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Secrets, Volume 15
An eRed Sage Publication • All Rights Reserved • Copyright © 2005–2008
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Published by arrangement with the authors and copyright holders of the individual works as follows:
SIMON SAYS • Copyright © 2005 by Jane Thompson
BITE OF THE WOLF • Copyright © 2005 by Cynthia Eden FALLING FOR TROUBLE • Copyright © 2005 by Saskia Walker THE DISCIPLINARIAN • Copyright © 2005 by Leigh Court Cover • Copyright © 2005 by Tara Kearney; www.tarakearney.com Cover Models: Diana Peterfreund and Will Scheid
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Contents
Jane Thompson
Simon Says
Cynthia Eden
Bite of the Wolf
Saskia Walker
Falling for Trouble
Leigh Court
The Disciplinarian
Simon Says
* * *
by Jane Thompson
To My Reader:
Want to hear something it has taken me most of my life to figure out? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
Simon Says: Chapter 1
Simon Says column, Wednesday, June 16th
Nothing makes sense anymore.
The Red Sox won the World Series.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is still governor of California.
Another one of my brothers is getting married.
What the hell is going on? The divorce rate is high enough in this country without my family throwing in, state government is already in the toilet and, come on… the Red Sox? I am up a Major League creek without a paddle.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about rooting for the underdog but the Red Sox taking the pennant was nothing less than a harbinger of weird things to come. Case in point, the Terminator is a public servant that just happens to call his opponents ‘girlie-men’. This is worse than when Jesse Ventura took over the helm of the great state of Minnesota (let’s all take a moment to remember how well that turned out) and, to top it all off, my mom is still mad at me about my drunken best man speech from the last family wedding I had to endure. There’s only one thing to do…
Vote? Admit that organized sports are no substitute for meaningful interpersonal relationships? Spend some time investigating my knee-jerk aversion to the institution of marriage?
Not in this lifetime.
I have formulated a three-prong attack (why don’t we just call it a fork-attack and be done with it?). Free booze, easy women and access to the beach. Yes, idiot reader, yours truly is looking at three alcohol-soaked days of sun, sand and sex to obliterate reality, gratis a friend of mine whose name and/or address I am not at liberty to divulge (so don’t bother asking). It’s enough for you to know that my host is in possession of a monstrous beachfront estate, complete with a full bar in his living room.
It’ll take me weeks to recover from the hangover, and then there will be lawyers to contact, medical bills to expense and letters of apology to compose. In short, there will be a variety of charges.
Things are looking up my friend… up, up and away.
***
Friday
The first night of Simon Campbell’s much anticipated three days of sun, sand and sex found the man himself leaning against the bar in his host’s vast living room, a drink in one hand, a blond in the other, and so bored he was seriously entertaining the idea of ditching the blond, keeping the drink, and going upstairs to see what was on TV. It was a sad state of affairs when a man, surrounded as he was by a veritable smorgasbord of beautiful women, found himself wishing for nothing more than a comfortable chair and the remote.
There goes my career.
“Nah,” Simon muttered, nudging the blond off his side with an impatient flick of his arm. She teetered back with a giggle, then began flirting with the bartender.
The TV urge was a momentary glitch, nothing to worry about.
He was just tired… as in sleep-deprived, not tired as in the idea of living through one more weekend like this was starting to feel like one of life’s have-tos, on a par with flossing and voting and…
And this train of thought was getting him nowhere.
Simon turned towards the bar to order another Chivas over ice.
Maybe booze would help.
As he waited for the bartender to notice him, Simon glanced up at the large wall of glass behind the bar and saw, not the majesty of the Pacific Ocean at night as he had expected, but rather the room reflected back at him. It felt as if he was looking into an old mirror that had gone hazy and dim. Simon studied the collection of laughing, beautiful people spread out behind him. There wasn’t a hair out of place or an unsightly bulge among them. With the muted, recessed lighting, the minimalist beige décor and all these beautiful people, Simon felt like he was in an up-scale bar rather than the living room of a private home.
Checking out the faces in the crowd, Simon had to admit that the turnout tonight was impressive. This being L.A., most of the guests were either household names or grasping after that same dubious distinction, blindly following the New American Dream to the movies, TV or a lucrative recording deal.
Simon wasn’t interested in having his face on every billboard between Santa Monica and Times Square but that was only because he preferred the writing life… his version of it, anyway.
Every Wednesday, his byline appeared in newspapers across the country and below it followed a report from the front lines of what every desk-locked, thirty-something American male considered a fantasy life: free tickets to every sports arena and nightclub in the Los Angeles area, invites to record launches and movie premieres and, to his readers’ endless delight, an ever growing parade of young women eager to get naked for a chance to appear in print as another one of Simon Says’ conquests.
