As Hot As It Gets Page 3
Crazy.
That’s exactly what he was if he let this go on for another second. He’d come to Claire’s room because he’d been so full of nervous energy he hadn’t known what else to do. And he’d truly felt bad about slamming the door in her face. He’d hoped—and still did—that he could send her on her way with no hard feelings. Maybe offer her a free week’s stay at the Fantasy Ranch, which would put plenty of distance between himself and Claire.
Distance was desperately needed right now.
Mason summoned all his willpower and broke away from the kiss, then grasped Claire by the shoulders and put her at arm’s length. He gently slid each of her dress straps back onto her shoulders, covering her delicious breasts as he did so.
She fired him a glare that could have leveled buildings. “I only came here tonight to prove to myself that you’re a lousy lover.”
Now there was the Claire he remembered.
“Why would you need to prove that?”
Her glare turned calculating. “There’s no denying a certain chemistry between us….”
Yeah, the sort of bad chemistry that left unsuspecting bystanders with third-degree burns.
“Let’s just say I have a bit of an overactive fantasy life, and there’s no way you can live up to my fantasies.”
Mason felt a burst of satisfaction that she’d fantasized about him. “If you’re so sure of that, why do you need to prove it to yourself?”
Claire crossed her arms over her chest and expelled a sigh. “My mind and body are not in agreement on the issue.”
He had the same damn problem. “Like I said before, it’s best if you leave. There’s a tropical storm headed this way, and you might be able to fly out tomorrow morning before it hits the island full force.”
“If you want me to leave, you’ll have to have me physically removed.”
Mason thought of Lucy, of how let-down she’d feel if he had her beloved best friend kicked out of Escapade, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. Not yet, anyway. Not until Claire gave him a really good reason to use when he had to justify his actions to Lucy.
“I’m sure you’ll give me a valid reason to do that soon enough. Until then, try to keep your distance from me, and no more showing up at my door—or anywhere else—trying to seduce me.”
Mason turned to the door and opened it, then spun back to Claire to say goodbye. She wore the smug look of a woman who thought she’d won the battle. She was mistaken.
“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” she said.
“No, I’m just smart enough to recognize trouble when I see it.”
Mason stepped out into the hallway. As he closed the door, he caught a glimpse of Claire’s self-satisfied smile, and for no apparent reason, his sense of victory evaporated into thin air.
MASON WAS PROVING TO BE a harder target than Claire had anticipated, but she wasn’t ready to give up. The kiss they’d shared had been more than a little disconcerting because rather than kissing like a dead fish, as she’d hoped he would, Mason’s kissing technique was pretty impressive. Maybe even incendiary.
Or maybe she was just so out of her mind with wanting him that she’d become a poor judge of such things.
Yes. That had to be it.
Claire touched up her lipstick in the bathroom mirror, then once again headed for the Cabana Club. This time, she actually made it out into the hallway without interruption. She made her way outside, where the rain still hadn’t resumed, but storm clouds continued to hover, and the wind whipped her hair into her face as it caused the plants and palm trees to flail about. She hurried along the path to the public area where she’d spotted the bar earlier, a sense of excitement and possibility filling her.
Maybe she’d see someone at the bar who’d make her forget all about Mason. Maybe that was the real reason she’d flown all the way here today. She doubted she could settle for one man, anyway, so it was ridiculous that one man dominated all her fantasies. There’s no way he could live up.
Claire’s standards were too high, her appetite too insatiable, her sense of adventure too strong. Predictability was death, as her father had always said. She blinked away the sudden dampness in her eyes.
Her father, Wilson Elliot, had passed away six months earlier in a car accident, and she still hadn’t gotten used to his absence. She’d been Daddy’s girl—even if Daddy was usually away on business. He’d always been only a phone call away to offer advice or just a listening ear, and he’d always been there to remind her that no one was good enough for his princess.
Claire forced the melancholy thoughts from her mind when she spotted the glow of the Cabana Club sign. Once inside, she brushed her wind-battered hair out of her face with her fingers. She took a seat at the bar and caught the eye of the bartender, a hunky guy with bulging biceps and a blond buzz cut. He nodded a greeting as he poured a blender drink into a glass, and after he’d served it he made his way over to her.
“What’s your pleasure?” he asked with a flirty smile.
“A dry martini.” Claire flashed a halfhearted smile at him, hating that she couldn’t even muster the energy to flirt back.
When he turned away, she stared hard at his body, to no avail. Damn it, she couldn’t even get aroused by such a fine male specimen. And she’d been like this for months. Mason and all the wild fantasies he incited were ruining her sex life, and it had to stop.
A raunchy Prince song was playing over the speaker system. Claire glanced over at the stage and noted that it was vacant. Either the band was on break, or her hopes of watching drunken people dance to Caribbean music were soon to be dashed. Then she spotted a few couples at the edge of the dance floor engaged in the kind of dancing that left little to the imagination regarding what they’d be doing in bed mere hours from now.
What she should have been doing with Mason at that very moment.
