High-Stakes Bachelor Read online

  One of her spaghetti straps slipped off her shoulder. And then the other one. It dawned on her belatedly that neither had been accidents, but rather his fingers pushing them down. The thin elastic strip at the top of the dress stretched as something—someone—tugged her dress down inch by inch over her breasts.

  “Jackson,” she gasped.

  “Need me to stop?” he responded immediately, her dress stopping in its tracks.

  She weighed her reactions to him. Nope. No panic anywhere. She shook her head, her hair flipping around her face.

  “You’re going to have to say it aloud, baby. I don’t want there to be any miscommunications between us.”

  “Don’t stop,” she managed to whisper hoarsely.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Dammit, this was embarrassing. But then his mouth kissed a path of destruction across her temple, down her cheek and back to her mouth, where his tongue did all kinds of wonderful things to hers. Who knew one tongue could stroke another like that? Or that it would feel so slippery and rough and damned sexy?

  “Keep taking off my dress,” she breathed.

  “Roger that.” The fabric resumed its achingly slow descent down her body. Her strapless bra came into sight, and then the dress’s elastic popped against her waist as it slid free of her chest all of a sudden.

  His fingers followed the strapless bra around her ribs and paused on the hooks at her back. “Mind if I get rid of this?” he murmured against the tender flesh just below her ear.

  “Um, no,” she managed. He wasn’t speeding up their trust exercises. He was obliterating them! But she was so delirious at the prospect of Jackson Prescott living up to a few of her fantasies that she could burst.

  The hooks popped free easily. Scant lot of protection they’d provided. The bra fell to the floor between them. Thankfully, Jackson kept his mouth on her neck and didn’t lift his head right away to take a look. But his hand did creep forward under her arm. His knuckles grazed the swell at the side of her breast, and she groaned at how good it felt. His other hand did the same to her other breast.

  “Now what?” he asked against her lips.

  “Your shirt. I think you need to take it off if we’re going to have mutual trust here.”

  “Mmm. I like the way the lady thinks.”

  She reached for the hem of the soft cotton and lifted the shirt over his head, reveling in the slabs of muscle uncovered as she went. “My, my. You are pretty, Mr. Prescott.” She indulged herself and leaned forward to kiss the sprinkling of dark hair over muscles that flexed abruptly beneath her mouth.

  “You’re pretty damned hot, yourself, Miss Izzolo.”

  He did step back then, and his gaze slid down her entire body with aching slowness and back up again. She trembled before him in nothing more than a skimpy pair of lace panties and a pair of high-heeled strappy sandals. “Beautiful.” He sighed.

  “You’re not going to fire me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “No producer on earth would fire a woman who looks like you from his movie. He might invite you into his bed. But fire you? Absolutely not.” He took a small step forward, and for the first time, their naked chests came into contact with one another. She inhaled sharply and Jackson froze against her. “You okay?” he murmured.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You feel incredible, Ana. I could stand here forever.”

  He didn’t feel half-bad himself. Her thoughts were leaping ahead to all kinds of X-rated possibilities that involved him losing the rest of his clothes and her losing what little remained of hers.

  “How intimately do you think we should get to know each other?” he asked.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, he sounded a bit out of breath. “I have no idea.”

  “Should I do this?” His hands wandered down her back to cup her mostly bare behind rather more intimately than any man had in a very long time. She’d tried to date after the attack. She’d even had sex a few times. But she’d never been able to get past her basic distrust of men to let herself get into a real relationship. Her shrink would have a ball analyzing this trust game between her and Jackson.

  He murmured, “You fill my hands perfectly.” He traced the line of her thong, his fingertips pressing into the crevasse between her cheeks, and making her gasp with shock. A surge of lust and liquid heat between her legs all but made her knees collapse, and she clung to him more tightly.

  “You like that?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she answered shyly.

  “Me, too.” His palms rubbed her behind lightly, tantalizingly. “What else do you like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? You’ve had sex before, right?”

  “Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean I know what I’ll enjoy with you. Maybe you’ve thought of things to try that I haven’t.”

  “So you’ve had bad sex before,” he declared. “We should fix that.”

  “But...just rehearsing...trust exercise...” she mumbled, alarmed. It was one thing to have secret dreams of bedding a man like him. It was another thing entirely to be mostly naked in his arms and have the man propositioning her for real. Aw, heck. She was such a poser. All talk and no action. A wimp. A chicken.

  Jackson drew a gratifyingly shaky breath. “Right. Rehearsal. Damn.” His hands retreated to the safety of her waist.

  Make that a moronic chicken.

  “Here’s the thing, Ana. If you and I are going to have to do a bunch of fight scenes and love scenes together, we’re going to have to put our hands all over each other before it’s said and done. We may as well get used to it now, right?”

  The logic seemed perfectly sound to her. She stepped back a little to place her palms on his chest, right over his sternum. She moved her hands in ever-widening circles across his skin, reveling in the way his copious muscles jumped under her touch.

  “You have a beautiful body, Jackson.”

  “Thanks.”

