Business or Pleasure? Read online

  “You Know What Your Problem Is, Alec?” Daisy Demanded. “You Don’t Trust Anybody.”

  “Of course I trust people,” Alec answered quickly.

  “Liar. And your suspicious nature ruined my plan for tonight.”

  “You had a plan?”

  “Yes, I did, and no thanks to you….” She tipped her head to one side, considering Alec with an expression that made him uneasy.

  As he waited for her to come clean with her big plan he tried not to notice the way she tugged at her lower lip with her teeth.

  “Ah, what the hell,” Daisy said, taking a step closer. “I’m going to Plan B.”

  And with that, she went up on her toes, placed her fingertips on his shoulders and gently touched her warm lips to his.

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to another passionate month at Silhouette Desire where the menu is set with another fabulous title in our DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS series. Linda Conrad provides The Laws of Passion when Danforth heir Marc must clear his name or face the consequences. And here’s a little something to whet your appetite—the second installment of Annette Broadrick’s THE CRENSHAWS OF TEXAS. What’s a man to do when he’s Caught in the Crossfire—actually, when he’s caught in bed with a senator’s daughter? You’ll have to wait and see….

  Our mouthwatering MANTALK promotion continues with Maureen Child’s Lost in Sensation. This story, entirely from the hero’s point of view, will give you insight into a delectable male—what fun! Kristi Gold dishes up a tasty tidbit with Daring the Dynamic Sheikh, the concluding title in her series THE ROYAL WAGER. Rochelle Alers’s series THE BLACKSTONES OF VIRGINIA is back with Very Private Duty and a hunk you can dig right into. And be sure to save room for the delightful treat that is Julie Hogan’s Business or Pleasure?

  Here’s hoping that this month’s Silhouette Desire selections will fulfill your craving for the best in sensual romance…and leave you hungry for more!

  Happy devouring!

  Melissa Jeglinski

  Senior Editor

  Silhouette Desire

  BUSINESS OR PLEASURE?

  JULIE HOGAN

  Books by Julie Hogan

  Silhouette Desire

  Tangled Sheets, Tangled Lies #1500

  Business or Pleasure? #1614

  JULIE HOGAN

  discovered romance novels at the age of ten and spent her youthful summers tearing through one book after another when she should have been doing chores at her parents’ northern San Diego County avocado orchard. Luckily, in spite of a checkered past that ranged from undercover department store security to “hotwalking” thoroughbred horses at the Santa Anita racetrack, all that summer reading paid off. After ten years in the rat race, Julie gave up her career as an internet marketing executive and, with her English degree from UCLA clutched in her fist, finally realized her dream of writing her own romance novels. Julie shares a quiet, Southern California home with her true-to-life hero husband, Jud, who inspires both her writing and her life, and two bad-tempered cats who rule the neighborhood with an iron claw. In her writing, Julie enjoys bringing funny and engaging characters to life, then putting them through the wringer until they realize that love is the only true path to happiness. The only thing Julie loves more than reading and writing romances is hearing from readers who share her mania. You can write to her at [email protected].

  To David Ankrum, who stands in my corner and encourages me, nudges me and makes me laugh.

  To Stephanie Maurer, the very soul of patience, supportiveness and genuine niceness.

  And to my husband and my son, who make my life a heaven on earth.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  One

  “Mackenzie, you are the luckiest damned guy in the world,” Todd Herly said as he hefted his golf bag onto his shoulder.

  Alec Mackenzie hid a smile. “I’m going to tell your wife you’re cussing again.”

  “Go ahead,” his friend snapped as they walked toward the Riviera Country Club’s parking lot, their cleats clicking rhythmically on the concrete path. “When the kids aren’t around, I can do whatever I want.”

  Alec laughed, shifting his own clubs higher on his shoulder. “Sure you can, buddy.”

  “Anyway, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how scoring the Santa Margarita contract makes you the luckiest man alive.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. I won this contract fair and square. I worked for this,” he said, indicating the thick manila envelope in his hand, “which is more than I can say for you and your company, which, as usual, threw together an inflated proposal that probably didn’t even make it onto the client’s radar.”

  Todd, the man who was both his best friend and his most ardent and talented professional rival, gasped in predictable outrage.

  Alec just grinned. “Of course,” he said, “when it came down to the wire, my charm, charisma and good looks probably helped clinch the deal.”

  “I doubt it,” Todd shot back. “Although, I’m sure that’s what you used to get that tall, cool drink of water to hand over her phone number at the benefit Saturday night.”

  “Jealous?” Alec joked as they approached their cars.

  “Hardly. Chelle would eat me alive if she even suspected that I’d looked twice at a woman that gorgeous.”

  “Chelle is that gorgeous,” Alec said and meant it. Todd and his wife were perfect for each other, a regular storybook romance. But Alec was a man who liked his freedom, and he meant to keep it that way. Not that his bachelor status was in jeopardy. Far from it. In fact, the woman he’d met the other night was going to be just the ticket for a few weeks of fun. She was beautiful, had legs up to here and…well, that pretty much made her ideal.

