Your Wish Is His Command (7 page)

Todd grabbed his head with one hand, keeping
the other one hovering above his groin with the damned kitchen
towel. It’d be funny if it weren’t so ungodly pitiful.

He, a grown man, hiding his modesty behind a
piece of eight-by-twelve cotton because he didn’t have enough sense
to pass out in his own bed.

He kicked open the bedroom door and grimaced.
Bare, tan walls, minimal furniture, and the fucking king-sized bed
mocked him.

He knew exactly why he’d chosen the
couch.

And he wasn’t about to dwell on it. He’d done
enough dwelling last night. More than enough,
apparently.

He barreled through to the bathroom, his
refusal to dwell on the reason just one more part of the person
he’d become in the past two years.

And the poor woman downstairs who’d had to
witness the person he’d become last night… God, wasn’t it just
perfect
she’d shown up this morning?

Todd grabbed the shower handle and turned the
water full force to hot. He’d burn the alcohol out of his system if
he had to. No one deserved that greeting her first day on the job.
Even if it was his house.

Todd sucked in a breath as he stepped beneath
the pelting liquid fire and realized he wasn’t as tough as he
pretended. He turned the spigot back to warm and leaned his
forehead against the cool ivory tile, and listened to the phone
ring in his bedroom. Let the machine get the fucking thing. He
couldn’t deal with the calls and the goddamned hounding.

Not today.

The water ran into his eyes and he wiped it
away with the heels of his hands. Why
today
? Why’d she have
to start
today
?

Why’d she have to start at all?

Why wouldn’t they all just leave him
alone?

The Morning After

This wasn’t her hotel room.

The suit jacket tossed on the chair was Lara’s
first clue.

The discarded matching pants on the floor in
front of it was her second.

The dip in the mattress as someone got off the
bed behind her was her third.

Oh my God
. What had she
done?

Well, it was pretty obvious what she’d done,
but, oh God...

Lara clamped her eyes shut as that someone
came around the foot of the bed, peeking only when she heard the
bathroom door slide open.

Oh my
. The guy’s bare naked ass looked
really good. Probably better out of those pants than in them—too
bad she didn’t remember what it’d looked like in them.

Too bad she didn’t remember him.

The door clicked closed and Lara shot to her
feet—to the second shock of the morning.

She was wearing only a t-shirt. And it wasn’t
hers.

She didn’t want to think about whose it was or
how she came to be in said t-shirt; she just wanted to grab her
dress, shoes, and purse, and get the hell out before her
one-and-only one-night stand finished doing whatever it was a
one-night stand did the morning after.

She scooped the dress off the dresser—no, she
wasn’t going to think about how it’d gotten there—tore his shirt up
over her head then the dress down over it, and bagged looking for
her bra. She just wanted out.

Her shoes were next to the chair—one was under
it—and her purse, thank God, was hanging on the hotel room
door.

Twenty-five seconds. That’s all it took her to
escape from the most un-Lara-like thing she’d ever done in her
life.

It took thirty-five more seconds for the damn
elevator to make its way to the—she squinted at the floor marker
above the “Down” arrow—the tenth floor.

Thank God there was no one in the elevator.
She didn’t need witnesses to her walk of shame.

God, wouldn’t Jeff be shocked to see her now?
“Sexually boring and uninspiring” was what he’d said to explain the
affair—among others—but this walk of shame negated
those.

She couldn’t believe it. Thirty-years-old with
her own up-and-coming bakery, yet one too many shots at her college
roommate’s bachelorette party had her picking up some random guy
for a night of uninhibited monkey sex to soothe her
smashed-to-smithereens ego from an ex who didn’t deserve the time
of day let alone this kind of prove-him-wrong strategy.

It
had
been uninhibited monkey sex,
right?

She closed her eyes and tried to conjure up an
image, but the last thing she could remember was jitterbugging on
the dance floor.

She didn’t know how to jitterbug. But,
apparently, that hadn’t stopped her.

Oh, God, her head. And her stomach. And that
cotton mouth thing…

The bell dinged as the elevator arrived at the
second floor. She fumbled for her room key and stumbled out into a
blessedly empty hallway. Her room was down a few doors, and
thankfully she’d decided to forego a roommate on this
trip.

Well, a regular roommate.

Who was the guy? She didn’t even remember what
he looked like, let alone his name.

She groaned as she made it into her hotel
room. How bad was it that the only recallable part of him was his
bare naked ass and
that
she only remembered because she’d
seen it on her way out the door?

She peeled the dress off her body—it’d been on
backwards—and headed into the bathroom. Shower, breakfast, and a
big glass of orange juice, then she could grab her car and get the
hell out of Dodge so she wouldn’t have to risk running into her
biggest regret anytime soon.