Lately, Simon had been tossing in a few political comments but he was going to have to stop doing that. His editor was making just a little too much noise about them, saying that the comments had the flavor of a possible new direction, and if Simon was in any way interested in broadening his horizons, the powers-that-be would have no problem with it.
Yeah, right. The second Simon Says’ readership fell off, the powers-that-be would fire his ass and he’d be back to writing obituaries. Simon would rather write his own obituary, then shoot himself, than go back to that.
Returning his attention to the wall of glass behind the bar, Simon narrowed his eyes, looking past the frolicsome guests to the serene ocean beyond. He searched for the horizon, that hard, dark line where ocean gave way to sky. Strangely enough,
when he found it, there appeared to be someone standing on it.
Huh?
Must be someone lurking up in the gallery, Simon realized.
Turning around, he looked up towards the second story gallery, a narrow promenade that jutted out over the crowd. There in the shadows, with her hands gripping the wrought-iron railing, stood the one, and thank you Jesus for small favors, only, Ms. Georgina Abigail Kennedy.
Early thirties, slender, brunette, and almost as tall as him, Georgina was an annoying spinster-librarian with a hooker’s mouth and a snotty, holier-than-thou attitude that made Simon want to mess up her hair and take a bite out of that mouth just to see her react with something more than polite disdain when she looked at him.
“What the hell is she doing here?” Simon asked, too shocked by her presence to keep his voice down.
The blond next to him, who had been blithely blathering on about God-knew-what for the past ten minutes, followed his gaze and said, “Oh, I heard she was going to be here.”
Simon looked down at… Cherry… no… Sherry… no, wait;
what was this woman’s name… Cheryl, that was it… and watched as she waved towards the balcony. He turned back in time to see Georgina wave back, a serene, All Hail the Queen look on her face.
“You know her?” Simon sputtered.
“I had lunch with her and Valerie last week. Do you know Valerie Kennedy?” Cheryl asked.
“Yeah,” Simon said. He and Valerie had been friends for years, but if she had something to do with Georgina’s presence here tonight…
“Oh, that’s right. You went to Valerie’s birthday party last month. I couldn’t go, I was in Vegas. And we had sooo much fun.”
Something in Simon’s expression must have clued Cheryl into the fact he didn’t give a rip about her trip to Vegas. After flounder-ing for a second, Cheryl picked up the thread of conversation having to do with Georgina and ran with it.
“Georgina is Valerie’s cousin. I was surprised that she was so nice, Georgina, not Valerie. By the look of her, I thought she would be a bitch but she wasn’t. Come to find out, she’s a librarian and, get this, Valerie told me that our host hired her to organize his library this weekend. Kind of weird timing but…” Cheryl giggled and then waved her hand listlessly in Georgina’s general direction, the gesture apparently completing her thought.
“Jerome’s having his library organized the same weekend he’s hosting this party?” Simon asked. Their host for the weekend, Jerome Vance, was an odd one but shit, this took the keg. “Well, that explains Miss Perfect’s presence here tonight.”
“Yeah, it sure does… Wait, don’t tell me that you’ve met her,”
Cheryl gasped.
“Yeah,” Simon said, glancing back towards the gallery. Georgina had stepped away from the railing and Simon sincerely hoped she wasn’t on her way down here. The last thing he needed was another run-in with her high-and-mighty-ness. He was still reeling from his first encounter with her three weeks ago at his friend Valerie’s thirtieth birthday party. After Valerie had introduced them, Georgina had gifted him with a thin-lipped smile, a cool ‘How do you do’ and then spent the rest of the party looking through him rather than at him, quickly changing direction when their paths were about to cross. Basically behaving as if he was something she had scraped off her shoe earlier in the evening and was determined to stay clear of until such time as she could leave the premises altogether.
Simon was usually immune to the scorn ladled out to him by the good women of the world, and he wouldn’t have given her a second thought if she hadn’t been so damn nice to everyone else.
She’d treated every flighty party girl and hard-eyed womanizer to a kind smile, a little chit-chat and an offer to refill their drink. Valerie had stuck by her cousin all night, acting as a buffer between Georgina and the raunchier advances of some of the guests, frustrating Simon’s urge to take the librarian down a peg or two by informing her that a few of the men she was being so nice to were thousands of times sleazier than he was.
Simon again felt the need to ruffle Georgina’s feathers and get back a little of his own, mostly to make up for the fact that he still remembered the sinking feeling he had gotten every time she’d turned her nose up at him.
No longer the least bit bored, and with the hint of an evil smile playing around the corners of his mouth, Simon excused himself, picked up his drink and made his way toward the narrow staircase that led up to the gallery.
