An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,66
couldn't seem to keep her waves tamed these days.
"Well, well, well," an amused voice - Eve's - said. "This isn't my sister, Tea Caruso, is it, playing hooky on a Tuesday, at eleven o'clock in the morning?"
"I had an hair emergency," Tea answered. Not to mention she was looking for any excuse to keep herself away from Johnny's house today. Forever.
"It looks fine to me." Eve was dressed in something Donna Karan probably dreamed up, her hair in an effortless fall of blonde, her makeup nearly invisible.
"It needs to be straight," Tea insisted, pulling on the ends as she looked back at the pumps and aerosols. "Perfectly straight."
"It is perfectly straight."
"It doesn't stay that way," Tea grumbled, then she lowered her voice and told the truth, because if anyone might have some good advice for a woman on the morning-after, it would be Eve. "It doesn't stay that way in bed."
"In bed?" Her sister sounded puzzled.
Tea whispered this time. "In bed with a man."
Eve didn't say anything more, but Tea felt her stunned stare all the same.
She turned to frown at her sister. "Is it so hard to believe that a man would want to... to... you know, with me?"
Eve blinked. "No, no, it's not that. Not that at all." She put out a hand and touched Tea's arm. "It's that I haven't thought you wanted to... to... you know, in quite some time."
Because Tea had decided it was safer to be like their mother - single, celibate, successful. She still did. It was how to keep her secrets locked tight and her heart locked whole inside her chest. No sense in risking falling in love and wanting to marry because no respectable man would want to wed the Mafia association that would walk down the aisle with her. "It was a mistake, obviously."
"Obviously, why?"
For starters, because she'd gone there that morning with the express purpose of doing business and nothing more. "He manages to get to me somehow. I don't like it."
"Meaning he turns you on in a way that all those great-nephews and grandsons in your dating past never managed to."
"He probably thinks I'm easy," Tea muttered, remembering how she'd looked in the mirrored ceiling. Her dress in disarray, her hair a wild mass, her underwear ringing one leg. She'd felt easy. He'd grabbed onto her in an obvious need for comfort and then she'd let that slide into a delirious roller-coaster ride of afternoon delight.
Eve laughed the throaty laugh of a woman who'd loved and left a thousand men... and left them wanting more. "We're not fifteen any longer. Forget all that guilt the nuns fed us. Real women experience lust."
Experiencing lust wasn't the problem. Acting on it might be. Tea distrusted the sensation that it was her body taking over and leaving her control and common sense behind. "Anyway, the sex wasn't that good." Not that sex ever was.
Eve raised an eyebrow. 'Then you weren't doing... you know, with Johnny Magee?"
Tea half-turned back toward the hair products. "What does the who have to do with anything?"
"He looks like he'd be good in bed, that's all. There's a certain... twinkle in his eyes."
"He is good in bed. It wasn't him." She didn't know about the twinkle, but she knew he was long and golden and hard. His mouth set her on fire. When his tongue pressed inside her mouth she melted, just like that, her body ready for him. It had never been like that for her, never. The excitement of the lead-up had been more than she'd ever expected or experienced.
But when it came to satisfaction, she'd always been better off on her own, without a witness.
Eve sighed. 'Tea, Tea, Tea - "
"I don't know what to do now, okay?" She swung around to face her sister. If she wasn't envious of Eve's beauty, she would give just about anything for an ounce of Eve's sexual sangfroid. "How am I supposed to look him in the eye and do my job when the last time he saw me I was - " Flushed and wet and sprawled across the bed. She shivered thinking about it.
Eve gave her a little smile. "I'll tell you exactly what you should do about it. Listen to Big Sister Eve and I'll clear it all up."
Tea rolled her eyes. "Big Sister Eve is younger than me by four months," she pointed out dryly.
"But decades older when it comes to men. So here's my advice - "