Led into Temptation

And she wanted to taste him, too.

As she thought of doing both of those things, her insides melted. She couldn’t feel her legs below her knees, but she discovered that all on their own, they’d moved her to the railing of her balcony.

She continued to stare, fascinated by the angle of his arm, the strength in his wrist, the grace of his movement as he lowered the phone to its stand. And then she saw it. Lying right next to the phone. The Roman collar. And that should have had the effect of stepping into a cold shower.

But it didn’t. Instead, everything she was feeling intensified. Her pulse hammered at her wrists, at the base of her throat. The heat she’d felt from the moment she’d spotted him ratcheted up several degrees. Her brain cells clicked off, and she forgot to breathe.

When he turned and met her eyes, she suddenly couldn’t think. All she knew was desire—a scorching wave of it that she couldn’t control. Didn’t want to. What she was feeling wasn’t anything like the illicit puppy love she’d experienced at fourteen.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there or how long she might have remained on her balcony, but the fact that someone had knocked on her door finally penetrated. It had to be room service come to clear the dishes, she thought as she turned and moved on legs she still couldn’t feel.

But when she opened the door, there was no one in sight. Just an envelope lying on the floor. She blinked, still trying to clear her head as she leaned over to pick it up. She’d closed and locked the door and made it back to her bed before it sank in.

The envelope was made of the same yellowing parchment that she’d pulled out of Hattie’s box in the secret room.

And she knew even before she opened the envelope what the folded piece of parchment inside would say.

Your secret fantasy has always been to make love with a priest. Now you will experience all those forbidden pleasures.

NAOMI GLANCED at her watch, then pressed a hand against the nerves dancing in her stomach. Nine forty-six. Exactly two minutes since the last time she’d checked. Too early to go down to the courtyard. With a quick, impatient step, she strode to her closet and inspected her image in the mirror. For the fifth time.

It hadn’t improved. She still looked like a lawyer. The linen suit was a pearl-gray color and the white silk tank top she wore beneath it was prim and suitable for the office. Normally, she liked neutral colors. In fact, her entire wardrobe was a tribute to the practicality of the word neutral.

So why was drab the word that came to mind now? It was the perfect suit to wear to court in Boston in the summer. And dammit, she was a lawyer. Not to mention a hotel owner.

Lifting her chin, she stared at herself defiantly. She was appropriately dressed for a business meeting. None of the more casual outfits she kept here at Haworth House—T-shirts, a couple pairs of shorts, a bathing suit and some jeans—would do for a meeting with a prospective client. And certainly not a priest.

Pressing her hands to her temples, Naomi walked back to the side of her bed and sank down on it. Never in her life had she taken such care, never had she worried so much about how she looked. Not for the office. Not for a court appearance. Not for Michael Davenport.

Not even for herself.

Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe to become the new Naomi, she had to focus more on pleasing herself. Pulling open the top drawer of the bedside table, she glanced at the parchment envelope she’d placed there the night before. She had no idea how it had ended up on the floor outside of her bedroom.

Had Hattie put it there? That had been her first suspicion. But the only manifestation she had experienced of her presence was on that day in Hattie’s boudoir when she and her sisters had toasted their purchase of Haworth House with champagne.

There’d been nothing since. Not even a little chill in the air. Still, Naomi had often felt her presence.

A less fanciful explanation would be that Jillian had confided in Avery about the hatbox and the secret room. And since he now knew just who her first crush had been, he might have somehow dug out the parchment and left it for her. As a joke? Or as another little incentive to live on the wild side, like giving her the keys to his Corvette. Avery might think that doing something as outrageous as seducing a priest could be just the ticket to jettison her down the road to reinventing herself.

Whoever was responsible, receiving the parchment with her fantasy written on it had helped her to think everything through and reach a decision. Since she’d locked the tote with her notebooks in Hattie’s secret room, she’d used the hotel stationery to jot her ideas down.

Making love with a priest was a particularly alluring fantasy because it was so forbidden. And impossible. Talk about being star-crossed. Absolute secrecy was another essential element of the fantasy. When she was fourteen, the fact that no one knew about her crush on Father Bouchard had been ninety percent of the thrill.

Most of the guilty pleasure she’d experienced had been private, the result of writing those diary entries by flashlight in the middle of the night and those vivid and tantalizing dreams she’d had after she’d fallen asleep. During the day, she’d been very careful to act in a perfectly respectful and normal way around the young priest.

