Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  He let her hand go and smiled back. “I see that. I’m telling you now. And as soon as you want to tell me the rest of it, I’m here to listen. I can’t exactly go anywhere. I have this broken leg. And I’m very, very good at solutions.”

  “Mm.” She’d lost the fine-wire tension, and she was smiling for real. “You make it so easy to believe in rainbows and unicorns. Being with you is like dancing in my slip and my sparkly headband. You make me believe I’m Princess Ariel, or that I could be.”

  “Good.” He tried to think of something else to say, but for once in his carefully polished life, couldn’t come up with a thing.

  “Eat your burger,” she said. “I’m eating mine. Somebody cooked for me and cut me flowers, and that makes it a good night. I need a wee while here. My arms have gone all tingly. That’s either the aftereffects of mushroom poisoning, or it’s you. I think it’s you.”

  She was all the way out of her comfort zone, he could tell. Which came from, odd as it seemed, being comforted. Having a man want to be her hero.

  She needed time, though? He had time. Time to sit in the lingering warmth, eat a quiet dinner, listen to the most beautiful music a composer had ever written, watch the sky turn magical jewel colors, and let her feel it all. So that was what he did. The scent of the flowers he’d cut her mingled with all the others in this lush subtropical garden, the wine glowed red as rubies and tasted like sin, and when they finished dinner and the sky began to glow, he got up and said, “Let’s lie down and watch the show. If you shove one of those loungers on over here next to mine, I can hold your hand.”

  She smiled at him with the kind of slow, knowing sweetness that made a man’s blood heat, and she didn’t talk about the dirty dishes, her schedule, or anything else. She just shoved the lounger over and climbed onto it. Now, he had his fingers threaded through hers and his thumb tracing patterns on her palm, while Kathleen Battle poured the mysterious, aching notes of Vangelis’s Mythodea into the night.

  The clouds were lit to brilliant gold, with luminous pink showing around the edges, when the bats came.

  They flew overhead like shadows, on and on, papering the sky with their black wings. Beside him, Willow sighed and shifted, and he said, “Yeah. That’s something.”

  No candles for them tonight, just the glow of the sky and the half-circle that was the moon coming up on the horizon. Over the ocean, but he couldn’t worry about the ocean now, because the bats were still in the sky, and Willow was focusing on his hand.

  He was turning her on with his thumb. He needed to see what else he could do. That was the last part of the deal tonight. He turned onto his good side, kept her hand in his, and pulled her over with his other hand on her shoulder, and she let him do it. His hand threaded through her curls, he held her other hand tight, and she sprawled over his body while he kissed her, slow and deep and easy, the rush of the bats faded away, and the music played on.

  He kissed her until she was melting against him, until he had his hand under that nearly transparent white shirt and was confirming what he’d seen at first glance, when he’d been standing at her door. That she wasn’t wearing a bra. The faint shadow of her nipples had teased him all through dinner, and as he brushed his hand over one, it hardened under his touch. Like all she wanted was him, and she was trembling for the satisfaction only he could give her.

  He said, “Willow,” and all she did was moan and rub into his hand.

  He smiled. “Stand up and take off your clothes for me.”

  The hard rush when she obeyed. Was there anything better than that? She stripped the white shirt slowly off her body until her hands were over her head, and then let it drop to the ground in a drift of soft fabric. She was standing in the green cotton shorts, then, her hand going to the snap. She unzipped slowly, and he watched the whole thing.

  “Leave the thong,” he said. The sight of her wriggling her shorts down over her hips—surely that was something he’d never get tired of. They hit the ground, too, and she stepped out of them, one foot and then the other, kicked them aside, and shook her hair back like a woman who knew she was beautiful.

  “Thong now,” he said. Maybe it was the wine, because he’d needed a couple more swallows for his dry mouth before he set the glass on the table beside him. Maybe it was the night, and maybe it was endless legs, slim hips, and a tiny white scrap of silk with her fingers hooked into the sides. And the sight of that scrap sliding down and off her pretty body.

