

  Copyright © 2013 by Tawny Weber

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  COSMO and COSMOPOLITAN are registered trademarks of Hearst Communications, Inc.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com

  A Delicious Mistake

  One day I’m getting canned from my job as a computer programmer for having wild copy-room sex with a guy I thought was the new game designer. The next, I’m crashing my ex-boss’s business lunch in a creative attempt to get my job back, and men are eating sushi off my naked body!

  That’s when I realize

  a) My ex-boss is hiding corporate secrets

  b) Hot copy-room guy is an undercover FBI agent

  c) I would make a kick-ass spy!

  Then Special Agent Hottie brings out his cuffs, and things get really interesting....

  Sexy, contemporary romance stories for today’s fun, fearless female.

  Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin

  www.Harlequin.com/Cosmo

  Dedication

  To Roberta Brown, who has always been there for me.

  Dear Reader,

  I love James Bond, with his gadgets and his wild, sexy adventures. As a kid, I spent many afternoons in a dark movie theater, riding shotgun with the handsome spy in his Aston Martin. And the women in his life, oh, my! I’d never be Honey Ryder, but I had this fantasy about filling her bikini.

  So I created Pepper O’Malley. She doesn’t want to be a Bond girl; she wants to be James Bond. Agent 007 in high heels. Why not? Pepper is a crack computer programmer who just happens to wear glasses, but she can beat the boys at their own game. Like so many girls who work in male-dominated fields, she has to work twice as hard and be twice as smart.

  I know what Pepper is up against. I wrote a column called Sweet Savage Byte for a computer magazine, where I looked at the world of technology from a female point of view. I also worked for a video game company, wrote code and created audio/video. These experiences paved the way for me to write Pepper’s adventures.

  I had a blast writing the story of this girl-spy wannabe who ends up sporting not a bikini, but yellow pom-pom chrysanthemums and a banana leaf when she becomes a naked sushi model to get her job back. She finds herself caught up in the world of corporate espionage with a sexy FBI agent and his hot chopsticks.

  My story is sexy and fun but also explores the real-life challenges women face in the workplace. I love hearing from my readers. Follow me on Twitter, @JinaBacarr, www.facebook.com/JinaBacarr.author and my website, www.jinabacarr.com.

  Bon appétit!

  Jina Bacarr

  Jina Bacarr

  Naked Sushi

  Sexy, contemporary romance stories

  for today’s fun, fearless female.

  Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin

  www.Harlequin.com/Cosmo

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Naked and as helpless as a beached mermaid, I held my breath. I was about to get eaten by the sexiest man alive.

  I knew taking off my clothes was not a smart career move. But did I listen?

  Did I?

  Out of work and desperate, I had no choice but to take this gig if I wanted to survive. So here I was, lying on a table nude except for a shiny pink thong, banana leaf and yellow pom-pom chrysanthemums, which covered my breasts.

  A live sushi plate.

  Rose petals lay scattered around me, and was that pickled ginger I smelled?

  What if I sneezed?

  It got worse when I saw the gorgeous man who got me fired from my computer job grabbing a sliver of red tuna off my belly, pinching me.

  Ouch, that hurt.

  He gave me the “sorry, babe” look that got me into trouble in the first place. Those smoldering dark eyes of his had led me into temptation. Self-assured and no doubt used to getting his own way, he oozed danger from every pore. I would have followed him to hell if he’d asked me.

  He didn’t. Instead, he seduced me on top of the copy machine at midnight. His tall, athletic body crushing mine
against the glass, his hands everywhere. And every dark fantasy I ever had came true. An orgasm that kept coming. And coming...

  I groaned.

  God, look at that grin. He knew what I was thinking. He knew I wanted him even if I was majorly pissed at him.

  Then he had the nerve to wipe his chopsticks across my midriff, leaving a trail of sticky white rice. His tongue flickered out as if he intended to lick the gummy rice off my bare skin.

  Oh, yes, please!

  I dared not move a muscle.

