Coming Attractions (5 page)

He considered lecturing her about
keeping out of trouble, but figured that line of conversation would simply
cause her to dig her heels in and be more stubborn about her vigilante notions.
He’d just have to hope the felon stayed out of Cara’s way, or that he got to
the crook before she did.

In the meantime, Levi decided to try
once more to maneuver the subject to safer ground.

“The director and the leading lady
are flying in for a powwow, tomorrow. The set crew arrives, too. I’m pretty
sure I’ve covered all of the dietary requirements.” He indicated the numerous
grocery bags on the back seat.

“Don’t bigwig movie producers have
Girl Fridays to deal with grocery shopping and those kinds of things?”

“Ah... Normally they do, but I’ve
diverted my Friday to a personal project—nothing nefarious, just a geeky
enterprise that may or may not go anywhere. Besides, I’m a dab hand in the
errands department. We have a couple of vegetarians, a vegan, and a plethora of
beer and pizza buffs arriving. I have organic tangelos, whole pitted dates, soy
cheese, and Flintstones chewable vitamins for Selena, the leading lady. And
single malt Scotch, cheese puffs, jelly donuts, and roasted cashew chocolate
for Otto, the director.”

The director he’d hired was a
rising star in the industry. Otto Zampa was ripe to make the transition from
low budget, high art successes to something with a more substantial profile and
bankroll. And Selena Simms, the lead actress who would play Cara’s mother, was
a veteran performer who had focused her career on romantic comedies with a
touch of drama, but whom it was plain to see was perfectly suited to a gutsier
dramatic role. Apollo planned to give her a role she could get her teeth into.
The rest of the cast had been selected to set the world on fire. They’d scored
a couple of A-listers for cameos and some edgy new talent for supporting roles.

The same story could be told for
everything from costume budgets to stunt doubles, special effects and
promotion. In short, Apollo had not held back. Levi had so much faith in the
project he was putting all his eggs in Cara’s basket. If it all went belly
up... Levi squashed the thought like an empty milk carton.

For on the flipside of his
conviction was desperation. He was running out of time to hit the big time. The
clock that was ticking was a very personal timepiece and the stakes were so
high that whenever he thought of failing, his mouth dried out and his pulse
spiked so fast he felt lightheaded. So, he stopped thinking of failing. Ever.
He wrote the possibility off completely. Eradicated the “f” word from his
vocabulary. Dismissed it from his mind. He refused to plot contingencies. There
was no exit strategy, no emergency chute, no plan B. He just focused on
winning. That was the only result he would permit himself to consider. Any
other outcome simply didn’t exist for him. He would not allow it.

“Scotch, cheese puffs, donuts, and
chocolate, huh? Sounds like a stomach ache to me.” Cara laughed.

“Or a coronary. It’s a good thing I
got something much nicer for us then, huh?” Levi grinned.

“Toast?” she suggested innocuously.

“Vixen,” he teased as they hit the
isthmus and drove west toward the peninsula and the imposing facade of Flinders’
Keep where storm clouds amassed.

“What was it like growing up there?”
he asked.

“What? As a rich kid in a mansion?
Or in my eccentric mother’s shadow?”

“Can you separate them?”

She slid off her Wayfarers as the
cloudy darkness rolled in. “I guess not. My mother wasn’t an ogre, you know.
The tabloids loved her because her monied background paired with her wacky
career choice made good reading, and because she was beautiful. They liked to
photograph her treasure hunting in her Wellington boots in Zaire or some
equally remote location and run the picture alongside another of her at a gala ball
in a tiara. It made a dramatic juxtaposition, I guess. And then when my father vanished,
it was all conspiracy theories and intrigue and tragedy, which just added fuel
to the fire. The public lapped it up.”

“Your father, Dane, disappeared
during an expedition. Is that right?” Levi asked her.