  She caught the frown that flickered across his brow and lifted her hands away from him immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Old memory.”

  “Of what?”

  The frown came back, heavier this time. He physically shook his head to get rid of it. “Sorry, Ana. Not you.”

  Whatever he was remembering flipped him out more than he wanted to admit, though, because he spun away from her and jammed a hand through his hair. She’d noticed he did that when he was frustrated or worried about something. She picked up her dress and shimmied back into it behind him. Note to self: telling Jackson he was beautiful was the mother of all mood killers with him.

  She was relieved that the hot tension of the moment had been effectively crushed. Right? Yes, darn it. She was relieved. Not.

  Crap. He was her boss and was just teaching her the ropes so he could coax a good performance out of her. For him, it was just business. It. Was. Not. Real.

  She picked his shirt up and paused on her way past to hold it out to him. “I’m sorry I dredged up bad memories for you.”

  “Dammit, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I swear it’s not you.”

  No, but she would bet the contents of her measly checking account that it was some woman. Who was she and what on earth had she done to him?

  Chapter 8

  Jackson looked around the conference room trying to find Ana in the cast-and-crew meeting. When she’d thrown him that take-me look out of the corner of her eye last night, he’d about thrown her down and had his way with her on the spot. Only by the barest of margins had the memory that he was her boss and responsible for her safety prevented him from doing it. He was an idiot. And a horny bastard.

  If long years in this industry hadn’t taught him to be cautious of rising starlets, surely his mother’s cautionary tale of
addiction and self-destruction had. She’d thrown herself on every casting couch in Hollywood in search of the fame that ultimately eluded her.

  He owed Ana an apology. But what the hell was he supposed to apologize for? For kissing her back when she kissed him? For thinking dirty thoughts while he took off her clothes? For dreaming last night of her naked and writhing beneath him and waking up with the mother of all hard-ons this morning?

  He glanced at his watch. Time to start the meeting. His crew contained a high percentage of ex-military types—Adrian liked working with them, and they came out of the service with a lot of the technical skills needed around a movie set. Punctuality was a sign of self-discipline to them as a group. He picked up the remote control for his laptop and the spreadsheet of the next week’s schedule flashed up on the wall.

  The door opened just as someone turned out the lights and he recognized the petite, curvy silhouette briefly outlined in the door. Ana slipped into a seat in the back of the room. Was she avoiding him?

  Distracted, he forced himself to go over the various projects on the schedule and divvied them out to his crew to work on. Experienced pros one and all, none of his people needed much more direction than that, and he dismissed them all to get to work.

  He and Adrian had handpicked their crew from all the previous films they’d worked on, offering top dollar to lure away the best in the business to help them get this new studio rolling. They’d come together beautifully as a team over the past few months.

  The lights came on and a bunch of the crew clustered around Ana, ostensibly welcoming her aboard. More like checking out the new talent. She seemed a little overwhelmed at all the attention.

  An urge to shove his way to her side and shelter her from the crowd startled him. He eyed the way the crew was circling her with an entirely new perspective today. Were those hungry looks being thrown at her? Did someone just steal a look down her shirt? Something tight and angry jumped in his belly, and Jackson was shocked to identify it as possessiveness. Since when was she his exclusive territory?

  Since he’d heard about her rough past and seen how nervous she was about this whole movie thing. He politely but firmly chased everyone else out of the room with a brisk comment that he wasn’t paying any of them to stand around chitchatting.

  “Sorry I was late,” Ana said guiltily. “My locker in the ladies’ locker room was broken into. Nothing was taken. Just some shampoo and body lotion. I don’t know why anyone bothered.”

  “Lemme see.”

  Frowning, she led him to the locker room and shouted in to make sure no women were inside before leading him in.

  “God, the estrogen’s so thick in here I could cut it with a knife,” he muttered. Jackson examined her busted locker door closely. “Jimmied with some sort of tool. Maybe a small crowbar.”

  The locks were flimsy in here. Hers appeared to be the only locker that had been robbed, which was raising all kinds of red flags in his head. What the hell was going on with her? Why was some bastard targeting her specifically? He supposed it was possible that a thief had been startled after breaking into just one locker, but why hers? Ana’s locker wasn’t on the end or on the more easily accessible top row, for that matter. He didn’t like this. Any of this.

  Jackson’s frown deepened. “And you’re sure no one could be targeting you specifically?”

  “Positive. I’m just that boring, I promise.”

  He seriously doubted that. But he also didn’t want to alarm her any more than necessary. She’d already been through enough. If anything, a little distraction was called for. “Use my office for now to store your things, change and shower. It has a private bathroom. I’ll get you your own trailer and a security guard once shooting starts.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I want to,” he cut off her protest briskly. To distract her, he asked, “Feel like fighting with me?”

  Her gaze, wide and blue, snapped up to his, sparkling. “Sure.”

  “You think you can take me, squirt?”

  “Bring it on, buddy.”

