Sex & the Single Girl Read Free Page B

prepared. He’d think about baseball while he spoke with her, if that’s what it took to safeguard against inappropriate thoughts.
    He was going to have a real conversation with Brianne now. A talk that didn’t involve sexual innuendo or past recriminations. A talk that focused solely on his case.
    Chucking his shades in a cupid-covered trash can on the way out the door, Aidan rooted around his brain for enough baseball trivia to stifle all sexual thoughts while he talked to Brianne. As if that were possible.
    He could read Baseball Weekly cover-to-cover and not find enough to distract him from mile-long legs and her I’m-in-charge strut.
    Nevertheless, as he made his way through the lobby toward the offices at the back of the club, he started ticking off slugging percentages for the whole Marlins’ roster.
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    O BVIOUSLY , B RIANNE HAD been immune to the Good Fortune Potion. Having the FBI show up her first night in business definitely equaled bad mojo. Especially when the guy with the badge happened to be the object of an embarrassing ancient crush.
    She wound through the darkened resort lobby on her way back to her office, all the while wondering why the federal investigator assigned to her smarmy stepfather couldn’t have been fifty and balding. Or awoman. Or even a guy who looked remotely like a Fed was supposed to—sharp suit, regulation haircut, clean-shaven.
    Instead, she got all six-foot-four of non-conforming Aidan who looked more like a Hells Angel.
    Sighing, she slipped into the safety of her office and cursed her predilection for rebels. Hadn’t she learned anything from dating that psycho guitarist in New York? Sure, his tortured music had appealed to her as a fellow social outsider, but maybe she should have taken the electric-blue highlights in his hair at face value. Jimmy had been out of control.
    Not bothering to flip on the light, Brianne checked her monitors and slid out of her shoes, padding silently around the glass-and-mirror studio in her bare feet. Summer had puzzled over how anyone could work in an environment so coldly sterile, but Brianne had never been one to reveal too much of herself. She preferred her remote haven to the raucous party taking shape on monitor number one.
    She turned up the volume on the video feed from the stage camera in the Moulin Rouge Lounge. The floor show was just getting underway with dancers in white-feathered headdresses that were far more elaborate than their skimpy costumes. Yet as Brianne absorbed the images of half-dressed women striking deliberately erotic poses, all she could think of was the even more enticing video in her possession.
    The archived footage of Aidan Maddock prowling around Honeymoon Heaven.
    Assuring herself she only wanted to look at it for a minute, Brianne flicked the appropriate switches on hercontrol panel until the cupid quarters flashed up on the main screen. The gilded white room was vacant now.
    Maybe Aidan had realized Club Paradise was exactly what the new ownership purported—a legitimate business out to recoup the losses of its former incarnation. All the women involved in rejuvenating the scandal-mired resort either wanted a chance to make back the money they’d lost when the Rat Pack left town, or they wanted an opportunity to prove themselves career-wise. Some of them were hoping for a little of both.
    Brianne rewound the archived footage until she found the moment Aidan entered the room—only about five minutes before she’d discovered him. She smiled in spite of herself as she watched him in action. Instead of breaking out his fingerprint kit or high-tech phone tap equipment, Agent Maddock had pumped six quarters into the hospitality cabinet to earn himself a Milky Way bar that was probably a year old.
    Then, as if testing the mattress, he’d bounced on the heart-shaped bed for a minute before peering into every nook and cranny of the saccharin-sweet accommodations.
    Her gaze