Page 1 of Tempting as Sin
Rafe Blackstone wasn’t a prima donna, dammit. He could handle real life just fine.
You tell yourself that, mate.The windshield wipers of the midsize SUV were working their hardest, but they couldn’t keep up with the sheets of wind-driven rain battering the car, which meant that he couldn’t see a thing. He followed their motion with his eyes anyway and turned the radio up another notch, because it was preferable to the alternative: wondering whether his emergency flashers were doing the business and contemplating a possibly fiery death on the shoulder of a San Francisco freeway.
If these were his final minutes, he should be thinking something of a more elevated nature. Reflections on whether he’d made the best use of his time on Earth—the answer was probably “no”—or loving concern for his brother, who would go ahead and propose to the wrong woman in barely three weeks unless Rafe made it to Sausalito right now to persuade him that he was being a bloody fool. Instead, he sat in drenched jeans in a crippled SUV, his body rocked by the windblast from each much-too-close bus and tractor-trailer, listened to a bloke who’d clearly been smoking too much telling him that he shouldn’t worry, he should be happy, and wondered how long the car rental firm’s roadside assistance could possibly take. It had already been forty-five minutes.
Bugger that.Time to summon a little more Aussie bloke and a little less pampered actor. He stabbed at the radio’s preset button, got a blast of eighties pop, and reached over for his laptop bag. Which was why he jumped at the flash of orange light and the knock at the window. Not because he was freaked out.
He took a moment, called on thirteen years of being cool for a living, andthenrolled the window down.
A fluorescent yellow rain jacket and trousers ringed with reflective stripes, a red ball cap withBayside Automotivespelled out in white, and a stolid face fringed by brown beard. The bloke had to yell some to be heard over the rain and the roar of passing traffic. “Hey, brother,” he said. “Looks like you’ve got a problem.”
You think?Rafe thought. “Yeah,” he said. The tow truck was behind him, its lights flashing reassuringly, warding off his violent death until another day. “You could say that. I heard a clunk. Had just enough power to get to the shoulder, and then she died.”
“Uh-huh,” Ball Cap said. “See, you got your driveshaft lying under the truck. U-joint’s broke, probably. Can’t go anywhere like that.”
Rafe hauled on his patience hard. “Thanks. I saw that when I got out.”
“Rental company’s on its way with a new car,” his new mate said. “They told me to hustle, even. You’re lucky. It can take a lot longer than this. March came in like a lion for sure, huh? Come sit in the truck while I get ’er hooked up. Safer.” He peered at Rafe more closely. “Wait. Oh,hell,no. You’re kidding me. You’re what’s his name. The Beast, from those Urban Decay movies. Aren’t you? You have to be. You got those freaky wolf eyes and all.”
Rafe considered denying it, but it wasn’t going to work, not while he was still sporting the Beast’s trademark shaggy dark hair and scruff of black beard, because he’d come riding to his big brother’s rescue in the middle of filming. Denial would be a dick move anyway, after the bloke had come out in the rain.
He should’ve gone with the driver and limo. Sometimes, trying not to be an entitled bastard didn’t work out so well.
Material,he told himself, as he always did when things got dicey.Also: life.Aloud, he said, “Guilty,” grabbed his bags from the back seat, and stepped out into the deluge, where he was instantly drenched in a spray of water and blasted with the horn of another tractor-trailer. And didnotjump.
His rescuer led the way to the safer side of the freeway’s shoulder and opened the passenger door of the tow truck, its roof lights turning the sheets of rain a ghastly orange. “My kid loves all that stuff,” he informed Rafe. “We should do a selfie. He’d go crazy. And hey. Get this.” His genial face shifted into a snarl. ‘I don’t have a problem.Youhave a problem.’ Then he laughed again and said, “Except right now, you actually do. I won’t tell my kid, though. I’ll tell him you were cool.”
Lily Hollander’s twin told her, “Seriously, you should stick around. We can watch a movie or something. Do some rainy-day relaxing. Except that I don’t want a manicure, so don’t ask.”
