Scandal, Temptation & a Taste of Flan is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2014 Allison Janda
Cover design by Andrea Walters
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States.
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And visit AllisonJanda.com for excerpts, updates and more!
Also, don’t miss the first two novels in the Marian Moyer mystery series:
Sex, Murder & Killer Cupcakes
Seduction, Deceit & a Slice of Apple Pie
For Grandma — I know you would have been proud (though the content is a wee scandalous). I feel your love every single day.
I rolled over and opened one eye, squinting to see if his body was still next to mine. Mika Andrushkiv and I have been together for nearly three months and I’m still convinced that one day I’ll wake up to realize our entire relationship has been a dream. He’s an incredibly tall, lanky Ukrainian with a soft accent that’s nearly as seductive as his bright blue eyes and wild mess of curls. I, meanwhile, am Marian Moyer. A shorter, rounded and slightly better-than-average looking Irish American with curly, reddish-brown hair, a pile of freckles and terrible vision. I squinted harder. Yup, he was still there. A dark brown ringlet fell across his forehead. I gently swept it back as I ran my fingers through his hair, appreciating its silky smoothness. One of the many things I appreciated about Mika was his lack of hair product usage. Somehow he managed to stay perfectly coiffed without handfuls of sticky, greasy-looking gel. As such, I often found that my hands were lost in those curls, unseen for minutes, hours, even days at a time. What can I say? He’s hot.
I hitched the soft, sage-colored sheet slightly higher around my body as I leaned forward to kiss him awake. A series of soft pecks and light nibbles up his neck later, Mika rolled onto his back and stretched, his side of the covers just barely brushing his hips. Relaxed, Mika turned to me and smiled lazily. I continued to be mesmerized by the sheet, willing it with my mind to just fall a little to the left… “Morning,” Mika murmured, leaning over to kiss me square on the lips. “How long have you been awake?” He stretched again and the blankets moved just slightly, but not quite enough.
“Not long,” I replied nonchalantly, still staring at the sheet. Mika chuckled and tugged it up over his abdomen tucking it under his hips. “Well, what did you go and do that for?” I cried, sitting up rather quickly.
He smiled and pulled gently at the blankets that I clasped closely to my chest. “Tit for tat,” he murmured, his eyes growing dark with desire. I shuddered involuntarily. You can call it the honeymoon period all you want. The man was utterly delicious and I had no intention of easing up on our extracurriculars, no matter how long we’d be together. Still, something about the light of day always made me feel shy and slightly insecure. I loved my body. I accepted it. And don’t even let me count the ways Mika had proven his love and acceptance for my soft curves in the last few weeks. Still, next to him, I always felt slightly inadequate.
“I asked first,” I teased him, running a hand through my own hair, nervously. It got stuck about halfway through. Embarrassed, I began to tug, ripping a few hairs at their roots in the process. “Yeow!” I cried, clamping my hand to my head. “What a rat nest. I need a shower. Must have slept really hard last night.”
“You did,” Mika assured me, sneaking an arm around my waist. “But I don’t think it was the sleep that caused your issue.” I blushed as he pulled me closer, kissing my exposed side. “And before you go shower, I think that your hair could stand to be just a little bit sexier.”
“I do not look sexy,” I scoffed, closing my eyes as he continued to kiss me. Up my side. Around my shoulder blade. Nibbling my neck. Up to my ear where- “Oh!” I gasped, as he gently sucked at my lobe.
“Looking pretty sexy from where I’m sitting,” he whispered softly, tugging at the sheets, which I refused to let go of. “But if you insist on showering, I guess I’m just going to have to come with you.”
In one swift movement, he stood and pitched me along with half of our blankets over his shoulder. I giggled helplessly all the way down the hall.
One very long, steamy shower later, I was furiously running around my bedroom, half dressed. My hair hung in wet ringlets down my back and I was going back and forth between brushing my teeth and pulling on a pair of socks. “What time is it?” I called out as best I could without blue and white toothpaste foam rolling out of my mouth and down my chin.
“What was that?” Mika smirked, peering around the corner from the hallway.
Turning and balanced on one foot, I glowered. “You heard me,” I muttered just as incoherently.
Mika checked his watch just as I tugged on my sock and hopped past him into the bathroom. Giving my teeth one final brush, I turned on the faucet and spit into the sink. Cupping my hands, I pulled cool water to my lips to rinse, dried my face on the hand towel and raced back towards the bedroom. “It’s a little after ten,” Mika informed me as I frantically pushed hanger after hanger aside, desperately trying to find a blouse that matched my new, chic navy blue trousers. The problem was, I wasn’t a very chic individual. In fact, the majority of my closet consisted of jeans, sweatpants and t-shirts I’d collected over the years. My smattering of work-appropriate attire was mostly borrowed from Addison and had to be pinned or stuffed in order to look appropriate on my frame. I didn’t have time for pinning or stuffing. We were late. Growling, I pulled off the trousers, stuffed them deep into the confines of my closet and tugged on a pair of faded but respectable jeans. Next, I pulled a girlish but still somewhat cute paisley peasant blouse over my head. Mussing with the bowtie in front for a second, I eventually sighed and let it be. “What was wrong with those pants you had on?” Mika asked from his perch on the bed. “They made your butt look good. Real good. In fact, the only time it ever looks better is when there’s nothing covering it at all.”
