Striptease Page 12

A sharp rap on her door brought her head up in time to see Chloe invite herself into the office, plop down into a visitor’s chair and glare.

  Melanie didn’t give her girlfriend the chance to launch into the bitchy tirade she saw coming. “Don’t start. I know what you’re going to say. And I’m sorry for not telling you I was leaving on Saturday.”

  Chloe remained unsmiling. Her hands gripped the chair’s black leather arms. Her crossed leg swung. Her eyes, made up in shades of pink, glowered.

  Melanie tossed her pencil onto the legal pad, leaned back and sighed. “Fine. Make me suffer. I know this is about me ducking out before the end of the party, so have at it. Just do me a favor. Tell me exactly what you’re thinking, because I’m fed up with hearing people talk in circles. What’s so hard about making a point? Or saying what’s on one’s mind?”

  Chloe’s leg stopped swinging and an expression of curious regard crossed her face. “Well, now, sugar. From the way things are sounding, I’m thinking you’re the one who needs to unload first. You seem to be a lot closer to the edge of the proverbial cliff than I am.”

  “I am on edge.” Melanie pushed up her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose. “And it’s making me crazy. I’ve been a basket case now for thirty-six hours.”

  And that wasn’t even counting back to the day she’d sent Jacob the tape. Only to the moment she’d decided to follow him upstairs. The moment the full-blown crazies had taken over her life. “I’m supposed to be calm and rational and totally in control.”

  “Says who?” Chloe asked with a frown.

  Melanie sputtered out a big fat raspberry. “Me! But it’s like I’ve been in a permanent premenstrual cycle for almost a week now. Piss and moan and bitch and snap. The only thing not on my list is tears. And it’s not even that time of the month.”

  “So cry already,” Chloe offered sagely.

  “Ha,” Melanie barked, shaking her head briskly and fluffing up her hair with both hands. “That’s the one thing I refuse to do. It’s the last straw between me and insanity. And you know what?” On a roll now, she was! “If I’d stayed at your place and eaten a damn hamburger and taken care of the leftovers like I told you I’d do, I wouldn’t be sitting here fighting off a nervous tic.”

  Or sitting here wondering if I’ll ever be able to walk straight again.

  One of Chloe’s eyebrows went up as she studied Melanie’s face. “Actually, sugar, you cutting out of the party early is not why I’m here to smack you around.”

  Hmm. So it could be a couple of other things, one involving the state of Chloe’s guest bedroom, but Melanie preferred not to go there. At least not with Chloe. “So, you’re mad over something other than the fact that I didn’t help with the cleanup?”

  “Well, yes, because you promised, but that’s a small blip on the big screen of my anger.” Chloe pouted. “You could’ve at least told me you were leaving.”

  “Uh-huh, right.” Melanie looked the other woman up and down over her rectangular frames. “And your pissiness isn’t about me not saying goodbye.”

  “Exactly.” Chloe leveled an accusing finger. “If you’d said goodbye, I would’ve seen firsthand that you hadn’t left alone. But, no. I had to hear from Rennie that you’d left with Jacob.”

  Time to prevaricate. “I didn’t exactly leave with Jacob. Only at the same time.”

  “And?” Chloe’s brows went up.

  “And what?”

  “And, how was he?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Melanie countered, feeling the heat of a rising flush while working to keep a straight face. A calm, cool and collected face.

  “The kind of question a best friend shouldn’t have to ask.”

  Maybe not, but it wasn’t one Melanie was sure she wanted to answer. “So, I could ask you the same about Eric, then?”

  “Sugar, I’ve told you everything there is to tell about Eric.”

  “You haven’t told me much of anything in well over a year.”

  “Well, okay,” Chloe hedged. “But that’s only because we got serious. I spilled all the details when he was still a boy toy.”

  “So?”

  “So, spill all the details already.” She tilted her head to the side, blinked, pouted and considered. “I know I’m not psychic, but my boy toy radar never fails.”

