Kristin Hardy - My Sexiest Mistake

Ryan let out a nervous laugh. She couldn’t help herself.

Cade raised an eyebrow. “What’s the joke? All I said was that I take what I do seriously. I deal with people who have a certain set of needs and I come in and make sure they get satisfied. It seems pretty worthwhile to me.”

“So you leave satisfied customers behind you?” She lost a beat watching him.

“I do my best. So what do you do, when you’re not hanging around hotel lobbies?” he asked innocently.

“Oh, I spin yarns.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me a good story.”

When Ryan was a child, her family vacationed near a lake in Maine every summer. In early June, the water was still icy cold and there were two ways to approach it: stepping in an inch at a time, or running and jumping in, taking the shock all at once. Ryan had always jumped.

“Let’s go upstairs and I will.”

“Whatever you say, darlin’.” Cade rose and tugged her to her feet. “I’m all yours.”

Dear Reader,

Being a romance writer has been a longtime dream for me. I’m thrilled that it’s come true with the publication of My Sexiest Mistake, my first book for Harlequin’s new Blaze line. I like my sex hot and my writing even hotter, so when I had gorgeous but stubborn Ryan meet her match in sexy hunk Cade, it was easy to steam up the pages. Let the two of them take you on a rollicking ride that starts with mistaken identity and turns into a red-hot love affair that’s true-blue beneath.

Blaze is a line designed to appeal to women who demand more from their relationships and their reading—more steam, more tension, more romance. I’d love to hear what you think of Blaze, and of Ryan and Cade’s tale. Write me at kristinhardy@earthlink.net, or visit www.kristinhardy.com for contests, e-mail chats between characters in My Sexiest Mistake and Blaze-ing excerpts from upcoming books.

Enjoy!

Kristin Hardy

P.S. Don’t forget to check out tryblaze.com!

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my beloved Stephen

Te adoro, amor

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

“ARE THEY HAVING SEX YET?”

Ryan Donnelly jumped for the button that transferred the call from speakerphone to handset. In the stodgy offices of Beckman Markham Corporate Training, the last thing she needed was for her boss to hear a caller talking about sex. She blinked at the gravelly voice barking out of the phone. “Not even a hello today. You must be in a good mood, Helene.”

“Well are they?” her agent persisted.

“You know the plot line calls for a love scene in chapter five.” Ryan sounded evasive even to herself.

“Oh my god, you still haven’t done it.”

“I’m going to get to it.” Ryan strove to seem placating rather than panicked.

“Get to it? Your final manuscript is due in exactly fifteen days. You’d postpone my trip to the E.R. for hypertension and heart failure if you could be a little more specific.”

Ryan looked uneasily around her office. “Helene, I’ve got a class to teach in ten minutes. Can’t we talk about this later?”

“Do I need to remind you what’s at stake, here?” Ryan could picture the redhead sitting at her speakerphone, the cigarette in her hand sending a thin ribbon of smoke to the ceiling. “A legal contract. The other three books in the series. Your early retirement from corporate training. Your reputation. My reputation, and—not to be overlooked—my commission. You know I’ve had my eye on that hot tub.”

“Helene, I’m trying.”

“For heaven’s sake, Ryan, the hard part is done. You’ve got most of the book written. All you have to do is get them between the sheets for a little nooky.”

“A lot of nooky, Helene.” Ten to fifteen pages, last time she’d checked. Ryan tried to stem the rising tide of anxiety. “The scene doesn’t want to come out. I keep trying, but I just can’t write it. Oh, why didn’t you let me stay in sweets?” Her voice rose in a wail of frustration.

“Let you stay in sweets? I should be beaten for letting you stay in sweets as long as I did,” Helene rasped, as a crack in the background signaled she was opening one of her ever-present Diet Cokes. “Eight of them, two awards. You’re the best thing out there. You should be writing single-title books, but I can’t get you there because everybody wants to see how you’ll handle the sex. It was a miracle I managed to get them to consider a multibook deal,” she grumbled.

For the past four years Ryan had been happily writing sweets in her spare time, short, snappy romances with nothing more provocative than a lip lock or two. Each time she sold a book she thought that this time, finally, she might be able to quit the day job she loathed and write full-time, but it never quite happened that way. She felt a distinct pang of longing for each of her eight books, lovely little tales that required nothing explicit, just some impure thoughts and a few kisses. Kissing she could do. Kissing she had done, with her own lips. At least, oh, well, half a dozen times, anyway. Sex was largely a black hole to her, enlivened by one memorably unfortunate outing.

Write what you know, she’d learned in her courses at Brown. Unfortunately, sex was something she didn’t know. One fact was indisputable, though—the hook of the book she had sold was supposed to be hot sex between the hero and the heroine. All she had to do was finish the book, get the contract, and write full-time. If she screwed it up, though, there was no telling how long she’d be condemned to teach corporate management classes.

Helene heaved a long-suffering sigh down the phone. “Ryan, you have to do this. Now is not the time to get writer’s block. Do you at least have a draft?”

Ryan thought of the miserable paragraph that she’d wrung out the night before. Normally, her prose galloped onto the screen. Okay, well, there were times it trotted and times it downright dragged its feet, but it at least came.

If only her characters could.

Helene decoded her noncommittal humph for the negative that it was. “Come on, kid, just pour yourself a glass of wine and think about the last time you had really hot, sweaty sex. You do remember sex, right?”

Ryan made a vague noise and Helene’s voice sharpened. “How long has it been since you’ve slept with someone, anyway?”

“Oh, a while,” she answered evasively, nervously straightening a stack of files on her desk.

“How long?”

“Um, eight years. Or so.” Ryan’s voice sounded thin even to her own ears.

“Eight years?” Helene’s voice rose incredulously. “Since you were twenty-one? Eight years?”

“A little less,” Ryan said defensively. “I’ve been busy…” her voice trailed off.

“Ryan. Honey. You’re gorgeous. You’re in the prime of your life. What are you waiting for?”

“I just haven’t had too much luck in the dating department.”

“You’ve been hiding away teaching Quark classes. No wonder you can’t write about sex. You probably don’t even remember what it’s like. Sweetheart, we need to find you a man,” Helene said decisively.

Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “Helene, you are not going to set me up with a sex partner.”

“Ryan, you’re writing a Private Moments romance. You don’t just need some Joe to have sex with, you need a sex god.”