After Hours: Black Lace Classics
Read After Hours: Black Lace Classics Online
Authors: Crystalle Valentino
Contents
It’s getting steamy in the kitchen…
Venetia Halliday, a go-getting entrepreneur, is trying to make it in London’s fiercely competitive restaurant scene. And her new chef – East End bad-boy Mickey Quinn – has tricked his way into her business, and her bed.
Cheeky, well-built and confident, Quinn embodies everything she loves in a man, but with wild sexual abandon on the menu, can Venetia keep her mind on the job?
Black Lace Classics – our best erotic fiction ever from our leading authors.
Crystalle Valentino writes erotic fiction. She is the author of
After Hours
,
Personal Services
and
A Private View
, all coming soon from Black Lace.
CRYSTALLE VALENTINO
BLACK
LACE
‘Would you consider cybersex?’ flashed up unexpectedly on Venetia Halliday’s computer screen as she sat in her first-floor office over her restaurant.
Venny did a double-take. She had just been completing the accounts and was feeling tired after Saturday night’s trade, even if the restaurant hadn’t been particularly full. From outside came the noises of departing patrons getting into their cars, some still grumbling loudly over the food. She knew they were right to complain. She knew that she had made a mistake when she had hired Bill Thompson two months ago. She also knew that she was going to have to do something about him, or go under.
Venny stared at the screen.
Well, would she consider cybersex?
She had considered a lot of things in her lifetime – a whole clutch of impulses had in fact been grasped at with initial enthusiasm – but mostly she disliked risk and so abandoned those wild impulses untried.
Hair extensions? No. Too much trouble, and would it look like a wig after all that fusing-on and fussing?
Quitting London for a stress-free life in the sticks? Emphatically no.
Getting a bigger, sportier car? Again, no. Getting a smaller car and saving on petrol and insurance? Yes to that one.
Liposuction to save on gym time? Nope. Too big a coward. Body piercing? Here again cowardice played a part. She wasn’t worried about shocking her parents – they lived in Spain, and were rarely in touch. What worried her was the suspicion that having her navel or nipples pierced was going to hurt like hell. Added to that, she thought that tongue studs looked too gross for words, so she’d settled for having her ears done. Very daring.
If she was truthful, it was her inbred caution that had led her to this sorry pass. She had hired Bill because he had seemed like the safe option. The other applicants had seemed too go-ahead, too cocky, too likely to undermine her authority from day one.
But Bill Thompson had been different. Quiet. Chunky and dark-haired and brown-eyed. Sweet, she had thought. Attractive, but not overwhelmingly so. Not like that other one. A light frown crinkled her brow. The one with the impudent blue eyes and the shock of gelled hair and the tall angular body.
Venny sat back in her chair and considered. What was his name? Gin? Finney? Something like that. One look and she had known he was trouble. That he would be
expensive, demanding, impossible, a sexual time-bomb ticking away in her kitchens, just waiting to explode.
So she had hired Bill. Steady, reliable Bill. Who had turned out to be without culinary flair and bull-headed and pedantic, so that any complaint about the unexciting food or slow service was greeted with massive bouts of sulking and a complete refusal to change a thing.
Obviously, Venny was going to have to make the changes.
She looked at the screen again.
Cybersex.
An ironic smile flickered over her lips. She had believed that hiring a chef would set her restaurant, Box of Delights, on the road to success, justifying all the angst she had suffered over refurbishments and bumpy cash flow. Cash flow was, in fact, still her biggest problem. She had to pay the staff, the suppliers, the overheads, the accountants – but she loved it. This place was her baby. She had dreamed of it winning her the prestigious Blue Ribbon award this year. After that, publicity would follow, trade would rocket, and all her problems would be solved. Then she might sell. Or she might not. She’d see.
But there was Bill, who right now was a problem and a half. Bill was admittedly sexy in his heavy, blokish way, and the other staff tended to warm to his genial charm, even covering for him when he made mistakes.
Troubled, Venny – she hated her full name, Venetia, and never used it – leaned back in her leather chair and slipped both hands behind the sweat-sticky fluff of
blonde curls at the base of her neck to ease the tension there. As she moved, her tightly cut caramel-coloured suit strained tight against her prominent breasts. She liked suits. Suits were an armour-plated uniform to Venny, making her feel businesslike and invulnerable. The summer storm rattled and rolled outside, making the close city air feel sticky. Her green eyes closed and she exhaled slowly, regaining calm. It wasn’t raining yet, but soon it would pour and bring relief from the torpid August heat.
She stretched again, relishing the pressure on her nipples from the silky material of her suit. This was going to be difficult. This was the bit of the job she hated. Mostly, she loved what she did. She was an entrepreneur. She’d gone straight out of university and into a series of dull dusty jobs to raise cash for what she knew she wanted to do more than anything else – set up businesses, run them and then sell them on at a tidy profit.
First she’d purchased, with the help of a knee-tremblingly large bank loan, a small faltering manufacturing company. She’d initially had a partner – a fellow business graduate – for that one, and he’d legged it when the going got tough, nearly grossing her an ulcer instead of the profit she had foreseen. But she struggled on and somehow made sense of it. Later, when it was in the black for the first time in a decade, she sold it for double what she’d paid, and her ex-partner demanded half. She’d paid him off and figured she’d learned a valuable business lesson so probably the
louse had done her a favour. No partners, ever again. Then on to the second, a defunct hotel. The profit had been less overall on that one but, without an ex-partner to threaten lawsuits, she did just fine.
