Mandy Makes Her Mark by Ruby Laska Read Free Book Online

for nice after having someone like Luna?
    â€œI’m taking you to bed now,” Tad murmured, already moving, walking across the tiled floor to the bedroom alcove lit by a single flickering lantern. Someone had been here earlier to light the candle, protected by the hurricane glass, which now cast flickering shadows around the cozy small room. White linens had been folded back invitingly on the bed, and Tad laid Mandy down gently before pulling the cotton sheet up over her.
    But before he let the fabric fall against her body, he looked at her long and hard. “You,” he said softly, his gaze lingering on her softly rounded curves. “Gorgeous.”
    Mandy knew she should protest. Knew he was lying, or at least, being polite in a way that stretched the truth beyond credibility, but she was suddenly in some sort of sated near-coma. Every cell in her body hummed with pleasure; every muscle was relaxed almost to the point of paralysis. Her hair spread out on the pillow and the white sheets drifted down like feathers.
    Tad got into the bed next to her and she rolled against him without a thought, into his arms, into the warmth of his skin. She tucked her head under his chin and twined her legs with his. He slid his hand along her back until it came to rest on her hip, claiming her.
    I really ought to leave , Mandy meant to say, but somehow the barrier blurred between what she should do and what she really wanted. Her eyelashes fluttered against his chest as her eyes drifted shut. Her breathing slowed in time to his. She really ought to leave, but she wanted nothing more in the world than to stay, and her last thought before slipping into a dream was that maybe she’d done the right thing for far too long.

CHAPTER SIX
    Mandy awoke to the muffled sound of Bach’s oboe sonata in C Major. Her own personal alarm tone, a favorite since she’d been third chair oboe in the Willingham High School band.
    Mandy extricated herself carefully from the bed, refusing to look over at the slumbering figure on the other side, and padded across the bungalow to where her purse lay abandoned on the floor. She turned off her phone alarm and made her way back gingerly to the bed, the events of the prior evening rushing back to her. Six-thirty in the morning on Cupid Island, and she was naked as the day she was born, shivering and wondering exactly what had gotten into her the night before.
    It had to be some sort of island madness. She’d slept with her sister’s boyfriend. Tad Eckholm, he of the perfect proportions and thousand-yard-stare, the face behind the Clarity For Men skincare line and the Drive Like You Mean It campaign for an Italian sports sedan. Mandy had the tousled hair, the pleasant throb, and the love bites on her neck to prove that she’d done something reckless and rash on the eve of an important shoot, and now she had to get out of here fast, before Tad woke up and came to his senses.
    All that mattered right now was the shoot. Later, much later, like on the plane back to California—perhaps Mandy could get out on an earlier flight, once the shoot was wrapped up—she could let herself dwell on how absurdly she had behaved. Not to mention figure out what momentary lapse of sanity had caused Tad to make love to her in the first place. And then would come the mortification of their working relationship, and confessing to Luna, and…and all of that.
    Her face hot with mortification, Mandy tugged her clothes on, finding her bra under a wicker chair and her pants against the bedroom wall. She searched for her shoes for a full minute before remembering that they’d left them on the wooden stairs to the beach last night.
    She took a last look at Tad. He was sleeping soundly, his arm slung across the bed where, only moments earlier, Mandy had been. He had a sweet, innocent expression on his face, a faint smile that seemed to suggest he was having a pleasant dream.
    Mandy shuddered, her