Someone was rubbing Lacey’s shoulders in a seductive, delicious rhythm, easing her forward and back, talking to her in low tones. His touch—and it was definitely a he, she realized groggily, sinking into the feel of the dream—was electric. Strong fingers curved over her shoulders, fanned her hair, skimmed her skin. Everything was warm, sensual, and smelled like home.
Wait … home? That couldn’t be right.
Lacey struggled to recapture the beauty, the sheer perfection of the fantasy world she’d built in her mind, but even as she willed herself to dive back under, a soft laugh snagged her, drawing her unwillingly to consciousness. She blinked her eyes open.
And stared straight into the rich chocolate eyes of the man she’d been in love with since he’d headlined the Disney Channel.
Who was now sitting in her room. On her bed.
“What are you doing here?” she gasped, curling herself up into a tight ball of—what? She stared down at her favorite summer pajamas—pink cotton trousers and a Hello Kitty tank top. For real? That’s what she was wearing? “And who changed my clothes?”
“As to who changed your clothes, I think her name was Anna. We all agreed that you’d be more comfortable this way.” Dante’s voice spilled over Lacey like poured buttercream, his eyes shadowed with worry and—something else. Something that made her heart skitter around in her chest like startled bird. “As to what I’m doing here, I refused to leave until I knew for myself you were okay.”
“That I was okay,” Lacey repeated, trying to reconcile the Dante she was seeing in front of her with the one she knew from magazines and the Internet. He was still the boy he once had been, sort of. Only now he looked like a seductive perversion of that former self—all the smooth lines stretched and angled. The once-soft mouth was now full and wicked … and smiling at her like he knew a secret she’d missed somewhere along the line. Lacey pressed her hands to her temples, the soothing coolness of her palms not doing much to ease her confusion. “What happened to me?”
Dante’s smile flattened. “In a word, you were drugged. That little celebratory bottle of champagne? It was spiked with what we think was GHB, one of the more popular party date rape drugs. Not roofies, according to the doc. Otherwise you’d have been out for hours.” He scowled. “Bad enough as it is.”
Lacey felt her brain slowly coming back online, and tried to put her words together in a coherent sentence. “The champagne … was drugged?” she asked. She shook her head. “That makes no sense. You wouldn’t drug me.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Dante said dryly. “But no. Not my bottle. The girls you met at my room brought it in. We’re following up on that separately, but there’s no way to prove they even knew the bottle was tampered with. They told me they’d gotten it from the band’s party room downstairs, but that’s tough to track down. No way to check the cork—it’s gone.”
Lacey stared at him. “This happen to you a lot?”
He shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. And I don’t generally drink the stuff fans bring in. These two said they were from IMO, so my guard was down. Won’t happen again.” He quirked her an unreadable look. “I’m sorry if you think I should have taken you to the hospital, Lacey.”
She frowned, struggling to focus on his words, not his mouth. “The hospital?”
“I just didn’t think either of us needed that kind of publicity. I keep a doctor on staff for such emergencies, and he said the best thing for you to do was to get home and get some rest. Your day planner was in your bag. You had the name Erin Connelly in there.”
“My landlady, yes—”
“Right. She got us here and the blonde met us at the door with cinnamon rolls.”
Lacey smiled. “Anna. She’s my best friend in Boston.”
“Well, she’s a good one.” He searched her gaze, appearing satisfied with what he saw. “Anyway, we got you changed and I finally chased them out with assurances I wouldn’t molest you in your own bed.” He lifted a dark, sardonic brow, and Lacey felt her cheeks burn. She dropped her gaze, but he just reached out and lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Not yet, anyway.”
They stared at each other, suspended for just a moment, and Lacey didn’t know what to do. She still felt a little woozy, out of sorts—but at the same time she wanted to kiss Dante so badly her entire body hummed with desire. Then again, she was a professional. He was her client. And she would never—
“Oh!” She pulled away from him as a flood of memories suddenly assaulted her. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “I took my clothes off in front of you!” Her gaze shot to the open door, and forced her voice to drop down several decibels. “Tell me they’re not standing right outside the door.”
Dante shook his head, but he didn’t lean back. His gaze had turned just a little hungry, and his smile had a determined cast. “How much about tonight do you remember, Lacey?” he asked. His words were almost a purr, and Lacey felt her cheeks flush. Instantly she realized her mistake. This would go much better for her if she played dumb and forgetful, but she could no more stop her blush than she could stop breathing.
“I—we—you were signing contracts,” she said finally, her voice little more than a tortured whisper. Then as another realization struck her, she looked around wildly. “My God, the contracts!” she blurted. “I need to have those delivered—”
“They’ll be couriered over to IMO first thing this morning,” Dante said easily, pushing Lacey back onto her pillows. “We’ll get your car to you, too, as soon as you tell us where you parked it.”