But the question was: what was her regret for?
That she’d picked him up in the first place, or that she couldn’t
remember a damn thing about what had come after?

***

Gage ran the towel through his hair, then
wrapped it around his hips. Didn’t want to shock Sleeping Beauty
out there with nudity upon opening her gorgeous eyes.

He caught his smile in the mirror. Yeah, it
was wolfish, but why shouldn’t it be? He’d ended up with the most
gorgeous woman at the party, and that included the
bride-to-be.

Of course, he’d broken his own rules to do
so—no partying with the patrons—but she’d walked in and knocked him
sideways.

It’d be funny, really, if it weren’t so, well,
not. He never went for short, dark, and curvy. Model-thin
bombshells were more his type. At least, they had been. But then
she’d walked in, her curves making his palms sweat, her curls
begging for his fingers to dive in and hold on, and those chocolate
brown eyes... They’d screamed
bedroom
so loudly they’d
almost drowned out the music, and he’d had a hard time keeping his
mind on the show.

Thank God the guys knew their shit. Markus had
known it a little too well; he’d been focused on Lara from the
first bump-and-grind number.

Luckily, no one had questioned the quick
change-up in routines he’d made so that Markus was off stage until
the middle of the second act.

By then, the shots that’d been flowing around
that table had insured Lara’s interest had no longer been solely on
Markus.

That’s when he’d made his move.

Made his move
. Gage groaned. What was
he—twenty? He never had to make moves; women flocked to
him.

But she’d been wedged in the corner of her
booth, surrounded by friends, staring at the stage, and hadn’t
looked like she was going to get out anytime soon.

He grabbed his toothbrush. He should have
moved sooner. Then maybe she wouldn’t have done those last two
shots. The woman was a lightweight. She’d made it to the hotel
elevator and had literally passed out in his arms. It’d put a
damper on his evening, but not his libido.

He just hoped she was more awake this
morning.

He finished brushing his teeth and poured a
glass of water. She was going to need it and it’d give him the
excuse to sit beside her.

And hopefully do much more.

He opened the door softly. He wanted to be the
one to wake her, not the noise or the light from the
bathroom.

Except… she was gone.

He slumped against the doorframe. Served him
right. He played to the fantasies of hundreds of women every
weekend, but the one whose fantasy he’d personally wanted to grant
apparently had no interest in letting him.

Chapter One

He had a son.

Bryan Lassiter stood at the end of the grocery
store aisle and stared at the little boy three feet in front of
him.

The curly black hair was the same, including
the identical cowlick above the right eye that drooped a little
lower than the left, and the same dimple in his right cheek. The
eyes, too, were the same. Those damned, cursed violet eyes that
Bryan had hated ever since Julie Richardson had called them pretty
in first grade. Him and Elizabeth Taylor.

And now this boy.

And if
those
weren’t enough, it was the
birthmark on the kid’s arm that sealed the deal. Bry had the same
one, shaped like a five-pointed star with a rounded tip on the
bottom right spoke. Bryan had eventually had a tattoo put on top of
it—in the shape of a star—but it was the same.

He had a son.

“
Trevor? Where are you?” A pretty
brunette rushed around the end cap, worry etched across her face.
It softened when she saw the boy—the exact opposite of Bryan’s
reaction.

He didn’t know her.

Oh, he’d slept with a lot of women in his
life, but he did pride himself on remembering what they’d looked
like, no matter how drunk he’d been—

No. That wasn’t entirely true. Brad’s bachelor
party had passed by in one drunken haze and there could have been a
stripper involved…

Considering Brad’s party had been four years
ago, and the kid looked to be about three or so… Yeah, it looked
like it was more than possible, though he’d never been so drunk he
hadn’t worn a condom.

Which have been known to
break.

Hell. Given that the kid looked like every one
of his baby pictures, one night of debauchery and bad luck
could
have led to him having a son.

“
Sweetheart, I told you never to
run away from Mommy. This isn’t the place to play
hide-n-seek.”

Bryan’s eyes flew to “Mommy.” About five-six,
with curly brown, chin-length hair that she kept tucking behind her
ears but which wouldn’t stay, high cheekbones, and wide eyes—blue
or gray, he couldn’t be sure. Graceful movements of a dancer that
would be lost in a strip joint, but the legs that went on forever
definitely wouldn’t be.

Had they been wrapped around him? Bryan felt
himself grow hard just thinking about it.

But then he looked at Trevor and his whole
body
got hard. If that little boy was his, she’d kept him
from him.

Did she even
know
who the father
was?

“
I sowwy, Mommy.” Trevor stuck his
thumb in his mouth and Bryan was even more convinced the boy was
his.