I laughed. “I don’t have anything that really goes with them,” I admitted.
“Then, why did you buy them?” he asked in that confused, male way.
Smiling, I shook my head. “They were cute and they were on sale. I can always add something to my wardrobe.”
Mika laughed. “Whatever you say, Sugar. Are you about ready?”
“Ten minutes,” I promised, starting to fuss with the bowtie again. Nothing I did could make it fall right.
Mika checked his watch again. “We’re going to be late,” he warned.
I smirked and sashayed towards the bathroom, where I picked up my hair dryer. “With the way you drive?” I teased, just before I flipped on the blower.
Fifteen minutes, a lot of hair product and three shirt changes (on my part) later, Mika and I were roaring out of my parking lot. “We don’t even really need to be at this,” I grumbled, fussing with my hair in the flip-down mirror. “Or at least, I don’t. Not sure why you’re dragging me along, anyway.”
“She’s coming in to do a photo shoot with you,” Mika pointed out. “You have to meet her anyway; you may as well come along with me since I need to sit down with her.”
“I know,” I whined. “But I don’t understand why you or James are involved in her security detail and need to go to some big meeting with her bodyguards. You’re detectives, not muscle.”
“I beg to
differ,” Mika scoffed, teasingly. I harrumphed and turned to stare out my window as the city whipped by. A few months ago, I’d been dating both James and Mika, trying desperately to decide between them. In the end, Mika had won me over with his relentless pursuit and chivalrous intentions. I hadn’t spoken to James in weeks, despite his continued efforts to remain in touch. Frankly, I was fine avoiding him for as long as humanly possible. Just because I’d chosen Mika didn’t mean I wasn’t still wildly attracted to James. He was more muscular than Mika, with lighter features and a 5 o’clock shadow that made me weak in the knees. Still, I felt that James and I had, had our time back in college and he’d chosen to pass. I wanted to be open to possibility, not tethered by my past. That conclusion didn’t make my decision any easier and I’d been too embarrassed to face James since I’d let him down gently over coffee. His hardened eyes and set jaw that afternoon are forever burned into my memory. I’ve never been capable of breaking up with someone by phone call or text — still, I loathed doing it in person.
“But explain this to me again,” I asked Mika grumpily, “James knows her?”
“From when they were kids,” Mika explained. “The two of us together, well, we worked a case for her a few years ago, back when James and I were still partners living here in Milwaukee. She thought that her fiancé was cheating on her.”
“I didn’t know that Carmen Suarez used to live in Milwaukee,” I told him, wrinkling my nose. It didn’t strike me as the place someone as exotic and well-known as she was would come from. Carmen was wicked famous in Hollywood. Even the stars were star struck.
“She didn’t,” he assured me. “James and Carmen both grew up in Chicago and I think they kind of knew each other as kids. But either way, our company came highly recommended and, as you know, her family has quite a bit of money. She didn’t care what the cost was and didn’t care that we were over an hour’s drive. She wanted the best. She wanted to know what kind of man she was really marrying. This was before she became famous, by the way. She was still just modeling at that point.”
“And?” I asked. “Was he? Cheating, I mean.”
Mika shrugged. “We were never able to turn anything up on him. Solid guy. To be honest, I think that she was just hoping for an excuse to get out of the engagement. She wanted to be big and he wanted a housewife. Eventually, she just broke it off and moved to Los Angeles. Never has been married, to my knowledge.”
I nodded and then, after a few moments of thought, I decided to ask Mika a question I’d never thought to ask him before. “How did you and James become partners?” I inquired. Have I mentioned that the men that I had decided between romantically were formerly partners and good friends before Mika retired and took his share somewhere warm and south? He’d actually come out of retirement to help James with a case. One that involved me and a crazy cop by the name of Barry. Barry had been trying to murder me. Thankfully, that case was solved just in the nick of time.
Mika shrugged again and frowned as traffic on the interstate became somewhat congested. Congested traffic was far from being his favorite thing. He liked to keep things moving. I shuddered and closed my eyes, a smile playing at the corner of my lips as I recalled how he’d kept things moving in the shower that morning. Mika didn’t notice me replaying our steamy tryst and his voice snapped me out of my reverie. “We actually met at a bar. I was in Chicago visiting friends and James was in Chicago visiting family. We ended up sitting next to one another at some joint on the north of Lincoln Park. We got to chatting while we waited for our people to show up and discovered we had a lot of the same goals in mind. James even wanted to start his own PI firm. We hit it off and I guess things just kind of grew from there.”
I nodded. It was so easy for men to make new friends and, it seemed too, business partners.
From what I understood, James had always been the face of the company, while Mika had been more of a shadow in the background. He’d never worked directly with clients — he enjoyed the research and the discovery of facts far more than the schmoozing. The schmoozing and legwork to find new clients had always been James’s specialty.
