Excerpt from Delicious    

At three forty five the following afternoon, Reggie was pacing around her kitchen, fidgeting with utensils and glancing at the door every two seconds. "Are you sure he said three?"

Natalie grabbed Reggie’s wrist so she could see her watch. "He had a meeting this morning and was going to catch a one o’clock flight from L.A., and in case of traffic we made the appointment for three."

Reggie opened the refrigerator for the millionth time, hoping something delicious would suddenly materialize.

Natalie rattled her magazine page in exasperation. "God, would you just settle down?"

"Nat, I have so much work to get done, and now this joker has wasted almost an hour of my time. I knew this was a bad idea"

"Why don’t you go write or something?"

Reggie started pulling items out of the pantry and rearranging them by food category. Veggies on the third shelf down, right side. Soups in the middle on the same shelf. Cereal on top, along with other grain products. "I can’t focus if I know I’m about to be interrupted." Despite what Natalie thought, recipes didn’t just spring fully formed from her head. Rather, they existed as scraps of notes and inexact measurements that she had to translate into easy to follow directions, and then add spirited commentary about the inspiration for each dish.

As much as she loved it, sometimes the writing process was absolutely mind-numbing.

She was busily wiping down the counters when a knock finally sounded at the door. "Can you get that?" God, she must be PMS’ing or something. It wasn’t like her to be this crabby, even under these circumstances. Lots of her television appearances required a hurry up and wait mentality, and she’d forced herself to overcome her natural tendency to leap from one task into another. Until this precise moment, she thought she’d adapted pretty well.

"I’m very sorry I’m late," a masculine voice rumbled from the entryway. Low, deep, with the barest hint of a southern accent. "I hope you got my message."

A gasp from Natalie. "Oh, no! I must have turned off my phone." Natalie invited him in, the click of her stiletto boots on Reggie’s hardwood floors echoing up to the crown molding.

"You think someone may be stalking you?"

Something about that voice... Familiar but escaping her reach. Like a subtle spice she couldn’t but knew a recipe would be ruined without. . .

"Actually it’s my sister who has a problem. Reg! Adrienne’s brother, Gabe is here."

Gabe. No. It had to be a coincidence. The world couldn’t possibly be that small.

Natalie gestured to the man in her living room. "Reggie, this is Gabe Bankovic, your personal security consultant."

Her first look at him froze the air in her lungs.

No way.

But there he was in her living room, looking every bit as big and darkly delicious as the last time she’d seen him nearly a year and a half ago.

Except then he’d been naked in a tangle of bed sheets, sleeping the exhausted sleep of a man who had spent the last several hours showing her all the ways he knew to bring a woman to a soul screaming orgasm.

###

"Gina?" Her name flew out of Gabe’s mouth before he had a chance to think about it.

The woman who had introduced herself as the client’s sister shot him puzzled look. "This is Reggie, my sister, the victim, I guess you could say."

Gabe closed his eyes and prayed. But she was still there when he opened them. Yep, that was Gina – or Reggie as she called herself now - with the glossy shoulder length brown hair, big Bambi brown eyes to match and a wide red mouth that brought heat to his crotch just looking at it.

What were the fucking odds that she would be his only client?

Somewhere, someone was having a huge belly laugh at his expense.

He deliberately schooled his features into a neutral expression and offered her his hand to shake.

"It’s nice to see you again," he said quietly. A single touch of her small, capable hand sent a jolt straight to his groin and his head flooded with images of those slender, pale fingers tracing down his chest, digging short nails into his ass as he sank into her deep and hard. He forced himself to let go almost immediately, afraid if he held on for one more second he’d have her pinned to the couch and damn his professional reputation.

Natalie looked between them in puzzlement. "You two know each other?"

"Your sister and I met some time ago while we were both on vacation." There, that sounded nice and neutral.

Obviously not neutral enough. Natalie looked at her sister in open mouthed astonishment. "Is this the guy who-"

Reggie cut her off with a look that would curdle milk.

Natalie pressed her lips together and slyly ran her eyes down every inch of his six foot three frame. "Small world."

Gabe wanted to howl like an angry baby. Under any other circumstances, he would have been overjoyed to see her again. First, he’d let her know how angry he was that she left without a word after showing him the most fun he’d ever had naked. Then he’d give her an itemized list off all the things she could do to apologize for sneaking out while he slept.

Steeling his resolve, he knew he had no choice but to put personal desires aside. No matter how badly he wanted to get his hands on that luscious ass beautifully displayed in tight black pants, there was no way in hell he was getting involved with another client.

"Why don’t you start by walking me through what’s happened so far?"

She licked her lips, the small gesture making it almost impossible for him to not lean over and suck her soft pink tongue into his mouth.

