Shadowed Paradise by Blair Bancroft Page B

to
interrupt.
    She’d reached his zipper.
    Hypocrite of the Year
Award . He’d win hands down.
    Brad moaned—he couldn’t help it—as his
ramrod-stiff cock sprang free. Part relief. Mostly
self-loathing.
    Diane twisted out of her lacy black G-string,
lowered her head to take him in her mouth.
    Brad grabbed her arms, held her off.
    “ You know, don’t you?” he demanded.
“You know why I’m here. This is your way of dealing with it, and I
nearly went for it. Show good old Brad a bit of tail, and he’ll
pant like Pavlov’s pet pooch.”
    Diane’s eyes flashed. Her lips sneered, as
she hissed, “Little Boy Blue, I can blow your horn any time I damn
well please.”
    Brad fisted a hand in her hair. “I thought if
I paid the check I wasn’t a toyboy,” he drawled, “but I guess I was
wrong. My apologies to all the two-bit whores down through the
ages. Now I know how they felt. Guess what? I actually feel guilty
because I can do something most of them couldn’t. I can afford to
walk away.”
    “ Don’t you dare!” Diane hissed as he
set her aside and stood up in one long fluid movement. “Nobody
walks out on me.”
    “ I don’t intend to just yet,” he
replied coolly, adjusting his briefs and tugging up his zipper. He
noted with satisfaction that his body was well on its way to
joining his mind’s loss of interest. While Diane swore at him with
a fluency which never ceased to amaze him, Brad retrieved a black
silky robe from the bedroom closet and tossed it at her. “Put that
on, and then we’ll talk. And no more tricks. You’re an icon to half
of Southwest Florida. For just this once, try to maintain the image
off-screen.”
    The long drive back to Golden Beach—at a rate
of speed that caused the dark Florida landscape to blur into
nothingness—gave Brad ample time to contemplate his sins. He should
feel guilty, but all he felt was unclean. For a moment there, he’d
almost lost it. And himself. He could count on the fingers of one
hand the times he had lost control of his adult life. At the top of
the list was his breakup with Phil. And the moment nearly three
years ago when he had discovered he was not immortal, that bullets
didn’t bounce off the supposed man of steel. He’d spent six months
in the hospital before turning down the offer of a desk job and
limping back to his roots in Golden Beach.
    And tonight? Tonight he’d nearly become
something worse than a whore or a toyboy. They, after all, were
just engaging in business. He, macho he-man Brad Blue, had come all
too close to being a slave to physical desire. He was an imbecile,
a moron, a dimwit. A fool beyond price.
    Since it was three in the morning and a time
when everyone’s sins come home to roost, Brad recalled all the
women in all the other beds and odd places he had known. If he’d
been in such damn control, did that make them whores? Or had he
always been a toyboy, a slave to his own desires, the women smug
and smiling because they knew where the control really lay?
    Shit! On top of everything else he was a
fatuous ass. He’d known some fine women. From pros to society
darlings. He’d been responsible, taken precautions, never aroused
expectations of a long-term relationship. There was no one to blame
for tonight’s stupidity but himself. Diane had as much right to
fight for what she wanted as he had to leave her.
    But now that he’d made the break, an
unexpected problem loomed. If he showered and scrubbed for a week,
he still wouldn’t be clean enough for a woman like Claire
Langdon.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Claire scowled at her computer screen. No bad
news from the Board of Realtors today, but it reminded her of her
latest exercise in masochism: watching the evening news with Diane
Lake. A whole week since Brad had said he would cut himself free,
yet nothing . . . not a word. Not even a wild office rumor.
    For a few blissful, delusional moments, she’d
allowed herself to dream, but compete with Diane Lake?