Led into Temptation. Cara Summers
to allow herself to hide out in her room. That was not the way she was going to explore who the new Naomi Brightman was.
That’s when she saw him. He was in a room directly across from hers and one level down. Naomi’s throat went dry. The doors to his balcony were open, and the drapes billowed inward. Because he had the lights on, the thin material of the curtains had become transparent, and she could see him very clearly.
There was no Roman collar now, nothing to indicate he was a priest. But she recognized that body. And this time she could see a whole lot more of it. He wore only a towel around his waist as he strode across the room and picked up a phone.
He stood with his back to her, his dark hair wet and slicked back, his broad shoulders still glistening from a shower.
Her mouth literally watered as her eyes traveled down the well-muscled back to his waist. The towel was short and damp and clung like a second skin to the curves of his tight butt. It would be hard to the touch, she thought, then marveled at the tingling rush of heat in her fingers. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to run her hands over every plane and hard angle of that body.
And she wanted to taste him, too.
As she thought of doing both of those things, her insides melted. She couldn’t feel her legs below her knees, but she discovered that all on their own, they’d moved her to the railing of her balcony.
She continued to stare, fascinated by the angle of his arm, the strength in his wrist, the grace of his movement as he lowered the phone to its stand. And then she saw it. Lying right next to the phone. The Roman collar. And that should have had the effect of stepping into a cold shower.
But it didn’t. Instead, everything she was feeling intensified. Her pulse hammered at her wrists, at the base of her throat. The heat she’d felt from the moment she’d spotted him ratcheted up several degrees. Her brain cells clicked off, and she forgot to breathe.
When he turned and met her eyes, she suddenly couldn’t think. All she knew was desire—a scorching wave of it that she couldn’t control. Didn’t want to. What she was feeling wasn’t anything like the illicit puppy love she’d experienced at fourteen.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there or how long she might have remained on her balcony, but the fact that someone had knocked on her door finally penetrated. It had to be room service come to clear the dishes, she thought as she turned and moved on legs she still couldn’t feel.
But when she opened the door, there was no one in sight. Just an envelope lying on the floor. She blinked, still trying to clear her head as she leaned over to pick it up. She’d closed and locked the door and made it back to her bed before it sank in.
The envelope was made of the same yellowing parchment that she’d pulled out of Hattie’s box in the secret room.
And she knew even before she opened the envelope what the folded piece of parchment inside would say.
Your secret fantasy has always been to make love with a priest. Now you will experience all those forbidden pleasures.
NAOMI GLANCED at her watch, then pressed a hand against the nerves dancing in her stomach. Nine forty-six. Exactly two minutes since the last time she’d checked. Too early to go down to the courtyard. With a quick, impatient step, she strode to her closet and inspected her image in the mirror. For the fifth time.
It hadn’t improved. She still looked like a lawyer. The linen suit was a pearl-gray color and the white silk tank top she wore beneath it was prim and suitable for the office. Normally, she liked neutral colors. In fact, her entire wardrobe was a tribute to the practicality of the word neutral.
So why was drab the word that came to mind now? It was the perfect suit to wear to court in Boston in the summer. And dammit, she was a lawyer. Not to mention a hotel owner.
Lifting her chin, she stared at herself defiantly. She was appropriately dressed for a business meeting. None of the more casual outfits she kept here at Haworth House—T-shirts, a couple pairs of shorts, a bathing suit and some jeans—would do for a meeting with a prospective client. And certainly not a priest.
Pressing her hands to her temples, Naomi walked back to the side of her bed and sank down on it. Never in her life had she taken such care, never had she worried so much about how she looked. Not for the office. Not for a court appearance. Not for Michael Davenport.
Not even for herself.
Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe to become the new Naomi, she had to focus more on pleasing herself. Pulling open the top drawer of the bedside table, she glanced at the parchment envelope she’d placed there the night before. She had no idea how it had ended up on the floor outside of her bedroom.
Had Hattie put it there? That had been her first suspicion. But the only manifestation she had experienced of her presence was on that day in Hattie’s boudoir when she and her sisters had toasted their purchase of Haworth House with champagne.
There’d been nothing since. Not even a little chill in the air. Still, Naomi had often felt her presence.
A less fanciful explanation would be that Jillian had confided in Avery about the hatbox and the secret room. And since he now knew just who her first crush had been, he might have somehow dug out the parchment and left it for her. As a joke? Or as another little incentive to live on the wild side, like giving her the keys to his Corvette. Avery might think that doing something as outrageous as seducing a priest could be just the ticket to jettison her down the road to reinventing herself.
Whoever was responsible, receiving the parchment with her fantasy written on it had helped her to think everything through and reach a decision. Since she’d locked the tote with her notebooks in Hattie’s secret room, she’d used the hotel stationery to jot her ideas down.
Making love with a priest was a particularly alluring fantasy because it was so forbidden. And impossible. Talk about being star-crossed. Absolute secrecy was another essential element of the fantasy. When she was fourteen, the fact that no one knew about her crush on Father Bouchard had been ninety percent of the thrill.
Most of the guilty pleasure she’d experienced had been private, the result of writing those diary entries by flashlight in the middle of the night and those vivid and tantalizing dreams she’d had after she’d fallen asleep. During the day, she’d been very careful to act in a perfectly respectful and normal way around the young priest.
And there was absolutely no reason why she couldn’t handle the attraction she was feeling for Father Dane MacFarland the same way. If the intensity of the attraction persisted, she would record everything she imagined she might do to him in her diary, and make sure the fantasy stayed right there on the page.
Before she’d fallen asleep, she’d considered going up to Hattie’s secret room and retrieving one of her notebooks out of her tote bag. But they were a part of her old life. Right after her meeting with Father MacFarland this morning, she’d go into town and buy some new notebooks to record her new fantasies.
And she already had one to record—the dream she’d had during the night. Even now as the memory slipped into her mind, Naomi felt her eyes close and her breathing become more rapid.
It had been dark in her bedroom. The moon had shifted in the sky, so only starlight had filtered through the curtains. But she’d known that the figure standing just inside her balcony doors was him. She’d known it by the sensory shock her body experienced.
He’d stood there, his dark hair slicked back, wearing nothing but the skimpy towel she’d seen him in the night before. The towel that she’d wanted very much to rip off him.
The urge to get out of bed and cross to him was strong. But the dream seemed to paralyze her, and all she’d been able to do was push herself into a sitting position. She couldn’t even lift her hands, and her voice hadn’t worked. All she could do was look at him as a rush of hunger seared through her. The needy ache that followed freed one of her hands and she lifted it to beckon him closer.
He moved then from the faint illumination