How could Mason have turned her down a second time? What, did he have supernatural powers? Maybe he didn’t feel the same animal attraction for her that she felt for him. Maybe she was making an even bigger ass of herself than she feared.
“You look like you need this,” the bartender said when he returned with her martini.
“I need a lot more than a drink to solve my problems,” she said, calculating whether seducing the bartender would be a worthy pursuit.
But try as she might, she just couldn’t do more than appreciate him on an aesthetic level. She may as well have tried to leap tall buildings as get her pulse to quicken over any guy lately.
Except, of course, the one she absolutely didn’t want to pulse and quake over.
The bartender looked over her shoulder and his expression changed from flirtatious to guarded. “Mr. Casey,” he said, all business now, “how can I help you?”
Claire followed his gaze and found a gray-haired man in a white shirt that was open to reveal his hairy chest taking the seat next to hers. She flashed a thin smile at him, hoping he wouldn’t take it as a sign to start hitting on her.
He ignored the bartender’s question and turned his attention to Claire. “You must be Ashley,” he said, placing one hand on her lower back.
Claire shifted her weight away from him, forcing his hand to drop. “No, wrong person.”
“Mr. Casey, I believe Ashley’s been delayed by a few minutes. Why don’t you take a seat over there and have a drink,” the bartender said a little too quickly, nodding at the other side of the bar.
His gaze darted nervously toward Claire, and his flirtatious smile was nowhere in sight.
Claire glanced between the two men, trying to guess what exactly was going on as the guy named Mr. Casey moved to the empty bar stool the bartender had indicated. Who was Ashley, and why had the bartender suddenly gotten so uptight? She sipped her martini and watched other people laughing and flirting across the bar. Normally, she would have been one of those carefree souls, but tonight she must have been giving off bad vibes. Bad, Mason Walker-induced vibes.
A few minutes later, a woman C
laire guessed was Ashley showed up, clad in a black leather mini-dress that was too slutty even for Claire’s taste. After a short conversation with the shirt-button-challenged Mr. Casey, the two left the bar together. Their body language, she noted, was more appropriate for a business deal than a lover’s tryst, and her curiosity was piqued.
She eyed the bartender again but doubted he’d offer any enlightenment. And then it occurred to her that he could be in on whatever business dealings, illegal or otherwise, might have been going on between the suspicious pair.
Was the woman a prostitute? A drug dealer? An inappropriately dressed massage therapist?
Without anyone to answer her questions, Claire got bored with the subject and looked around for other people-watching entertainment, but she’d seen it all a million times. Mating rituals performed with the aid of alcohol, loud music and tight clothes. It all just bored her tonight.
Claire downed the rest of her martini. The festive atmosphere in the bar was bumming her out, and the alcohol hadn’t helped. What she suddenly wanted more than anything was to be curled up on her couch at home, watching old movies and eating a fudge-brownie sundae. Maybe Mason was right that she should leave before the storm hit, cut her losses, give up on curing her case of Mason-itis.
She pushed herself away from the bar and cast one last glance at the bartender, hoping he might get her loins stirring after all. He caught her eye and smiled, and Claire decided on a whim she’d take a risk and give him her room number. What the heck. If he called or dropped in and they still didn’t click, she could tell him to get lost. She found a pen in her bag and wrote her room number on a drink napkin, then turned it around so that the bartender could read it when he came to clear her glass from the bar.
There, now it was in the hands of fate, and she could at least feel like she was being proactive when she went back to her room to sulk. Getting rid of her Mason urges was proving to be a hell of a lot harder than she’d planned.
3
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR interrupted Claire’s perusal of the room-service menu.
“What now?” she muttered, pretty sure Mason hadn’t returned to grant her wish for a night of mediocre sex.
Then she remembered the drink napkin, and her hopes rose. Could it really be possible that something good would happen to her tonight?
A peek through the peephole answered her question with a resounding “no.” Instead of Mason or Hunky Bartender, what she saw was a middle-aged man with a disappearing hairline and an expanded waistline. She’d never seen him before, and he was, coincidentally enough, wearing a raincoat tied at the waist. Claire could only hope he had more clothes on under his than she’d had on under hers.
She considered not answering the door, but curiosity got the best of her. Grabbing a hotel pen from the dresser near the door, she prepared to jab her visitor in the eye if he made any funny moves, then opened the door.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I’ve been a bad boy,” he said, his voice oddly strained. “Are you going to punish me?”
Claire stood there frozen, fully aware that she should be slamming the door at that moment but unable to make her arm move.
When she didn’t speak, Bad Boy’s expression grew a bit hesitant. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Um…” Where, exactly, should she start explaining everything that was wrong with what he’d said?
“I’m sorry, this is my first time, and, um, maybe you need payment first?” The man started fumbling for what Claire assumed was his wallet, but when he opened the waist of his coat, he revealed that he was wearing a man-size diaper. And nothing else.
Claire emitted a sound something like “eek,” and Bad Boy froze, his expression a mixture of confusion and embarrassment.
“Y-you’re not the dominatrix, are you?”
The dominatrix? An image of the woman in the black leather dress came to mind.
