Palm Springs Heat

1

The limo jerked hard to the right,
sending Lara Dixon sliding across the slick leather seat.

That can’t be good.

The man seated across from her—the
man Gina had found to introduce her to Clay Creighton—scrambled upright and
banged on the plexiglas partition separating them from the driver, a uniformed
woman who had quarter-inch silver hair peeking from beneath a livery cap.

“What the hell?” he demanded as the
partition slid open. “Did you hit something?”

The driver met Lara’s questioning
gaze in the rearview mirror. “Oops.” The partition slid shut.

That really can’t be good
.

Lara flipped down a mirror to fix
her hair. Her natural color shimmered through the semisweet chocolate veneer.
Hard
to get used to after thirty-two years as a blonde.

“Just a bump in the road.” Anton
Roche worked his neck like a preening turkey and settled back in as the limo
raced past Paradise Cove on the road to Malibu.
“As I was saying, the girl thought she was the aurora borealis, Liberty’s
torch and the leprechaun’s pot o’ gold rolled into one. But she knew she looked
even hotter in my bustier.”

Lara suppressed a sigh.
How does
Gina put up with this guy?
The lingerie designer had prattled about his
life with the glitterati from the minute he’d picked her up at her humble Santa
Monica apartment. She wished he’d let her concentrate
on this new experience of riding in luxury. After tonight, she might never step
into a limo again. Then again, Roche had put his turkey neck on the line to
talk up Lara to Clay Creighton.

He has his own axe to grind, but
I should at least pretend to be interested.

“Why is it the ‘STP’ bustier?” Lara
asked, though after weeks of researching Creighton’s Fast Lane empire, she knew
the answer.
Never hurts to practice. You’ll be lying all the time if
everything goes right tonight.

Roche straightened with pride.
“‘Seconds to
Paradise
.’
It’s goddamn brilliant. Builds up the bust—and a man can
unhook it one-handed like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You know how much
money Creighton’s made from that thing? It’s the biggest seller in the Toy
Store. But do I get the credit?” He looked more closely at Lara. “It wouldn’t
have been a bad idea for you to wear one tonight.”

Lara had considered buying one from
Fast Lane’s notorious online gift shop back when she was married. “I thought
STP had something to do with gasoline.”

“Yeah, well…Fast Lane: Racy cars,
the high life…and all that.”

Fast women, fast cars, fast
living.
I know all about Fast Lane and Clay Creighton.

Lara looked out the window as Roche
chattered on. The sun drifting down through the maritime haze toward Point Dume
reflected in her diamond-blue eyes. The conflagration of red, orange and purple
looked no different from here than it did from the bluffs on the other side of Santa
Monica Bay.

The
limo jerked
again as they turned up
a gravel road. Lara’s heart quickened.
We
must be close.

“We’re here!” Roche announced as
the car turned into a driveway that twisted skyward through desert terrain.
“Are you ready?”

Lara thought about the weeks she’d
spent in the gym. The coaching sessions on how to lie with a mysterious woman
whose name and accent changed daily. The hours poring through the enormously
popular Fast Lane website, reading Creighton’s daily encyclicals on materialism
and carnality until she could easily extemporize on the advantages of gadgets
she’d never use and the attributes of running backs she’d never cheer for.

But everything she learned did
nothing to change her opinion: Fast Lane was nothing but a place where men like
her asshole ex, Kyle, could leer at naked women and find validation for
believing they deserved their own harems.

 
An instructional guide on
how to screw over your wife.

She closed her eyes and her mind to
escape Roche’s jabber. When she had approached Gina Wray, creator of the
pro-woman website HardCoreGrrrls.com, with the idea of infiltrating Fast Lane
to reveal its sordid secrets, Lara had never expected to be the one doing the
infiltrating.

“I know plenty of people who’d like
to bring Clay Creighton down—people who’d pay big bucks for an exposé,” Gina had
told Lara. “Putting an end to The Rotation wouldn’t be so bad, either.”

The Rotation consisted of three
women who were at Creighton’s beck and call 24/7. Every six months, he dumped
the most senior member and introduced a new plaything. Relationships arced, he
said, starting out passionate and ending up routine, so a man had to bring in
“new talent” to keep things exciting. Gina’s plan was for Lara to become the
first woman in The Rotation’s disgraceful sixteen-year history to dump him
instead.

