Secret Seduction. Lori Wilde

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СКАЧАТЬ to come drinking with her. But Elle had a hot new fiancé in Dr. Dante Nash, and Julie was studying to get board certification as a counselor specializing in sexual dysfunction.

      In all honesty she’d needed to be alone. Her friends didn’t know about her hostile past and she simply couldn’t bring herself to tell them. Vanessa couldn’t bear to see the disap-pointment, disbelief and shock in their eyes if they found out the truth.

      No. Getting out of the house all by herself was the only way she could exorcise the demon plaguing her. She refused to stay home and cower under the covers simply because she’d gotten the news she’d spent fourteen years dreading. Come what may, she was going to live her life.

      Drink. Dance. Forget.

      Determinedly she motioned at her empty glass for another shot of tequila, and Julio returned to give her a refill. She swallowed it back with a tight-lipped grimace, this time forgoing the salt and lime.

      What she needed to forget wasn’t pretty and her method of forgetting shouldn’t be pretty, either. It would take some-thing raw and primal and elemental to blot out the past on a day like today.

      But the tequila wasn’t working.

      In spite of the delicious heat searing straight to her brain, she remembered all too well that ugly night a little over fourteen years ago.

      The night she’d witnessed a murder.

      Vanessa shuddered and shoved away the memory.

      Today had begun like any other weekday morning. Up at 4:00 a.m. to get dressed and head over to Confidential Reju-venations. Grab a breakfast protein bar to eat in the car on the way. Prepare for her surgeries that usually started at six-thirty. The governor’s wife’s face-lift had gone splendidly, as had the nose job on an up-and-coming young Austin celebutante. Lunch had been an uneventful Cobb salad with low-fat rasp-berry vinaigrette, rye crisps, a fruit bowl for dessert and a bottle of Evian in the hospital cafeteria. Her follow-up ap-pointments in the clinic had been run-of-the-mill.

      And then her cell phone had rung and she’d heard a voice she hadn’t heard in years. A voice she’d prayed never to hear again. A voice that had shaken her to the core.

      Even now the memory of the phone call had her hand trembling and her heart racing.

      It’s not finished, a man had said. You owe me fourteen years of my life.

      Drink. Dance. Forget.

      The mariachi band trooped past her as they returned to the stage from the side door after their smoke break. They smelled of tobacco and marijuana and alcohol. Grinning knowingly at each other, they picked up their instruments and began to play a familiar dance tune with sexually sugges-tive lyrics.

      It was the perfect song for her mood. Fast and hot. Vanessa smiled and licked her lips. Now all she needed was a dance partner.

      She scanned the room for possibilities.

      A minute later, she spotted him sitting in a darkened corner nursing a beer. Light skin, blond hair. His Nordic ethnicity stood out starkly in a roomful of Latinos. Not to mention that he was jaw-droppingly handsome.

      For a brief, startling moment, his eyes drilled into hers.

      Delicious bedroom eyes. Brilliant, blue and yet strangely brooding. Sultry, enigmatic eyes that both roused her curiosity and inspired her lust.

      She studied him through the smoky haze. He possessed rugged masculine features that would make other men think twice about crossing him and he looked like a person who planned everything. She imagined he laid out the clothes he would wear in the morning the night before, hooking a wooden coat hanger laden with his pressed chinos and starched chambray shirt on the bedroom doorknob. Crisp new boxer shorts and rolled up socks stuffed inside his shoes.

      Vanessa tilted her head. No, she decided. He wore briefs. He just seemed the tighty-whities type. Straight and narrow. Traditional. A good boy lurking behind that hard-ass mask.

      The pulse at the hollow of her throat fluttered, and Vanessa’s fingertips itched to trace the lines of his unyield-ing chin. To run her fingers through that thick shock of blond hair. To test his lips to see if they were as hard as they looked.

      The thought sent her imagination soaring. In spite of her miserable day, Vanessa smiled. She hadn’t had sex in months, and he was looking more and more like an ideal candidate to help her forget.

      He was different from the other men in the bar. He didn’t stare at her the way they did, but he was paying attention. It sounded illogical and maybe she was fooling herself, but he looked like a man she could trust.

      Stupid, that thought.

      But the expression in his eyes wasn’t one of lust so much as concern. As if he somehow knew exactly what she needed and was more than willing to provide it. Scary.

      Drink. Dance. Forget.

      Then he quickly glanced away, dropping her gaze as if it was a hot lava rock. As if he had something to hide and he was afraid that if she looked too long into his eyes, she would figure out what it was.

      Odd, this strange, inexplicable tugging that pulled her toward him.

      Intrigued, Vanessa decided this was a man she simply had to know better. He looked like her ticket to oblivion.

      And she intended to seduce him.

      SHE WAS DEFINITELY the woman he was looking for.

      Tanner Doyle didn’t even need to consult the photograph he carried in the pocket of his jacket. Her beautiful face wasn’t one a man easily forgot. And her slight resemblance to his dead wife made her doubly memorable.

      Not to mention that today was the fourth anniversary of Maria’s death.

       Maria.

      Tanner strummed the pad of his thumb along the back of his bare ring finger. God, how he missed her.

      Briefly he closed his eyes, tamped down the grief he couldn’t seem to shake. Maria wouldn’t want him to grieve this hard, this long. She’d want him to let her go, get on with his life. But that was easier said than done.

      Especially today.

      He swallowed back the remains of the beer he’d ordered from the cocktail waitress after he’d followed the woman into Emilio’s. His drink had gone warm in the meantime and tasted darkly bitter. Tanner didn’t even like beer, but Maria had been a Dos Equis fan, which was why he’d ordered it.

       Don’t think about Maria, do your work.

      Even though it entailed shadowing a woman who looked like Maria.

      She doesn’t look that much like Maria, he argued with himself.

      Sure, they were both tanned, black-haired beauties with deep brown eyes and wide, generous mouths, but Maria had been petite, just over five feet. This woman was statuesque. At least five-eleven even without those stilettos. With them, they would probably stand eye to eye.

      Maria had possessed a small chin, heart-shaped face and button СКАЧАТЬ