Boys and Toys. Cara Lockwood

       Chapter One

      Liv’s heart beat madly as she stood in the living room of the upscale penthouse, dressed in her work uniform of a push-up leather corset paired with sky-high stilettos. Her almond-shaped eyes, lined with smoky gray liner, focused on the man in front of her, a thirty something day trader wearing a Lacoste polo and faded jeans. He looked down at her hands, eyes wide, as she clasped the shaft, running a finger sensually over the top, causing his mouth to drop open in a small O. She knew she had him right there, in the flick of her blood red nail over the tip. He’d be all hers.

      “How much again?” he asked her, sounding nervous.

      “Sixty,” Liv Tanaka said brightly, her pouty red lips curving up in a smile. They both stared at the enormous vibrating purple dildo she held in her hand.

      “I’ll take it,” he said, nodding vigorously, and the whole room laughed. Some bachelor party guests hooted and sent wadded-up napkins Paul’s way. Paul, the groom-to-be, flushed a deeper shade of red, helped along by the beers he’d already drunk in the confines of his luxury penthouse on Chicago’s Gold Coast. Still, he happily handed over a bunch of twenties to Liv, who rolled them up neatly and put them down the front of her corset. She may have come dressed as part-Asian Elvira, but she definitely showed that 100 percent sex sells.

      “That’ll make Carrie happy!” one of the other guys shouted.

      “Careful, Paul, she might want to marry that instead of you!” the best man said, and the room roared with laughter again.

      “Why is it so big?” Paul lamented, as he held an oversize vibrator in his hand.

      “You feeling intimidated, Paul?” the best man joked.

      Conversation happily buzzed as Liv went about showing her wares: dildos, edible panties, flavored oils. She wore a short skirt, as per usual, and her legs were bare. She could feel the eyes of some guys on the ever-rising hem of her spandex skirt, but the partygoers, all in their early thirties, were mostly behaving themselves, and she was beginning to think her reservations about taking on a bachelor party were unfounded. Up until now, she’d said no to most of them—she preferred to be in a roomful of girls or a small number of couples. She didn’t trust a room of all boys to behave themselves.

      But the groom-to-be was a friend of her roommate’s so she knew him and his fiancée, and Liv was glad she’d said yes. She’d made enough in the last hour to pay her rent this month. So far, the party was topping the bachelorette one last month, and the couples therapy party the month before that.

      As she sold some warming lube to the best man she thought, as she had many times before, that if her Chinese mother or Japanese father ever caught wind of her “job,” she’d be banned from Thanksgiving for the rest of her life.

      But she’d tried to find work with her marketing degree, and so far had failed miserably.

      * * *

      Her dad had offered her a job at the law firm, of course, right out of school, but the last thing Liv wanted to do was spend all her time in her father’s shadow or tucked away in some file room. When her good friend Kat had retired from the sex toy business last year, deciding to ditch it and go to law school, Liv needed serious convincing to take it over. What did she know about sex toys? She’d never even owned one before.

      Besides that, she’d only ever had sex with two guys, anyhow.

      There’d been her clumsy college boyfriend of six months who’d left her for a girl who lived down the hall in the dorm, and her second—a random hook-up from a neighbor’s party—had been quick and blah and ended with him asking her if she would do him the favor of not sleeping over.

      But, as it turned out, hosting sex parties was easier than having sex. It was playing a role, just like during her college stage days when she flirted with majoring in drama. Nobody expected her to deliver, and she found she liked acting naughty. It was the first time she’d ever really gotten the chance, if she was honest