“I took a cab,” she said, distracted by his warmth, his body, his nearness.
Dante grinned. “Even better.”
He leaned toward her then, and it was like his words suddenly vanished between them, and she was left with just the reality of him sitting there, on her bed, in her room, acting like having a conversation with her was the most natural thing in the world. She stared at him, mesmerized, and knew the exact moment when he caught her watching his perfectly sculpted lips—since they then eased into a full, teasing smile. Her gaze darted back up to meet his eyes, and she vaguely realized that he was wearing the same buttery-soft trousers he’d had on when she’d entered his rooms. At least one of them had kept their clothes on the whole time. Only, that made her start thinking about what his chest looked like under that loose and flowing shirt, open at the neck with just a hint of his bronzed and tattooed skin showing through, and pinup calendar after pinup calendar from aged fourteen on rocketed through her brain, images of Dante growing from cutest boy bander ever into this sleek, dangerous, and devastatingly sexual man who was sitting right in front of her and—
“Lacey,” Dante said, and from the tone of his voice she suspected he maybe just might have possibly perhaps have said her name more than once.
“Of course. Yes,” Lacey said sternly, once again all professional. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking.” She looked toward the open door then squeaked as Dante dropped his mouth to the exposed column of her neck.
“You never made good on your last dare,” Dante murmured, nuzzling the sensitive skin with his lips as he spoke the words against Lacey’s throat. Beneath him, she held herself perfectly still, unable to move, unable to breathe, her entire world focused on the touch of his lips against her as tiny little whorls of sensation exploded with every word. “You told me you’d—well, you know what you told me you’d do if I signed your last contract.”
What she would do? Dante’s lips were now trailing over Lacey’s collarbone, dangerously close to her breasts, which were doing their level best to burst free from Hello Kitty’s embrace. This was good, because it meant Dante couldn’t see her eyes widening in abject horror, confusion, and mortification even as her body was quickly turning into Sterno fluid. “I—um—,” she began ineffectively, and his soft chuckle against her shoulder just about killed her.
“It’s okay,” he said, lifting his gaze back up to meet Lacey’s. His mouth was right there again, right there at her lips, and she managed to hold his gaze with Herculean effort, hoping desperately he couldn’t hear her heart hammering. “I’ll settle for a kiss.”
“A kiss,” Lacey managed, and he was so close to her lips that when she spoke it was almost as if they were kissing already, their lips brushing with a zing of electricity and the promise of a million volts of desire, if only she would go for it, take it, press her mouth to his and demand from him what he already seemed so willing to give.
Watching her with half-lidded eyes that would have seemed lazy except for the intensity of his stare, Dante seemed to vibrate with the barely checked hold he had on his instincts to move, to act, to take. He was clearly waiting for her to do something, and Lacey felt every nerve ending stand up and cheer in her body, even as her brain struggled to process clear rational logic and she thought—insanely, ridiculously—that they really should have taught college students something about how to handle this exact situation when your client offers you the chance merely to kiss him rather than strip bare-ass naked in front of him and have sex.
Wait. Had she offered to have—
The rest of the night came back to Lacey in a rush.
“I propositioned you!” she squeaked, even as she heard the unmistakable sound of distant motorcycles revving, shattering the early-morning silence. Other than the local unofficial bike-repair shop at the end of the street, hers was a tree-lined boulevard of pretty little brownstones, old money, and quiet lives. And she’d gone and brought a rock star home.
A rock star who was still in her bed.
“You did proposition me,” that rock star said now, his voice challenging her with sensual promise, and she found herself staring at his lips again. They were really … amazing lips. “You gonna tell me now that it was just the drugs talking?”
“What? No! I never planned to do that!” Lacey looked up at Dante, horrified, then realized what she was saying. Was she seriously denying her attraction to the man she’d lusted for her entire teen and adult life? “I mean, of course you’re attractive. Don’t be silly. But—I should never have … said what I did. You’re my client! I never intended … I mean—”
“Shhh,” Dante said, but she didn’t miss his intense smile, or the heat in his gaze. “I’ll try to put it out of my mind. But I’m not sure I can let go of the idea of holding you naked in my arms, tasting your skin, exploring every inch of your body until I know it better than my own.” He reached out and tilted up Lacey’s chin again. But instead of brushing against her lips, he drifted a soft kiss over her forehead, then lowered his mouth to the sensitive curve of her ear, hovering there as she quivered in a reaction she couldn’t control. “So be careful what you promise, Lacey. Because the thing you should know about me is, I always collect.”