Page 24 of Sweet Temptation

Squeezing the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white, he took the next corner a little faster than necessary. The building that housed Meg’s commercial kitchen rose up in the distance, and he sucked a big rejuvenating breath to pull himself together.

Get your shit together, dude.

With anger irrationally morphing into excitement—Jesus, he couldn’t wait to see her again—he parked his rental car on the curb of the downtown street and slammed it into Park.

The warmth from the late-day sun fell over him. He smoothed a damp hand down his custom-made dress shirt, knowing that Meg would appreciate the effort—she had an eye for quality clothing, one he appreciated, because he had it, too. Also...well, he wanted to impress her. Her and her family.

He’d known them all for the last couple of months—Meg, her sisters, Beth, Jo, and Amy. Beth’s fiancé, Ford. Jo’s partner, Theo, who was also his friend. And running herd on them all, their matriarch, Mamesie.

He shouldn’t have been so nervous. Shouldn’t have felt like he was about to pick up his high school sweetheart for prom.

Prom. Ha. At that age, he’d skipped more classes than he’d attended. Even if he’d been more involved in student life, his sporadic attendance had been at an inner-city school that could barely afford books for its students. Even if he’d wanted to attend, there was no prom.

Back then, his attention was fully consumed with survival. With scavenging enough cash to eat, with surfing from couch to couch to find a place to sleep. With staying under the radar of social services during his mom’s binges, since landing in a good foster home was, to his knowledge, a one-in-a-million chance.

He’d known too many kids who were sent to homes that hosted five, six kids at a time just to get those government checks. To his way of thinking, he’d still have to fight for food and a place to sleep, but it wouldn’t be on his terms.

A car drove the opposite way down the street he was parked on, and the headlights shining in his eyes in the darkening evening sky pulled him out of his reverie. He shook his head to clear it—he didn’t need to be thinking about that crap right now. It was in the past, a long, long way in the past. He wanted to focus on the present.

Meg was the present.

Sliding out of the car, he glanced around, searching for Theo’s vehicle or Amy’s scooter. He saw Meg’s lumbering catering van, but besides it and his rental, there was only one other car on the street—a Porsche Boxster tinted a fire-engine red that screamed look at me. John snorted when he noticed that the vehicle, which had intentionally been angle parked across two spaces, boasted a license plate that read EARNDIT.

Holy obnoxious. It made him thankful that, even with his love of nice things, he’d never felt the need to pump up his ego or have an identity crisis with a hunk of steel and chrome.

Locking the doors to his perfectly acceptable and not at all obnoxious rental, he wondered if the lack of other cars meant that he was the first to arrive. Adrenaline surged with excitement at the thought that he might get a few minutes alone with his girl.

His girl?

Well, his girl for now.

He walked up to the commercial building and tried the heavy steel door. He had to yank to open it, and when he stepped inside, he was greeted with warm, humid air redolent with garlic, onions and spices. His leather Salvatore Ferragamo dress shoes tapped a rhythm on the dark tiled floor as he followed the low but upbeat bubblegum sound of Britney Spears circa 2000.

He’d wondered what kind of music Meg liked. He rounded the corner, ready to gently tease her about it, but found himself stopping short when he saw that Meg wasn’t alone.

Meg was in profile, hands resting on a giant, stainless steel island as she spoke earnestly to a man with hair that should have been gray but had instead been tinted a fake blue black. Meg looked luscious, as always—she’d dressed to impress in a short froth of scarlet floral that had clearly not been purchased at a mall. Gauzy fabric flirted with the tops of her thighs and the cap sleeves showed the graceful curves of her shoulders. The neckline wasn’t low and might have been modest on anyone else, but Meg had been blessed in the breast department, and her cleavage rose from the bright fabric like scoops of vanilla ice cream, tasty and tantalizing.

John would have heartily approved of all of this, if not for the man facing Meg. The one who was not listening to a word she said, attention focused on the cleft between those breasts. And John was the first to admit that those breasts were fantastic, but the ogling of them was not a professional way to behave in what John was pretty sure was a business meeting.

“Gavin Aronson,” he muttered to himself when he dragged his attention back to the tool with the dyed hair. The man, who was in his late forties, was wearing jeans that had been sandblasted and artfully torn within an inch of their lives, a studded leather belt and a T-shirt so tight it accentuated the small paunch of his stomach.

John knew Gavin, though not well—thankfully. He’d met him at a handful of events over the years, ones that Gavin’s company had staged for start-ups that John had mentored through a launch. Every time they met, Gavin pitched John some wacky new business idea and hinted that he’d like John’s expertise...without, of course, paying for it.

John would have bet his sizable fortune that the insufferable Boxster outside belonged to the man in front of him—the misogynistic pig who was eyeing Meg.

John was a breath away from placing the man’s eyes back in his head, one sharp, pointed poke at a time.

“You look lost, sugar.” A tall, rail-thin blonde slunk into his line of vision, blocking his view of Gavin and Meg.

“Not lost.” He tried to look around the woman without seeming rude. “I’m a friend of Meg’s. Here for dinner.”

“I’m Meg’s assistant, Jada.” The blonde bombshell arched her spine, toying with a lock of perfectly waved gold hair as she looked John up and down. He was pretty sure she meant the look to be flirtatious, but all he could think was that it was stupid to put that much time and effort into hair and makeup when they would be ruined in the humidity of a commercial kitchen.

When he didn’t respond, the girl, who couldn’t have been a day over twenty-four, jutted her chest out a little more. He kept his eyes up, afraid that if he followed her invitation to look down, her nipples would poke his eyes out. And it wasn’t remotely cold in here.

“Is that Gavin Aronson?” It was—he knew it was—but he needed to say something, to do something, anything to distract him from the urge to insinuate himself into Meg’s conversation. He fully believed that a woman had a right to wear whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, without inviting unwanted attention, but Gavin was clearly of the opinion that her cleavage was there for his viewing pleasure. And even if he wasn’t staring like a total lech, John could see from across the room that he was just paying lip service to what Meg was saying.

Why was he there in the first place?

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