“No, I’m not!”
“But the number I got from the bar was for suite number—”
He withdrew a napkin from his pocket and looked at it, then glanced between Claire and the room number on her door. The sight of her drink napkin caused Claire’s stomach to twist into a knot. She was an idiot, and she deserved every bit of this humiliation.
And it was time to get rid of the guy in the diaper. “Wrong room, buddy,” she said, then slammed the door before her urge to turn the pen into a weapon became too strong to resist.
She locked the door for good measure, then stood staring at it for what felt like minutes, trying to make sense of the encounter.
Questions whirred through her head. What was going on here? And whatever it was, did Mason know about it?
In the face of such a bizarre crisis, there was only one person to call. Without stopping to question how she’d explain her room number on the drink napkin, she went to the phone and dialed Lucy’s number. When her best friend answered, Claire relaxed at the familiar sound of her voice.
“Hi, Luc. It’s me.”
“Claire! I’ve been hovering by the phone all afternoon! Why didn’t you call me sooner? I was worried sick.”
Claire winced at the verbal assault. “Because I didn’t feel like listening to you try to talk me out of anything.”
“What do I need to be talking you out of? Claire? What are you up to?”
“I just came here to sleep with Mason, that’s all.”
“That’s what I was afraid of! Why didn’t you talk to me about this ahead of time? Did you hit your head when you had that accident yesterday?”
“No, my neck’s a little stiff, and Daisy’s totaled, but I’m fine.” Claire felt a pang of sadness over her poor, smashed-up Mustang. That event, more than anything else, had convinced her to do whatever it took to make sure she was a victim to no man’s charms, and especially not to Mason’s.
“I’m sorry about your car—I mean, Daisy, but don’t you think your reaction is a little drastic?”
“I thought you wanted me with Mason.”
Lucy sighed into the phone. “I do, but not like this, not as part of some scheme to make yourself forget him.”
Claire felt her face burning. Was she really that obvious? Maybe not to the whole world, but to Lucy, who knew her better than anyone, she was. There was no sense in trying to hide anything from her because she always guessed what was really going on.
“You’re such a romantic, Luc. Not everyone can have what you and Judd have.” Some people, like Claire, just wanted the sense of adventure and possibility that came with being single, and if it meant sacrificing having one true love in order to have her carefree lifestyle, she was pretty sure she could deal with that.
“Of course you can!”
Claire rolled her eyes at the phone. She might as well just accept that Lucy was never going to see eye to eye with her about her lifestyle. Claire loved her job managing the travel agency, loved the opportunities she had to visit exotic places and make love to exotic men, loved never having to deal with the complications that came with long-term boyfriends.
Her life was everything she wanted it to be. Well, almost. Except for her Mason problem.
“We’ve had this argument already, and there’s no point in having it again right now, because Mason has already kicked me out of his suite and told me to leave the resort.”
“No!”
“Well, not in so many words, but he got his point across.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing much,” Claire said, smiling. Lucy would have a conniption fit if she knew the truth.
“Claire…”
“Really! He just wasn’t exactly happy to see me, that’s all. Understandable, given our history.”
“Maybe if you apologized to him—sincerely apologized—”
“Don’t worry, I have a feeling me hanging out at Mason’s resort is going to be the least of his problems after what just happened a few minutes ago.” Claire told Lucy what she suspected was going on at Escapade.
Claire held the phone closer to her mouth and over-enunciated, “A dom-in-a-trix service. Do you think Mason is capable of being involved in something like that?”
“Absolutely not. No way. He’d never—”
“Okay, okay. I thought that’s what you’d say, but I wanted to be sure.”
“Are you sure it’s really a—a dominatrix service? I mean, how do you know?”
Claire explained the incident at the bar followed by the one at her door. “I’m not totally sure, but I’d be willing to bet that’s exactly what’s going on,” she said, happy that she’d managed to tell the story while carefully avoiding any mention of the drink napkin. She couldn’t quite explain how that mix-up had occurred, anyway. It just would have muddied the water.
“Mason’s going to be furious. This could ruin the reputation of his business if word gets out.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, not exactly feeling sorry for Mason, but surprisingly not gleeful either. “He’s going to have to crack down on it right away and try to keep the news of it quiet…. Or who knows, maybe wild rumors about the place are just what he needs to keep business booming.”
“That’s not Mason’s intention. He wants Escapade to be more about luxury and less about sex. He’s not going to like this one bit—you’ve got to tell him right away.”
“Why should I help him? He wouldn’t help me if my life depended on it.”
“You’re not giving him enough credit, and you should help him because it’s the right thing to do. And because it might mend a few fences between you two.”
“I don’t want any mended fences—I just want him to sleep with me.”
“You can’t have one without the other,” Lucy said.
“Believe me, I don’t have to like him to sleep with him, and vice versa. In fact, it’s impossible for me to like such an arrogant, pigheaded—”
“You’re talking about my brother-in-law. I don’t want to hear it.”
Claire rolled her eyes at the phone. “Okay, fine. I see where your loyalty lies.”