“I don’t know,” Lara had protested.
“I’m not exactly Fast Lane material.”

“The material is there,” Gina had
assured her. “You just have to move it around a little.”

Nothing’s simple. The world is
warm and cool and open and mysterious and bright and muddled—all at the same
time. How do you live with that?

Lara opened her eyes to see Roche
staring at her chest. He frowned. “Can’t you show a little more cleavage?”

Lara reflexively looked down the
ruffled collar of her dress—a sleeveless
midnight
blue Roland Mouret crepe Gina had purchased for this night. Lara marveled at
how easily the twenty-five-hundred-dollar price tag convinced
her the
dress fit and felt better than anything she’d ever
worn.

But does it look good enough?

Even with her new body and hair, even
with every follicle below her forehead sugar-waxed and ripped clean, her nails
filed, polished and buffed to a mother-of-pearl sheen, her feet soaked in
lavender-scented Dead Sea salt water and tucked neatly into a pair of Guillaume
Hinfray platform slingbacks, even after two months of Gina’s pep talks, she had
to ask this clown, “Do you believe I can even
get into
The Rotation?”

Roche leaned back against the
velvety leather, his beady black eyes taking in Lara’s slender
five-foot-eight-inch frame, long legs, toned and spray-tanned arms. She held
steady under his gaze. He reached up and pushed a lock of hair off her
forehead. She knocked his hand away and moved the hair back.

“Eh,” Roche said. “Stranger things
have happened.”

Just what I needed: a big boost
of confidence.

The limo crested a hillock and
slowed to a stop. A busty young woman wearing the lowest-cut Lakers jersey Lara
had ever seen opened the door. “Welcome to the ICE House!”

* * *

Clay Creighton moved from his suite
of rooms to the portico, where he could look down at the partyers gyrating to a
pulsing beat on the massive structure known as the Upper Deck. His trademark
white Egyptian cotton shirt hung unbuttoned, and the ocean breeze blew it open
to reveal his taut six-pack abs and well-defined chest. His eyes—the irises
sparkling like amber in the light of the tiki torches below—scanned the
assembled multitude.

“Watching over your subjects, your
highness?” The low, sensuous voice of Sun-Li Hwa came from behind Clay. She
joined him at the railing, snuggling up against his back and ruffling his dark,
wavy hair.

“Yes, my lady,” he said, a dry
smile forming on his lips. “It does my heart good to see the peasants so
happy.”

“Am I your lady?”

“One of them.”

Sun jabbed him in the kidney.

“Ooh. I like that.”

“I wasn’t being nice.”

“Is there a problem?” Clay turned
and looked into her face. He could not help, though, letting his eyes wander
down the neckline of her tastefully sequined black Massimo Rebecchi dress that
plunged to within an inch of her bellybutton. Her dark olive skin glowed gold
in the flickering torchlight.

“I’m not complaining,” Sun said.

“Of course you’re not. Why would
you?”

Someone called to Clay from below.
Clay smiled and held up a finger to indicate he’d be down in a minute.

Sun had a mischievous look as she
ran her index finger in little curlicues down Clay’s chest.

“My subjects need me, my dear,”
Clay said.

“What about me? I have needs.”

“You already have everything you
need.”

Sun buttoned Clay’s shirt. “I don’t
know what I’m going to miss most.”

“I have a feeling you never miss
much.”

“You’ve made me feel like a queen.”

“You
are
a queen,” Clay
said. “Now, get the other girls. Our audience awaits.”

* * *

The beat pounded louder as Lara and
Roche approached the Upper Deck. A bodyguard with an earpiece microphone
blocked the entrance, but stepped aside and nodded to Roche.

“That’s a good sign,” Roche said
privately to Lara. “He thinks you’re just another one of the unbelievably hot
babes who naturally gaggle around me.”

“You design lingerie,” Lara said,
welcoming the banter as an antidote to her mounting nervousness.

“You don’t think I do it just for
the money?”

Maybe I can work a deal with
Gina to murder this guy. Or just do it as a public service.