“Don’t worry,” Lily said. “I’m not going to force you into hideous beauty rituals, partly because I have another plan. This is my big chance to do some stealth comparison shopping.” She’d snatched a few midweek days away from her lingerie shop in Sinful, Montana, fleeing a storm that would close the late-season ski lifts, to visit Paige and her new partner in Sausalito. Of course, she’d only traded snow for rain, and it was still a relatively busy time of year for Sinful Desires, but…sometimes, you needed your twin, that was all. Some nights, the dark closed around you too hard.
There was only one problem. Despite having seen Paige and Jace at Christmas, she hadn’t fully grasped the extent of the change that a mere nine months had wrought in her sister’s life. It had been a while since Paige had been blissfully involved with anybody. Or Lily could admit the truth, that even though they’d both been married before, neither of them had ever had anybody look at her the way Jace was looking at Paige right now. Which was, of course, wonderful. As was the fact that Paige’s tiny, bare, no-view Outer Sunset apartment didn’t seem to be seeing much of her anymore, because she was all but moved into Jace’s luxurious houseboat. Although Jace, being Jace, was wisely not making a big deal of that.
That wasn’t the reason Lily was going shopping today, though. The real issue was that Paige had come off a four-day, forty-six-hour police workweek looking too fragile, and Lily would have bet her next La Perla shipment that all her twin wanted to do this afternoon was to have Jace take her back to bed, hold her close, and do some slow, sweet dancing to the rhythm of the rain.
Normally, it would be creepy to see that far into somebody else’s mind. But normally, that somebody wasn’t your identical twin, and you hadn’t been seeing her mind almost as clearly as your own for more than thirty years.
Lily was happy for her sister. How could she be jealous of the person she loved best in the world? Right now, that love meant getting out of Paige’s way. “We’ll spend time together tomorrow,” she told Paige, “like we planned, which will be perfect. Although, if you want to come lingerie shopping with me…”
Paige made a face, as Lily had known she would, and Lily laughed. Paige said, “While you examine the stitching on the hems and make me try everything on? Yeah, not so much.”
“Having you try things on works for me, baby,” Jace said. “As long as you bring them home.”
“Except that I wouldn’t,” Paige said. “That’s why she wants me, because she can see how the thing looks better than she could if she tried it on herself. I’m a mannequin, that’s all. And even if it was the sexiest, most gorgeous whatever-it-is you’d ever seen, all she’d do was take notes so she could get it for the shop, then send it to me two months later, once she’d bought it wholesale. Get her on the subject of retail markups sometime. You wonder why I don’t shop? Well, obviously because I hate to, but besides that.”
“Never mind,” Lily said. “You don’t have to go. That means I don’t have to listen to you whine, and also that I can have a lovely afternoon and the kind of sophisticated evening that’s hard to come by in Montana. I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll bring something back for you, something extra-special enough to pay retail for. Call it my hostess gift. Any requests?” She didn’t ask Paige, since Paige’s answer was bound to be completely unsatisfactory. She asked Jace. She’d bet he could come up with an idea.
Paige stood up, and Tobias, Jace’s enormous Ridgeback, raised his handsome head from his paws and looked alert. He’d gone for a run in the rain this morning with Paige and Jace, but he was clearly hoping for more. “I’m going to do the dishes,” Paige said, and Tobias sighed and put his head back down again. “Don’t ask Jace that in front of me. You’re supposed to be the tactful one.”
“That wasn’t tactful? I meant favorite color,” Lily lied. “I help men choose what to buy women every day. That’s my job, to help men and women please each other.”
“Ugh,” Paige said. “You sound like a sex therapist.”
“Well,” Lily said, “in a way, I suppose I am. Beautiful lingerie makes a woman feel like she deserves pleasure, and buying it for her lets a man tell her that he feels the same way.”
“No,” Paige said. “Just no. Dishes.” Jace, though, was smiling.
“All right,” Lily said when they heard the water running. “Tell me.”