“Yes. Mom never discussed any
details. I only know what everyone else knows from the media—basically that
he’d had a run-in with some shady characters. He was gone and was never coming
back. After that, if Mom so much as shared coffee with someone who happened to
be male, the paparazzi would leap to a sexual conclusion. If she had slept with
even half the men the papers said she did, she would have died from exhaustion.
In truth, while she was an outrageous flirt, I never recall a man staying at
the house. As far as I could tell, she was about as sexually active as mashed
potato. When I was older, I developed a sense that she flirted so shamelessly
as a ploy to keep men at a distance. The coquetry was almost like a shield. She’d
stroke their egos and play their games and send them on their way, happy but
puzzled as to how she had deflected their advances so gently but so completely.

“She was a nice, normal woman,
Levi. She cared about other people’s feelings, she gave money to charity, and
she dug in the garden. She baked the best brownies and watched dumb movies or
played Monopoly with me and Mia on Saturday nights. She never complained when
Mia cheated or when I spilled popcorn all over the couch. She was just a
regular mom.”

Levi pulled up in front of the
house and gestured for her to wait while he stepped around the truck and took
her elbow to help her out. He didn’t release her arm as her feet touched the
gravel. Instead, he took her other arm and gently guided her around to face
him.

Toe to toe, inches apart, he could
see the different rays of blue in her irises, the pierced holes in her ears,
the curl of her lashes, and the faintest smattering of freckles over her nose.
He could taste the sweetness of her breath and feel the electric buzz that
hummed between them.

“Sounds like Alessandra was a great
mom,” he said, meeting her eyes, somehow knowing it was important to her that
he acknowledged this.

“She was.” Cara’s voice was throaty
with emotion, though whether it was thick with memories of her lost mother or
whether the cause was more immediate and more primal, he wasn’t certain.

He hesitated, unsure.

She blinked.

He waited.

She exhaled and closed the space
between them, lifting her arms and crossing them lightly behind his neck,
coaxing his face toward her own and edging her pelvis forward to nestle against
his crotch. She was bold without being vulgar, confident without being cheap.
He thrilled in the way she judged the moment so perfectly. He responded
immediately to her invitation and withheld nothing as he joined his mouth to
her own and savored the taste and tang and touch of Cara Kelly in his embrace.

Her rejoinder to his kiss was swift
and thorough. Her lips were hot and honeyed as she claimed his mouth with her
silken tongue. Her hands were sure but searching as they roamed the muscles of
his shoulders, the plains and troughs of his back, the curve of his buttocks.

He took her daring as a provocation
to allow his own hands to slide from her elbows over her biceps and to skim her
shoulders and descend her back. She was arched against him, so when he skated
his hands down her spine, they came to a natural rest at her derriere and,
instinctively, his palms cupped her rear and drew her even closer.

She gasped. She could not miss his
readiness, he realized. He was ramrod straight and hard as steel for her. His
whole body was alive with need for the vibrant woman reacting so deliciously,
so wantonly in his arms. At the very center of his hunger was his throbbing
cock.

And then the rain came. No stray
drops, no warning sprinkle. A sudden sheet of cold water thundering without
notice from the sky, drenching them at once.

He would have kept kissing her,
would have damned the weather and continued to feed on her luscious mouth, to
fondle her delectable ass, to delight in the sublime feel of the length of her
lush body pressed hard against his... But she shrieked and yanked away from his
embrace, making a mad dash for the veranda. The sprint would have been comical
except that she looked even better wet than she did dry, he thought, remaining
where he was and unashamedly ogling her departing form. Her jeans were
plastered to her thighs and hips, her t-shirt painted against her ribs. When
she turned, laughing, a spray of water flicked from her hair and his eyes
zeroed in on the mounds of her breasts and their sexy peaks poking against the
thin, wet fabric. She looked like a TV ad for something fresh and feminine. He
groaned.

“Pervert,” she shouted over the
roar of the rain, and laughed as she crossed her arms over her chest.

“Spoil sport,” he replied, jogging
over to join her on the veranda. “Here.” He pressed his house key into her
palm. “Go inside. I’ll bring the supplies from the car. There’s no point
waiting. By the looks of this storm, the milk will turn sour before we get a
break in the weather.”