And now she was on her third.
A restaurant.
Venny sighed and drummed her fingers on the desk. She could have bought houses and tarted them up. She could have bought antiques and flogged them on. Why a restaurant? She wasn’t even interested in food.
She opened her eyes and glanced down at her jutting breasts. Her nipples were erect, clearly visible through the thin material of her suit. That was why she did it. The buzz. The thrill.
Venny raised her hands and reflectively ran them down over the full curves. Her nipples tingled deliriously when she touched them. Fully clothed, Venny considered that she looked a bit too lush and curvy for the current fashion. But when she was naked, she looked extremely good. A real mug’s eyeful. Her blonde, curly hair was long enough to just touch and conceal and tease her nipples. Her green eyes were almond-shaped, almost catlike in their appeal, and her heart-shaped face was centred by a neat, small nose. Her mouth was full, the lips flaring and pouty, promising an abandoned passion she doubted she could ever truly deliver. But God, she wished she was naked now, and receiving more enjoyable relief from her tensions from an able lover.
And there was one on offer.
She knew where the cybersex message must have come from, because this computer was linked to the one beside the till downstairs, and all the staff had departed for the night except Bill.
With her tongue trapped seductively between her teeth, she leaned forwards and tapped out on the keyboard: ‘Why settle for cybersex when I can have the real thing?’
‘Who says you can have the real thing?’ flashed up instantly.
Venny typed: ‘I do. I’m the boss, remember.’
‘As if you would let me forget it,’ came back – just a trifle waspishly, she thought.
Venny shut down the computer and stood up, stretching luxuriously. She crossed to the open window and lifted the thin blind to peer out. A gusty breeze scented with rain cooled her face and she inhaled deeply.
The quaint Camden side-street was quieter now as bars and restaurants closed and people began making their way home. She gazed at the half-timbered white-painted houses opposite Box of Delights, the packed rainbow-hued windowboxes dotted here and there, the heavy heads of marigolds and surfinias and geraniums dancing in the freshening breeze beneath the cold sodium glare of a stylish repro ‘gaslight’. Even the shop signs were carefully vetted in this pretty, select little enclave, so that the ambience of the place was never spoiled. If you squinted a bit, she thought, you could almost be back in the nineteenth century. Except for the cars, and the fumes, and the ever-watchful traffic
wardens, and the clampers. Oh, and the city noises, the shrieking of a car alarm, a police siren, an ambulance.
This city.
She loved it.
As she peered out at the encroaching night, fat drops of rain started to pelt the window. Lightning flared above the darkened rooftops and she let the blind drop with a clatter. She hated thunderstorms. They felt dangerous and uncontrolled, like an unruly passion.
Unruly passion, she thought, and turned away from the window.
When was the last time she’d felt anything even close to that?
She could imagine her friend and flatmate Dani’s brisk reply to that one. Never. Because she never took risks, never took chances. Well,
almost
never. She did take the odd minimal, calculated risk in business; sometimes you had to, to make progress. But basically she was a control freak. And true passion, true stomach-churning desire, was a huge risk, one that Venny felt safer avoiding.
As she stood there in the slanting rainbow light from her fake Tiffany desk lamp, Venny found that man’s face floating into her mind for the second time. The laughing blue eyes. The crackling energy he’d radiated. His mouth, curving upward in a smile full of sexual challenge.
Irritated with herself, she switched off the lamp and walked – teetering slightly on the skyscraper heels the male patrons found so alluring – out of the
office and down the stairs. At the bottom was a quilted burgundy baize door. She opened it, and stepped into the kitchens.
And froze, her jaw dropping by a mile.
In the middle of the brightly lit room, which was dominated by the big stainless steel tables, ovens, cupboards and utensils of a professional kitchen, stood Bill.
He was about the same height as her when she wore her spiked heels. His body was robust and hairy as a hearthrug. The hair on his head was tidy and cut close into the nape of his neck, but if it were allowed to grow longer she just knew that it would be a mass of thick dark curls. Bill was facing away from her, idly stirring the contents of a saucepan.
He was wearing nothing except a white linen apron tied around his waist.
When Venny finally got over her shock, she admired the show. Bill had good broad shoulders, and his waist where the apron was tied was taut. Beneath the knotted ties was a pair of delectable buttocks. They were much paler than the skin on his back or legs, and there was a suggestion of dark hair between and slightly beneath them, because he stood with one leg comfortably bent at the knee.
Despite her reservations about this, Venny felt her crotch moisten. It wasn’t like Bill to be surprising, but he’d certainly surprised her tonight. And it was a pleasant surprise, she had to admit that. Bill had been flirting with her for weeks now, and he was handsome
and appealing, if you ignored the fact that he was a liability in business.
Venny had found herself pushing it to one side. She liked Bill. All right, she fancied Bill too. And there was more to a person than how they did their job. Even if they did it badly.
A sigh slipped from between her lips as once again she pushed that unpalatable fact away. It was, in these circumstances, easy to do so. Her thighs clenched lightly. Suddenly lightning flared, dimming the lights for a moment. Venny shivered. Well, this was passion, wasn’t it? Of course it was. She deserved this, and she wanted it too.
Venny walked forwards slowly, very aware of the movements of her own body, aware of that old itchy need. Underneath her suit she was wearing a very sensible black body, but now the thin garment seemed to chafe her nipples and it felt uncomfortably damp between her legs.