Secret Seduction

“Take care of yourself, Tanner,” she said, grabbed up her purse and ran out the door.

And you claim not to be a coward.

“SO WHERE WERE YOU last night?”

It was an innocent enough question. Vanessa was supposed to have called Elle last night to make plans for Julie’s birthday, but she’d forgotten. To Vanessa’s ears, Elle’s question sounded like an accusation. She shrugged, not wanting to lie, but not wanting to admit where she’d been. “I got caught up in something.”

“A man’s arms perhaps?” Julie Demarco asked with a teasing gleam in her lively blue eyes.

“You’re such a die-hard romantic,” Vanessa said, effectively dodging her comment.

All three friends worked at Confidential Rejuvenations. The cloistered hospital had been built fifteen years earlier on the banks of the Colorado River. It was owned by a group of private physicians with high social standing and powerful connections in Hollywood, the Austin music industry and Texas politics. It was the place where anyone who was anyone came to receive the very best in specialized medicine and cutting-edge health care.

While their jobs held a degree of glamorous cachet, they were also stressful. To deal with the demands of their professions and the secrets the job forced them to keep, Vanessa, Julie and Elle had formed an after-hours club where they could get together and vent. Sharing their hopes, dreams and fantasies with one another. Today, they were meeting for lunch at a cozy tearoom that also served as an antique store in a genteel area of Austin. Vanessa appreciated her two best friends, but sometimes—like now—she wished that they weren’t so perceptive.

“How are things in the E.R.?” Vanessa asked, hoping to throw Elle off the scent. “Has it calmed down any after what happened with Mark?”

A few months earlier, Elle’s ex-husband Mark Lawson, who had also been one of the co-owners of Confidential Rejuvenations, had been murdered by the gangster he’d been doing business with, selling designer party drugs on the black market. Elle and Dante, an undercover FBI agent who’d been investigating Mark, had barely escaped with their lives.

Elle scowled at the memory. “Things were improving. We’d stopped seeing kids come into the E.R. with overdoses, and we thought all the petty vandalism was over, but last night someone sliced all the tires on the cars in the employee parking lot.”

“Oh, gosh,” Julie said. “The hospital saboteur strikes again?”

Elle blew out her breath. “Apparently.”

Besides the issues with Mark, over the past few months several odd incidents had occurred at the hospital. From anonymous leaks to the press about celebrity patients to an arson fire in the laundry room to items stolen from the kitchen and central supply. Taken one by one, the occurrences were nothing more than criminal mischief, but put together they seemed suspicious, especially with all the security cameras in the hospital. It seemed odd that the perpetrator hadn’t been caught on the monitor.

“Dante told me the hospital board hired a new head of security,” Elle said. “Let’s hope this puts an end to this mess. Confidential Rejuvenations had taken a big financial hit from the fallout over what Mark did. The last thing the hospital needs is more scandal.”

Vanessa nodded. She knew all too well how scandal could ruin lives.

“Anyway,” Julie said. “Back to Nessa’s boyfriend.”

“There is no boyfriend,” Vanessa corrected.

Elle eyed Vanessa speculatively, running a hand over the beige linen table cloth. “I don’t know, you look different somehow.”

“Must be the lighting in here,” Vanessa said, embarrassed to think she had that freshly and well-laid look about her. She picked up her menu. “I’m having the curried chicken salad. How about you guys?”

Elle leaned in closer and narrowed her eyes. “No, it’s not the lighting. Your skin is glowing and you keep glancing off into the distance and smiling as if you have a sweet secret. And when you walked in, your step seemed peppier than usual. You’ve had great sex.”

A waitress brought over a communal bowl of bread-and-butter pickles, the house specialty, and took their orders, but the momentary distraction offered Vanessa no reprieve.

As soon as the waitress left, Julie rubbed her palms together. “Oooh, something juicy’s up with Nessa.”

“Nothing’s up,” Vanessa denied, but her voice was higher than usual, totally giving her away.

Elle’s eyes widened and she chuckled. “Omigosh, you were with a guy last night.”

Apparently it wasn’t going to do her any good to deny it. Vanessa took a deep breath. “Yes, okay, I met a guy last night. But it’s not a big deal. Don’t make anything out of it.”

Julie rested her elbows on the table and propped her chin in her upturned palms. “I want every detail. Since I’m sans boyfriend, I have to live vicariously through you and Elle.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. I think I’ll have the fruit cup as well as the chicken salad.”

Julie and Elle exchanged glances and for one brief moment Vanessa thought they were just going to let the topic drop, but no such luck.

“What’s his name?” Elle asked.

“What’s he do for a living?” Julie quizzed.

“You guys,” Vanessa sighed in exasperation. “It’s nothing. Seriously.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

Pretending she hadn’t heard the question, Vanessa reached for a bread-and-butter pickle and munched on it.

“Come on, Nessa, throw me a crumb,” Julie begged. “I need details. My love life is in the toilet.”

Vanessa chewed the pickle, determined not to make a huge hairy deal of a one-night stand. She didn’t regret it, but neither was she particularly proud of it. She wouldn’t be seeing Tanner again. It had been a glorious, blissful, one-time-only thing. Besides, she didn’t even know the guy’s last name, so that settled it right there.

“How cute is he?” Elle asked, her eyes twinkling.

Vanessa sighed. “You’re not going to let this go are you?”

Julie grinned. “Nope.”

“We met, we danced, we had dinner, we got a hotel room. End of story,” Vanessa said in a rush. She shifted in her seat, looked out past the restaurant to the antique section of the store. “Is that armoire new? I don’t remember seeing it the last time we were here.”

But Julie wasn’t having any of it. “You had a one-night stand?” Her voice was filled with a mixture of shock and admiration. “I’d never have the courage for something like that. Weren’t you scared?”

“Actually,” said Elle who’d broken a few rules in her affair with Dante. “That was probably part of the charm. Right, Vanessa?”

Julie sighed. “Not to me. I love being romanced too much for a one-night fling. With those you don’t get any flowers or chocolates or tickets to a Longhorns game.”

“Sometimes,” Vanessa said, “all you want is someone to help you wash away your troubles.”

Elle sat up straighter and narrowed her eyes. “Is there something you’re not telling us, Vanessa?”

She met her friends’ interested gazes. How could she tell these two women about her secret past? A past she was so ashamed of that even fourteen years later she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it to the two people who meant the most to her in the entire world.

Knowing it was the only way she was going to get out of this conversation, Vanessa forced a grin. “You guys, please don’t read anything into this. It’s cut-and-dried. I just needed to get laid.”

“AMANDA BET ME that you would come,” Texas State Senator Robert Garcia said as he turned the steaks on his backyard grill. He was a little over six feet and narrow of face. His thick salt-and-pepper hair was combed back off his forehead. He flashed the megawatt smile that had helped him get elected. “Now I’m going to have to let her buy new draperies for the living room.”

“That’s what you get for gambling,” Tanner said to his uncle-in-law and took a sip from the beer bottle the senator had pressed into his hand. Was Robert still his uncle-in-law, now that Maria was gone? he wondered.

“Seriously, this is the first time you’ve been to our house since—” Robert snapped off his sentence.