Isabel Sharpe - Light Me Up

The touch was sensual, the air around them turned electric…

“If it’s okay, I’d like to move your panties so more skin shows … here.” Jack touched the side of Melissa’s hip. It was all she could do to stay in the pose. She wanted to arch up into his hand. She wanted him to flip her over and take her right there under the warm lights.

What on earth was happening? She was turning into a primal beast. He was turning her into one.

“Sure.” She tried hard to sound as if men asked her to move her underwear out of their way so often she found it incredibly tedious. “No problem.”

She had to close her eyes again, force herself calm. She wanted him to kiss her. Her mouth, her back, her thighs, everywhere.

Something was definitely working. Or getting worked up.

Click … click … click.

Melissa couldn’t help it, she looked up at him, and caught his expression. Jack’s eyes were dark and intense, his jaw set.

Kiss me, Jack. Touch me again. Make love to me.

Dear Reader,

As someone who hates pretty much every picture I’ve ever taken or seen of myself, I’ve always thought of photography as a mysterious and sexy art form. So I loved the chance to explore Jack, the next hero in my FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS miniseries, a man who expresses himself better with images than words—once he has the right model to inspire him.

That model is Melissa, who thinks she’s got herself and the world all figured out until she discovers the way Jack sees her, and learns surprising truths about the passionate woman she’s always wanted to be.

I hope you enjoy reading about Seattle and the residents of the Come to Your Senses building! Look for Demi’s story, Feels So Right, available in December 2012.

Cheers,

Isabel Sharpe

ISABEL SHARPEwas not born pen in hand like so many of her fellow writers. After she quit work to stay home with her firstborn son and nearly went out of her mind, she started writing. After more than twenty novels for Mills & Boon—along with another son—Isabel is more than happy with her choice these days. She loves hearing from readers. Write to her at www.isabelsharpe.com.

Light Me Up

Isabel Sharpe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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This book is dedicated to two photographers: Henk Joubert, friend and artist, whose brilliance always inspires me, and Knox Gardner, whose online picture of Seward Park and willingness to help a total stranger did likewise.

“WHERE’RE YOU GO-ING, JA-ACK?”

The women’s voices, raised in singsong teasing, carried easily from the propped-open bakery door, stopping Jack in midstride on his nervous trek down the hallway of the Come to Your Senses building. He and four friends from the University of Washington, Seattle, had bought the place a couple of years back and turned it into living quarters and places of business.

Two of those friends, Angela Loukas, owner of the bakery A Taste for All Pleasures, and Bonnie Fortuna, florist proprietor of Bonnie Blooms, were grinning at him, hands on their hips in identical poses. He was busted.

“Me?” He pointed to his chest, looking behind him as if he expected to see someone else, though at slightly past seven in the morning, the only business open in the building was the bakery. “You talkin’ to me? ”

“Off to take pictures of someone, are we?” Bonnie pointed to his camera and raised her eyebrows, a light-brown contrast to her dyed-red hair.

“Gee.” Angela faked a look of confusion, plunking a finger on her cheek. “I wonder who?”

Jack rolled his eyes. He’d told Angela about the woman way back in April when he’d first started taking photos of her practicing yoga in nearby Cal Anderson Park: an extraordinary woman, an immediate siren call to his photographer’s instinct. He’d gotten to know her schedule and had taken picture after picture without her knowledge, obsessed on a level he didn’t understand until the idea for a gallery show he’d been mulling over transformed from his original vision to one featuring this woman. Finally understanding what he wanted, he’d felt ready to approach her with an offer to model, and in a colossal demonstration of Murphy’s Law, she didn’t show up that day. Or the next or the next. May, June and July had been rainy and busy with graduations and weddings that kept the checks coming in. He might have lost track of the woman but he sure hadn’t forgotten her, and hadn’t stopped checking out the morning yoga class whenever he could spare the time. The vision for this series wouldn’t leave him alone. He had to find her.

Then yesterday morning, the miracle.

“Tell me if you see this woman today you’ll talk to her.”

“For a raspberry muffin I’ll tell you anything.” He grinned at Angela, who made a sound of disgust and went behind her counter. Angela was a beautiful woman with thick chestnut hair, wide-set brown eyes and the warmest smile he’d ever seen. He adored her, thoroughly platonically.

Bonnie’s arms were folded disapprovingly across her bright red tank top worn over a white-and-red polka-dot skirt. He and Bonnie had had a fling not long after graduation, a brief experiment neither regretted, which had then settled into solid friendship. Which meant Jack adored her, too, only slightly less platonically. “You should have talked to her yesterday when you finally saw her again.”

“I was in my car on the phone with one client and on my way to meeting another.” He’d nearly driven off Denny Way when he saw the woman, for the first time in months, walking toward the park with her gym bag. For a split second he’d even calculated whether he could risk pulling over. “Leaping out of my car to ask for her phone number wouldn’t have gone over so well.”

“You should have talked to her last April.” Angela handed him the muffin, fragrant and still warm.

“It’s obvious why he didn’t.” Bonnie shook her head, tsk-tsking. “He’s terrified of her.”

Jack kept his features neutral as he slung the camera over his shoulder. Bonnie was dangerously close to a truth. Something about this woman had made him hesitant to contact her, a “something” he didn’t care to examine closely. Fear wasn’t Jack’s operating mode, especially with women. “Yeah, she might beat me up.”

He bit into the muffin, rich with a tart burst of fruit. Even his nervousness couldn’t overcome the rapture of Angela’s baking. “God, Angela, if Daniel hadn’t already given you a promise ring, I would.”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled her pleasure, but whether at his compliment or the mention of her future fiancé, Jack wasn’t sure. Daniel Flynn had walked into Angela’s shop in early April, still grieving the death of his fiancée. In spite of some crazy vow he’d taken not to date anyone for two years, he’d succumbed in a very short time to Angela’s beauty, sweetness and chocolate chunk cookies.