  Joking and insulting each other, the two of them headed for the cavernous soundstage and stepped onto a huge, green padded floor the size of a basketball court where a pair of stuntmen were working out a fight choreography. She commenced stretching and warming up. He enjoyed the view while he did the same.

  Well, now, she was quite the pretzel. Some of the poses she was taking made him think downright pornographic thoughts about what they could do in the bedroom with all that flexibility of hers.

  “You okay?” she murmured.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “That’s a strange look you’ve got on your face. What are you thinking about?”

  “The Kama Sutra.”

  She straightened abruptly to stare at him.

  He added hastily, “Some of the contortions in it remind me of aliens. I think we could lift some of the poses and incorporate them in a fight sequence. It would be sexy as well as cool.”

  “Sorry. I’ve never studied it in detail,” she mumbled. Her face was beet-red.

  He gave himself a mental kick in the head for embarrassing her. He was used to working with experienced actresses who had little by way of inhibitions. Distracting her yet again, he said, “I was thinking about what you said the other day before you walloped me about how you’re fast and small. I think we could exaggerate that more....”

  They’d been working on choreography hard for a couple of hours and had paused to catch their breaths after a strenuous sequence when Jackson heard a strange popping sound. Like tiny little shaped charges firing in a daisy chain.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

  Frowning, he looked up into the rafters where it sounded like the noise had come from. He was just in time to spot a huge steel track that stage lights slid back and forth on come swinging down out of the rafters.

  Right at Ana.

  He dived forward, crashing into her and knocking her to the ground, hard. He managed to get his hands down on either side of her head and break a little of his fall from crushing her. The wind of the broken light track’s passage lifted his shirt off his back.

  He grabbed Ana and rolled away as an explosion of sparks showered them, stinging his skin sharply. The studio went pitch-black. Power outage. He came to a full stop back on top of Ana as male voices erupted around them.

  “What was that?” she gasped.

  “Are you okay?” he bit out.

  “No. You’re smashing me. And that tackle hurt.”

  “Sorry. Lighting rig was coming down at you. No time to warn you. Just had to knock you out of the way.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Oh!”

  The dark was velvet and warm around them, and relief flooded him with heat. She was alive. Unhurt. Thank God. He tilted his head down and found her mouth with his. He kissed her voraciously...and she kissed him back like she bloody well meant it.

  “Jackson? Ana? You guys okay?” someone shouted, going down through the roster of crew who’d been on the stage when it went dark.

  Reluctantly, he tore his mouth away from hers. “We’re good!” he called back. Lower, he muttered, “I gotta go do the producer thing. Hold that thought.” He kissed her hard and fast and then pressed up and away from her luscious body. Lord, that woman was made for sin.

  He’d no sooner gained his feet when dim lights flickered on in each of the corners of the room. They were big halogen spots, illuminating slowly. Emergency lights. They would get brighter over the next five minutes or so as they warmed up.

  Ana was sprawled on the floor at his feet, her fingers on her lips and a blissful look on her face. She blinked up at him for a moment and the look fled, replaced by something that looked a lot like chagrin. She liked kissing him, huh? Good to know.

  He held a hand down to
her and pulled her briskly to her feet. He spared her a brief, private smile and then spun away, shouting, “I need whoever’s the best explosives guy on set over here, now. And nobody touch that lighting rig!”

  * * *

  Ana sighed in delight as the shower’s hot water pummeled her sore muscles. Jackson had tasked one of his security guys—a beefy ex-commando of some kind—to drive her back to his beach house. The guy was still outside, prowling around the property doing some sort of security sweep.

  That tackle Jackson had laid on her hadn’t been a stunt tackle where he caught most of his body weight on his hands and didn’t crush her. Nope, he’d hit her with his full body weight and clobbered her good.

  Thankfully. That lighting rig had weighed a couple of tons and had crashed right through where she’d been standing an instant before. Jackson had ordered her off the set while he and a couple of his guys took a close look at the big steel track and figured out what had brought it down.

  A horrible suspicion that it hadn’t been an accident niggled at the corners of her mind, but so far, she’d managed to hold it at bay. She was safe. She was alive. And no doubt being totally paranoid. Stuff like that happened on movie sets.

  But not on Adrian Turnow’s, the little voice in her head whispered. He was as conscientious as directors came.

  Someone was targeting her, and there was no way around it. And like it or not, she had to let Jackson and Adrian know. As her producer and the director of the movie, she owed it to them to give them a chance to remove her from the work environment they were responsible for keeping safe. But to leave Jackson? Out of sight, out of mind, right? Her heart hurt at the notion of him forgetting her with ease.

  She pulled on the gauzy beach pants that had appeared in her armoire and one of her new camisoles, a mint-green one that looked awesome with her fair coloring. Minerva really had to quit buying her clothes. She already had more than she’d owned before the earthquake. She made a mental note to thank her hostess profusely and beg her to stop her largesse.

  And then she made the mistake of stretching out on her bed for just a minute. She’d slept for crap last night. She kept waking up all hot and bothered after dreaming of that smoking-hot kiss she and Jackson had shared.