Sexy and Funny, Hilarious Erotic Romance Bundle (81 page)

The cabin interior was dark, compared to the sunny outdoors, and I couldn't see his face.

The man spoke, his voice deep and calm, with a neutral American accent, possibly a West Coast transplant. He said, “I presume you're the one the agency sent? Tori, is it?”

“Moose!”

“Unusual name. But I like unusual. I'm just making some grilled cheese sandwiches. Would you like one, Moose?”

I caught my breath and with it, my thoughts. “I'm Tori, but I saw a moose out there. On the trail. Scared my pants off.”

He took a long, appraising look down my body. “Nope.”

We were in a mudroom, a vestibule with rubber boots and plenty of hooks for jackets. The man turned and walked through the interior door, toward the scent of grilling bread.

I followed, bumping into the door frame because my backpack was still slung over one shoulder.
My backpack?
I smacked myself on the forehead for having terrible survival instincts. If I'd actually been in danger, say if the moose had been a
flesh-consuming zombie moose
, those seconds I spent picking up my backpack and letting it slow me down could have cost me my life.

I kicked off my dirty sneakers and dropped the backpack, then got a good look at the place. The interior was larger and more sumptuous than I'd expected. An enormous chandelier made of antlers and a thousand tiny lights hung from a vaulted ceiling, lighting the spacious open-plan interior. To my left, a wood-burning fireplace that was large enough to walk into dominated one wall, with three good-sized sofas placed around the hearth, as well as chairs and wood side tables. To my right was a long dining table with a dozen tall-backed leather chairs, and beyond that was my dream kitchen.

My apartment kitchen, the one I'd had a hurried piece of toast at that morning, featured about six inches of working counter space, between the stove and refrigerator. This so-called “cabin” had a kitchen that could service a neighborhood restaurant.

The man buttering two slices of bread for a grilled cheese sandwich was not at all the type of boss I was expecting. I figured this mysterious novelist would be chubby, bald, and hunched—hobbit-like. Before I left home for the assignment, my mother and I had joked about me pushing a dresser in front of the door while I was sleeping at night, alone in the woods with some neckbeard goober.

A thought came to me, sharp and clear, like a voice in my head:
He's the one who'd better barricade
his
room at night!

He had light hair, the kind of ash blond that hid gray hairs, and it was just long enough that it feathered at his temples. His hair was thick and his hairline came down low on his forehead, into a small widow's peak. His jaw was wide and square with a crease in his chin—the kind of handsome bone structure it would be a shame to hide under any more than a few days' stubble. His eyes were not the gray-blue you'd expect with his fair coloring, but a rich, deep blue, like sapphire with a hint of green.

Did I know him? His face was familiar, as though he resembled a well-known actor, though I couldn't think of which one for the life of me.

He looked up from the grilling sandwich and smirked, seemingly aware I'd been checking him out. Being an author, he was probably good at observing people, plus he had life experience points on me. The crinkles around his eyes and the lines on his forehead would make him about forty or so. It was hard for me to guess his age, as I'd been hanging out with nobody but college students the last four years.

I wondered if all that life experience made him a better lover. We were to be working closely together for two weeks. I'd dismissed the idea of fraternizing with my boss, but now that I saw him, everything changed. He had no ring on his finger.

He was still looking at me, and smiling. Could he read my mind? I felt dirty and guilty, my cheeks growing hot as I blushed.

He flipped the sandwich, spanked it with the spatula, and said, “How fast are you?”

“Beg pardon?”

He nodded down at my hands, which I was wringing together nervously. “As a typist. How fast do you type?”

I spread out my fingers wide and stared at my hands, my prized tools. “One hundred words a minute, though my accuracy's better at about ninety.”

He quirked up one eyebrow. “Sometimes a slow hand's good. Sometimes hard and fast is the way to go. Or a mix.”

I held back my response for a second to think. The man was a bestselling novelist, who worked with words for a living. His double entendre was not an accident, not at all.

Oh, but I could give as good as I got. There was a reason my girlfriends got me to write their flirty emails and text messages for them, and why my nickname was
Tori the Torrid
.

I took a deep breath, leaned up against the counter so my cleavage showed at the top of my blouse, and said, “Some people would swear I'm ambidextrous. That's how good these hands of mine are.”

He mouthed the word
wow
and spanked the grilled cheese sandwich a few more times.

I said, “Thanks for making lunch. I am ravenous. That hike and my oh-so-awkward meeting with the moose worked up my appetite.”

He chuckled as he put the sandwiches on plates and led me over to the long dining table. After setting the plates down, he reached his right hand out to shake mine.

“Nice to meet you, I'm Smith Wittingham.”

His hand was hot and firm, his eye contact unwavering. Those chilling blue eyes had a ring of green around the pupil.

“Smith?” I took my seat directly across from him. “I wonder if I've read any of your books. What's your most popular one? I've mostly been into textbooks the last four years, not a lot of time for fiction.”

“That's too bad.” There was a bowl of mixed greens on the table and he served us both some salad instead of answering my question.

He was so familiar, from his looks to his name.

A bird outside flew past one of the windows, and he turned to look. As I saw him in semi-profile, everything clicked into place. That was the pose he used in his author photo, and I
had
read his books.

As he turned back, he raised his eyebrows, his forehead furrowing.

“Everything okay?” he asked. “That was just a bird, not the killer moose coming back to finish you off.”

Of course. His mocking tone. His I'm-so-wonderful attitude.

He was Smith
Fucking
Wittingham, author of the
Smith Dunham
detective series. He'd actually named the main character after himself, boldly owning up to the fact his character was his own disgusting fictional avatar. Smith Dunham bedded one or more ladies in every novel, sometimes at the same time. He made
James Bond
look monogamous. And people loved the books, of course.