  I couldn’t believe I was lying here naked, belly up, with raw fish spread out all over my body, even around my pubic area. Waiting for this guy to make his move. He appeared unconcerned by the fact I was at his mercy. I would have died if his sexy lips nibbled on me, lips that I imagined were both soft and rough, tender yet insistent in finding out what was underneath that crisp, brown banana leaf glued to my mound.

  As if I was going to let that happen.

  Phew. I smelled like raw fish, tasted like raw fish, and I had raw fish, cold and slimy, sliding down between my thighs, much to the delight of the salivating man breathing on me. I felt so vulnerable lying here, unable to move, as I watched him licking his chops.

  I stifled a groan in the back of my throat, imagining him pushing his probing finger into me, testing the moistness inside me, his touch arousing me before his mouth found the pleasure of my pinkness. Sucking on me, giving my swollen clit so much attention I could hardly stand it.

  In my mind, he stroked me faster and harder, delicious sensations building inside me and the ache turning into an unrelenting agony when he went down on me and—

  Dream on. I’ll never let my defenses down again. How can I?

  It was because of him I got fired from my job. I allowed my overripe female hormones to be seduced by this man with a slow, irresistible smile.

  And a great butt.

  He looked amused, which annoyed the hell out of me. Because of my indiscretion, I wasn’t getting unemployment checks, my savings were almost gone, and my rent was due.

  Naked sushi, indeed.

  I wasn’t just pissed. I was going to get even.

  * * *

  It all started weeks ago when I was working late, preparing to copy the cue sheets for a commercial spot due in the morning. No big deal. Five minutes of slaving over a hot copy machine, and I’d be heading home to my studio apartment with Chinese takeout.

  A single girl’s best friend, next to her rabbit vibrator.

  The office manager had gone home, so I decided to do the job myself, though I wasn’t familiar with how the new machine worked. I was a computer research analyst programmer for a video game company, better known in the world of corporate acronyms as CRAP.

  It was a private joke among programmers. No corporation could run without our snappy codes and erratic symbols splashed across pages of files that looked like Jackson Pollock got stuck inside a computer.

  I liked my job.

  I analyzed and edited clips of our company’s ads and video games and then recoded the video and audio files and converted them for various media. I also did postproduction, including sweetening the videos with music. When I got bored, I’d get creative and do fun things, like embed hidden erotic poems into corporate microdots in PowerPoint presentations. Easy as texting if you knew how.

  All you had to do was create a new text box on a slide and type in sexy stuff like, “Did your last date speak French without an interpreter?” Then change the font color to the background color to make it invisible before shrinking it down to a small, dot-sized box. Add a grid, note the box’s location, and then send that to all the programmers. The clued-in ones without computer anxiety knew how to read the sexy message. Made Tuesday morning meetings a lot more fun.

  I also added sexy French words to the background tracks on test video games. I was good at picking up languages. And I loved messing around with spy stuff, which was why I’d applied to the CIA, FBI, DEA and ATF.

  I never got past the written exams.

  I found out sporting anchor-girl glasses didn’t place me high on their list of qualified applicants. I was saving up to get Lasik surgery before I got canned, but I could never get the cash together.

  Then there was the matter of my questionable background. I was a security risk because I didn’t know who my parents were. How could I? Officer O’Malley found me when someone dumped me at the 16th Street Mission BART Station while I was still in diapers. He gave me his surname and called me Mary Dolores after the mission nearby, but the guys knew me as “Pepper.” I started calling myself that in the eighth grade to rev up my sex quotient.

  Since it was doubtful I’d make it as a covert operative, I was determined to be the best at my job. I was really comfy at my last place of employment. You could call me an arty techie, which was why things like outdated office furniture and dirty bathrooms, leaky ceilings and vermin of the four-legged kind bugged me.

  I found out you can’t escape the two-legged ones no matter how cool the decor was. I worked at one company with a gang of programmers who thought using soap was for girly men. Worse yet, I could hear rats scurrying above me. When a ceiling tile came loose and I saw a tail and two little feet dangling over my head, I bailed.

