Avril Tremayne - Kiss Don’t Tell

It’s going to be ever so hard to keep this secret!

David wants Lane and she wants him back. But to a known lothario like him, how will Lane ever measure up in the bedroom? With just one disastrous sexual encounter to her name, Lane knows she needs help in that department, and fast—before David loses interest.

So when Adam, her best mate’s brother (with his own impressive reputation), agrees to her bizarre proposal, she’s ready to learn everything he has to offer about how to please a guy in bed. But as she soon discovers, there is no textbook for love …

Kiss Don’t Tell

Avril Tremayne

Contents

Cover

Blurb It’s going to be ever so hard to keep this secret! David wants Lane and she wants him back. But to a known lothario like him, how will Lane ever measure up in the bedroom? With just one disastrous sexual encounter to her name, Lane knows she needs help in that department, and fast—before David loses interest. So when Adam, her best mate’s brother (with his own impressive reputation), agrees to her bizarre proposal, she’s ready to learn everything he has to offer about how to please a guy in bed. But as she soon discovers, there is no textbook for love …

Title Page Kiss Don’t Tell Avril Tremayne

Author Bio AVRIL TREMAYNE Avril Tremayne took the circuitous route to becoming a writer, via careers in nursing, teaching, public relations and – most recently – global aviation. She hung up her corporate hat in 2013 after returning to her home city of Sydney, Australia, following a three-year stint in the Middle East, turned her mind to becoming a full time author, and has been writing madly ever since. When she’s not reading or writing, Avril can generally be found dining to excess, drinking wine, talking about travel, and obsessing over shoes.

Dedication For Kya and Adam – who had the good sense to fall in love and give the world Matilda Rose

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Excerpt

Copyright

AVRIL TREMAYNE

Avril Tremayne took the circuitous route to becoming a writer, via careers in nursing, teaching, public relations and – most recently – global aviation.

She hung up her corporate hat in 2013 after returning to her home city of Sydney, Australia, following a three-year stint in the Middle East, turned her mind to becoming a full time author, and has been writing madly ever since.

When she’s not reading or writing, Avril can generally be found dining to excess, drinking wine, talking about travel, and obsessing over shoes.

For Kya and Adam – who had the good sense to fall in love and give the world Matilda Rose

CHAPTER ONE

He was late.

Thirty minutes late.

Late enough for her to wonder if he’d changed his mind and wasn’t coming.

Lane tried to get her head around the fact that she may need to go back to the drawing board and find someone else for the job, but she couldn’t bring herself to face that possibility. It had seemed like fate, the way things had fallen so quickly into place and presented Adam Quinn as the answer to her dilemma; she couldn’t give up on fate yet.

Instead, she recalculated how long it would take him to drive from his house in super-cool Newtown to her house in not-quite-so-cool Mascot at this time of night. Maybe longer than the fifteen or twenty minutes she’d initially thought—especially if he’d got stuck in traffic. That happened sometimes, when people were driving to her place; it was one of the downsides of living near Sydney Airport.

Maybe he wasn’t even coming from home. Maybe he was coming from some far-flung construction site, where he’d been bricking a wall or laying concrete or … or whatever it was that builders did. There were lots of reasons he could be running late that had nothing to do with standing her up.

And anyway, she knew he’d turn up because his sister Sarah had said he would. Sarah could get any guy to do anything she asked—and she’d assured Lane that was doubly true of her big brother, who’d been like a one-man vigilante squad smoothing her path in life ever since she’d been born. Sarah had promised she’d laid it all out for Adam and that he not only knew the score, he’d already agreed to the score as well. Tonight was just a formality. Signatures on the page. Therefore he—would—turn— up !

‘So—stop—freaking—out!’ she ordered herself.

But despite the stern order, and the cool-headed reassurances she’d given Sarah and her other best friend Erica when she’d shared her grand plan with them last night, she was finding it almost impossible to subdue her roiling insides now the moment was upon her. As evidenced by her hands—always the most reliable clue to her state of mind—which were clenching and unclenching. She wiggled her fingers, trying to ease the coiling tension in them, but it seemed a lost cause.

She looked around her living room, checking one last time that nothing was out of place, taking a series of deep, silent breaths in an effort to calm herself down.

She hated being nervous. Hated nerves . Had perfected the art of not letting them show, because the dithery fluttering of them made her look like an unsettled flamingo.

Logical, rational financial economists weren’t supposed to look like fluttery flamingos. They weren’t supposed to pace floors. Or chew fingernails. Or clench their hands into fists. Logical, rational financial economists stayed unemotional and invulnerable as they crunched numbers and analysed data and predicted market trends with level-headed precision.

That was how she’d approached drawing up the contract for tonight, how she’d prepared the checklist for each of them to review before the contract was signed. Rationally, unemotionally, with a level, invulnerable head. Because she would not be vulnerable. Not ever, ever, ever again. And okay, that was two more evers than required, which didn’t suggest a lack of emotion, which meant she had to work harder to get herself under control. Like now.

Maybe taking one more look at the checklist would do the trick. Checklists always soothed her.

She walked swiftly to her briefcase and slid out the relevant paper-clipped pages. Three of them. Neat. Error-free. Black type on white paper.

She drew in another one of her silent, secret, calming breaths as she skimmed the introductory description of Adam Quinn she’d compiled from the details Sarah had provided, even though she already knew it by heart:

• twenty-nine years old

• works for AQHP, a small architectural construction company

• no unmanageable character flaws unless you consider ‘obscene’ (Sarah’s word) self-confidence a problem

• no disgusting habits

• obsessively clean

• attractive but with a few rough edges

• not a psychopath—underlined, because Erica and Sarah’s chief concern had been that Lane would end up with one of those.

Sarah had summed him up as ‘the quintessential alpha male’, with hordes of women making booty calls with impressive frequency. When Lane had told Sarah she didn’t really believe in the concept of a ‘quintessential’ alpha male, Sarah had laughed her head off and told Lane she’d change her mind within five minutes of meeting her brother.