On the Loose. Shannon Hollis
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put her on his scale of priorities somewhere between the office and his daily workout at the gym.
She needed to get out of this gracefully, with her pride still intact. Behind Josh’s back, Lauren raked the sea of people with a hasty glance. Where were her sisters when she needed them?
GETTING THE LOVELY LAUREN to stay in one place long enough to talk to her was proving to be as difficult as pinning down George Lucas for an interview.
Josh had succeeded with Lucas, mind you, and the resulting story had been in the issue the magazine’s readers had voted “Best of 2004.” But so far tonight, all he’d managed with Lauren was to launch her at Kit Maddox—thereby losing a dance—and to win a theater ticket, after which she’d promptly vanished.
So she’s not interested. Write it off.
That was the problem. He could swear she was interested. Part of it was the way she said outrageous things and then let her hazel eyes lock on his mouth while she waited for him to respond. Part of it was the way she’d looked at him after she’d come back from her dance with Kit Maddox—she’d lit up like a kid at Christmas when she’d seen him waiting for her at the edge of the dance floor. It was pretty hard to resist a woman who looked at you like that.
Not that Josh had any intention of resisting. Until now he’d poured his concentration into work, into making enough money so that he’d finally feel safe. He had a knack for analyzing popular trends and seeing what consumers were going to need a few years down the line. That, combined with a business confidence that appealed to fellow venture capitalists, had made him a success in the oak-sheltered enclaves along Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley.
However, it didn’t do a damn thing for his social life. Which brought him back to this club and Maureen Baxter’s charity bash. She was a friend of one of the other investors in Left Coast magazine, who had talked him into coming after the last quarterly forecast meeting. It hadn’t taken much to convince him. It was time to put some serious investment into the opposite sex.
Both women and entertainment hadn’t been on his agenda much in recent years. He was—he admitted it—rusty. He was going to change all that.
Okay. But there are a lot of beautiful women here in short black skirts with fabulous legs. Pick one of them.
Nope, he thought, obstinate even with the voice of reason in his head. I have the key to Lauren’s lock. That’s supposed to mean something.
The adventurer in him enjoyed a challenge. The logician figured the odds were pretty good she was as attracted to him as he was to her. And the male underneath it all wanted to know how those legs might feel wrapped around his waist, what that generous mouth would taste like under his, wanted to test the weight of those small breasts under her fragile silk top.
If things progressed that far. He was going to do everything in his power to see that they did.
Fifteen minutes later he found her sitting alone at a table near the dance floor, speaking rapidly into a minirecorder. The music had slowed down, and colored spotlights circled the floor, illuminating her skin and then leaving her in the muted glow of the table lamp.
He folded himself into the spindly gilded chair next to her and waited for her to finish dictating her thought. “No rest for the published,” he said, indicating the recorder.
She didn’t apologize for losing him earlier. Nor did she look unhappy to see him. Either she had social Attention Deficit Disorder or she was focused in a major way on her story. He liked focus in a woman. But selfishly, he wanted that concentration turned on him for a little while.
“I still have what you need,” he went on. “We haven’t gotten around to that interview yet. Who do you write for?”
She put away the little unit in an evening bag that, from what he could see, didn’t have room for much more than the recorder, a credit card and a lipstick. As she concentrated on the mundane task, her hair tumbled forward and hid most of her face. “I’m a freelancer. Anyone who will pay me, basically.”
“I know how that goes,” he said with sympathy. In his view, it wasn’t important that he owned a thirty-three percent interest in the magazine. What mattered was the writing. He’d been submitting stories on spec since he’d been in high school, and his progress toward acceptances by Left Coast put him, in his opinion, at the top of his game. “Some months I could barely come up with the rent, much less pay the bills.”
She shook her hair back. “Are you a journalist, too? I thought you might have been in the movie business.”
He made a face. “Not me. The closest I get to movies is interviewing the odd producer or actor, which is why I knew Kit Maddox. No, I write for Left Coast.”
Something flashed in her eyes before her lashes came down and veiled them. “Lucky you. I’m not sure Left Coast is in the market for a piece on key parties.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” he said easily. “Depends on the slant.”
“Oh, come on. They only buy the kind of stuff that wins prizes. And I hardly think the Pulitzer panel would consider something like this.”
From her tone, he couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing or a bad one. “Well, I don’t write my stuff with the Pulitzer committee’s opinions in mind. Talk about a way to shut down your creativity.”
To his relief, she smiled and the light came back into her face. For a moment suspended in time, he gazed at her. Her skin was smooth and tinted with color, her eyes the color of tea in the warm light from the lamp. Hair like spun taffy cascaded around her shoulders in an uncontrolled way that gave him an involuntary picture of how it would look tumbled on a pillow.
His pillow.
Tonight.
The band launched into the sensual, minor chords of an old blues song. At the same moment Lauren raised her gaze from where it had settled on his lips and met his eyes. He’d wanted that look turned on him. Oh, yes. Josh felt a shower of heat.
“Why did you run away from me?” he heard himself say.
The music wrapped around them, insinuating itself into his heartbeat, pulling them together. “Because you’re a menace,” she said softly.
A menace? Had he misheard her? He leaned in, close enough to hear. Close enough to smell her perfume. “How can that be?”
“The way chocolate is. The way it’s so bad…and tastes so good.” Her voice was low, her gaze locked on his mouth in a way that excited him past bearing.
“Would you like to dance?” His words came out involuntarily, a knee-jerk reaction to physical stimulus instead of the result of actual thought.
In response, she rose and held out her hand. He took it and led her onto the dance floor, feeling her fingers, cool and slender, in his. A pianist’s hands. Or a journalist’s, made for keyboarding. Touch typing.
Touching.
Would you relax? It’s just a dance. Keep this up and she’ll have you arrested.
She was too tall to fit under his chin, but she fit pretty nicely everywhere else. Her cheek brushed his as she settled into the rhythm of the music, their feet sliding into a lazy rhumba step.
“You’ve had some experience at this,” he murmured into her hair, trying to make small talk while he got his equilibrium back.
“You like the way I move, do you?”
So much for small talk. In the space of eight words she turned the dance inside out so that all he sensed was the feel of her, the scent of her hair that combined something herbal with lemon, and the way her thighs brushed his with every step. He was pretty much in sensory overload, with no cycles left to initiate speech, so he settled for a noise in his throat that meant he agreed.
Yes, sir. His whole body agreed.
“I never thought of dancing as a social activity,”