  He started to pull off his own shirt, and she said, “Oh, no. That’s my job.” She was kneeling carefully over him on the lounger, then, sliding his T-shirt up, stroking her hands over his chest, and saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mr. Hunter.”

  Her hair brushed over him as she bent to kiss him, and he slid his palms down her shoulders, her sides, until he had both of them around her bare ass. It fit perfectly in his palms, and when he stroked his fingers down to explore the sensitive spot at the back of her thighs, then up to her tailbone, rubbed her there, and finally drummed them, she shuddered, long and luxuriantly, kissed him deeper, and whispered, “I’m going to make you so happy tonight. Come in the house with me.”

  She was already hitting him like a heart attack. If she made him much happier, she was probably going to kill him, but what the hell. He’d live dangerously. He got himself up to sitting, and she handed him his crutches, drank her wine down while he got himself upright, and said, “That’s lubrication, and I’m going to need it,” before she pulled his head down and kissed him again. After that, she turned and sashayed her way into the house like she knew he’d be following her. Slowing down, for once, and believing.

  All the way down the shadowy hall and into the bedroom, where she didn’t turn on a light. She was pale as the moon in the darkness, and she turned, looked him over, and asked, “Can you stand up a while, if you prop yourself against the bed a bit?”

  “Yeah.” His heart was beating hard, and she had him turned on like she had her hand on the electric switch. She smiled, got her hand on the zipper of his shorts, and eased them down his legs, and then she had her hand on him and was stroking him as if he were everything she wanted for Valentine’s Day. He knew that was how he felt about it, anyway. Flowers, hell.

  “Hang on a sec,” she whispered into his ear, and he thought, What? He needed to get rid of these crutches so badly. He had nearly three weeks’ worth of frustration going here, and about a year’s worth of positions he needed to put her into and things he needed to do to her. And he couldn’t. It was torture.

  He forgot that, though, because she was climbing onto the bed, then crawling across it, and the sight of Willow crawling, naked, was something that required his focus. She grabbed all the pillows, then lay crosswise on her back, her head nearly off the near side of the bed and her hips on two more, and he thought, OK. How does this work with a broken leg? Two pillows went under her hips, the others beneath her shoulders, and she leaned her head all the way back, looked at him upside-down, her corkscrews of hair falling toward the floor, smiled, and said, “It’s a bloody high bed, hey. Think somebody did that on purpose? I did a little online searching myself. Want to come hold my head?”

  Oh, yeah. He did. Balancing on your crutches, he found, wasn’t one bit easy when you were buried halfway down a woman’s throat, and when she had one arm wrapped around your good thigh and the other one drifting over her own breasts. She couldn’t talk, because her mouth was full, but she was making some noise anyway, little satisfied sounds like she was loving it despite the awkward position, or because of it, and like all she wanted was for him to give her more.

  He’d have done it, but it would be so easy to go too far, so he forced himself to hold still and let her control things. He could have closed his eyes, but there was no way he wasn’t watching her hand. Teasing each breast in turn, giving him a perfect view, then sliding over her ribs, down her belly, over the soft, secret spots on her inner thighs.

  “Spread your legs for me,” he managed to
say. He let the crutch on his good side drop against the bed. He needed a hand, because it had to be on her cheek, holding her against him, feeling how hard she was working. “Show that to me, Willow. Come on, baby. Do it for me.” She did, and he appreciated the hell out of those pillows.

  After that, she set in to please herself. Feet flat on the mattress, knees up, rocking on her pillows, playing as hard with herself as she was with him, her fingers slippery and busy and not one molecule of her embarrassed to show him everything. And all he had to do in the world was stand here, hold her head tight around him, balance on one leg, try to keep breathing, and watch.

  It was a great view.

  It was quite possibly going to kill him.

  She’d had a bad day, and he’d been too wonderful and had slipped under every last one of her defenses. That was probably why she was so desperately turned on, she thought hazily. She hadn’t known if he’d like this. From how tightly he was holding her face, he was loving it. Then she forgot to think about that, because something shifted, she was letting him in deeper than she’d ever managed, he was letting out a strangled curse and trying to hold himself back, and she was going up like fireworks. Her legs straightening, then stiffening, her feet flexing hard, her body displayed for him, and every gasp pushing him deeper down her throat.