  Alec slipped his prized clubs into the passenger seat of his convertible Ferrari Spider and turned to his oldest friend. “I better get going. I’ve got to get this,” he said, tapping a teasing finger on the envelope, “to the office.”

  Todd frowned as he slammed the trunk of the big Mercedes he’d recently bought because—as he’d sheepishly explained to Alec—it was the perfect sedan for his family of four. “I take it back, Mackenzie,” Todd said. “You’re not the luckiest man alive, you’re the most competitive. You always have been.”

  Alec climbed into the fastest sports car on the market and slid the contract that named his firm the victor in a protracted battle for the most coveted architectural redesign project in southern California into the glove compartment. “Winning is what matters, Todd,” he said as he fired up the engine and threw the car into reverse. “The only thing that matters.”

  Todd opened his mouth to protest, but Alec just waved and sped away with The Eagles’ Greatest Hits pouring out of the stereo’s speakers.

  By the time the band had launched into the opening notes of “Desperado,” Alec was halfway to his Santa Monica office. It doesn’t get any better than this, he thought as he sped down a winding, tree-shaded patch of Sunset Boulevard and hummed along with the old tune. Breakfast at the country club with his best friend and a solid hour at the driving range would have been enough to make for a great morning. But the arrival of a messenger from the office bearing the news that his firm had won the project had been the best possible interruption.

  He pulled into a parking space under his company’s building and opened the glove compartment. Todd was right. Alec had a lucky streak in him a mile wide—and a compe
titive one at least a mile and a half wide. But this, he thought as he grabbed the contract, he deserved.

  Alec wasn’t shy about his abilities as an architect so he’d only been half kidding when he’d told Todd that his talent had won the contract. He was, he thought as he stepped inside the waiting elevator and punched the button for the top floor, very good at what he did. And he and his team had put together an extremely competitive bid.

  But now that the contract was in his hands, he realized that in spite of his confidence—some would say ego—he still couldn’t quite believe it. Just off the southern California coast on the tiny island of Santa Margarita, seven historical but decaying mansions were going to be restored to their former glory and reopened as five-star bed and breakfasts. And he and his company were going to do the job.

  “Mackenzie Architectural Revivals,” he heard his receptionist say into the phone as she looked up and smiled. “How may I direct your call?”

  He winked at her and headed for his office. Yessir, this was shaping up to be one hell of a day.

  His assistant, Daisy Kincaid, wasn’t at her desk when he walked by, but he only had to take one step into his office to see she’d already been there. Neatly arranged on his prized Frank Lloyd Wright desk were all of life’s little essentials: a cup of hot coffee, a couple of his favorite Krispy Kremes, the day’s Los Angeles Times and a stack of trade magazines.

  He sat down, propped his feet up on the desk, put his head back and smiled, really smiled, for the first time in weeks.

  “Did you get it?”

  Alec looked up and saw Daisy leaning against the door frame. She, too, wore a wide, delighted smile, and for a second, just one second, he saw something he’d never seen before. She looked almost…pretty.

  The jacket of her tailored gray jacket was unbuttoned, showing a flash of soft, smoky colored T-shirt beneath, her dark-brown eyes danced happily behind her wire-framed glasses, and curly strands of her chestnut hair had escaped her perpetual twist, suddenly making him feel like he wanted to pull out the pins one by one.

  He shook his head to scatter the image. A trick of the light, he thought, or maybe just another sign that today was magical because during the three years she’d worked for him, he’d never once been tempted to use the word pretty to describe Daisy. Loyal, hardworking, efficient, smart, resourceful, responsible—those were the words he would use. Nope, she wasn’t pretty, but for what she did so well here at his company, she was exactly what he needed.

  He swung his legs off the desk, sat up and motioned for her to enter. “Thanks for sending a messenger to the driving range with the contract, Daze. How did you know I’d be there?”

  She gave him a look that had “Oh, please” written all over it and sat down in one of his guest chairs.

  “Right,” he said, chuckling.

  She crossed her legs, and her skirt rippled and flowed before it finally settled gently over her thighs. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me. How happy are you?”

  “Unbelievably.” Stop staring at her legs, he told himself. Stop staring.

  “I know how you love to win,” she said as she reached out and started compulsively straightening the knickknacks and pens and pads of paper on his desk. “But this one is important to you for other reasons, too, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, definitely,” he said, then sidestepped her question by saying, “but I don’t deserve all the credit. You put a lot of time in on this one, too.”

  She looked up from her organizing and her smile broadened. Daisy’s smile radiated sheer sweetness, which was one of the many reasons his clients seemed to love her, as did every employee on the Mackenzie payroll. In fact, she’d been a boon to his growing business since the day she’d come into his office clutching the job posting from the university’s career center.

  When he’d first met Daisy, she’d been twenty-five years old and had been going to college part-time for several years. During the interview, they’d hit it off and he’d hired her on the spot. She’d been his first employee and had stuck with him the entire time he’d been building Mackenzie Architectural Revivals from a one-man show to a thirty-some-odd-employee, seven-figure-success story.

