HiddenDepths

Angela
Claire

Evan Reynolds
likes his sex straightforward and without strings attached. An anonymous
hook-up is just his style. So the hot quickie with the high-class escort he
hired to meet him at one of his father’s parties suits him just fine.

The only problem
is she’s not a call girl.

Supremely aloof
executive assistant Andrea Prentiss has shot down passes from guys in a dozen
different languages. So when she realizes big-money-on-both-sides-of-the-family
Evan thinks she’s a whore he’s ordered up like a flower arrangement, it should
have prompted one of her most disdainful set-downs.

Instead, it makes
the ice princess hot.
When Andrea gets together with
Evan, her cool façade melts away and his laid-back front starts to show its
possessive, alpha-male Reynolds roots.

But Andrea isn’t who she seems. Her thaw is interrupted
after a chance meeting identifies her resemblance to a long-lost heiress. She
disappears without a word only to reappear months later. She’s in trouble, he’s
confused and they’re both exploring hidden depths.

A
Romantica®
erotic suspense romance
from Ellora’s Cave

Evan Reynolds lived in a lighthouse on his own private
island. And that wasn’t even the most interesting thing about him. The most
interesting thing about him was that he had somehow managed to get past her
usual defenses. And he’d done it within five minutes of meeting her.

Andrea Prentiss only hoped that wasn’t because he had
thought she was a whore—and treated her like one.

She contemplated the candy in the hospital waiting-room
vending machine. Not one to indulge, she nonetheless knew when life merited a
chocolate bar. Her powerful boss Michael Reynolds was lying flat on his back
from a gunshot wound and her recent hook-up, his brother Evan, was glowering at
her in the presence of his whole family—now was certainly the time.

The only pertinent question was nuts or no nuts.

She stared through the glass of the candy machine at her
choices but saw only
him
. Evan Reynolds. He was handsome. All five
Reynolds brothers were, in surprisingly different ways, their only similarity
being that they were all tall and lean. Unlike Michael, who was black-haired
and blue-eyed, Evan had brown hair, mahogany she believed it was called, with
green eyes and a healthy tan from what she knew was a life spent a lot of the
time outdoors. And he was younger than Michael. No more than twenty-eight or
so. If Michael Reynolds emanated stern power, Evan exuded more of a laid-back
vibe. When Andrea met him at his father’s party, he’d been dressed in a sweater
and chinos, while every other guy there had on a tux. But rather than looking
out of place or underdressed, he looked completely at ease and in control. As
if he didn’t give a damn. And from what she knew of Evan Reynolds, that was
certainly true. Big money on both sides of the family did that to a person. She
should certainly know.

Andrea was no more than quietly amused when Evan seemed to
think she was someone else at the party. A blind date had been her immediate
take on it, although why a man as good-looking as this one would need a blind
date was a mystery to her. As he hustled her up the staircase at the Reynolds
mansion, though, she detected something more urgent, and blatant, than a blind
date. By the time he had her behind closed doors in a guest bedroom, throwing condoms
on a table and ordering her to strip, she had figured out what was really going
on.

Evan Reynolds had mistaken her for a whore. One he had
apparently ordered up to be delivered to the party like a flower arrangement or
a tray of petit fours.

It should have made her disdainful, or at the very least
indifferent. But it didn’t. Incredibly enough, as she stood there watching him
take his clothes off without any pretense, it made her—
hot
. Something Andrea
Prentiss had never in her life been accused of.

On the contrary, she was cold. An ice princess. A dozen guys
had called her that to her face and countless more undoubtedly did so behind
her back.

But when Evan Reynolds skimmed his long, warm fingers along
her collarbone and kissed her, the stab of longing she felt had taken her
completely off guard. So much so that he was naked, a huge erection pointing
right at her, before she realized how tricky it was going to be to extricate
herself from the situation.

And even more shockingly, how much she didn’t want to.

* * * * *

Evan Reynolds could certainly kiss, although she didn’t have
much to compare it with, admittedly. Her lips still tingled from the light
exploration of his tongue and she was tempted to put a finger up to them just
to make sure they were really hers. But the thought came and went as she
realized he was naked now. How did a person undress so very fast?

“I haven’t been laid in quite some time and you are just
what the doctor ordered.”