  It was too much. He was too deep, and she was coming too hard. Spasming again and again, her hips slamming against the pillow, and Brett swearing, low and dirty and thrilling, and emptying himself into her.

  She swallowed, and then she had to swallow again, because he was still going. And so was she. Up and over again, making more noise against him, while he held her face tight, his fingers nearly bruising her under her chin, and said, his voice as tortured as she felt, “Oh, God, Willow. I have to fuck you. I have to fuck you so hard.”

  Happy Valentine’s Day.

  He got himself onto the bed at last, pulled her up to lie with him, tucked her into his body, and asked, “All right? Too much?”

  Her shoulders shook, and he got a stab of ice-cold fear right to the chest. He’d made her cry. And then she raised her head, kissed him on the mouth, letting him taste himself on her, and said, “Hell of a time to think of that, boy.”

  He exhaled in relief, got a hand around the back of her neck, smiled a little sheepishly, and said, “It was an exciting position. Maybe too hard on you, though. And I’m a little bit of an, ah . . .”

  “Bloody pushy bloke?” she asked, giving him another of those sweet kisses that got a man off track. “Alpha male? Well-endowed fella?”

  Another grin. This kind of satisfaction went too deep for anything else. “Could be.”

  “Mm. Could be I love all of it.”

  He stroked her neck, keeping it as gentle as he hadn’t managed before. “Could be I saw that from the start. I saw something, that’s for sure. I could’ve bruised you here, though. I held you too hard.”

  She was kissing his neck now, and both her hands were in his hair. It felt great. “You could’ve, and I didn’t care. You excited the hell out of me, if I’m confessing, and it seems I am. You bring it out in me. Makes me wonder what you’d do with two legs.”

  “Wonderful things.” He sent his hand down her back, just because he loved touching her, and he hadn’t had nearly enough of it. “With plenty of communication. We should’ve had a signal tonight, so you could let me know if it was too much. It was so hard not to make it too much. Next time. And slow can be sexy, too. That was supposed to be the idea of tonight. Valentine’s Day. I was going to be romantic, and go slow. You got in the way with your surprise, so I still owe you one. We could see exactly how excited I could make you. I’m guessing I could make it last a long, long time.”

  She hummed again and said, “First day I met you, when I was taking my shower, trying not to get carried away and wanting to pull you in there with me, I thought of that thing people say, that never turns out to be true. Not even close. Love you all night long. And I thought—I’ll bet he could. I’ll bet he would.”

  “I would. And I could.” He petted her a little more, thought about what a lucky bastard he was, and finally said, “So when are you going to ask for my advice? Or does that take a spanking?”

  It made her shudder, and not just in a sexy way.

  First things first. She kissed his neck again, made her way up to his ear, and whispered, “That a promise?”

  He was too easy. His hand closed around her bottom, his whole body went on alert, and he said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a promise. We’ll wait until you’ve had a better day, though. In fact—I’ll wait until you ask me for it. And stop turning me on so much, dirty girl. I’m being serious here, and I’m wounded.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed and rolled onto her back. “This was definitely the best part of my day. The rest wasn’t so good. You’re also right that I don’t know what to do about it. How do you prove you didn’t do something?”

  He flipped the switch from “sexy” to “serious” from one second to the next, and if all that controlled power was as exciting as every other part of him—well, she was pretty far gone. That wasn’t news. “Tell me,” he said. “The whole thing. Don’t leave anything out.”

  So she did. She told him about the kitchen inspection that hadn’t turned up anything at all, about the trip up to Ben’s, and what Katherine had admitted when Willow had finally run her to ground.

