Private Pleasures (2 page)

His gaze raked her from the top of her head to the tips of her pink painted toes and back up. His eyes when they once again locked on hers were molten. "I think I have a pretty good idea."

Wendy felt a startling wave of heat as her lips, the tips of her breasts, and her sex pulsed to life in an instant, nerve endings quivering and tingling, seeming to yearn toward him even as her brain very firmly told her body, "no way."

Once upon a time she would have given in to the urges without a second thought. Hurled herself headlong at this gorgeous, cocky bastard whose hot gaze, muscled body, and big, long-fingered hands promised the kind of pleasure that would send her soaring into the stratosphere.

Now she knew she needed to run away as fast as she could before she let herself get drawn in by the tractor beam of big, bad sexuality threatening to pull her in. So when she caught Julie waving at her out of  the corner of her eye, Wendy jumped at the chance to make her escape. "I should say hello to Julie," she said curtly, hurrying through the crowd to her friend.

But as she hugged Julie and exchanged the usual round of "you look gorgeouses" and gushed over the party, her mind was very much on the man whose stare continued to bore into her back.

Sure enough, when she chanced a look over Chris's shoulder as he bent to buss her on the cheek, she caught Drew's intense, all too knowing stare.

Her own skittered away, and she tried to focus on Chris's story of Mathilda's latest adventures in potty training.

Yet even a she smiled and nodded and laughed at the appropriate moments, she couldn't stop thinking about how it would be to throw caution to the wind and give in to six feet three inches of pure sexual temptation.

She knew how it would be with Drew. Exhilarating,. Other-wordly.

All of which , she reminded herself harshly, made the inevitable crash all the more devastating. Wendy had crashed too many times not to know better.

She'd already known better by the time she met Drew the first time, at Julie and Chris's wedding. Not only that, but seeing Chris and Julie so happy had made her yearn for that kind of love, that kind of security in knowing the person you're with had your back and would be there for the long haul. And she knew she wasn't going to get that if she kept letting herself get swept off her feet and  emotionally wrecked over men who were amazing as long as she didn't give any indication she wanted something more serious.

In the weeks leading up to Chris and Julie's wedding, she'd made a pact with herself. No more players. No more guys who could have any woman they wanted with a crook of a finger and had no interest in giving up the privilege. She was going to find a nice guy, stable and emotionally available and ready to commit.

Someone like Alan?
Wendy shoved the insolent little voice aside.

No sooner had she made the decision than the universe decided to test her resolve in the form of Drew. From the first moment she'd laid eyes on him and met that smoldering stare, she'd known there would be trouble if she didn't keep her distance.

It had taken every ounce of resistance, but somehow she'd pulled it off.

Outside of work, Wendy liked to think of herself as friendly and fun to be around. But with Drew she'd summoned up an inner ice queen she didn't even know existed. She'd been standoffish to the point of rudeness, so bad Julie had even commented on it.

So it was no big surprise, when they were reacquainted through Alan, that Drew hadn't exactly been friendly. No doubt he thought she was a cold, unfriendly bitch. And Wendy was determined to keep it that way.

Still, as she drank and chatted and nibbled on hors d'oeuvres, she found her gaze straying back to him, his tall, broad shouldered form easy to spot in the crowd. She picked out his voice over the din of conversation, the deep, raspy timbre sending a quiver or sensation rippling through her.

Though the tropical air cooled considerably once the sun went down, Wendy's skin felt flushed, prickling with heat even under the breeze wafting off the sea. She cut herself off early from the champagne and rum drinks the bartender was serving, not trusting her resolve under the influence of any more alcohol. Icewater was the name of the game now.

But even though she was practically mainlining the frigid liquid, she could feel his gaze on her, burning like a brand along the bare skin of her arms, shoulders, back and legs, all exposed by the sexy cut of her halter dress. She was afraid if she didn't escape soon she'd spontaneously combust right there on the beach.

