LITMIR.BIZ

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that kind of drive even if she’d never possessed it herself. Old self-doubts threatened as she wondered if she’d be able to claim half as much success in her own new business. Could she—the woman who’d held twelve different jobs before this one—ever stick with something long enough to make it a success?

      Tamping down the twinge of insecurity, she crossed his physical line to stand toe-to-toe with him. “Are you prepared to settle for just co-existing when we could be doing so many other more interesting things?”

      To prove her point, she laid her hand against his chest and walked southward with her fingers.

      Jackson caught her wrist as she hit his belt, his fierce grip an indication that she might have pushed him to his personal limit.

      They stared at one another in the swirl of blues music and the sea of red velvet, silent for a tense moment.

      Finally, Jackson released her wrist to a more gentle hold, soothing her skin and her racing pulse with the pad of his thumb.

      “How about tonight you go along with my strategy and tomorrow I’ll adapt to your impulses?” His voice was even but his breath huffed out in a ragged sigh.

      Nodding, she agreed, even as she wondered if she’d lost her mind.

      Clearly this steely-willed Taurus man was all wrong for her artistic, move-with-the-flow Aquarian self. Even the stars said she had no business dating Jackson on a boat or anywhere else.

      As much as Summer looked forward to the freedom of the waves and the lure of the water tomorrow, she also couldn’t help but fear she was already in way over her head.

      4

      Sensual inspiration may ambush you when you least expect it.

      “I MISS the hot-tub meetings,” Summer groused to her co-owners the next afternoon in one of their frequent executive sessions. Today they were taking care of business in the vacant and half-finished Sensualist’s Suite. At least, she’d be taking care of business for another couple of hours before she saw Jackson again. “How come we’ve created one of the most hedonistic playgrounds on South Beach and now we’re relegated to the rooms that still have scaffolding and paint brushes?”

      Lainie Reynolds, an attorney with shrewd business sense and a thirst to take revenge on her cheating ex-husband by turning his former club into a raging success, tossed Summer a spiral notebook with a pen wedged in the wire coil. “Because now we’re open for business. We can’t indulge ourselves in the hot tubs anymore. Personally, I’m not in any hurry to put my thirty-year-old bod on display beside the swarm of European models and twenty-one-year-old party monsters in tangas by the downstairs pool.”

      Summer cracked open the spiral notebook with a huff. “Please. You could give them all lessons with your silk cover-up and your high heels.” She spared a glance for her sleek blond partner as Lainie passed out notebooks to their co-owners as the other women entered the suite. Lainie’s black robe had a fire-breathing dragon embroidered on the back, her toes painted the same fire-engine red shade as the mythical creature stitched across her shoulders. “You’ve got some sort of Grace Kelly meets Grace Jones thing going on there. I think you could hold your own with the beach babes by the pool.”

      “Still mad we can’t sit in the hot tubs anymore?” Brianne Wolcott strode into the partially renovated suite, her auburn hair a sharp contrast to her cool gray skirt and neatly tucked white blouse. She slid off one high heel to plunge her toe in the man-made brook that streamed through the exotic room. “Why don’t you just dip your feet in the stream for your water fix?”

      Summer didn’t mention that her water fix was going to come from another source today. She’d never been the type to keep secrets about the men she dated before, but something about this date with Jackson struck her as more tenuous than her one-night interludes with surfer studs in the past. “Putting my feet in the water isn’t the same. I just don’t want our group to turn into some rigid corporate crowd where we feel like we need to sit around a conference table wearing power suits.”

      Giselle Cesare, the fiery Italian head chef and fourth owner of Club Paradise, patted Summer’s shoulder as she waved a pink pastry box under her nose. “But at least if we ever do sit around a conference table, I can personally guarantee you we’ll still be munching on erotic confections to keep things lively.”

      Summer’s spirits lifted slightly. She wasn’t joking about her fear of going corporate. She’d never be able to make it in a job where she couldn’t occasionally don overalls and do a little spackling and tiling on her own walls, damn it.

      “Really?” She reached for the pastry box as both Lainie and Brianne hovered closer. “And just what naughty treat do you have for us today?”

      Giselle’s only response was a sly smile, urging Summer’s fingers to flick open the box and see for herself.

      And there, nestled on a bed of wax paper and covered in delicate frosting, were the chef’s prize delectable… “Kama Sutra cookies.” Brianne and Summer breathed the words with similar hushed reverence.

      Even Lainie let out a momentary sigh of longing before she asked, “Shouldn’t we save these for guests?”

      “No. These are actually a few of the flawed ones. You’ll note the extra arm on one of them, the anatomically impossible position on another, and one cookie depicts a very huge male member thanks to a slip of my wrist while painting.” She rolled her eyes as she began handing out the cookies. “I finally found time to make a batch despite my brothers being underfoot all week trying to convince me the club is no place for an innocent young lady like me. Can you imagine? So I finally decided to put them to work as long as they were here. I made Renzo clean the kitchen and Nico organize the pantry, which gave me tons of time to paint my cookies.”

      Summer gazed down at the sweet in her hand, which depicted a woman kneeling before a man as she pleasured him. Sure enough, there was an extra arm in there, but the work remained lovely. The woman’s long dark hair fell over her shoulder to graze the man’s thigh while the man’s head fell back in sensual abandon. “Damn, but you are a genius, Giselle. If you ever decide to try painting on canvas instead of sugar cookies, I’ll be the first in line to buy up all your artwork.”

      And how. The simple picture was enough to give a woman sweet shivers. Especially if she already had a virile, gorgeous man on her mind.

      Lucky for her, Jackson had said he was ready to go a little wild with her, and she had managed to shuffle her day off so she could take full advantage of their time on the boat today. Would he be amenable to letting her try out the sensual position depicted on her cookie, she wondered?

      Perhaps the sexy thoughts were catching because Lainie was fanning herself as she stared down at her treat. “I think I’m going to frame mine just in case I forget how it’s done. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be divorced…” Her eye lingered on Giselle for a moment, making them all tense since Giselle had unwittingly had an affair with Lainie’s husband in an earlier lifetime. “…but the lack of sex is less appealing.”

      Clearing her throat, Summer removed the cap from her pen before a catfight broke out in the Sensualist’s Suite. She needed to get her mind off Jackson anyway and focus on the business she’d worked so hard to bring to life. “Maybe we should get down to the work at hand then?”

      She really shouldn’t be letting Jackson Taggart dominate her thoughts. She’d undertaken the mission of Club Paradise to prove to herself that she could be successful and have fun doing it. No way would she let a man overshadow that dream already.

      But nearly an hour later, Summer feared for her dream.

      According to the dismal income figures Lainie had shared with them all, business wasn’t booming as much as they needed yet. Sure, the nightclub was hopping and the lines to enter the Moulin Rouge Lounge were impressive, but the hotel suites weren’t yet booked to capacity and the women were running on a thin margin for loss given how much they’d each strapped themselves to personally invest in Club Paradise.

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