  Melanie sighed again, hating to admit that Chloe might be right. Talking to a much-trusted friend couldn’t hurt, and might actually relieve the pressure causing a headache of monstrous proportions.

  “Fine. If you must know, he’s amazing in bed. And on the sofa, against the wall. Sitting in a chair. But that really doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t mean anything? It means everything!” Chloe gestured expansively with both hands. “Are you kidding? Finding a guy who knows what he’s doing in bed and all those other places? How can you think that doesn’t mean anything?”

  “Well, sexually, yes. It means everything.”

  “But?”

  “C’mon, Chloe. You know there’s more to life than sex.”

  “And?”

  “And Jacob may make for a perfectly good boy toy, but that’s it. He’s got an attitude that’s half know-it-all, half don’t-give-a-shit.”

  Chloe signaled a time-out. “If this is only about his boy toy potential, what does it matter if he’s a bum?”

  “I suppose it doesn’t. Except that I know he isn’t. A bum, that is.” She shook her head. “But then this isn’t about who he is. This is about me.”

  “You having problems with your id?”

  Melanie rolled her eyes. “You’ve been hanging out with Rennie too much, and no. What I’m having a problem with is facing that I’m lusting over a man because of his body. Period. End of story.”

  “Just his body. Hmm.”

  “And the way he looks at me.” She didn’t even have to close her eyes to relive the feel of the heat. “That panty-melting thing. It’s like his eyes flash and I want to take off my clothes.”

  “Well, of course you do.”

  Melanie took off her glasses and closed her eyes. God, but her eyes were tired. As tired as she was, she couldn’t remember why she wasn’t supposed to want to spend her life in Jacob Faulkner’s bed.

  Groan. Now she was including him in her future. This was not what she’d expected from a purely sexual affair. She looked back at Chloe. “What happened to being attracted to his intellect? Admiring his ambition?” And him admiring hers, dammit.

  Chloe shrugged. “If that’s what floats your boat.”

  “Lust does not last.”

  “Says who?”

  “Okay. It can. You and Eric are proof.” Even though Chloe’s quiet grin indicated her agreement, Melanie couldn’t help but be curious how much of the couple’s emotional involvement fueled that physical attraction. And then she frowned.

  Ugh. No. She did not want to fall into the trap that paralyzed so many relationships. She refused to fall in love with the man she was sleeping with just because she was sleeping with him. And, yes. Unfortunately, she spoke from personal experience.

  But she was years older now and years wiser and way too levelheaded to let her emotions ruin the best thing that had happened to her in ages. The best thing physically, she rushed to amend. Half a week of working with him, a weekend of sleeping with him and she was already looking forward to more.

  As she’d said, how totally un-Melanie Craine.

  Still, no matter how much fun she was having with Jacob—even out-of-bed fun—she refused to start attaching anything emotional to their pseudo relationship. He might have breached her underwear, but he was not going to breach the walls of her heart.

  AS MUCH AS MELANIE HATED taking long late lunches, Thursday’s two hours spent at Frankie B’s had been worth the time away from the office—not to mention worth every bite of the fried green tomatoes and Cobb salad.

  In addition to wiping out lunch and dinner in one meal, she’d finally managed to p
ick up several ideas for expanding her gIZMO gIRL line. And the best part…

  She hadn’t been stuck doing her individual in-office documentary interview. She’d been late enough getting back to the office that the production crew had called it a day.

  It wasn’t the interview she dreaded. After five years in business, she was used to publicity profiles and probing questions. A one-on-one with the show’s host didn’t faze her in the least. Except it wouldn’t be a simple one-on-one.

  It would be a ménage a` trois with a voyeuristic cameraman rounding out the party.

  And she didn’t know how much of her true self—the self that existed fully clothed and out of bed, the self that the documentary host would be digging deep to reveal—she was ready for Jacob to know.

  As much pleasure as he provided—and he did, oh, how he did—she should be listening to the advice of her practical nature rather than relinquishing control to her selfish and greedy physical side. Here she was, waffling again, reversing the conclusion she’d come to earlier in the week.