Either that or experience a total break in common sense, and hurl herself into Drew's arms and demand he drag her off to his man cave and do whatever the hell he wanted to her because she knew it would be good.

She took a huge gulp of ice water and closed her eyes as her sex went instantly wet and throbbing at the thought. God, what was wrong with her? Granted, she'd been attracted to Drew in spite of her better judgment all along, but this was ridiculous.

Then again, the last several times she'd been in contact with him, it had been on the arm of her fiancé. And while Wendy was honest enough with herself to admit Drew was the kind of guy who in the past would have drawn her like a bee to honey, she was also faithful in the extreme. Knowing—well, okay, thinking—that Alan loved her and she loved him must have created enough of a mental block to keep her hormones at bay.

But with Alan out of the picture and the fact that it had been over six months since she'd had sex—and mediocre sex at that—it was like the floodgates had burst. On top of all that, romance and ,face it, lust, were thick in the salt air. Combined with the hedonistic setting of a Caribbean island and it was like the perfect storm meant to spark Wendy's long dormant libido.

Wendy held out until the toasts were given, but when couples made their way to the square of linoleum laid out on the sand to serve as a dance floor, she knew she'd reached her limit. As she watched Chris and Julie sway, and Chris's cousin Carla press hip to hip with her smiling hunk of fiancé, it was too easy for Wendy to imagine curling into Drew's arms, pressing herself up against the hard wall of his chest until the hard tips of her breasts pressed into hard muscle.

Too easy to imagine finally giving into the desire she'd kept so secret for so long.

Chapter 2

Drew watched as Wendy disappeared into the darkness that lay beyond the torches set up on the  beach for the party. Even after she was gone, he still stared at that one spot as though he could conjure her back.

He didn't know what it was about her that drove him crazy, had since the second he'd laid eyes on her at Chris and Julie's rehearsal dinner the night before their wedding five years ago. Sure, she was beautiful, with her wide brown eyes, long dark hair, and full red mouth that made him immediately think of all the places on his body he'd like to feel it. Combined with a body that was all long legs and full breasts there was no question Wendy Carmichael was a knock out.

But Drew had been with a lot of beautiful women—more beautiful than Wendy even—so he knew it wasn't that. There was a spark in her. A fierce intelligence that rivaled his own, offering a challenge most of the women he ran around with didn't.

A little too challenging, it turned out. When Wendy had made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him, Drew hadn't pushed it too hard. It wasn't like he was lacking in female companionship, and back when he'd met Wendy he didn't see the point in working overtime to get laid when he didn't have to.

But a couple years ago he'd realized, that in life, as in business, the things that were the most valuable were the things he worked hardest for. He never would have made past his working class roots and gotten a scholarship to UC Berkeley if he hadn't busted his ass. Nor would he have managed to take a germ of a product from a research lab at Cal Tech and turn it into a half a billion dollar business in a little over five years.

Busting his ass and pouring all of his energy into work hadn't left much leftover to devote to his love life, such as it was. Not that he was interested in pairing off  - he liked the freedom to do what he wanted, and until his company was really established he'd liked the idea that if it didn't work out, he could move anywhere, any time.

No ties keeping him any particular place. As it always had been, just the way he liked it.

After he sold the company two years ago and was given a polite but unmistakable don't let the door hit you on the ass by the new management, work went from all consuming to nearly non-existent. Suddenly, for the first time in over five years, he had actual time for more than a quick, compulsory dinner and shallow conversation that would earn him a decent fuck from whatever woman he was dating that month.

And he realized he was spending his time with women who, though undoubtedly gorgeous, bored him shitless.

The itchy restlessness had hit him again full force, the need to move to a new place, to start a new venture, overwhelming him as it did every few years or so. The only reason he'd lasted as long in Austin as he had was because getting his company, Visitel, off the ground was so goddamn hard he didn't have time to get bored.

