My Secret Fantasies
Behind him, inside the house, Damien heard a noise.
A soft shuffle.
And suddenly, he was less interested in what Violet had to say and more interested in who might have overheard the conversation.
“I’ll let Miranda know,” he assured his visitor, stepping back and gripping the door. “Have a good night.”
Smiling, Violet said all the things that a “nice” girl would in taking her leave. Damned if he didn’t wonder what she really wanted to say to him, if indeed Miranda’s character on Gutsy Girl was her secret role model. No doubt there was more to Violet Whiteman than met the eye.
As he closed the door, he stood still. Listening.
Soft footsteps retreated up the stairs to the second floor. Was it wrong of him to hurry so he could catch Miranda in the act?
“Nice girl?” he called as he moved toward the back of the house near the staircase. “She must not know about the eavesdropping habit.”
He arrived at the base of the stairs in time to see her bare feet stop midway up. Miranda stood with her back to him, a blanket thrown around her shoulders like a shawl and a pair of silky turquoise pajama bottoms covering her legs.
She turned.
Her dark curls were clipped at the back of her head, her hair short enough that half of it sprang free to fall in her eyes. Beneath the blanket she wore a dark tank top, and he was pretty sure that was all. The waistband of her pajama pants was rolled down to just above her hips, a line of skin visible where her top ended and the bottoms started.
The snake’s eye in her belly-button ring winked at him in the half-light of a hall sconce.
Miranda lifted her chin. “I wanted to make sure whoever was at the door wasn’t here because of Stretch.”
“Because of what?”
“Stretch. That’s what I’ve been calling Tallulah’s foal in my mind.” She tugged the ends of the blue throw blanket tighter around her, covering up the bare skin at her midsection. “That little foal was the first thing I thought of when the doorbell rang.”
“Me, too.” And how strange that their lives and thoughts had synced so quickly. He would have never envisioned that kind of compatibility between him and any woman a few days ago, especially not a Hollywood runaway who’d blown into his life like a gale-force wind. “Violet was only here so she could see you. She had a camera.”
“I’m not much for photo ops.” Shaking her head with a rueful smile, Miranda sagged back against the banister and slid down to sit on a stair. “Especially not after the way that show treated me.”
He moved toward her but didn’t climb the steps. He dropped onto a tread below her. Still, the dim light and confines of the stairs—a wall on one side and the banister on the other—made for an intimate setting. Or maybe that was just because she was in his house, wrapped in his blanket, wearing pajamas.
That definitely could have been part of it.
“It’s some kind of competition?” He’d never heard of Gutsy Girl until yesterday and hadn’t found time to look it up online.
“There are a lot of team and individual challenges similar to what you might go through at boot camp. The show invited a bunch of diva-type women to go on it, minor celebs from other reality shows, along with a couple of ‘regular women’ like me to compete for the grand prize. Audiences had fun watching the high-maintenance women fall in the mud or burst into hysterics over climbing a rope.”
“And you somehow won by making friends?” Damien peered up at her, surprised to discover her thigh was so close to his cheek.
Close enough that he could lean over and kiss her right there through the turquoise silk that featured—he now realized—a subtle print of trapeze-swinging monkeys. Okay, maybe it wasn’t subtle. He just hadn’t noticed it before.
She leaned forward on her elbows, stirring the air just enough that the scent of her soap or shampoo teased his nose and drew him nearer.
“You have to form alliances along the way and play that whole social mind game.” Shrugging, she lost the blanket that had been around her shoulders. It slid down her back to rest on the step beside her. “But I’m not good at stuff like that, so I just concentrated on winning challenges and being myself. I guess some critics saw that as some kind of nefarious strategy. I think Hollywood is more comfortable with reality-game players who plot their approach openly and share their thoughts with viewers. I didn’t share much of anything when the camera was on me, so now—because I won—I’m somehow seen as an evil schemer.”
His eyes drank in the sight of her bare shoulders in the dark tank top, the graceful lines of her arms and neck an unexpected visual feast that had his mouth watering. He wanted to see more. To touch more. Taste any part of her he possibly could. With heat simmering in his veins, he lifted himself up to the step beside her and retrieved the fallen blue cashmere. Hardly thinking about what he was doing, he wrapped it around her again.