“Anyway, you blend.” Roche did a
quick once-over of the ocean of undulating bodies. “On the other hand, the
crowd does seem rather ho-hum. But, like I always say, ‘The duller the setting,
the more the gem shines.’”

He waded into waves of humanity.

The crowd is ho-hum?
Lara
tried to convince herself there was even half a chance that was true. The women
all had tiny waists, creamy legs and abundant hair. Hips were scarce, but Lara
noted collagen-engorged lips and silicone-enhanced upper thoraxes aplenty. And
some of the males bobbing around in that gulf stream of prettified people might
mature into men sooner or later.

Minnows. I’m after bigger game
.
A shark, no less. Fully grown and experienced. She had to adopt the mindset of
a barracuda. Or maybe a dolphin. Her goal was to disorient the beast with a
blow to the belly, then disgorge his ego, thus delivering all of female kind
from his predatory ways.

“Hey, weren’t you in my chem
class?” A morsel of nascent manhood grinned as though he were the first guy
ever to think of that sophomoric college line.

“What school?” Lara answered with a
tease.

“Pepperdine, duh.”

Even from a few feet away, Lara
could make out the distinct aroma of man perfume. The kind that’s always on
sale at the local drugstore.

“What year did you graduate?” she
asked.

“Next year.”

“Wow. Your parents must be proud.”
Lara patted his shoulder. “Get back to me when your resume is, um, a little
more filled out.”

Lara chuckled as she wended her way
to the bar. She had never talked to a man that way, for fear of being labeled a
bitch. But bitchy felt kind of good. Still, she was relieved to see when she
got to the rail that the Pepperdine dude had already located a
chica
who
appeared more likely to share some chemistry with him. Lara didn’t want to hurt
anybody’s feelings.

Or, at least, not everyone’s
.

The server was a brunette stuffed
into what was basically a racecar driver’s fire suit cut into pieces held
together with black electrical tape, which made her look like an S&M
version of Danica Patrick. She nodded to Lara as she mixed a vodka Collins and
set it in front of a cutesy blonde.

“I’ll have a Karhu,” said a hunky
schoolboy who clung to Cutesy like a polyester dress. “And give me some head.”

The bartender pursed her lips as
she poured the beer into a tall glass. “One Finnish lager,” she said. “You can
suck off the head yourself if you want.”

Schoolboy didn’t seem to hear.
Apparently Lara proved a strong enough distraction to snare his wandering gaze.
Cutesy gave her the evil eye.

Lara turned to the bartender and
said, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Two nanoseconds later, Cutesy led
Schoolboy away like a dog on a leash.

“Somebody’s smoking tonight,” the
bartender said.

“I haven’t even turned on the heat,”
Lara responded. It felt strange to hear herself talking that way. She noticed
that the bartender’s nametag said “Danica.”

“Um…is your name really...?”

“Weird, isn’t it?” the bartender
said as she reached under the bar.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No problem. All the servers get a
sport.” Lara glanced around and saw a woman in a football getup, another in a
hockey uniform and still another dressed like a jockey. Each costume had
bondage-style electrical tape alterations similar to the racing suit. “The
racing outfit didn’t fit anyone else.”

She put down a tall Collins glass
hand-painted with topless hula dancers swaying beneath palm trees. “Besides,”
she said, “my name has a K instead of a C. They spelled it wrong on the tag.”

Lara laughed. The drink wasn’t even
made, and she was already more relaxed. Danika was just about to pour rum into
a shaker when Lara stopped her.

“On second thought,” Lara said,
looking Danika straight in the eye, “I’d like a Centurion.”

Danika arched one eyebrow. “You’re
not here just to turn on the heat,” she said as she tucked the Collins glass
back under the bar and replaced it with what looked like a martini glass
crossed with a goblet. “You’re here to bring on the sweat.”

Lara watched as Danika poured two
shots of Crown Royal Extra Rare Heritage Blend into an ice-filled,
chrome-plated shaker, chased by a shot of Italian vermouth and a dash of Cynar.
After the artichoke-based liqueur entered the mix, Danika gave Lara a knowing
look, and then splashed in some more.