Tease

Hewas down on one knee, rearranging her legs and inadvertently brushing against her bare skin. He’d removed her boots, leaving her legs and feet exposed. Why had he done that? He didn’t seem to understand that his fingers tickled like feather fringe, and his skin was the richest shade of tequila gold she’d ever seen. He touched her ankle, innocently positioning it, and streamers of light shot up her thighs, straight to her sex.

No, straight to her pussy, she thought, giving in to a wicked urge to use the bad-girl word. The words and images assaulting her overheated brain were bordering on lewd, but they might be the only way to get this man’s attention.

He cupped her calf with his palm, and her pulse raced out of control. His hands were warm, strong, smooth against her flesh. He was going to wreck her. Now he was playing with the back of her knee, lingering in that secret, unbearablysensitive spot. If he went higher, she’d faint. If he didn’t, she’d explode.

Fainting was less dangerous.

“Danny,” she whispered. She drew up his head, gazed at the crescent scar on his lip—and didn’t know whether to kiss him or slap him silly. How could he not know what he was doing?

Desperate, she inched up her skirt, letting him see that she wore no panties. “See that?” she whispered. “It’s a pussy, in case you were wondering. Help yourself, for heaven’s sake. Stop making me crazy and make me co—”

Tess slapped the desk with her palm. This had to stop. Her eyes snapped open, and she breathed out an exasperated sigh. She’d been drifting off into crazy X-rated fantasies all morning. And they all revolved around her spread-eagle legs—and him. He didn’t get all the credit, though. This was at least partly biological. Could doctors induce periods the way they induced labor? Her never-ending PMS was killing her.

And, she’d figured it out. Now she knew who he reminded her of with his cut-you-like-a-knife eyes. Tess prided herself on having left her past behind, but there was one man who’d touched a chord that wouldn’t stop resonating in some darkened corner of her mind. If every woman had her indelible bad-boy experience, then Professor Jonathan Wiley, her theater arts instructor in college, was Tess’s, except that he wasn’t a boy. He’d been her phantom of the opera, in a manner of speaking, but without all the soaring romance—and his image had come to her during her fantasies about Gabriel.

Not good, she thought. Nothing about this was good.

She drew herself up and surveyed the chaos on her desk. It was Saturday, but she and her entire team were working this weekend in order to be ready for the pitch to the Faustini brass next week. Even Erica Summers had agreed to make herself available, probably to set an example for the troops.

Tess’s desk was strewn with eight-by-ten glossies that had been sent to her by casting directors. She’d spread them out hoping that photos of fit young male and female models would inspire a killer idea for the Faustini promotion, but no such luck. Some of the women were promising, but the guys reminded her of southern California’s yuppie bikers, who dressed up in black leather and swore off shaving for the weekend. A couple of them were cute, but definitely not the millennium outlaw with the soul of a poet she had in mind.

Tess sorted through the glossies one more time, creating a stack of hopefuls. Too bad she couldn’t blame her fantasy trips on pictures of buff bikers. Unfortunately, Danny Gabriel’s sneak attack had triggered the daydreams, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate worth a damn since.

The welcome dinner with the board last night had gone as predicted. Gabriel was conspicuous by his absence and probably on everyone’s mind the whole time. Certainly he was on hers, the snake. Sure, he’d been acting as if he wanted to help her with the campaign, but she had to wonder if that wasn’t about hiding his real intentions. He was a saboteur at heart. And she didn’t need one of those. She was doing well enough on her own.

What had happened to that headlock she was supposed to have on her emotions? More than likely, she was suffering from simple estrogen overload. In theory, the human body was like a hydroelectric dam, which overflowed if left untended, and she was definitely untended. All she needed to do was open the sluice gates a little, and the quickest way to do that was with some good old-fashioned masturbation—or what her mother had called “naughty fingers” when Tess was growing up.

The Queen of Euphemisms, her mother. “In the family way” meant pregnant and the birth was a “happy event.” The bathroom was “the smallest room in the house,” and a woman’s period was “a visiting friend.” Tess’s favorite—“tired and overemotional”—was how her mother described her father when he got carried away with the communion wine.

God bless them, her parents could never have been accused of neglect. Tess was a desperately wanted only child, and her mother had anxiously attempted to control every aspect of her daughter’s existence. All in an effort to protect her, of course—from life’s pain, from its ridicule and shame. Sad that her mother had resorted to ridicule and shame, herself.

Tess had been shy and overweight, and her parents had tried to embarrass her out of both. Her mother had weighed Tess before every meal, bought her clothes that were too small and put her on her first medically supervised diet at five. Five? Mom, what were you thinking? The debating team and the glee club had been Dad’s idea. Under all the pressure, Tess had developed a stutter.

Fortunately, she’d outgrown it and the weight, which had turned out to be a combination of baby fat and adolescent rebellion. But when she’d slimmed down in college—and started getting attention from boys—she’d gone a little crazy. Enter the wild-child phase. She’d been looking for love in all the wrong places, needing to prove to herself again and again that she was desirable to men when what she’d really wanted was the love and acceptance she didn’t get as a kid.

Most of the boys she was with couldn’t handle the sex part, much less provide any sensitivity toward her emotional needs, which even she wasn’t aware of at the time. Tess could barely remember the encounters, probably because she didn’t want to think about all that furtive groping in hallway alcoves and the sweaty fumbling in parked cars. But there was one guy she did remember.

