Flirting with Temptation - By Kelley St. John Page 0,28

width of the condo provided. The entire back side of his home was wall-to-wall windows.

Babette had thoroughly enjoyed making love to him with those windows open, listening to the waves crash against the beach, feeling the warm breeze against her skin as Jeff undressed her and then distributed feather soft kisses over every inch of her body. She tingled at the memory, almost feeling the tantalizing sensation of that Gulf breeze teasing the damp wake of those heated kisses.

She swallowed. For all she knew, he did the same thing with Kitty. Opened those windows and made love to her like there was no tomorrow, until she thought she’d die from the sheer pleasure of it.

There. That did it. No more reminiscing.

She put on her blinker and started to turn into the resort parking lot, but a blazing red convertible Jaguar whipped in merely inches in front of her, causing Babette to slam both the brakes and the horn. Thank God the brakes worked better than the horn; Sylvia stopped on a dime, but the wimpy excuse for a horn didn’t scare anyone, certainly not the woman in the Jag. She merely tossed her head, sending her sleek brunette hair swinging around her bare shoulders, then gave Babette a fingertip wave and a smile, as though that made the near-wreck acceptable.

If Babette hadn’t just gotten here, and if she didn’t suspect that Jeff’s neighbors might notice a little (or big) tirade in the parking lot—or an all-out cat fight—she’d jump out of this car and give the brunette bimbo a piece of her mind. And her fist. And her foot. But given she didn’t want to cause a scene before she’d even unpacked, she took a deep breath, counted to ten, then started toward the valet. She pulled close, very close, and nearly let Sylvia kiss the bumper on that Jag, but the rude one didn’t even notice. She was too busy sprucing up her makeup while two valet attendants all but fell over each other trying to get to her and her Jag. No one was making any effort whatsoever to tend to Sylvia’s needs, or Babette’s, for that matter. Bitch! Babette merely thought the word, but in her mind, she shouted it with fervor, grabbing a fistful of brunette hair as she did.

She squinted toward the woman in the car and tried to determine whether she’d seen her before. The turnover at White Sands wasn’t all that great; people fortunate enough to have a White Sands condo didn’t typically sell. Since she had met lots of Jeff’s neighbors during her past trips, she was fairly knowledgeable about the residents, and even if she didn’t know them by name, she knew the majority of them by sight. But this woman wasn’t anyone she’d seen before. And something about her, and the way she’d cut Babette off, put her in a snooty classification that was all her own.

The folks at White Sands might be rich, but most of them were still polite. Babette had the sudden recollection of Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes, when those two girls stole her parking space. If it weren’t for loving Sylvia, and for probably not having nearly as much insurance as Kathy Bates’s character had in that movie, she’d ram that Jag into oblivion too. Then she’d bet the valet guys and the brunette would notice. As it was, she did love Sylvia, and she only had liability coverage, so she simply glared at the woman’s back as she exited her car and entered White Sands.

And wouldn’t you know it, both valet attendants had suddenly disappeared, one in the Jag and the other with the brunette. So Babette waited for someone to notice the fuming redhead growing hotter and hotter every second, not merely because Sylvia had a pitiful excuse for an air conditioner and needed a serious Freon fix and not because the temperature outside was nearly a hundred, but because Miss Rude Jag Lady had thoroughly pissed her off.

Chapter 6

It was probably a good thing that it took a while before Sylvia was rather reluctantly taken by a valet attendant. By the time Babette had entered the White Sands lobby and checked in, the Jag woman was nowhere to be seen.

“Yoooohoooo!”

Immediately recognizing the owner of the shrill scream, Babette pocketed her condo key and turned toward the voice she remembered so well. “Hey, Ms. Nettles. How are you?”

“Good Lord, I don’t care if it has been a long time since you’ve seen