Bared. Jill Shalvis
snorted his opinion of that, which made Rafe smile a bit grimly. With Amber there was always a problem, but how about with Emma?
The sheets shifted as she moved within them, and grumbling sounded on the stormy air, but she didn’t call out or reappear.
“She probably needs help,” Rafe said on a sigh, looking at his watch.
Stone clasped him on the shoulder. “I’ll go. You’ll just be tempted to kill her.”
“And you won’t be?”
Stone flashed a white grin. “She’s in there naked. I’m never tempted to kill a naked woman.”
Rafe listened to the muttering, watching the wild movements of the sheets. Amber never muttered. Nope, if that woman ever had an issue of any sort—and there were at least a million of those a day—she screamed them out for the world to deal with.
But not today.
Because it wasn’t Amber, but Emma who was currently ruminating about the thin material of the costume, which, in itself, was just another dead giveaway.
Amber had a body to die for, and she lived to show it off. What did she care about the thinness of the material? All the better to expose herself.
Stone waggled a brow at him, then ventured closer to the sheets. “Need any help?” he called out, reaching with one hand to peek in.
“No! I’m…fine. I’ll be right there.”
Stone glanced back at Rafe in surprise, because he also knew it was extremely unlike Amber to not require an entire posse, a minimum of ten people hovering around her, jumping to her every whim.
Then again, as apparently only Rafe realized, they weren’t dealing with Amber.
Hell if he’d lose time over this. Emma would suit his purposes just fine—his purpose being to get this shoot over with.
Assuming she came out of the dressing room sometime today.
2
EMMA WILLIS STOOD NAKED, surrounded by a few flimsy sheets and bamboo poles, somewhere on the northern tip of Kauai, all courtesy of her sister Amber.
It was unbelievable that she, a known anal-retentive workaholic, had landed herself in this position. But she had and she’d have to deal with it.
Just as she’d dealt with every other Amber emergency over the years. And there’d been far too many to count.
Emma looked at the little triangular patch of white silk in her fingers that made up the bottoms of the costume. Just put the thing on, she told herself. But how did it go on? There was no way this would come anywhere close to covering her. Hoping against hope, she shook it out and held it up, but nothing changed.
It wasn’t meant to cover her.
She could see now that the thin strap of silk was actually a thong.
A thong.
She was sure Amber Willis, actress, model and all-around hell-raiser, would love wearing such a contraption, but Emma Willis, lowly soap-opera scribe and all-around pansy, hated thongs.
Amber was going to owe her big.
She had to laugh at that. Amber always owed her big, and hadn’t paid up once. What did that say about her, Emma wondered wildly, that she just kept saving her sister, no matter what? Far too much to contemplate at the moment, she decided, and reached for the top.
Which turned out to be even worse than the bottom.
She’d had high hopes for the filmy material because there was a lot of it, but when she placed it against her skin, she might as well have been as naked as a newborn. She supposed that was the idea of the thing. Virginal sacrifice was the theme of this shoot and she was about to look the part.
She certainly felt it. The rain drummed the sheet around her, soaking through so that water ran down the sides of the changing area. Still, the air felt refreshingly cool, not cold, and in an odd contrast, the ground beneath her bare feet was warm.
Amber had called her two days ago from some island in the Caribbean, where she’d been lounging for a few days with her latest boy toy. “This guy can give me an orgasm from the next room,” she’d exhaled dreamily over the thousands of miles to Emma. “I think he’s The One.”
Right. The One.
There was no The One and after years of watching Amber make a fool out of herself over and over again, Emma just wished Amber would realize it as well and stop falling in love at the drop of a hat.
Or a nicely filled-out pair of Levi’s.
But before Emma could sing that old refrain and remind her sister how many times “love” had turned out to be sheer lust, the kind that always faded, Amber had begged Emma to take on this job, the one that Amber had already signed to do and had been paid for, because this calendar was going to “launch her as nothing else had.”
There had been many such declarations over the years from Amber, but Emma still had such high hopes for her sister, who despite all her wildness was still her sister.
Who couldn’t handle responsibility to save her life.
But Emma could, even if she couldn’t see how parading half nude in filmy white material would boost Amber’s acting career, when not even a bunch of real acting jobs had done that.
But love and stupidity kept Emma wishing. And hoping.
And helping.
Besides, maybe this job would be the one to launch Amber’s career, maybe this guy would finally be The One. Who was Emma to decide they weren’t?
And, anyway, how was this any skin off her nose? She was in Kauai, a place she’d seen only in pictures, getting drenched by the daily rain she’d wanted to see so badly. In Los Angeles, she could only dream about daily rain. And for once, she wasn’t holed up in her small office, fingers cramped from all the pages she’d produced for the soap opera she wrote for.
How many times had she promised herself she’d do something fun for herself? This could be that fun. Yes, she was worried about missing two days away from her script, but they were weekend days and, theoretically, her own.
“Theoretically” because the soap opera and the studio who owned it had taken complete advantage of her over the years, and she’d let them. She worked directly beneath the head writer—a coup for any twenty-six-year-old—but the head writer was a tyrant who worked her people to the bone.
And still Emma did it, week in and week out.
Well, it was time for a little break. Hard as it was to believe, she really was going to put this itty-bitty costume on, and use her beauty instead of her brain. Just because the design was everything she wasn’t, and just because being in front of a camera made her nervous, and just because she was shaking in her bare feet, didn’t mean a thing.
In the name of Amber, in the name of having some of her own “fun,” she’d do this.
“Let’s go,” came the forceful, impatient voice from the other side of the sheet.
At the sound of him, her heart leaped into her throat. She didn’t have to see him to remember how potent he’d been upon first sight. He was everything Amber had said he was—tall, imposing, with a set of dark, dark eyes that she had a feeling saw just about everything. Though he’d looked unhappy to see Amber, Emma supposed she couldn’t hold that against him. She knew exactly how difficult Amber could be, and imagined he had braced himself for a nightmare shoot.
He wouldn’t take lightly to being fooled—if he found out. Telling him now was out of the question. Her sister had been clear on that. If Rafe knew Amber had bailed, he’d bail, too, and then the calendar would be cancelled and she’d be back to square one.
This job was a coup and she needed it.
Emma