What a wicked kinky dude Jonathan Wiley was. Not a boy, a man—and maybe a demon escaped from her id, if anything Freud had said was true. Wiley had quietly insisted that she had talent and could have a big acting career, if she wanted. Yeah, sure. She’d barely heard that part, given the blazingly erotic stuff he’d whispered in her ear during their after-hours coaching sessions.

Tess remembered his suggestions in far too much detail: If I had you where I want you right now—naked with your bottom in the air—I wouldn’t know whether to swat you or lick you like an ice cream cone.

He’d talked about restraining her with the ropes that hung from the stage rigging, freeing her from her clothing—and her inhibitions—and arousing her until she fainted dead away. He’d been particularly obsessed with her ass, and all the amazing things he could do to it, including love bites and erotic discipline. Spanking, to be exact. He’d whispered about disciplining her in ways that had made her hair stand on end, but only to bring her the most intense pleasure, of course.

Honestly, he’d frightened the hell out of her, and she’d run for her life. She was only eighteen. But much of what he’d said and done had stayed with her, and as she’d matured into her twenties, the fear had faded, and she’d become secretly fascinated with some of his suggestions, especially the darker ones.

That had scared her a little. Still did. Especially given that just thinking about it made her hot and twitchy. Like now.

“Enough, Tess,” she warned. “You’re not a college kid anymore, and Danny Gabriel is not an incarnation of Wiley.” Despite the sensual features and the seductive ways. All Gabriel did was kiss her.

She got up from her desk and went over to the water dispenser, hoping a cold drink would put out the fire. On the way she passed the Messerschmitt mounted on the wall. “Give it your best shot,” she said softly. “I’m pretty fast.”

She drank several tiny paper cups of water and went back to her desk. This wasn’t her first time dealing with sluice gates. She was a healthy thirty-two-year-old woman, who’d been celibate for a very long time, and she’d had to find creative ways to deal with the situation. Quite by accident, she’d discovered a certain yoga position that had brought about some spontaneous relief. It might even have made the Cosmo orgasm quiz.

She needed to start doing yoga again. Quickly.

She was thinking fondly about her version of the full lotus position when the phone rang. It was the landline, which reminded her that her PDA was still missing. She’d looked everywhere, including the lost and found in the coffee lounge. She’d stopped by security this morning and reported it. She’d also picked up a replacement phone, but it contained none of her vital information, of course.

She went back to studying the glossies as she picked up the receiver. “Tess Wakefield,” she said.

“I know who you are. I just don’t know why you’re not here.”

Tess had a moment of confusion. The male voice struck a familiar chord, but she didn’t know how to respond. It had to be Danny. “Where are you?”

“Waiting for you down here in the Sandbox.”

“The Sandbox? Why are you there?”

“Tess, hello! It’s Andy. We’re all waiting for you down here in the sandbox. You called a team meeting this morning, remember?”

Tess fell back in her chair. Suddenly her heart was pounding when before it had been utterly still. She’d just daydreamed her way through fifteen minutes of the session she’d scheduled with her team. And after all the peptalking she’d done, trying to impress upon them how important it was for them to be prepared. Oh, yes, she definitely needed to get busy with those naughty fingers.

“Okay, this is major,” Carlotta told the team. “We choose one man and one woman with tremendous potential, and we call them Faustini spokesmodels. We create images for them that are totally distinctive, maybe something like Darth Vader for the man.”

Tess had been hoping for something other than Darth Vader, but Carlotta clearly loved the idea. Her expression said she was waiting for affirmation, applause, something. Her shapely butt was perched in a belt swing that hung from the ceiling on chains. Andy had taken the other swing, right next to her, and the rest of the team was sitting around the conference table, which was an old-fashioned picnic table.

Of all the agency’s themed conference rooms, the Sandbox was the favorite, probably because it suggested a day at the beach. Only a wall-size wipe board and a flip chart said business as usual. Otherwise, the wedge-shaped room was lined with real bamboo in naturalistic planter boxes, and the floor was exotic pink sand, imported from somewhere in the South Pacific. The rustic table could have been found at any state park, and the ceiling was painted sky blue. Several large skylights washed the room in sunny yellow.

Natural light, bare feet and sifting sands were supposed to inspire greatness, apparently. Mostly, they inspired Tess to nap like a cat in the sunshine, but that was about it. All this outer pressure and inner tension was getting to her.

“Batman and Catwoman?” Andy suggested.

“That’s distinctive?” Carlotta’s tone dismissed him. “With my idea, we save the client money because the spokesmodels do the entire campaign, and we create magnificent brand identification.”

“Only if the models are magnificent,” Tess countered.

“They will be—”

“Listen to this,” Brad cut in. He rose from the picnic table, his bare feet squishing in the sand. “We set the photo shoot in one of those hot new S&M clubs in the city. We’ll find ourselves the fucking Prince of Darkness and outfit him in Faustini.”

“I love it!” Carlotta squealed.

Tess wasn’t thrilled with the concept, nor did she think Faustini would be, but she was curious where her team might take it. “What about the woman?”

“Streetwalker chic? Gothic glam?” Brad offered his suggestions with a shrug. “I disagree that we need to be distinctive. Faustini already is distinctive. We need to get low-down and dirty. Make people notice.”

“What’s wrong with pulling women’s underwear out of a briefcase?” Andy said, apparently referring to his idea from yesterday.

Tess reached for her tote, where she’d put the manila envelope with the glossies. A moment later she had the pictures fanned across the picnic table like a large deck of cards.