My own mother read them and swooned over fictional Smith Dunham, discussing with her girlfriends what actor might play the detective if and when they made the inevitable movie or TV series.

I
had
read Smith Fucking Wittingham's books—while sitting on the toilet at my mother's house. The bathroom was where his books belonged.

And now I was stuck in the woods with him? For two weeks? The generous paycheck didn't seem at all adequate anymore.

“Moose do kill people,” he said casually. “In Alaska, some say moose kill more people than bears. The death toll includes vehicle accidents, but a few deaths are by trampling.” He paused, staring contemplatively at the antler chandelier above us. “What a novel way to kill someone and make it appear to be an accident. You wouldn't want to leave it to chance, of course, but find some implement that matches the hooves… perhaps through a taxidermist.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“No? Oh, of course not. Then the taxidermist would know, and you can't have a perfect crime if someone knows. Good point. The killer would have to kill the moose as well.”

“Am I here to help you type… a
Smith Dunham
novel?”

“Well, you're not here to sit around and look pretty, though it certainly would help. Perhaps if you unbuttoned a few more buttons.”

I shook my head. “I can't do this.”

“Of course you can! A hundred words a minute. We'll take it slow at first. And no, you can't record the session and transcribe later. I need to see the words on the screen or they're not concrete.”

I stared down at my hands. I'd done worse things for a paycheck—like the summer I'd worked at the meat-processor. My main duty was scooping up the floor meat to feed into a machine that made sausages.

That was it.

Smith Wittingham's perverted scenes and twisted ideas were just so much
floor meat
, and I'd scoop them up to make the sausages that were his bestselling novels.

After lunch, he showed me to my room, which was on the lower floor and the smallest of the three bedrooms in the cabin. I hung up my clothes and lay down on the double-sized bed with my tablet computer. My plan was to research my new boss and send some emails to let my friends and family know I had not been eaten by a moose. My tablet couldn't detect any wireless internet. Hadn't there been something in the contract about internet access? I should have read the thing.

I tried again to search for wireless connections, but found nothing.

Was this shit for real? No internet? Oh, no. No amount of pay was worth going two weeks without internet.

Smith knocked on my closed door. “Just so you know, there's no internet access here.”

“I gathered that.”

He chuckled. “If you don't mind, I'm ready to begin now. I have the first sentence in mind.”

I grabbed a pillow from the bed and muffled a scream of despair.

Two weeks. How much worse could it get?

I took a moment to brush my hair in the little bathroom connected to my room, then emerged, ready to type. Smith Wittingham had already gone upstairs, to where I imagined the office was.

I found him in the largest bedroom, which had a great view of the trees and a pricy-looking ergonomic desk.

Smith waved me over to my new chair, one of those mesh things with a hundred levers.

“Not bad,” I said of the chair, smiling over the first thing that had gone well.

His voice strong and sure, like a narrator, he said, “My client bowled me over at the door, the word 'moose' escaping from her luscious lips.”

I froze in my chair. “What?”

“That's the first line. I know it's not great, but you have to start somewhere.”

The computer was already on, with a blank document on the screen.
He's messing with me
, I thought, but I wasn't going to engage in his chicanery. I typed his words, verbatim.

I expected he would laugh and say the moose thing was just a joke, but he kept going. The woman in the story was breathless from an encounter in the woods with a moose. Stranger still, it sounded sexy the way he narrated the story, what with her bosom heaving and all.

As I typed, he paced the room behind me, his sock feet quiet on the thick carpet. I zoned out, focusing only on one word at a time, coming from a disembodied voice that moved around like sound effects on surround-sound speakers.

He used my moose, but at least the woman, Detective Dunham's new client, wasn't named Tori. She was Sheri, and she had waist-length red hair, unlike my own shoulder-length red hair. I had a bunch of freckles on the bridge of my nose, but she had a “smattering of delicious angel kisses.” Her chest measurements were also more impressive than mine, and yes, he did describe her bra size. On the front page. I found it difficult to type while rolling my eyes, but I forged on. I kept up my pace, never falling behind his narration, for nearly two hours.

At the end of the second hour, Smith clapped his hands abruptly. “Tori! Time for a break.”

“But… why did Sheri hire Detective Dunham instead of going directly to the police?”

I twirled around on my fancy chair to find a smug-looking Smith Wittingham, his face working hard to look even more self-satisfied.

“Gotcha,” he said. “Good to know. I'm off to take a shower. You can join me if you like, or do whatever your heart fancies for the next two hours, then we'll reconvene.”

My left eye twitched. Join him for a shower? He'd removed the light jacket he'd been wearing when I arrived, and wore only a tight-fitting T-shirt. The man either had good genes or spent some time at the gym—perhaps both. As I was watching him, he dropped to the carpet and started doing push-ups. “You should do something to get your heart rate up,” he said between presses. “Increased blood flow is good for the brain, too. Maybe go outside and get that scary moose to chase you around.”

“Good idea,” I said, stepping around him. I paused at the doorway long enough to get a good look at his butt, on display in that position.

I wondered how sleeping with him would change me, besides increasing the number of guys I'd been with, sexually. Despite all my big talk with my friends, and the dirty things I'd say over email and text messages, the truth was I'd only been with Todd through most of college. There'd been a few breaks and other people, but not as much experimentation as I'd hoped to have done by the time I graduated.

Todd and I had broken up half a year earlier, and I'd heard through friends he'd moved on. And on. He was dating his third girlfriend since me, last I heard. Wouldn't it be great if Todd heard about my affair with a wealthy author?