  Because no matter how much fun he’d injected into her life, gIRL-gEAR business and Jacob Faulkner did indeed make for a very bad mix.

  She was having the absolute worst time keeping her mind on the job. And that just wouldn’t do. Not when she was the one taking up the slack left hanging by the lovebirds surrounding her everywhere she turned.

  She supposed it wasn’t just Jacob, that the same would hold true for any man. But, she supposed again, never before had a man gotten under her skin the way Jacob had managed to do.

  Putting a stop to the sex had crossed her mind more times than she could count since she’d climbed off his lap in Chloe’s guest bedroom Saturday afternoon. Almost as many times as she’d wondered why she was considering giving up such a guilt-free and no-strings pleasure. It wasn’t as if Jacob was a permanent fixture in her life.

  The documentary shoot was scheduled to wrap in another month. Surely she could forget about drive and ambition and do thirty days worth of living for the moment, since the moment would be but a speck in the timeline of her life. She could easily regain her sanity once Jacob was gone.

  And, really. She’d always performed best under deadlines, anyway—a thought that brought a wry grin. Wouldn’t that drive Jacob to drink, benefiting from the very obsessive nature he complained about?

  Then again, he was a guy, and as long as he was getting laid often and laid well, why should he care about the attitude she had toward her work? Why was it so important to him to show her the fun he claimed she was missing? The selfishly sexual part of his reasoning she totally understood.

  But that was all she understood. She didn’t get his “mission” to spice up her life. What was in it for him, besides the obvious? Unless he got off on the power trip as much as he did on the sex. If that was the case, he’d done himself proud. Look at her, sitting here mooning over him like some sort of lovesick cow!

  As much as she hated to admit it and as much as that admission riled her, she needed to get her head out of Jacob’s pants and back into the entrepreneurial game. She pulled up her in-box, scrolled down the queue looking for priority messages, finding only one from Sydney and…wait a minute.

  An e-mail from jf@avatareproductions? It wasn’t marked priority but still it caught her eye.

  Why would Jacob be e-mailing her when they took care of business at the office during the day and took care of pleasure at night? In her bed. Beneath her new comforter of Moroccan red and gold, and Egyptian cotton sheets.

  Still, the fact that it was from Jacob brought a moment of indecision, not to mention nails tapping on her desktop as she stared at the screen.

  The part of her that was a savvy professional and wise to the ways of distraction told her to ignore him until she’d finished the more pressing matters of work. Dessert was always best savored as a reward for a job well done.

  Except when it was eaten first because it was irresistible, and the thrill of indulging in being bad beckoned. She couldn’t wait to see what he wanted, and that was the very reason she wished she could hate him.

  He’d totally destroyed her ability to focus on anything. She’d worked so hard for so long to get to this point, and she certainly knew better than to let herself fall prey to a cocky bad boy—no matter how good he was in bed.

  And that was the thought that fueled her decision. In addition to being a lovesick cow, she was now officially an unrepentant and insatiable horndog. Work could wait because Pavlov had whistled.

  She double-clicked on Jacob’s e-mail, only to bring it up and see that he’d simply sent her two hyperlinks. She tapped her finger on her mouse and debated on whether or not she had any interest in what he wanted her to see.

  But it wasn’t much of a debate because she had never been much of a debater.

  She clicked the first link, which took her to a Web page into which opened a Webcam feed. She rolled her eyes, started to close the window, but realized the feed she was seeing was familiar…. She frowned. What the hell?

  It wasn’t just familiar. It was her office! She was looking at herself sitting behind her own desk.

  Again she started to close the window, but remembered the second link in Jacob’s e-mail. A quick click on that one and she found herself looking into another office, one she didn’t recognize but had no trouble guessing to whom it belonged. Or at least who crashed there when he wasn’t busy harassing female entrepreneurs with his camera, grrr.

  The man should be shot on general principle—not to mention for being a spy, and for worming his way into her bed and her life so completely that she was less angry than amused by his invasion into her privacy. So what, exactly, did he expect to see? And where, exactly, was the camera?