  “It was a perfect case study for my senior business seminar,” she reminded him as she sorted his pens into an antique silver loving cup he used as a holder.

  As the pens rattled and clinked into place, he glanced at the jumble of sticky notes on his bulletin board. He sighed inwardly when he saw one that said, “Daisy’s graduation, May 23.” Two weeks ago. Dammit.

  “Don’t worry about it, Alec,” she said as if reading his mind, which she did with spooky regularity. “In the end, I decided putting on a cap and gown and waltzing around with a bunch of twenty-somethings was silly. My dad and my brothers took me out to celebrate instead.”

  “Aren’t you a twenty-something?”

  She shrugged. “Chronologically.”

  “Well, anyway, I think this,” he said as he leaned back in his big leather chair and pushed the contract to the center of his desk with a show of reverence that made her laugh, “calls for a celebration, too. Will you phone the Ivy and make reservations for tonight? Say, eight o’clock?”

  Daisy dropped a pen onto the desk and flushed three shades of crimson. While it was a fact that Daisy Kincaid blushed more often than anyone he knew, he couldn’t begin to imagine why making a dinner reservation would bring on a bout of it. Since he couldn’t cook anything more complex than toasted bread, she’d made reservations for him more times than he cared to admit.

  The blush stain was still on her cheeks when she got up abruptly and asked, “The Ivy in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills?”

  “Beverly Hills, if you think it’s possible on such short notice,” he answered, and let her efficient manner chase away his concerns.

  “No problem.” Daisy stopped in the doorway as he picked up a pile of phone messages from his desk. “Oh, there’s one in there from your mother. She called from Europe. No number but she said she’d try to call you later in the week.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Thanks.” He found the message, crushed it with one hand and chucked it in the trashcan. Then he continued to flip through the rest of the slips of pink paper, barely noticing when the door snicked softly closed behind her.

  Alec had just finished his Krispy Kremes and the interesting parts of the Times when Daisy returned. She walked into his office carrying a bright sticky note in one hand and a fresh cup of coffee in the other. As she came toward him, he got distracted by her legs again, this time by the length of them below that flippy, flowered skirt. It disoriented him so much that it took him a few beats to realize his gaze was fixed somewhere in the neighborhood of her sexy knees.

  Sexy knees? he thought as he blinked hard, then looked away. What the hell was wrong with him? That was twice in one morning. And this was Daisy, for crying out loud. It had to be the long, hard hours they’d been working together to get the bid and the preliminary plans done for Santa Margarita. His social life had definitely atrophied over the past few months, and these bizarre thoughts about his assistant were unquestionably a sign that he needed to remedy that—and soon.

  “Did you get some golf in this weekend?” he asked, grabbing the note and trying to get his thoughts back in order.

  “Oh, I hacked around a bit with one of my brothers,” she said with profound innocence as she set the steamy, fragrant coffee down on his desk and picked up the cup he’d already emptied.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Right.” Daisy was no hacker. She was a scratch golfer—or so he’d learned when he’d asked her to fill in a foursome at Riviera a few weeks ago and she’d practically wiped the green with him.

  As he stuck the note onto his bulletin board, he scanned it quickly. “Ivy, 8:00 p.m., reservations for two, Mackenzie.”

  “Alec, I was thinking I could—”

  “Oh, wait,” he said as he turned to pull his PalmPilot off the syncing cradle. “Could y
ou call Heather Garrett for me and make sure she can make it at eight?” He turned back to hand the PDA to Daisy. “I just met her on Saturday night and—”

  One look at Daisy’s face and whatever he’d been saying went right out of his mind. Her bright smile had wilted, her forehead had creased into a deep frown, and this time she wasn’t just flushed, she was bright red.

  “Daisy?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  She hesitated, then took the PDA from his hand with the same enthusiasm one might normally display for a hissing cobra. “Of course.” Her tone was flat, making the stormy glint in her dark eyes even more conspicuous. “Why?” she asked, and he was sure he heard a little quaver in her voice.

  “You just look kind of…” He paused, studied her a minute. Daisy was never temperamental or cranky, so his concern was very real. “What were you going to say before?”

  She stared at him, her expression blank.

  “You said, ‘I was thinking I could…’” he prompted.

  After a long, searching look that inexplicably made him feel like he’d just been dissected and slipped under a microscope, she straightened up to her full five and a half feet and gave him a thin, unfamiliar smile. “I was thinking I needed to talk to you about something. But it can wait. I have some things I need to do first.”

  And before he could say another word, she turned and left his office.

  What Daisy had to do didn’t take very long. She went to her desk, slipped into her chair, pulled out the keyboard and carefully typed the memo that she should have written a year ago when she’d first realized she had a terrible, terminal crush on her boss.

  While the laser printer hummed quietly, she stared at the familiar objects on her desk as if she’d never seen them before. There was a day planner, a Rolodex, dozens of photographs, a coffee cup with a handle shaped like a golf club, a candy dish full of fortunes she’d saved from lunches at the Chinese restaurant downstairs and a trophy Alec had given her when she’d co-captained the company’s undefeated softball team with him.