  At my last job we had airy working spaces, bathrooms with cut flowers and a lunchroom with a junk food menu to die for. Unlike a lot of software companies who dip their sticks in Silicon Valley, my ex-boss took over a restored Victorian house in San Francisco and turned it into a first-class company facility.

  I loved discovering the secrets of the old house, including hidden cabinets, desks with locked drawers, even a concealed entrance.

  And I had my own office. No backseat surfers peering over my shoulder and trying to tell me how to write code. Add to that a steaming-hot mocha latte on my desk every morning and I was stylin’.

  Damn, I wanted my job back. That place was cool.

  It was the why I got fired that had me pissed.

  I had sex in the copy machine room. My cheap surrender over the copier, buttocks thumping, my rear end overexposed.

  I admit it took two to fandango, but it wasn’t all my fault. I was hungry—and not just for Chinese takeout. I spent way too much time alone. It wasn’t easy keeping a man interested when you get excited by new software programs and he had a hard-on. My last boyfriend dumped me because I worked late nights stressing over things like audio warping.

  I noticed guys didn’t dig chicks who knew more about their computers than they did. Consequently, my dating life consisted of hanging out at a virtual world website and having an orgasm while I watched my flashy avatar have all the fun.

  So who could blame me for taking advantage of the situation when I cornered a stud in the copy room?

  Not just any stud, but my dream guy.

  For years, I’d pined over the bad-boy type. Bare chest ripped to please and tease. Cute butt. And a lazy swirl of black hair that covered one eye at just the right angle. Daring a girl to go further into the dark with him...

  And not look back.

  Maybe it was because I was tired of Chinese takeout or because I forgot to buy new batteries for my bunny vibe. Or maybe my new underwear was too tight in the crotch. Whatever the reason, I was feeling extra horny that night.

  It all seemed surreal.

  Midnight. Quiet offices. Dark shadows everywhere. Beckoning me like black holes you could fall through and land in an alternative universe.

  I could almost hear the creepy Rocky Horror Picture Show music guiding my every step as I tramped down the empty hallway.

  Then I noticed a light coming from under the copy room door.

  I stopped. I wasn’t alone. Who else was here, then?

  I should have minded my own business, gone home and copied the damn thing in the morni
ng. But the snoopy part of my personality that was convinced I had the makings of a spy wasn’t about to walk away.

  As soon as I opened the door, I discovered a guy I’d never seen before, making copies. I didn’t think it totally strange since Mr. Briggs, the owner of the company, recently hired an up-and-coming video game designer to boost sales in new media. I figured he was copying the Playmate of the Month to hang up in his locker. All the guys did that.

  It never occurred to me to slam the door and run for help. I was too involved in eyeing his hard butt.

  And those shoulders. Yum.

  He was wearing a black baseball cap and black sweats, which should have alerted me that something was wrong, but it added to my fantasy of getting locked in here with him after hours.

  I burst out with a cocky, “Copying corporate secrets?”

  He spun around and my breath quickened. My eyes fixed on the bulge in his sweatpants with both apprehension and desire. Spiky black hair covered his dark eyes like the mane of a wild animal; his mouth curled into a snarl that relaxed when he saw me.

  “Who are you?” he asked, with a teasing smile. The dark shadow of a two-day beard heightened the cut of his angular jaw. “Security?”

  His hand edged toward his pocket, a movement that didn’t escape my eye. What was he reaching for? His smartphone?

  I laughed in a casual manner, trying to keep the conversation light. “Who needs security with you around?”

  He grinned and then took his hand away from his pocket and cupped my chin. When he stared into my eyes, my knees turned to honey, all warm and melty. A shiver went through me.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Pepper.”

  “Are you as hot as your name?” he wanted to know, bumping his hip into mine, his hot breath steaming up my glasses. His tough, sexy talk took me to a place I’d only dreamed of going. His voice gripped me, making me squeeze my pubic muscles in a delicious manner and then release them.