CHAPTER ONE
It was Lissa Wilde’s birthday.
Her twenty-seventh, if you were counting, which she was not, and the celebration was in full swing.
A perfect celebration. All a girl could want was right within easy reach.
A gaily wrapped box of See’s Truffles. The one-pound box because, what the hell, this was a party.
A long-handled spoon standing in a just-opened pint of Cherry Garcia.
And a vibrator.
Not just any vibrator, but a pink one that had Pleasure Pleaser printed all over the tissue paper that enclosed it… Well, that enclosed it once you got it out of its plain brown wrapper.
Lissa patted the vibrator. “Soon,” she said. Then she tore the wrapping paper off the box of truffles.
What could be better than a birthday party planned by the person who knew the birthday girl best?
“Who, indeed?” Lissa said, fingers hovering over the chocolates.
Which would it be? White? Dark? Milk? Lissa shut her eyes, plucked a chocolate from the box, started to take a ladylike bite, thought the hell with it and popped the whole thing into her mouth.
Yum.
Delicious.
Amazingly delicious, she decided, and she swallowed, took another piece from the box and bit into it.
A perfect party.
That was the thing about being the only guest. You could concentrate on what really mattered.
“You hear that, Pleasure Pleaser?” she said.
The vibrator didn’t answer. Not that she’d expected it to. In fact, that was the thing about vibrators. They knew their place in life. They never had to be told what to do or how to do it. Or so she’d heard.
The truth was, this was her first sex toy.
She’d walked by a shop just off Hollywood Boulevard maybe ten times before she’d made up her mind to go inside. She’d thought about wearing dark glasses and a pull-down hat and maybe even a trench coat until she’d noticed women going in and out of the place, not hesitating, not in disguise, and she’d taken a breath, opened the door and found herself in, well, in a sex toy wonderland.
Pleasure Pleaser had been in a case along with at least a dozen others, and by the time the salesclerk had finished taking them out, one by one, turning them on and pointing out the high points of each, not only had Lissa been relaxed, she’d also been giggling.
Selecting one had been about as difficult as selecting one chocolate. The only certainty had been that she absolutely didn’t want the one that was supposed to look like a penis.
For one thing, it made her burst out laughing.
For another, the less the thing looked like anything to do with a man, the better.
“I know what you mean,” the salesgirl had said. “Who needs a man to get between you and ground zero?”
Lissa ate another truffle.
Who needed that, indeed? The best thing about a vibrator was that after it did its job, it went away until the next time you wanted it.
But then, one way or another, so did men.
Lissa scooped up a spoonful of ice cream and sucked it off the spoon.
“Not ladylike,” one of the nannies who’d raised her would have said.
“Man, that is sexy,” one of the idiots she’d dated would have said.
Hell. What it was, was the best way to savor the taste of the Cherry Garcia. Nothing more, nothing less.