The knock on the door of Lacey’s bedroom fairly jolted her out of her skin, but Dante barely registered the interruption. He’d learned what he wanted to know. He sat back and grinned as Anna poked her head in the room. “Um—I thought I heard voices. I wanted to make sure Lacey didn’t need anything.”
Lacey just blinked at Anna, but Dante stood, shifting out of the way to hide his semi as Anna hustled past. “Should she sleep?” Anna asked him, before turning to Lacey. “Are you hungry, honey? Are you okay?”
“Doc said she’d probably need to eat, and she’s already slept for a few hours, but—”
“I’m fine,” Lacey said stiffly. “You don’t need to worry about me, seriously.”
“Whatever. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck,” Anna snapped. Lacey winced and Dante did his best to look serious. “I have rolls downstairs. You want to come down? Everyone wants to see how you’re—there you go, sweetie, easy does it—”
Dante watched with amusement as Anna commandeered Lacey like a general and ushered her downstairs, giving him the time he needed to get his own reactions under control. Rage flicked to life again within him when he thought of what Lacey had endured. When he tracked down whoever spiked his champagne, there would be hell to pay.
“I’m fine,” Lacey was protesting, but they were already to the foyer of the Victorian brownstone when Erin, the pixie-ish young woman he knew as Lacey’s landlady, burst in through the back hallway, her paint-spattered Red Sox ball cap shoved on her head, her hair looped in a ponytail through its back. “Please—both of you, come back to the kitchen. Anna has—” She paused as she took in Lacey. “Are you okay?” When Lacey didn’t respond quickly enough she tried again, turning her attention to Dante. “Is she okay?”
Dante smiled, and Erin drew up short, blinking at him. He was used to having this effect on women, but then she tilted her head and frowned. “You need soul rest,” she said, and then turned around just as quickly, rushing toward the back of the brownstone in a blur of worn denim overalls and a T-shirt that looked slept in.
“Sorry,” Anna said cheerfully. “Erin is wonderful, but she’s an artist. You get used to it.”
“Hi there, handsome.” Another woman had come around the corner from the brownstone’s living room and was now leaning against the doorframe, cradling an oversized cup of coffee in her hands. Dante took in yoga pants and a Clash T-shirt so old it was almost see-through, and so large it hung off her slender frame. But unlike Erin, this roommate wasn’t tiny. Dante couldn’t place her ethnicity—Hispanic, maybe? Italian?—but the woman was long and lean and almost feral looking, and she watched Dante with a detached interest as if she’d seen his type before. He smiled at her and she smiled back—not warm, but friendly enough. Two outsiders recognizing a kindred spirit.
Dante made a note to make sure he still had his money clip when he left.
Lacey was already making mumbling noises for him to leave, but Erin drew them ahead to the kitchen, where he already knew from his first encounter with the blonde dervish Anna that coffee and hot buttered heaven awaited. The light spilled out from the kitchen into the hallway, and Dante stopped, momentarily arrested at the vision before him. Lacey’s pajamas did a piss-poor job covering her with the backlight, and her body was silhouetted like she was some sort of vision out of a porn movie. Dante felt all the blood in his body rush to his groin, and when they turned around to talk to him, he waved them both into the kitchen, grateful that the hellcat behind him in the living room couldn’t see his reaction.
“C’mon, you need to eat something, Lacey.” The voice from the kitchen was the blonde—Anna, the best friend—and Dante’s brain came back online as Lacey finally consented to be dragged into the kitchen and out of his line of sight. By the time he rounded the corner, Anna was back at the countertop, doling out whatever she’d just baked. “I’ve got to get ready for work.”
Dante frowned at the wall clock, and cocked an eye at her. “At four A.M.?”
“Workaholic,” muttered Lacey. She’d picked up a roll, at least, and Dante smiled at that. So many women he knew didn’t eat. But when Lacey took a bite and groaned in sheer, unadulterated pleasure, the sound hit him straight in the gut. Again. What was wrong with him? Pull it together, he admonished himself, and took a long, unsteady breath.
“Yo! Your lackey up here wants access!” The woman from the foyer had a voice that could stop traffic, and Dante turned as Erin looked up.
“That’s probably my driver—,” he said, but before he could move Erin was already out of the kitchen and bustling down the hall officiously as if she wasn’t the size of a lawn ornament.
“You’ve been out there all this time? Come in! Dani, quit accosting the poor man!” Erin’s soft voice climbed several octaves as she apparently attempted to intercede between Dante’s unfortunate employee and the brownstone’s self-appointed guard. Dante looked over to Lacey and grinned as she looked suddenly away, clearly caught watching him. He knew he made her nervous, but there was also something so direct about her interest in him. There were clearly two sides to Lacey Dawes, and he was looking forward to unsettling both of them.
“I should probably go,” he drawled, and the approaching Anna abruptly changed direction midstride and slid her cinnamon roll platter onto the counter, not the table.
“No problem at all, Mr. Falcone—”
“Call me Dante.”
“Dante,” Anna said smoothly. “I’m so glad you got Lacey back to us safe and sound.” In no time flat she had popped out a clear plastic container and had lined it with a paper towel. She was settling two rolls in its base by the time Dante raised a hand to protest. “For your driver,” she said. “Assuming Dani hasn’t knocked his teeth out. She’s a little …”
“Unrestrained,” Lacey said from the table. “Thanks, Anna.” She’d regained her color, and she lifted her chin slightly as Dante watched her. “And thank you, Dante, for, um—for bringing me home.”