And there was absolutely no reason why she couldn’t handle the attraction she was feeling for Father Dane MacFarland the same way. If the intensity of the attraction persisted, she would record everything she imagined she might do to him in her diary, and make sure the fantasy stayed right there on the page.

Before she’d fallen asleep, she’d considered going up to Hattie’s secret room and retrieving one of her notebooks out of her tote bag. But they were a part of her old life. Right after her meeting with Father MacFarland this morning, she’d go into town and buy some new notebooks to record her new fantasies.

And she already had one to record—the dream she’d had during the night. Even now as the memory slipped into her mind, Naomi felt her eyes close and her breathing become more rapid.

It had been dark in her bedroom. The moon had shifted in the sky, so only starlight had filtered through the curtains. But she’d known that the figure standing just inside her balcony doors was him. She’d known it by the sensory shock her body experienced.

He’d stood there, his dark hair slicked back, wearing nothing but the skimpy towel she’d seen him in the night before. The towel that she’d wanted very much to rip off him.

The urge to get out of bed and cross to him was strong. But the dream seemed to paralyze her, and all she’d been able to do was push herself into a sitting position. She couldn’t even lift her hands, and her voice hadn’t worked. All she could do was look at him as a rush of hunger seared through her. The needy ache that followed freed one of her hands and she lifted it to beckon him closer.

He moved then from the faint illumination of starlight into the deeper shadows of the room. Flames licked along her nerve endings and a hotter fire burst to life inside her. He knelt on the bed, took the hand she still held extended and drew her to her knees. They knelt facing each other, their bodies nearly brushing. That was when she saw it—the thin strip of white at his throat. It made such a stark contrast to the bronze tone of his skin. Raising her free hand, she ran her fingers over the stiff material of the Roman collar and felt the shocking thrill move through her.

This was wrong. So wrong. Was that why she wanted it so desperately? Raising her eyes, she met his. They were so hot that when he dropped his gaze to her mouth, she felt her lips burn.

Finding the strength to move, she dug her fingers into his shoulder to draw him closer. He settled his at her waist. Together they moved until their bodies touched. Pleasure exploded at each contact point. Her breasts and thighs ached where they softened against his muscles.

He rocked into her and she felt the length of his erection sink into the skin of her stomach. Wrong. So wrong, she thought as heat rocketed through her with the speed of a wildfire.

More. She remembered then what she’d thought of doing earlier and she ran her hands to the back of his waist to slip her fingers beneath that towel. His muscles were tighter than she’d imagined. She kneaded them first, then dug her nails into them.

In response, the exact one she’d wanted, his hands gripped her waist and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around him and wiggled until his erection was pressed flush against the raging heat at her center. There were still barriers separating them—the towel and the prim cotton of her bikini panties. But she couldn’t bear for him to stop moving, couldn’t make herself stop. Instead, she gave herself over to the building wave of pleasure until she finally crested and let herself be tossed over.

When she’d awakened, he was gone. Because all he’d been was a fantasy.

Ignoring the piercing sense of loss, Naomi opened her eyes. Even the memory of the intense pleasure she’d experienced in her dream had weakened her so that she had to brace herself with her hands or she would have collapsed on the bed.

It was sad but true. The fantasy sex she’d had with her imaginary Father MacFarland had beat out any sex she’d ever had with a real man. The new Naomi was going to have to do something about that.

She let her gaze stray to the foot of the bed where her T-shirt and panties lay folded. The one regret she had was that she hadn’t worn more accessible clothing in her dream. She was going to remedy that, too. It wasn’t only notebooks that she intended to purchase in town today. She was going to visit the boutique Jillian had recommended.

Shifting her gaze to the parchment envelope, Naomi pushed the drawer shut and drew in a deep breath. She’d made the right decision. She was going to continue to indulge her fantasy. Hadn’t she gotten the best night’s sleep she’d had in weeks?

Handling challenging situations and keeping in control had always been two of her strengths. All she had to do was keep her daytime meetings with Father MacFarland brief and businesslike. Then in the dark hours of the night, she was going to indulge herself with no-holds-barred, wild sex. As hot as she could possibly imagine it. And she was going to record every single detail in her diary.