  “There weren’t any false chanterelles in what I took from Bankside’s house,” Katherine had said, “but who knows when he collected them. If he found out about the poisoning, the first thing he’d do, surely, is go out and find more that he knew were right. He could even have mixed them on purpose, if he hadn’t been able to find enough for your needs. You must have ordered those in advance. If it wasn’t done accidentally, and you seem to think he wouldn’t have made the mistake, it must have been done deliberately. Not everyone knows that they’ll make some people ill. They probably don’t make him ill.”

  “First,” Willow told Brett now, “There’s nothing Ben doesn’t know about mushrooms. I told her that before, though, and she didn’t believe it. And second, who was going to tell Ben people were ill? He lives up there alone with the chickens and the dogs, and he only has wifi in fits and starts. I see him at the farmers’ market, and that’s about all. He’s not ringing up all his mates to ask how his mushrooms went over at some dinner.”

  Brett was frowning. “What did she say to that?”

  “Not much she could say. There’s nothing to say about either Ben or me, I reckon, except that we made people ill and sent them to hospital. Which got said. You read the article. Damning stuff. It wasn’t just news, it was the front page. ‘Mushroom Poisoning at Anniversary Dinner Hospitalizes 14.’ And the gossip everywhere you find locals, I’m sure, which is too many places.”

  “Which didn’t make your boss happy, I’m guessing.”

  “No.” She knew she had to tell him. It had been a beautiful reprieve, here with him, but it had been a temporary one. “We got slammed on our Yelp page as well, and on Facebook, which I suspect you also saw. Over forty comments on Facebook, and six new reviews on Yelp, all one star, straight down the page. Somebody posted photos of those people, the old lady and the pregnant one, with tubes in their arms, and asked why the Food Authority hadn’t shut us down. Amanda deleted the photos from Facebook, but she couldn’t do anything about Yelp. She asked. They said no. It happened. It’s not a lie.” Another breath in and out, and the other thing. “And a customer canceled already, a good one. A wedding a month out. The wedding planner rang up and said they’d never get a good caterer this close to the date, like that was our fault, but she couldn’t risk the guests being ill. She asked for the deposit back. She won’t be using us again.”

  “That’s one person,” Brett said. “Surely you mostly do destination events. Local gossip in Byron Bay isn’t even going to reach Brisbane. It’s certainly not going to reach Sydney.”

  She had to admit it. “No. That�
�s where we want to get. It’s not really where we are now. We’ve been more local, but we were branching out. I was branching out. I had a luncheon tomorrow. Fundraiser for St. John’s, the ambulance charity. Too late for them to find somebody else, but they asked that Amanda do the cooking, even though the booking came through a wedding I’d done, and the menu was mine. I’ll go in and help her beforehand, but I can’t turn up at the venue.” The humiliation was there, burning hot in her chest, and the anger, too. “I didn’t do anything wrong, Brett. I sliced chanterelles.”

  “If you didn’t,” he said, “and the supplier didn’t, then somebody else did, and slipped them into the bag at your kitchens or at the event itself. The question is: who? Why, and how? I’m guessing ‘why’ brings you to ‘who.’ Who were they targeting? The usual reasons for sabotage are money or sex. Possibly jealousy, or envy. Strong motivators.”

  “Those last two are the same, surely.”

  “Nope. Jealousy’s wanting somebody that someone else has, or worrying that somebody wants what’s yours. Envy’s wanting something that someone else has. Envy’s ‘It’s not fair.’ Jealousy’s ‘She’s mine.’ They’re both pretty corrosive, though I’m going to admit that I’m understanding jealousy a little better than I used to. If I didn’t mention it . . .” His hand was on her bottom again, and he gave her a quick slap there. “I’m an exclusive guy, and I want you bad. Wait, though. Where were we?”

  It took some focus to remember. “Money doesn’t make sense for anybody,” she said. “It’s Amanda’s business. Why would she try to destroy it? Why would anybody who works for us? That’s their job. The money doesn’t go anywhere but to her, to me, or back into the business. It’s set up as one of those, uh . . .”

  “Pass-through entities,” he said. “The owners take a distribution, and they pay taxes on it.”

  “Yeah. That.” This made her head hurt.