At her quiet words his heart tugged a little. It was definitely time to go, but he was already wondering when he would see Lacey again. That hadn’t happened in—longer than he could remember. There was just something about her knowing eyes and wistful smile, hinting at secrets she kept locked up in her head. There would be time, he told himself, to learn everything there was to know about Lacey Dawes. “Well, you’re the one who is due thanks,” he said now, quirking a smile. “I appreciate you keeping my naked ass off of YouTube.”
Lacey startled him with a quick grin of her own, those mysterious eyes now sparkling with mischief. “At least for another few nights anyway,” she said. “Then anyone with a laptop will have access to you twenty-four seven, remember?”
“We’ll see about that.” He nodded and headed out the door.
Lacey slumped back against the counter. Dante Falcone, the number one fantasy of her entire tween and teenage life—hell, her entire life up to this very second—had just walked out of her kitchen. But she’d hardly had time to process that amazing reality when Anna whirled on her, slapping both hands over her mouth.
“OhmygodohmygodohmyGOD!” Anna practically squealed through her fingers, as soon as the front door slammed shut. “That was Dante Falcone! The Dante Falcone! In our kitchen—eating cinnamon rolls! Lacey!”
She launched into a verbal assault, but try as she might, Lacey couldn’t quite lose her loopy grin long enough to get a word in edgewise. It could have been the drugs still wearing off. Or it could have been the Dante still wearing off. Either way she felt like something fundamental had shifted in her life, and she would never be the same girl again.
Anna was carrying on her monologue, as Anna did.
“That was Dante Falcone!” she concluded at last, her voice now pitched just under that of a squirrel’s. “How in God’s name did you get—and what did he mean about his bare ass on YouTube!” Her eyes rounded. “As in seriously his bare ass? As in something we can see on the Internet? Really!?”
“Really,” Lacey said. She’d just polished off a cinnamon roll as Erin and Dani came careening back into the kitchen, Erin to the fore but even Dani looking uncharacteristically intrigued.
“That was an extremely hot British chauffeur driving your rock star’s limo,” she announced, heading for the cinnamon rolls. “I didn’t even know they made men like that anymore.”
“So, tell us everything already, Lacey!” Erin prodded. She’d hopped up on the kitchen counter in a move that always looked like she’d been performing it since she was four, which she probably had. Now it had the additional benefit of giving her a slight height advantage, so she could stare at Lacey intently. “That is the guy you’re going to manage for the next few weeks?”
“He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who manages easily,” Dani put in, and Lacey groaned, her mental faculties coming back into focus with each passing second.
“Tell me about it. He’s already thrown the whole agency in a tailspin by demanding that I be his manager for this tour, and we all know why that is.”
“Because he thinks you’re hot?” Erin asked.
“Because he thinks I’m easy. And not in that way.” Lacey glared at Dani, who had leaned over to inspect the cinnamon rolls even while scoffing her doubt. “He is pretty convinced that I’ll do whatever he asks, whether or not it’s good for the tour or good for the agency. And that’s just not going to happen, regardless of what just went down tonight. I’ve got this amazing chance to prove to everyone that not only can I handle a spoiled rock star, but I can make him do what he needs to do to fulfill the terms of his contract.” And get me a promotion, Lacey added silently. If she didn’t get out from under Brenda’s thumb, she wouldn’t last long at IMO, regardless.
“Why can’t I find a rock star to hang out with me for a weekend?” Anna moaned. “I can’t even find an ordinary guy to go out on a date with me.”
Lacey shot Anna a rueful glance. It was already June, and Anna was locked into being a bridesmaid at the mother of all society weddings at month’s end. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Anna had been working the story of an imaginary boyfriend for so long, even Lacey forgot that the sexy lover who was Anna’s constant excuse for missing weekend trips, evening parties, or pretty much anything more than a text exchange with her work and college pals wasn’t a real, live, flesh-and-blood man. But now Anna was going to have to produce said man to keep her tenaciously matchmaking friends from hooking her up with some loser at the upcoming wedding, and that … was going to be a trick. Since, you know, the guy didn’t exist.
“Dude, you haven’t even really looked for a date,” Dani pointed out now, drawing a scowl from Anna. “I keep offering to set you up at the bar, but you’re always working. Like night and day and night again. Makes it kind of hard to get busy.”
“Busy is not what I need,” Anna grumbled. “I just need a date, not anything more.” Then she perked up, flashing Lacey a grin. “Besides, Lacey is going to be ‘busy’ enough for all of us. Because she’s going on tour. With a rock star. Who looks like he’d just as soon rip her clothes off as talk to her.”
“Oh, please,” Lacey said, feeling the blood rush into her cheeks again, her heart doing a happy little stutter step. “Dante is not interested in having sex with me.”
For the barest moment, all of the air seemed to get sucked out of the brownstone’s kitchen. Then it whooshed back with three women dissolving into abject gales of laughter.
“You’ve got to be kidding—”
“Did you see the way he looked—”
“Girl, you’re not going to get out of the parking lot, let alone the city—”
“Enough!” Lacey held up a hand to stay the onslaught. “This isn’t about me hooking up, okay? This is my job we’re talking about here. If it got out that I slept with a client—that I so much as have a crush on my client—my reputation would be absolutely shredded. For every moment of this fourteen-day tour, I’ve got to play blue-ribbon babysitter to a guy who could make or break my career. I can’t afford to screw up.” Lacey shook her head. “And I can’t afford to screw him.”
Dani leaned back against the kitchen table, lifting up the last steaming pastry from Anna’s early-morning bakeathon. “Then it looks like either way you’re screwed, sweetheart.”