Bravo Unwrapped Read Free

and six-pack abs. Not terribly imaginative, but effective.
    TopMale didn’t have Alpha ’s market share, or its cachet. After all, Alpha managed to be all things to a wide cross-section of men. From bon vivants to backwoods survivalists to your everyday Joe with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other, they all bought Alpha. Still, the upstart TopMale did have a solid readership, a readership that kept growing….
    B.J. flipped the magazine open to the page Giles had marked for her. She drank her cold latte and began reading.
    Manhattan Man-Eater
    Well, okay. A reasonably catchy title. Then she read the byline: by Wyatt Epperstall.
    The last time she’d seen Wyatt was the day four months ago when she’d told him she wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.
    Her hand began to shake. Cool milk and espresso sloshed on her wrist and stained her pink blouse.
    He wouldn’t.
    He couldn’t….
    Oh, but he had.
    You know her when you see her. She’s tall and she’s smart and she has great legs. Great legs and killer shoes on her narrow, perfect feet. You know the kind of shoes I mean. Shoes with fancy Italian names and price tags to match, shoes with high, pointed heels that have you dreaming of what it might be like if she wore them and took a walk on your chest.
    If you’re lucky, she might do just that.
    She makes the rules. And she makes sure you live by them. That is, until she’s through with you—which, believe me, will be sooner than you think.
    Okay, big guy. I know what you’re muttering right about now. No driven, focused, powerful steamroller career woman for you. You don’t go for that type.
    Let me tell you. You would. You could. In the dark heart of every man lies a yearning for a dangerous woman he cannot control. She is that woman. She could have you if she wanted you. One glance from those frosty gray-blue eyes and you are her slave.
    In bed, she—
    B.J. shut her—admittedly—gray-blue eyes. But shutting them didn’t do any good. When she opened them again, the damn article was still there—the article about her written by her sleazeball ex-boyfriend, Wyatt. Oh, she should have known better than ever to get involved with him.
    He’d seemed so… nice. So harmless. So sweet, really. At first, anyway. But then the niceness began to get on her nerves. The sweetness got cloying. She found herself doing what she always did with men she’d dated in the past six years: she compared him to—
    No. Not the B-word. She wasn’t thinking about B— No way. No more. Not today.
    And she really, truly had to face it: she was good at a lot of things. Especially her job. But men? Not her forte. Every time she tried with one—which wasn’t all that often, no matter what Wyatt Epperstall wantedevery TopMale subscriber to think…whenever she tried with one, it always ended badly.
    Just like it had with Buck.
    Oh, God. Buck…
    And there. She’d done it. Thought his whole first name, again—twice—not thirty seconds after promising herself she wouldn’t.
    Note to self: Do not think of B.
    Second note to self: No. More. Boyfriends. Ever.
    And really, she should never have taken that big sip of latte. Because, for some reason, her swallowing mechanism seemed to be malfunctioning. Her stomach was rising.
    B.J. knocked over her chair as she stood. The latte went flying. It hit the floor and splattered—across the floor tiles, up the wall. She glanced frantically around.
    Oh, God. What she wouldn’t give right now for the corner office—the one her father never used, the one with its own damn bathroom, for pity’s sake.
    She spotted her wastebasket in the corner. What else could she do? Making hideous gagging noises, she staggered toward it….
    Â 
    Good thing she had Giles. Once she was through ruining both her blouse and the wastebasket, she buzzed him and he came right in.
    He shut the