  After a brief study of the Webcam’s angle, she glanced up into the corner of her bookcase, ran her gaze along the top shelf to the center partition. There it was, the sneaky bastard. Wired in unobtrusively beside her television and the cables for the office satellite feed.

  Spy boy had been busy, hadn’t he? Obviously tapping into the Internet via the office’s dedicated service line. Taking full advantage of the run of the office Sydney had given the documentary team. At the very least, the bastard was way too sure of himself. At the very most…

  That most was what intrigued Melanie, what had her sitting here in her chair instead of climbing up to tear the camera out of the wall. She supposed it was his turn to throw down a gauntlet in this strange battle of wills they called an affair. But she wondered. How far would he actually go?

  Before she decided what sort of show she would offer up for his viewing pleasure, she needed to know more specifics on the setup—primarily, how secure was his connection. He obviously had the camera’s feed streaming to his capture software. Still, until she knew for sure, she had no intention of doing the wild girl party thing for an audience like some sort of coed on a locker room cam.

  Using the eraser end of her pencil to push her glasses back up her nose, she looked back at her monitor and hit Refresh. Then hit Refresh again. The software wasn’t broadcasting the live feed, but seemed to be taking a snapshot every five seconds or so.

  And that was when her plan began to come together. He seemed to have forgotten whom he was dealing with here. Or maybe he just didn’t know. Melanie Craine was not an easy conquest, no matter that easy was exactly what she’d been with Jacob thus far.

  She needed to remind herself of that fact, as well as show Jacob Faulkner a thing or two about the imaginative use of technology. She hadn’t spent all these years keeping her nose to the motherboard, keeping company with geeks instead of bad boys, for nothing.

  FRIDAY MORNING, Jacob tossed his satchel at the base of the coatrack in his office before collapsing into his chair, and rubbed both hands across his face. He was dog-tired. Just plain beat. This invincibility thing was obviously all in his mind because his body was dragging ass in a very big way.

  Sleep. He needed sleep. Tonight he would go home to his own
bed and catch up. Then again, sleeping in his own bed would mean missing out on not sleeping in Melanie’s. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t regret giving up a night of sex more than another night of sleep.

  What was a few hours, anyway? They were nearing the end of August and the shoot was scheduled to wrap next month. Once he finished with the documentary, he doubted they’d be seeing one another as often since he’d pretty much booked up October with interviews and photography showings in NYC.

  He’d worry about making up the deficit in his shut-eye quota then—the same way he was spending this morning making up for the time he’d missed in the Avatare office while working at gIRL-gEAR. He had paperwork to process and more than a few calls to return, not to mention dodging a couple of his work buds who were going to kick his butt the minute they saw him.

  Since hooking up with Melanie this past week, he’d cut out on a couple of the Astros baseball games he and his friends had made plans to attend. Neither Asa nor Harry would let him off the hook easily.

  Again he scrubbed both hands down his weary face. Yeah, well, the suckers could just bring it on. He was young and hale and hearty and could stand up to a little bit of ass-whupping.

  Or he could have if he wasn’t so friggin’ beat!

  Legs spread wide, he swiveled his chair around, hooked up his PowerBook to the Avatare office network and booted it up, watching through bleary eyes as it came to life. First things first meant cleaning out his in-box, since this was the only day he’d been to the office all week.

  He’d been scheduled to shoot Melanie’s interview yesterday afternoon, but she’d had to cancel due to a luncheon meeting that ran long. The documentary host had flown back to L.A. last night for the weekend, freeing up Jacob until Monday morning rolled around again.

  He’d slept in this morning until he’d heard Mel’s keys jangling as she was leaving for the office, then he’d decided what the hell. Tomorrow was Saturday. He’d get up and get going before she got that look in her eye that called him lazy.

  He wasn’t, really. He had money for everything he wanted and needed, and he’d gotten there without giving himself an ulcer in the process. He wondered whether or not Melanie had one—or if her body had grown used to the years of uptight living and figured, why go to the effort?