Bared

Or this was Amber’s twin sister.

What had Amber called her—Queen Emma? Yes, that was it. Queen Emma. He tried to remember why, but as he’d long ago learned to tune out Amber’s long, meaningless, selfish ramblings, he couldn’t recall.

Nor could he think of one good reason why Amber would send her sister in her stead, when this calendar was a huge career-boosting deal for her. She’d campaigned every bit as long and hard to get it as Stone had.

“Amber,” he said, testing, figuring Emma would speak up any moment now and tell him why she was here instead of her pain-in-his-ass sister.

Her gaze darted to his. “Um…yes?”

Shit. He was right. This most definitely was not Amber. “Change,” he said in a low, controlling voice that would have had Amber flipping him off. “Now.”

He watched in disbelief as she nodded.

She really wasn’t going to tell him the truth? Ah, hell, this was bad. He didn’t need this. He glanced at Stone, who again simply lifted a broad shoulder. Clearly still as mystified as Rafe.

Okay, fine, Rafe thought. Amber and Emma were identical twins; no one could tell them apart. As long as he could get his shot and have no one the wiser, he honestly didn’t care why the hell either of them were playing switcheroo.

Besides, “Queen Emma” couldn’t possibly be any more difficult than the notoriously difficult Amber.

“Do it,” he said with another nudge toward the changing area. “The rain is good, but with you just standing there, we’re wasting the little light we have left.”

Seemingly, reluctant, she moved toward the bamboo poles and sheets, dragging her feet in a way Amber never would have.

Stone came up to his side, holding a light meter and a clipboard that was getting waterlogged. He was as blond as Rafe was dark, with a tough, medium build that reminded Rafe of a boxer. Stone looked as irritated as Rafe felt as they watched her go. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Hopefully nothing.”

Stone snorted his opinion of that, which made Rafe smile a bit grimly. With Amber there was always a problem, but how about with Emma?

The sheets shifted as she moved within them, and grumbling sounded on the stormy air, but she didn’t call out or reappear.

“She probably needs help,” Rafe said on a sigh, looking at his watch.

Stone clasped him on the shoulder. “I’ll go. You’ll just be tempted to kill her.”

“And you won’t be?”

Stone flashed a white grin. “She’s in there naked. I’m never tempted to kill a naked woman.”

Rafe listened to the muttering, watching the wild movements of the sheets. Amber never muttered. Nope, if that woman ever had an issue of any sort—and there were at least a million of those a day—she screamed them out for the world to deal with.

But not today.

Because it wasn’t Amber, but Emma who was currently ruminating about the thin material of the costume, which, in itself, was just another dead giveaway.

Amber had a body to die for, and she lived to show it off. What did she care about the thinness of the material? All the better to expose herself.

Stone waggled a brow at him, then ventured closer to the sheets. “Need any help?” he called out, reaching with one hand to peek in.

“No! I’m…fine. I’ll be right there.”

Stone glanced back at Rafe in surprise, because he also knew it was extremely unlike Amber to not require an entire posse, a minimum of ten people hovering around her, jumping to her every whim.

Then again, as apparently only Rafe realized, they weren’t dealing with Amber.

Hell if he’d lose time over this. Emma would suit his purposes just fine—his purpose being to get this shoot over with.

Assuming she came out of the dressing room sometime today.

2

EMMA WILLIS STOOD NAKED, surrounded by a few flimsy sheets and bamboo poles, somewhere on the northern tip of Kauai, all courtesy of her sister Amber.

It was unbelievable that she, a known anal-retentive workaholic, had landed herself in this position. But she had and she’d have to deal with it.

Just as she’d dealt with every other Amber emergency over the years. And there’d been far too many to count.

Emma looked at the little triangular patch of white silk in her fingers that made up the bottoms of the costume. Just put the thing on, she told herself. But how did it go on? There was no way this would come anywhere close to covering her. Hoping against hope, she shook it out and held it up, but nothing changed.

It wasn’t meant to cover her.

She could see now that the thin strap of silk was actually a thong.

A thong.

She was sure Amber Willis, actress, model and all-around hell-raiser, would love wearing such a contraption, but Emma Willis, lowly soap-opera scribe and all-around pansy, hated thongs.

Amber was going to owe her big.

She had to laugh at that. Amber always owed her big, and hadn’t paid up once. What did that say about her, Emma wondered wildly, that she just kept saving her sister, no matter what? Far too much to contemplate at the moment, she decided, and reached for the top.

Which turned out to be even worse than the bottom.

She’d had high hopes for the filmy material because there was a lot of it, but when she placed it against her skin, she might as well have been as naked as a newborn. She supposed that was the idea of the thing. Virginal sacrifice was the theme of this shoot and she was about to look the part.

She certainly felt it. The rain drummed the sheet around her, soaking through so that water ran down the sides of the changing area. Still, the air felt refreshingly cool, not cold, and in an odd contrast, the ground beneath her bare feet was warm.

Amber had called her two days ago from some island in the Caribbean, where she’d been lounging for a few days with her latest boy toy. “This guy can give me an orgasm from the next room,” she’d exhaled dreamily over the thousands of miles to Emma. “I think he’s The One.”

Right. The One.

There was no The One and after years of watching Amber make a fool out of herself over and over again, Emma just wished Amber would realize it as well and stop falling in love at the drop of a hat.

Or a nicely filled-out pair of Levi’s.

But before Emma could sing that old refrain and remind her sister how many times “love” had turned out to be sheer lust, the kind that always faded, Amber had begged Emma to take on this job, the one that Amber had already signed to do and had been paid for, because this calendar was going to “launch her as nothing else had.”

There had been many such declarations over the years from Amber, but Emma still had such high hopes for her sister, who despite all her wildness was still her sister.