“You don’t want a hand?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I’ll go dry off then.”

“Don’t feel you have to,” he told
her, waggling his eyebrows suggestively in the direction of her chest.

“Later,” she laughed.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Chapter
Five

“So, what was your childhood like?”
Cara asked as she leaned against the counter in the back kitchen, sipping a
merlot and watching Levi cook.

“Pretty average. After-school milk
and cookies. Minivan. Suburbia. I was one of four kids. My parents stayed married,
still are. Dad was a vet, Mom worked part time as a florist. They’re retired. We
ate meat and three veg every night. We went to all the local football team’s
home games. We ruled the neighborhood on our BMXs, even my sister. And my
siblings all got sensible jobs out of college. I’m the black sheep, but not
very black. Maybe a chic charcoal or a pleasant ashy gray.” He laughed.

“Because you’re a movie producer?”

“Because I’m an entrepreneur, a bit
of a business buccaneer and a financial daredevil. My family was all about
certainty and security. I was about risk and return. I think I scared them.”

He passed her an orange melamine
tray. It had once resided under the toaster to catch crumbs, she recalled.
Tonight, it was laden with dense bread and held twin dipping bowls of oil and
pistachio dukkah.

“When did you first know you were
different from them?” she asked as she loaded up her bread, popping the tiny
triangle into her mouth and smoothing her tongue over her slick lips.

He seemed mesmerized by the motion,
so she dawdled. It turned her on to see the effect she had on him, even from
something as simple as licking oil from her mouth.

“Earth to Levi...”

“Ah. What? Oh...”

She laughed naughtily.

He cleared his throat.

“My first venture into exploiting
the capitalist regime? I was a senior. Kids were hooking up, couples springing
up everywhere, you know? And getting serious. By the end of the school year, a
lot of car windows were fogging up, if you get my drift.”

She nodded, but her mind was
suddenly in the back of his Tacoma. She envisioned herself and Levi frantic,
entwined, passionate, their tongues laving, their fingers craving. She pictured
the dark, the cramped space, imagined hot radio music, bare thighs against
leather seats.

He coughed slightly as though his
mind was also wandering down illicit paths and she forced her mind back to the
conversation.

“We’d all done sex ed, so we all
knew to use condoms.” Was he talking about sex to torture her? All she could
think about was how he would feel all hard and thick and swollen, thrusting
into her—and he was talking as though he was oblivious.

It wasn’t that she lacked interest
in his beginnings, but rather that she was completely distracted by the sensual
way his body moved as he stirred the pot, the sexy moue of his lips as he
tasted the sauce, the frank appreciation in his eyes every time he looked at
her, and the unmistakeable bulge of his cock in his snug jeans. He was making
her hungry, and not for pasta.

“Wrightville was a small town.
Old-fashioned, too. There was one drugstore. Walking into that store and buying
prophylactics was like announcing your engagement. So, instead, kids were
taking risks.”

“You saw an opportunity.” She gave
herself a mental point for not only following the conversation, but for making
an appropriate comment. She gave herself another point for stopping by the
Ocean Ridge drugstore that afternoon and making an anticipatory purchase of her
own.

 
“Sure, I saw an opportunity. I gathered my
courage, shrugged off my pride, and walked into the drugstore one day to plough
my meager savings into buying every box of condoms in stock. Then, I let it be
known I was the ‘go-to’ guy for rubbers. I did a discreet business in the
locker room and behind the gym. Teen pregnancy was down sixty percent that
year...”

“You’re trying to tell me you were
providing a community service?”

“Not at all, but it was definitely
a win-win scenario. In any case, the profit from my condom sales paid for my
first set of wheels.”

And with that remark, her mind was
back to the rear of his car and they were naked and desperate. Heat suffused
her like a sudden fever and all at once the air was more like puree and she
just couldn’t suck enough into her lungs. Her head swam and she actually
thought she might swoon.

“Levi?”