Topping the stairs, Simon paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He saw Georgina, a lone woman in a loose-fitting brown dress, slowly making her way deeper into the shadows, eschewing the confusion of light and noise below in favor of this dark gallery, lined by empty bookshelves. She paused to run her finger along a shelf, allowing him a clear view of her face in profile. With her hair resting at the nape of her neck in an intricately formed knot, she appeared a porcelain cameo, cool and finely drawn, above all the messy emotions that plagued normal human beings. When her mouth came to life in a close-lipped, wistful little grin, Simon lost his breath.
Tell me what you’re thinking, share yourself with me.
Stunned by the depth of longing behind that wholly unwelcome thought, Simon turned to leave her to her solitary wanderings. He’d come up here to mess with her, not yearn for a clue into what had brought on that sad smile. But then she turned her head, aware that she was no longer alone, and he hated her response when she realized who had joined her. The way she stiffened and drew back, crossed her arms over her chest and tipped her nose into the air, all of it shoved him forward, each reaction moving him one step closer until he was nearly on top of her.
She didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, she looked him up and down, as if she couldn’t quite believe he would dare approach her.
Without saying a word, Simon waited until her eyes met his.
Then he pushed forward, breaching that invisible line people set up between themselves and the unknown, barging into her personal space. That got her. She backed up with a soft gasp and a small, stumbling step that left her trapped between the bookshelves and his body. He felt a rush of triumph at having shaken her reserve, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He lifted his arm, set his drink on the shelf next to her head and then gripped the edge of that same shelf, caging her on one side.
She didn’t like that. Her eyes widened and she drew in her breath. Simon thoroughly enjoyed the tremulous sound as he let his gaze roam over her face.
Large, dark eyes, smooth pale skin and a gorgeous mouth he hated to admit he’d entertained a few fantasies about since the last time he’d seen her. Wide and soft and gently curved, her mouth was the one sensuous aspect of her appearance she couldn’t down-play or hide altogether. It probably drove her nuts that she had a mouth any man would pay good money to use. He smiled, a nasty grin fueled by a recurring fantasy he’d had of her, down on her knees before him, her lips wrapped around his cock, his hands buried in her hair, both of them collaborating on the full-scale destruc-tion of her prim façade.
Georgina flushed, as if she knew what he was thinking, as if she could see herself as he did, allowing him to slowly push his cock into her mouth, one of her hands caressing his hip, the other buried under the full skirt of her dress, languidly strumming her clit in time to his thrusts. Simon abruptly lost his sly amusement on a dizzying rush of pure lust.
He licked his bottom lip, peeked down her dress and saw that her nipples had drawn up into tight, hard peaks against her thin white cotton bra.
“Well, well, well… what have we here?” he murmured, thinking maybe he’d misjudged her, maybe she was here to do more than organize books, maybe…
Expecting a slap, Simon was shocked by the feather-light touch of her fingertips against his jaw. The gentle touch scrambled his thoughts into a low-level babble that ceased altogether when she leaned forward and gently licked his bottom lip, exactly where he just had. And then she paused, her top lip barely brushing his as her eyes close
d and she inhaled, the sound going through him like lightening. That split second of anticipation hung between them, turning him on more than anything that had happened to him in the past… God, how many years?
Then she kissed him and he could taste her, feel her gently sucking his tongue into her mouth, and it felt as if she was savoring him. She slowly upped the pressure, slid her fingers into his hair, turning his head as she deepened the kiss, practically eating at his mouth. Someone moaned, a broken, desperate sound Simon hoped to hell hadn’t come from him. It was one of the hottest kisses he had ever received, and he just stood there, hands fisted at his sides, his body so tense he was vibrating, his mind in a whirl, down-shifting from disliking her into a frightening, Holy-Jesus-what-took-you-so-long-to-find-me babble that sounded eerily like the love-struck ramblings his brothers engaged in when talking about the first time they’d met their wives.
The heat and mind-bending skill of her mouth combined with the horrifying wrongness of that thought were too much, and he pulled back, needing a second to calm down and decide exactly what the hell he wanted from her before he either attacked her or ran screaming for the hills. But she stole that second, took that momentary distance and used it to escape down the corridor, leaving him furiously aroused, thoroughly confused and wondering who had just gotten the better of whom.
As he watched her leave him, all he could think was that he’d just been sideswiped by a librarian.
Forget that, you moron! She’s getting away.
But Simon let her go, forcing his body to turn towards the stairs that led back to the party rather than rushing after her and begging for another shot at that world-class mouth.
A man had his pride, and his revolted at the idea of panting after a thirty-something spinster librarian. And that whole where-have-you-been-all-my-life… that was a load of crap. He hadn’t believed it when his brothers spouted it, and he sure as hell wasn’t buying it now, not when it was attached to a living, breathing cliché of what most people thought librarians were supposed to be.
Well, at least he’d gotten one thing out of this whole fiasco; his libido was back in full swing. Hell, he was so hard he could go after Cherry… Sherry… um… whatever the hell her name was…