She stared, open mouthed, at his naked body and most
especially his erect cock. God, it was beautiful. He was beautiful, tanned all
over, attesting to the fact that he must sunbathe in the nude on that private
island of his. All lean muscle and sleek angles, he looked like some Greek god
statue from her long-ago childhood.

Years of erecting a frosty exterior as the “Perfect Miss
Prentiss” failed her in the face of something as elemental as this naked man.
She wanted to touch him. She had to touch him. Bringing her hands to his slim
hips and then in front, she clasped his cock slowly, lightly, looking down at
it. Silky, smooth, but so very hard, it pulsed in her hand. He sucked in a
breath, the side of his mouth going up in a sexy half-smile, as she instinctively
tugged at the head, swirling a bead of pre-cum around it with her thumb, before
he batted her hand away with a laugh. “None of that. I can’t take it right
now.”

He tore off a condom package from the string and ripped it
open. “Take your dress off. I like to fuck naked, if that’s okay with you.” He
rolled the condom on, the gesture practiced and no-nonsense but a turn-on
nonetheless, and she watched, not quite admitting that she might go through
with this but not quite able to stop it. Not yet anyway.

He looked up, surprised apparently that she hadn’t followed
orders. “Come on, babe. We’ll have more time for playing around later at the
hotel. We’ll have all night. Now I want up your pussy. Right now.”

She suppressed a smile. Well, that was rather direct.

Sex was a perfectly normal facet of life. Guarded as she
was, even she knew that. It happened all around her. The instinct for
propagation of the species was very powerful, especially in the male half of
the population, who never had to actually do the painful part of the
propagating anyway, just the pleasurable part. And humans had long ago gotten
around Mother Nature on that score in any case, sex having little to do with
propagating for most people these days, as evidenced even now by this intense
man’s politically correct donning of the appropriate attire for safe sex.

So sex was certainly nothing to be surprised by or dismayed
at. Men tried to pick Andrea up all the time. And whether it was for dinner or
drinks or a play, she knew that what they were really thinking about, what they
really wanted was this, this moment, which was why she always cut them off at
the pass. To keep from getting to this moment. She didn’t want it. Not for
propagating or anything else. She never had. But suddenly she was here, with a
man asking for what he really wanted, demanding it and expecting her to give
it. No games, no sophisticated word play, just stripped-down desire, naked as
he was.

Who would have known that would turn her on?

Of course it didn’t hurt that the man asking was gorgeous as
sin.

“What?” Evan asked when, again, she didn’t obey.

She shook her head and her hand went to the side zipper
under one arm of her dress, sliding it down, taking a deep breath, feeling as
if she were another person. Not Perfect Miss Andrea Prentiss and certainly not
that long-ago girl whose name she hesitated to say even in the privacy of her
own head. Right at this moment she was yet another girl. Someone else entirely.
The woman Evan Reynolds wanted, and wanted now.

The zipper of the dress went down smoothly and she stepped
out of it, feeling more exposed than her modest underthings would suggest. She
had never stripped in front of a man. Not voluntarily anyway.

He rewarded her with a smile, making her heart beat faster.
“Look at you.” Her nipples peeked through the white silk of her bra and got
even harder at his perusal. Her panties and thigh-high stockings were white
too, her pink heels still on. Despite the demure façade, she had never felt so
decadent.

He slipped one arm around her waist, the other pulling down
a bra strap to bare her breast, and then he tongued the tip of it, sucking on
the nub until it was wet and throbbing. Oh God that felt unbelievable,
weakening her knees, the sensation was so strong. He did the same to her other
breast while she let out slight, almost stifled groans, her hands on his broad,
naked shoulders where his skin was hot to the touch.

He pushed her back onto the bed abruptly and then climbed
over her, ripping her panties off as he did, the jerk of it causing her to
shudder with pleasure. He flung them to the floor and kneed her thighs open,
looking down while he ran a careful hand between her legs where she could feel
she was wet. His hands were big, with long fingers roughened from the manual
labor she knew that he, unlike anyone else in his family, reveled in. It was so
intense she closed her eyes, embarrassed by his perusal. But just as she was
savoring the light touch between her legs, so different from her own, he pulled
his hand away and without further ado or warning shoved his erection almost all
the way inside her in one hard thrust. She should have expected it, given the
circumstances, but the unfamiliar flood of sensation as he fondled her had made
her slow on the uptake and she hadn’t. She gasped, her eyes snapping open and
her palms shooting up to his shoulders, not to push him off so much as to halt
him from any further sudden moves.