What was it about her that was so damned alluring? She wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Sure, she was attractive, in a wholesome, girl next door kind of way.

Except for her mouth. Nothing wholesome about those full, succulent lips and how they’d felt sliding along his rock hard dick.

But that wasn’t enough to explain why merely looking at her had him hard as a spike and seriously contemplating abandoning all his self imposed rules against dating clients.

He glanced around her apartment, trying to focus on something, anything that might distract him from the memory of Reggie’s lips and tongue tracing a moist path up his inner thigh.

Thankfully she distracted him with a rundown of the correspondence she’d received thus far while he attempted to view her with the same emotional detachment he would have for a sixty year old software CEO.

If he was going to get through this job with his sanity and professional credibility in tact, he had to keep his distance.

God knew he’d learned that the hard way.

Natalie held out the Xerox Reggie had received earlier that week.

It never ceased to amaze him, the workings of the male mind. Himself, he appreciated his own balls, but he’d never once considered that a woman might be impressed with a close up shot.

Reggie’s voice broke the silence. "Takes a lot of balls to send something like that."

Natalie groaned at the horrible pun while Reggie laughed at her own joke. Damn, she had a great smile. It was the first thing he had noticed about her in that restaurant in Maui. It was so wide it completely took over the bottom half of her face, suffusing it in unabashed delight. And when she turned it in his direction, he felt it like a goddamn force of nature.

Suddenly her living room with its big bay windows and overstuffed furniture was way too small. He had to get away from her, even for a few seconds. "Mind if I look around a little? I need to see what’s involved for the alarm system we install."

Thankfully the phone rang, so she didn’t follow. He walked down the hall and did a quick tour of the office, making a mental note to ask Reggie to show him the suspicious email.

The apartment suited her, or what little he knew of her, anyway. Decorated in warm tones with splashes of bright color, it was warm, comfortable, and inviting. Just like the woman he’d met in that bar in Maui.

Business, Gabe. You’re supposed to be looking for points of vulnerability.  He noted that the office windows were large enough to allow a man to crawl through.

The bathroom was typical of an old San Francisco Victorian, with the shower, bath, and sink separate from a closet size room that housed the toilet. The bathroom windows were small and high enough off the ground to pose a significant challenge to an intruder, but he’d make sure they were wired nonetheless.

He made a right and entered what could only be her bedroom. Like the rest of the apartment, it was comfortable, cozy, decorated in deep reds, midnight blues and rich browns. Not a hint of pastel or a square of lace in sight.

It was the kind of room only a woman could put together – no guy had that many throw pillows – but wasn’t so feminine as to send him running for the closest sports bar. The king size sleigh bed with its dark red down comforter and oversize pillows elicited all kinds of images of him and Reggie, naked in a sweaty tangle making damn good use of every inch of mattress space.

Shaking his head before he got too carried away, he moved to the window. He ran his fingers along the sides, tested the all but useless latch. She was on the second story, but anyone could sneak a ladder around through the alley and climb right up here. That was, if this stalker of hers was as determined as her sister seemed to think.

This was exactly the type of job he hated. Grunt work. Half the time these celebrities so overestimated their own importance to their fans that they overreacted to what amounted to nothing more than inappropriate fan mail. Disconcerting as it was to receive, more often than not there was no threat behind it.

His gut told him Reggie wasn’t a woman with an over inflated ego, but his gut had been so wrong recently, he’d all but stopped giving it credit.

Just because he knew exactly what the silky skin of Reggie’s inner thighs tasted like, just because the look on her face as she came had saturated his dreams for the last year and a half, didn’t mean he knew a damn thing about her character.

He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, wishing he had an ice pack to shove down the front of his pants.

Once again, he cursed the ridiculous coincidence that had landed him here in San Francisco, less than twenty feet from the woman who’d made him come so hard he’d nearly had a stroke.

What he really wanted – needed, actually – was a full scale corporate security consulting job, or even work that involved protecting high level executives. That was where the real money was, and it would only take a few referrals to bring him a steady stream of business.

Unfortunately, since a romantic entanglement with his last high-profile celebrity client had nearly annihilated his career as a security specialist, business had barely built to a trickle. As his assistant-cum-adopted mother Marjorie reminded him almost hourly, he was in no position to turn down any work, even if it meant walking little old ladies across the street for a dollar each.

He stared at himself in the mirror, finger-combing his hair and straightening his tie. So what if his new client was the sweetly sexy woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his head for over a year? He had bills to pay and a professional reputation to rebuild. No matter how badly he wanted to get back into Reggie Caldwell’s pants, he had no choice but to get this job done as quickly, thoroughly, and professionally as possible.