He looked up from the pot, flicked
off the heat, dropped the spoon, and rushed to her, grasping her around the
waist with one strong arm and tilting her chin up with the other.

“Cara? What’s wrong? Are you ill?
Being caught in the storm, maybe?”

Her legs were trembling and her
vision blurred. Her mouth turned so dry at his touch she had trouble getting
the words out. The warmth of his skin, the brush of his breath, the intensity
of his gaze sent her pulse from presto to allegro.

“I’m not sick,” she rasped. “I just
need—”

She kissed him then, desperately,
recklessly. Her kiss was an assault and a surrender all at once.
Unhesitatingly, she claimed his lips. Unapologetically, she pulled his body
hard against her own. Unflinchingly, she savored the unbridled response she
incited in him.

For the longest time there was
nothing but the kiss. There was no kitchen, no storm, no movie. There was only
Cara and Levi, and she would have struggled to identify where she ended and
where he began.

Two ravenous mouths devoured one
another, hands greedily grasped and grabbed, hair tangled, clothing snagged,
skin hungered for skin, eyes begged and promised and yielded. She was on fire,
utterly alight, a human firestorm burning for Levi as she had burned for no man
before.

Her fingers yanked his shirt from
his waistband as his hands slipped up under her t-shirt and moved unerringly to
palm her aching breasts through the flimsy underwear she’d belatedly donned.
Her hands ranged across his back, marveling at the play of muscle beneath her
fingertips. She gasped as his fingers grazed the stiff points of her nipples
through the lace and a shiver rippled through her as he applied a fraction more
pressure to the sensitized tips. She responded in kind, skimming her hands over
his ribs and sliding them over his broad chest, raking them through the
smattering of hair there and scraping her fingernails feather-lightly over his
flat male nubs. He sucked in a sharp breath and hauled her hard against him so
her hands were trapped between them, immobile.

 
“I want you,” he told her gruffly, his blazing
eyes making sure she understood just how much, “but not like this.”

Her breath was ragged, her limbs
unsteady. There seemed to be something wrong with her brain—it was like a snow
globe and her thoughts were the snowflakes. She couldn’t quite grasp hold of a
single one. There was only a veil of raw, desperate, consuming need—need for
Levi—and it just wouldn’t quit.

“You can have me any way you want
me,” she panted. “But it’s got to be now.” She ended the demand on a note that
bordered on hysterical.

His nostrils flared and he
swallowed thickly. He hesitated, watching her eyes. He must have seen the intense
need there, for he captured her hand and took off out of the kitchen,
practically dragging her in tow. She didn’t protest, didn’t question, just
blindly followed him as he led her purposefully up the wooden staircase, across
the landing, and down the hallway. The single focus of her consciousness was
consuming Levi—immediately.

The door handle he reached for was
the entrance to her childhood bedroom. For a moment, she stiffened, and he
reacted immediately to her faltering. He turned, hand on the doorknob,
arranging his face in a concerned question, obviously fighting hard to master
his lust until she saw barely a flicker of impatience beneath his worry. She
let out a shaky breath, smiled tremulously but genuinely, and nodded in
reassurance He gave her one more long, assessing look.

“It’s okay...” she assured him.

He saw that it was and opened the
door.

Her childhood bedroom was
transformed. There was no pink metal bed, no roll-top desk—huh, no floordrobe!
Instead, Levi revealed a starkly erotic geisha fantasy. Parchment-colored walls
and bamboo floors contrasted with a plain bed of dark mahogany. To the left, a
deep red kimono was draped tantalizingly over a rice paper screen. Dusky rose
silk bedding and curtains complemented two pillows of deep fuchsia velvet and a
single stem of cherry blossom in a simple glass vase. The only other ornament
was an enormous oriental-style print over the bed. The image was stylized but
graphic, depicting a man and a woman entwined,
in flagrante delicto
.

