Indecent Suggestion - By Elizabeth Bevarly Page 0,5

didn’t want to risk losing that friendship.

So she ignored the last part of what he’d said to focus on the first part, something that had her biting back both the sarcastic retort and the smack upside the head she felt threatening. There. That was better. That was more in keeping with the way she wanted to feel about Turner.

“Not that kind of hypnosis,” she patiently corrected him. “Hypnotherapy hypnosis.”

He eyed her blankly. “And the difference would be…?”

“Hypnotherapists are better dressed, for one thing,” she quipped. “They have white jackets and name tags and stuff.”

He rolled his eyes.

“And licenses,” she quickly added. “They’re licensed to do this kind of thing. They go through a lot of training and education, whereas the Amazing Mesmiro probably got his training from the Johnson Smith catalog. Not to mention his license.”

Turner’s expression remained impassive. “Hypnotherapists are licensed and trained to make people bark like dogs and flap their wings like chickens? Wow. And here I wasted my time with an MBA and a bachelor’s degree in marketing.”

“They’re licensed to help people,” Becca told him through gritted teeth. Oh, yeah. That smack upside the head was really close now.

“It won’t work,” he said.

She studied him through slitted eyes, nibbling the edge of her lower lip in thought. Turner’s gaze seemed to zero in on the movement, and his pupils widened to nearly eclipse the blue irises. She figured he recognized it meant she was lost in thought—he’d be correct about that—and that he was probably dreading what she was going to say next.

And he was correct there, too, she thought. Because what she said next was, “I’ll make a bet with you.”

It was the perfect way to respond. Turner was just arrogant enough in his masculinity to never, ever, back down from a challenge. But he was also just arrogant enough in his masculinity to hardly ever win a bet he made with her.

“What kind of bet?” he asked.

Bingo, she thought with satisfaction. Aloud, however, she kept her smugness under control and told him, “Tomorrow’s Saturday. If you can make it through the entire day tomorrow—from the minute you wake up until the minute you go to sleep—without once having to light up, then I won’t say another word about quitting, and we can take our habit outside whenever we feel the need at work. But if you break down and light even one cigarette tomorrow,” she quickly continued, “then you have to go with me to a hypnotherapist ASAP.”

He grinned, clearly thinking he would have no trouble sticking to such a challenge. “Piece. Of. Cake,” he said.

Becca grinned back. Yeah, it would be a piece of cake, all right, she thought. And she made a mental note to go ahead and check the Yellow Pages, under H for Hypnotherapist, as soon as she got home. No sense waiting until the last minute.

2

TURNER WAS DRAPED ACROSS his couch, dozing off despite the fact that it was barely ten o’clock, and the TV was blaring the closing credits of The Zombies of Mora Tau, when he heard the ungodly thunder of what he suspected, in his half-coherent state, must be the pounding of one of those very Mora Tauian zombies. Even though Ray Milland had taken them all out with an angry, torch-bearing mob in the final scene, which Turner had witnessed at least a half-dozen times. And it occurred to him as he struggled to a sitting position and knuckled his eyes that he really should find some other way to spend his Friday nights besides feeding bad B-movie monsters into his DVD player.

The zombie pounding at his front door kicked up again, and he wondered where was an angry, torch-bearing mob when you needed one? Not so much to take care of the zombie at his front door, but because at least a few members of the mob also might be bearing cigarettes, which, coupled with the torches to light them, would set Turner up for the rest of the weekend. Then he remembered Becca’s bet. So much for the weekend. Or at least tomorrow. And even though it wasn’t Saturday morning yet, he ignored the half-full pack on the end table and went to see who the zombie knocking at his front door was.

But as he rose to standing and his heart began pumping blood into his bleary brain, he decided that the knocking probably wasn’t coming from anything as lame as a zombie. If what Turner suspected was true, his visitor was way