Indecent Suggestion Read Free

precariously to his lip, then reaching slowly, slowly, oh…so slowly beneath the water to drag a finger along his strong—naked—thigh before closing her hand over his—very naked, very large—
    Uh, where was she? Becca suddenly wondered. She seemed to have gotten off track….
    Oh, yeah. Now she remembered. She’d been thinking of Turner as just a friend and nothing more. Which was how she always thought of him. Always. Really. She did. Honest. It was true. Hey, why would she think of him any other way?
    But not all women thought of him as a friend, she knew. For instance, that brazen redhead Englund had hired just last month. Lucy somebody. Yeah, that was an appropriate name, all right. Except that it should have been spelled Loosey . Talk about hot to trot. And obvious? Please. She was all over Turner like white on rice. The tart. Honestly. What some women would do to attract a man’s attention. Not that Becca cared, of course. Or even noticed, for that matter.
    Um, where was she? She seemed to have gotten off track again….
    Oh, yeah. Now she remembered. She’d been thinking about her good buddy Turner. Yep, that was all he was to her. Her good buddy. And at the moment, he was her agitated good buddy.
    “I’m tellin’ya, Becca,” he said as he began pacing again, “we need to go into business for ourselves. Just you and me. A partnership. This place isn’t suited to us at all.”
    “Maybe not,” she agreed. “But we were lucky to both get hired here. The pay and benefits are good. Well, except for the lousy health care plan. And this isn’t exactly a good time to be looking for work somewhere else. The economy sucks. The holidays are coming. It’s an even worse time to try and start up a business of our own. I mean, where would we get the capital?”
    “Small business loan,” he said readily.
    Becca shook her head. “It’s not a good time to start a business,” she reiterated. “But it is a good time to quit smoking.”
    “Becca…”
    They’d had this discussion before, a million times, in fact, about how they needed to quit smoking if for no other reason than that it was unhealthy. True, they were only twenty-seven and feeling immortal, but they’d both be better off if they quit. And now, with their jobs at stake, they finally had the motivation. If they took the vow to quit smoking together, maybe they’d be successful this time. They could do like in those twelve-step programs and call each other whenever they were at risk of falling off the wagon. Lighting up the wagon. Whatever.
    “Turner, this is a sign that’s it’s finally time for us toquit,” she said. “The habit is unhealthy, it’s expensive, it’s socially unacceptable these days, and now it’s about to cost us our jobs. We have nothing to lose by quitting, and everything to gain. And if we both make a pact to do it together, we can succeed this time. I know we can.”
    “We’ve tried before without success,” Turner reminded her. “We’ve tried going cold turkey, we’ve tried the patch, we’ve tried the gum. Hell, we’ve even tried smacking each other upside the head every time we saw each other light up. But none of it has worked, Becca.”
    “We haven’t tried hypnosis,” she said tentatively.
    He gaped at her and for a moment said nothing. Wow. She’d never seen him speechless before. But maybe this meant he was at least considering it.
    Then, “Oh, no,” he said. He shook his head forcefully, settling his hands on his hips. “No, no, no, no, no. No way. No how. Nuh-uh. Nein. Nyet. Non. ”
    Okay, so maybe he wasn’t at least considering it.
    “I am not going to let someone hypnotize me,” he added unnecessarily. “That’s a load of crap.”
    “It could work,” Becca said, a bit less tentatively this time. “It’s worked for other people. My aunt Louise stopped biting her nails after she was hypnotized.”
    Of course, what Becca didn’t add was that Aunt Louise went in to be hypnotized for