As soon as he was free of Visitel, opportunities were thrown at him left and right, and when he'd received an offer to move to San Francisco to be an entrepreneur in residence at a venture capital firm, he had jumped at the chance.

And he'd be lying if he said the chance that he might run across Wendy Carmichael on the streets of San Francisco—cold shoulder or no—wasn't a tick in the pro column that weighed into his decision to move to northern California.

And lucky him, he thought, washing away the faint taste of bitterness with a taste of the rum and fruit concoction Chris had pressed into his hand, Wendy had walked back into his life shortly after he'd started at Paradigm Venture Capital.

Too bad it was on the arm of Alan Parker, a managing director at Paradigm. A nice enough guy, above average intelligence if not a walking brain trust, decent looking in a clean cut, preppy kind of way.

When Alan had introduced her as his fiancée, Drew couldn't hold back the wave of scorn.

Apparently it showed and Wendy thought it was directed at her because her eyes narrowed into an icy glare, one that became her default expression anytime she got within ten feet of Drew.

But in truth, the only thing running through Drew's mind in that moment had been
Her?
With
him?
It would never work. No way did Alan have the cojones to take on a woman like Wendy.

Nice as he was, successful as he was, Alan was a bit of a putz. He might like the idea of the caché a woman like Wendy—as high powered in her career as she was beautiful—might give him, but in the end he was the kind of guy who would need a woman who pandered to his ego. Who put his career before her own.

Even if Drew hadn't heard bits and pieces from Chris about Wendy's success—top of her class at Stanford Law school, a clerkship with a Federal Supreme Court justice before she came on board at one of San Francisco's most prominent law firms—he wasn't in his new office more than a week before he heard her referenced as a rising star in a very complicated area of corporate law.

No way would Alan, who made sure within the first five minutes of conversation that you knew he'd been the one to convince the partners to invest in Google, sit back and watch in pride while his wife's career matched—or even eclipsed—his own.

No, Alan was in the market for the ultimate trophy wife. Not merely beautiful, but smart and successful in her own right, well on her way to her own high-powered not to mention financially lucrative career.

That is, until she put it all aside to support
his
career. Channeling all that intellect and energy to stay home to have kids and run the household while he continued to make his millions. The ranks of spouses of the partners at Paradigm were full of such women. Hell, the senior partner's wife was a former transplant surgeon, but she'd stopped working when her husband had taken an interim CEO position that required him to travel five days a week.

When Drew had asked him if maybe he should have handed the position to one of the other partners so his wife could continue her lifesaving work, he'd looked at Drew as though he'd grown horns.

For Alan, being with Wendy would eventually become about telling the world everything his wife had been willing to give up —intellectually, financially—to support him and his career.

But he only had to look at Wendy to know she wouldn't be one to put her hard won career up on the shelf to collect dust. At the handful of social gatherings that included spouses and significant others, Drew had often found himself ignoring his own date as he watched her interact with the other wives, hiding his smile as she blithely ignored their looks of disapproval when she announced her intention to continue to work as much as was necessary to make partner.

As for children? "We haven't planned that far ahead," she'd said with a soft laugh. "But I'm sure Paradigm has some kind of paternity leave program."

If the writing on the wall hadn't been on the wall then—to Drew at least—it became apparent when Alan and his admin, Tina, started having a few too many closed door meetings after hours, ostensibly to discuss wedding details Wendy was too busy to go over.

But if Drew had to guess based on the sounds coming from Alan's office, he'd say Alan was working out the kinks on his honeymoon moves instead of discussing flower arrangements or cake flavors.

Alan had gotten what he needed when he chose Tina.

And Wendy... she might not realize it, but she'd dodged a bullet. Alan didn't have what she needed. She needed someone strong, someone who would go toe to toe with her, challenge her when she needed it. Someone who didn't have anything to prove so he could step back and support her own rise to the top.

Someone who would recognize the sexual spark glowing under that professional, composed surface. Bring it flaring to life until its white hot heat threatened to burn the place down.