Joanne Rock - Silk Confessions

This morning, Tempest had been awake since dawn, cleaning and organizing the studio until she’d achieved some semblance of its former order. Now she reviewed the summary of her missed Days episode online while she told herself she wasn’t listening for Wes’s footsteps in the hallway.

She’d read the same line three times about the latest character to come back from the dead—normally a topic she loved—when Eloise ran to the door and barked.

Tempest peered through the peephole in time to spy a familiar figure striding down the hall. Obviously, her dog was even better attuned to the new man in their lives than Tempest. By the time Wes rapped on the door, she was already opening it.

“Did you even check to make sure it was me?” Wes frowned at her, his vintage suit replaced by faded jeans and a blue T-shirt underneath a long tweed wool coat.

In a word—yum. The more fitted clothes were put to good use on a man as ruthlessly toned as Wes Shaw.

“Eloise told me it was you.” She opened the door wider, her gaze flicking south as he walked past her into the apartment.

So she noticed he had a great butt, okay? That didn’t mean she was going to do anything about it. Slamming the door shut behind him, she braced herself for another round of temptation. She’d already decided today would be all about clearing her name with Wes and helping him find out what was going on with MatingGame.

“She told you?” He leaned down to pet her pooch’s ears before tossing a folder on the boxes of debris she’d stacked by the front door. “Lucky for you, I own a dog, too, or I might think you were losing your mind.”

“You have a dog?” She shouldn’t ask him about it, didn’t need any reason to like this guy any more than she already did, but curiosity got the better of her.

“Kong. She’s been with me since—For about two years.”

She sensed more to that story, but it didn’t look like he’d be sharing any more of it since he backed closer to her computer.

“Kong’s a girl?”

“Trust me, it fits. She’s not a girlie girl.” He bent over her keyboard and scanned a few lines about her soap opera before moving his hand to the escape key. “You mind if we pick up where we left off last night?”

Her heart slugged in her chest at the pImages** that idea conjured. What if they picked up right at the point when Wes had been sitting beside her, his steely gray gaze drifting down over her mouth? Lingering.

She blinked hard, waiting for her clearheaded thoughts to return. Daydreaming about Wes wouldn’t get anything accomplished today and she refused to let a little sexual attraction delay his progress on clearing her business’s name.

“That’s fine. I placed a call to the MatingGame head Web mistress who still oversees the day-to-day operations of the company. She’s out of town until Wednesday, but I left her an urgent message that we needed to discuss the business. I can’t imagine MatingGame is involved in anything improper, but if there is trouble in the company, this woman will know exactly where to look for it.”

“Good. Were you able to access her files for the site?” Wes slid into the seat in front of the computer and clicked a few buttons to review recently downloaded material.

“Her assistant sent a disk over by courier. It’s in the drive now.” Tempest watched him go to work on the files, his computer savvy obvious as he opened windows and accessed files.

“Can I get you some coffee?” She could do that much at least, since she would have offered the same to any other visitor.

He grumbled something unintelligible under his breath and then asked for tea.

Three hours and numerous cups of tea later, Wes hadn’t found anything unusual in the computer files. He’d forwarded names and addresses to his police station, checking out the women—and even some of the men—who posted profiles on MatingGame. So far not a single person had been linked to prostitution or violent crime. He’d flagged two sex offenders who had snuck through the screening process, however, and reported them to police stations in California and Wisconsin where the profiles originated.

Tempest couldn’t help but admire his thorough approach to his work and the noble intentions behind it. She could appreciate the importance of his job, even if it put her on the defensive as owner of the dating company.

Sipping from a small glass of orange juice, she stole past the small desk for the tenth time in the last few hours, curious about his work but not wanting to get too close to him. He’d warned her about sitting beside him last night and she’d taken him at his word. No way would she send him any signals that implied sexual interest.

Even if she felt it.

“If you told me what you were looking for, maybe I could help you find it.” She set down her juice to wave her laptop in front of him. “I could work at the table and review files from there.”

But Wes scarcely seemed to hear her, his concentration devoted to the text onscreen, which he’d enlarged. “Take a look at this.”

She started to lean over his shoulder and then decided she’d be better off just pulling up a chair, since he seemed engrossed in his work anyway. Settling next to him, she retrieved her juice in an effort to keep cool around the sexy detective. “It’s the coding for one of the profiles, right?”

Her gaze scanned along the text that suggested the woman who’d written it was especially adept at blow jobs.

Tempest nearly spewed her orange juice.

“Yes. But it’s unusual coding since it includes this graphic of an asterisk here and I can’t see any explanation on the site for what significance an asterisk has. Do you know?”

Blinking her way past the shock of blow jobs written in sixteen-point font, Tempest tried to focus on his question and not wonder if there was actually a technique to good blow jobs. What other key pieces of sex advice had she been missing out on all her adult life?

“I don’t know what the asterisk means. Perhaps it only has significance to the site managers?” She congratulated herself on her calm, intelligent words despite her ridiculous thoughts. “Maybe it means the woman in question is a repeat customer or received a good rating from her dates or something.”

“But why put it there unless the Web site wants customers to see it?” Wes turned toward her, swiveling in his chair until he faced her head-on.

“Valid point.” She half wondered if the asterisk denoted adept blow job givers. “I can put in another call to the MatingGame people and see what they say.”

“What if it denotes the prostitutes in the crowd so that visitors who are aware they’re available can make sure they choose from the right pool of women?”

“I don’t know.” Shrugging, she found it hard to believe MatingGame had anything to do with prostitution. Or was it just that she couldn’t bear for her business instincts to have been so dead wrong? “Did you check out other women who have the asterisk graphic on their page?”

“I’ll put someone on it. I know you don’t want one of your companies to be found guilty of trafficking in sex, but one way or another, I have to get to the bottom of it.”

“I’m just as eager as you are to figure out what’s going on.” She didn’t need her board of directors questioning her business decisions now.

Reaching down to the floor, she picked up her laptop to show him how helpful she could be in his case.

Except that her arm brushed his leg as she moved.

JUST AN ACCIDENT?

Wes might have written off the barely-there touch as unintentional, except that coincidences were piling up as fast as he could count them in this investigation. His murder case just happened to be linked to Tempest Boucher, who seemed to be the target of an intruder bent on destruction. And he still wasn’t comfortable with the fact that her father had died while out with a MatingGame client, same as the victim in Wes’s case.