In fact, the first time anyone realized that Mika had been James’s silent partner back in the day, was when Mika had come out of hiding to help save me. Throughout their entire time together, including when Mika came back to help deal with Barry, he’d retained his cover. “Who decided you were the silent partner?”
Mika grinned. “James said I would be too easy to remember for field work — that I stick out too much for the Midwest, between my appearance and my accent. No one really knew I was there, save for the extra initial in our company title. I did some on-site work when we were carrying larger loads, but I’ve always been more comfortable behind-the-scenes.”
I smiled. Mika was nothing if not a quiet, calming presence who would be easily forgettable if he didn’t resemble a god. “And now that you’re back in the business, you have to do both fieldwork and online research all by yourself, right?” Mika had recently started up another private investigation firm in Milwaukee. He didn’t need the work, but he claimed that retirement bored him more than he thought it would being back here. His plan was to build up the company and one day sell it for profit, just as he had with his previous firm. James was doing the same thing.
Mika wasn’t answering me. For the first time, I sensed that something about our conversation was just the tiniest bit off. Traffic began to ease up a bit and Mika shifted uncomfortably in his seat, keeping his eyes locked on the car in front of us. I felt my eyes narrow and my pulse quicken, but waited for him to speak. “Well, baby, that’s part of why I wanted you to come along today.”
“I thought you asked me to join you and James because I need to understand Carmen’s overall security plan while she’s visiting.” While I was pumped that Carmen Suarez would be returning to her modeling roots for Food Porn, I was becoming less so by the minute.
“Well, I never actually said that, you kind of assumed,” Mika said. When I started to protest, he rushed on. “See, James and I aren’t actually necessary for security, but Carmen needs us on hand.”
“Needs you for what?” I felt myself prickling, knowing that I wasn’t going to like whatever he was about to say.
Mika shrugged. “PI work,” he answered nonchalantly, checking my reaction out of the corner of his eye.
“She’ll be in town for less than 24 hours,” I countered. “What could she possibly need you to investigate? And have you informed her that you and James no longer work together? Was that ever a topic of conversation?”
“She has a case for us,” he said, ignoring my rising voice. “I don’t know much but her friend disappeared a while back.”
“Her dad has mob ties,” I scoffed as if the reasons her friend may have disappeared were incredibly obvious. “A lot of people that get involved with her family disapear.”
Mika shrugged. “I’ll know more once we talk to her.”
“Wait,” I snarled, remembering my original point. “We? As in you and James? Together? Like as partners?”
Mika nodded and quickly whipped over into the right lane to exit the interstate. “James and I have been discussing the possibility of reuniting as partners. We did make a great team. Plus, I’m unfortunately as notable as James now. We’re doing the same work and just making it twice as hard because we’re splitting up cases, plus doing all of our own groundwork. And now that you’ve decided which one of us you-”
“Excuse me?” I cut him off, livid. “When did my decision factor into yours?”
“A while ago,” Mika admitted, without a hint of mortification. I was fuming. How could they possibly even consider being partners again? And even if they could manage that without any awkwardness, I selfishly wondered why I hadn’t been brought into the loop sooner seeing as how it had obviously been a halting point to them reuniting earlier. Additionally, it was clear that my relationship with James was all but a puff of smoke — would that damage the partnership? I d
idn’t want Mika working alongside someone who might have it out for him. Perhaps I was just a worry wart.
Mika sighed heavily, looked over his shoulder and pulled over into the emergency lane, flipping on his hazards. He turned to me and cupped my chin in his large, strong hand. “Look,” he told me softly, “I don’t want to put you in a weird spot. But if we’re going to do this, you and me, then eventually you and James are going to have to run into one another and be cordial. He and I work in the exact same field. Seeing each other will happen, whether we’re partners or not.” I began to protest but Mika cut me off, pressing his finger gently to my lips. “It will,” he finished firmly. I frowned deeply into his finger as we stared at one another, neither of us willing to blink or look away. Finally, my eyes twitching with effort, I let out a loud snort of displeasure and turned towards my window. “I’ll take that as you agreeing with me,” Mika said, flipping off his hazards and checking traffic over his shoulder. “In which case, we may as well get pleasantries out of the way.”
I hated when he turned me on by being a decision maker. It was the worst kind of loss as far as I was concerned. “So just to be clear, I didn’t actually need to be here today? You tricked me.” I turned to look shoot him another dirty look to let him know exactly how I felt about his craftiness.
“If that’s how you’d like to see it,” Mika stated. “I just thought it would be good practice. And I didn’t actually trick you. You just made assumptions about why you’d be in attendance.”
I thought back to our conversation and realized that he was correct. “You so owe me,” I growled, crossing my arms tightly. It was as close as I’d get to being “wrong” this time.
“Anything you want,” Mika promised, lightly stroking my arm. “And I do mean anything.” The last sentence came out stoked with desire. I tried to cool the sudden heat that flushed across my chest. When I was unable to do so, I cleared my throat and turned back towards my window. “Hot?” Mika teased.
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