“Christ, you’re incredibly tight,” he muttered, his green
eyes narrowed and intense as he watched her. His eyelashes were long and dark
and she could see the strain in his expression before he buried his face in her
neck, nuzzling her. He was staying still as she got used to the feel of him,
huge inside her.

“It’s been a long time,” she admitted, even as she was relaxing
underneath him, his cock sliding a little deeper as he groaned.

It had been a long time and she had never felt this. This
full, throbbing, pleasurable possession.

“You’re not a regular?” he whispered in her ear.

She could barely decipher words at this moment, let alone
think to weigh them. “A regular what?”

Her legs parted farther and she kissed his cheek, loving the
salty, hot taste of him, a little rough against her tongue from an incipient
five o’clock shadow.

“You okay now?” he asked breathlessly as he studied her face
again and she leaned up to kiss him on his mouth, which was softer than she
would have expected given all the hardness of him elsewhere.

Taking that as her answer apparently, he pulled out almost
to the tip of his long cock and then thrust in again, slowly, and then again,
with more purpose, beginning a relentless flexing of his hips toward a goal
that happily brought her along for the ride.

God, it felt so good to be underneath him. Sharp bursts of
pleasure shot through her with his every lunge and her fingertips wound in his
hair as they kissed, his hands firmly underneath her, tilting her up to take
each inch of him. Despite his obvious need, his obvious desire, he was gentle
with her, or gentler than she had ever experienced. His grip of her bottom was
caressing, not bruising, and his kiss exploratory, coaxing not conquering. But
as gentle as he was being, he was still taking her, definitely incredibly
possessing her, and it wasn’t long before they were sweaty, their bodies moving
against one another in some mesmerizing rhythm.

It could have lasted a half an hour or it could have lasted
two minutes. Time had lost all context for her.

When he ground his hips into her one last time, she watched
as he came, arching his neck back with a deep, satisfied groan, and she came
too, but quietly, no audible corollary to his climax other than a quick intake
of breath. Collapsing on top of her at first, he then rolled over before
getting up from the bed and pulled the condom off, tossing it in the
wastebasket. He turned back to her. “Do you come?”

She sat up slowly. “What?”

“Do you come or do you not want me to even try?”

She shook her head. “I did come,” she said softly.

“Well, I’ll pay more attention next time. I promise.” He
grinned, looking boyish and relaxed. “Don’t worry. I like to make a woman come.
You’ll enjoy it next time.”

She reached for her dress and stepped into it. “I enjoyed it
this time,” she said, and unbelievably, it was true.

When she tried to retrieve her panties, he snatched them
away. “I’ll keep these, if you don’t mind.”

He pulled his chinos on and stuffed the panties into one
pocket, grabbing the condoms as well. They walked down the staircase, hand in
hand, until reality intruded at the sight of her boss at the bottom of the
stairway and she pulled away. Evan glanced over at her and she could feel
herself blushing.

“Hey, Evan.”

He turned at his brother’s voice. “Hi, Michael. I didn’t
know you were here already.”

“Yes. I’m staying over. Hello, Miss Prentiss. Do you have
those papers for me?”

“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. I was just looking for you.”

Sort of.

“They’re here in my purse.” She crossed to the hallway table
and pulled out a folded set of papers from the purse she’d uncharacteristically
been negligent enough to leave behind when Evan dragged her upstairs. She
handed the papers to her boss along with a pen, and he spread them out on the
table and started to sign, saying, without looking up, “Did you meet my
assistant, Evan? I don’t think you’ve ever been to the office, have you?”

He finished signing and handed the papers back to her as she
could see Evan putting the pieces together.

“I emailed you the file you requested as well, concerning
the gentleman on the rig. It’s in your inbox.”

“Good. That’ll be all, Miss Prentiss. Thank you for coming
all the way out here.”

She smiled. “My pleasure, Mr. Reynolds.” But she was looking
straight at Evan—now he was the one who was blushing.

And she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

* * * * *

Evan Reynolds had been trying to get the tall brunette alone
since he’d gotten to the hospital. Now that they all knew his brother Michael
would be all right, he had a thing or two to say to Michael’s secretary, who
was cool and put together once again, this time in a camel-colored skirt and
plain tan sweater, her hair in that same tidy chignon.