LITMIR.BIZ

      APHRODISIA

       KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For JWR—curiouser and curiouser

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      1

      How did the song go? The one about a foggy day in London…as if London was ever not foggy or rainy or gloomy or all-around miserably wet. Glad to be inside the financial building on Paternoster Square, Lara knew her hair was frizzing. Given damp weather, it took only seconds for it to turn from thick and barely wavy into a boingy cloud that floated around her head.

      She glanced at her reflection in the aqua-tinted glass walls that added to her sense of being underwater and sighed. She did not look remotely professional or corporate or cool. She looked…fluffy. In the world of international finance, fluffy was not good.

      A gorgeous woman in a short-skirted suit and aggressively rectangular glasses clicked by, her stilettos sure and quick. Behind the narrow lenses were eyes outlined in severe black pencil, assessing eyes that took in the details of what Lara had on in an instant. Lara could practically hear the other’s woman’s precision fashion sense whirring as she was duly inspected and found lacking. Ill-fitting jacket. Shabby shoes. How utterly pathetic. And how very American.

      Lara sighed and tipped her chin up. Poor but proud, that’s what she was. And yes, from the US, and proud of that too. She missed Chicago already, even though she was here for a job interview with the famous and somewhat mysterious Adam Bowlin. However, she fully expected to be hired on the spot. Strings had been pulled, favors were owed—it was a done deal. She hoped.

      She walked toward the lobby console, signed in and spoke briefly to the guard, who phoned an unseen somebody at the firm on the uppermost floor Lara specified. He murmured her name and appointment time without moving his lips, not even looking at her. She felt faintly unworthy for the second time in less than two minutes. The English were good at that. Except for happily smashed blue-collar guys in pubs and a few cheerful shopgirls, Brits seemed to pride themselves on being chilly and standoffish—and ranking everyone instantly according to a class system that baffled Lara.

      She’d been in London for less than a week, fascinated by the crowded, complicated, and ancient city, but she’d never felt so damn lonely in her life. Maybe it was because her temporary flat, sublet through a friend of a friend of a friend, was in Clerkenwell. Not posh, for all that it was so pricey she had barely anything left over for entertainment or shopping. And not even all that convenient.

      Oh, well.

      She hadn’t come to London to make new pals and go club-hopping. The trip was basically a climb-the-career ladder move to please her Chicago boss at Pratt Investments. Jason Pratt III, the brash grandson of the brokerage’s founder, wanted to start a hedge fund of his own, one that would rival the enviable returns and exclusive international cachet of the Bowlin Fund. La-di-dah.

      He also wanted to poach a few of its phenomenally wealthy clients.

      Jason was a hothead with money to burn and a bad reputation in the Chicago financial world. No doubt his grandfather, the first Jason Pratt, a conservative, thrifty Midwesterner who bought his suits at Sears, was spinning in his grave. Sedately.

      Jason Pratt III wouldn’t care. But he knew he needed to find out more about Adam Bowlin, and to do that, he needed Lara. Meaning he wanted to plant her in Bowlin’s office, in Bowlin’s lap if necessary, so she could find out what was what. Lara drew the line at the lap part.

      But she had wanted to see London and he knew it. With huge college loans she would be paying off for what seemed to be the rest of her life, travel was out of the question. So she’d agreed—and then came the haggling. Jason loved to argue about money and she didn’t. He’d insisted that he didn’t have the bucks to pay her expenses over and above her salary.

      Yeah, right. Jason thought nothing of dropping $250 on a single lunch. He preferred Kobe beefsteak, massaged to perfection while it was still on the cow in Japan, plus a $700 bottle of French wine to go with. His best offer: a jitney bus trip to O’Hare and a roundtrip coach flight to Gatwick. He’d generously agreed to continue to pay her full salary while she, as he put it, whooped it up in London. He threw in a promise, for what it was worth, to make up the difference for the dollar being in the toilet—his phrase—against the mighty euro.

      She frowned, wondering what Jason would say if he saw her now. She could guess. Geez, Lara, can’t you do something about your hair? Ask where Chryssie gets hers straightened, wouldja? I oughta send her and not you.

      Screw him. And screw Chryssie. But Jason was already doing the honors in that department.

      Lara looked at the guard, awaiting further instructions. He murmured something, his beady eyes even colder if that was possible, and made the barest inclination of his head toward a bank of elevators.

      “Thank you.” Evidently those went up to the executive office suites. She walked in that direction, trying to make her own high heels click on the highly polished marble in that scary way. Didn’t work. Instead, she felt a slight sideways movement of the half-sole on the left shoe, a recent repair. Just so long as it didn’t start to flap, she’d be fine.

      It started to flap. Lara scooted her left foot and stepped with the right. Great. Just great. Nothing she could do about it now. She was expected and the great and powerful Adam Bowlin was waiting for her. She could bet a hedge fund king never experienced a footwear emergency. His shoes were undoubtedly handmade in Italy and as highly polished as these goddamn slippery floors. His underlings probably licked the soles clean each morning even before they fetched his coffee.

      Scoot-flap-click, scoot-flap-click. Eventually she got to the elevators. There were six in all. The closed doors were silvery steel, trimmed with burnished brass. Massive. Forbidding. Like the doors of six impenetrable vaults.

      One set whooshed open and someone walked out as she was looking down worriedly at her stupid high heels. She should have dressed like the clueless American tourist everyone here thought she was and worn her ugly sneakers. At least the soles of those were still firmly attached to the—

      A pair of long, large black shoes stopped in front of her. Man shoes. Impeccably tailored trousers broke over the insteps.

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