Both Levi and Cara paused on the
threshold of the room, taking in the setting he had chosen for their
lovemaking. There was breath, there were heartbeats, there was need—and they
were all quickening. He couldn’t know, she thought, that this room had once
been hers, that the walls had harbored her childhood dreams and her teenage
fantasies... Or perhaps, at some level, he did know. Maybe on some primal
plane, he picked up the vibrations of her past, sensed the yearnings of her
younger, flowering self.

In the doorway, Levi held her hand
tightly and she was glad of the contact. A little of her earlier rashness had
ebbed as echoes of the past wrapped themselves around her and the reality of
what they were about to do seeped into her consciousness.

Cara looked up at Levi, took in the
strong set of his jaw, the rumpled tumble of his hair, the glitter of famine in
his eyes. She fanned her gaze over the breadth of his shoulders, the swell of
his biceps, the planes of his chest. He was the perfect male specimen, she
thought. And there was no question the chemistry was seething between them.
Yes, they had only just met, so she didn’t know the man—didn’t know which
football team he followed, where he’d grown up, whether he preferred boxers or
briefs, vanilla or chocolate...

But she knew all the important
things. She knew that he was a gentleman, that he was protective, that his hand
fit perfectly around her own, that he kissed like sweet sin, and that he would
be the hottest lover she could ever dream of being with.

There was suddenly no question of
backing out, no thought of putting off the inevitable, because it
was
inevitable, she realized. Their
union was as sure as the tides, as predictable as the full moon, and as
unavoidable as the dawn. It was almost as though this moment was preordained,
that there was more to this encounter than just the two of them and the desire
roaring between them.

Certain now, she looked down at
their clasped hands, met his eyes, smiled, and stepped across the threshold
toward the bed, drawing Levi alongside her.

Once her decision was made and
executed, Levi no longer held back. At the foot of the bed, he reached for Cara
and pulled her against him, his mouth angling over hers, his palms resuming the
exploration of her body that they had begun downstairs.

His fingers blazed a sizzling trail
over her neck and chest. His mouth gentled in the wake of his hands as he pried
her shirt away from her body, exposing the petal pink lace of the bra she had
donned after the storm. She felt exhilaratingly exposed as her shirt fell away
from her skin, pooling at her feet. She was at his mercy as he licked her
tender nipples through the underwear.

She pushed him back and his eyes
gobbled her up.

“I love the swell of these,” he
said, gazing at her breasts in their lacy cup. “And this…” His gaze traced the
expanse of golden skin across her slightly curved belly and the promise of more
treasures where her faded jeans rode low on her hips.

She made short work of stripping
him of his shirt and unfastened his belt buckle while she had the opportunity.

“Turnabout is only fair,” he teased
gruffly as he reached for the snap of her jeans, and they laughed as each
wrestled with the other’s denim. At the rasp of her zipper lowering, his eyes
flashed triumph and her craving for him intensified.

By silent mutual consent, they
stepped away from one another, then shrugged out of their clothing, toed off
their shoes, stripped back the vestiges of modesty, and revealed themselves
more fully to one another.

He really was luscious, she thought
as he wrenched off his jeans. Toned and defined but not too beefy, tanned but
not too dark, sporting a little body hair but not a rug. He was beautifully
proportioned with long, brawny legs and a trim waist flaring out to an
expansive chest. The makings of a six-pack were apparent when he flexed, but
there were slightly softened edges to his sculpted body, making him more real,
more human than some pin-up boy or show pony. Standing before her in nothing
but his blue briefs, she thought she might die if she couldn’t get her hands on
him soon. God, but she needed to touch him.

She hooked her thumbs under the
elastic at the waist of her panties, but before she could draw them down her
legs, his hands stayed hers.

“Let me,” he said, and she obediently
dropped her hands to her sides.

He knelt before her, worshipping,
supplicating.

She was practically naked—the last
pastel pink scrap of lace hid nothing. He could see, touch, taste everything.
And yet there was something incredibly intimate and romantic about the slide of
his fingers beneath the waistband of her panties, the slow drift of lace and
fingertips over her thighs, the feel of his breath against her center.