Kiss & Tell

Yes, he found the energy of chasing down nonstop leads more intoxicating than the boredom of waiting for a big story to break. But he’d never thought he’d end up stooping to the level he had, reporting on celebutantes flashing their bare crotches or finding fame through night-vision sex tapes.

Neither had he thought himself capable of betraying a confidence, so wrapped up in the thrill that he hadn’t realized he’d gone too far until it was too late. Until he’d ruined a career by telling the truth. Until he’d lost a lifelong friend because he’d been drunk on the rush of the scoop.

He’d give anything to take back the last month, to think before revealing what his best friend Del, a music star in his own right, had shared in confidence about his Christian pop star fiancée’s drug problem…but life didn’t work that way.

Caleb couldn’t change what he’d done, but he could damn well make sure it never happened again. Right now, however, it was vital that he get his act together. Candy had finished her tour of the rest of the club and was making her way toward him.

Drinking alone and slumped in his seat made him an easy target. Being male made him vulnerable—even knowing her act was a ruse. Last he’d checked, knowledge didn’t necessarily work as an inoculant. Especially with his susceptibility to her charms camped out in his pants.

Except for her spotlight, the bar light and the patterns of color thrown off by the disco ball’s spin, the club was dark. His corner was even darker, giving him the privacy he needed to adjust his crotch before she reached him.

And then she was there, singing to him, seducing him, the pull in her gaze mesmerizing as she perched her hip against the edge of his table and stretched, draping herself toward him strategically as if she’d done this hundreds of times for hundreds of other men.

Her neckline plunged to tease him. The slope of her shoulder as she leaned close, the movement of her neck, chin and mouth as she sang, teased him more. But what teased him most of all was knowing he should know her, being unable to place her, and sitting here too inebriated to do anything to find out.

He told himself to remember everything about her, to store the sound of her voice in the memory banks he could access most quickly when his wits returned. He didn’t hold out much hope for success. She had him stupid, bewitched.

Fluidly, the redheaded chanteuse rolled herself up and off the table, pivoting with an elegance that left him breathless—and therefore, thankfully, unable to groan and give himself away—as she slid to sit in his lap.

It wasn’t his lap as much as one leg, but the move put the swell of her bottom against the swell of his fly, and he could only hope the part of him making intimate contact with her wasn’t as apparent to her as he feared.

She seemed comfortable, in her element, looping her arm around his neck, looking into his eyes, drawing the song to a close with a breathy, bluesy, brush of words against his cheek as the pianist wrapped up his accompaniment, holding the final notes.

That was when the applause began.

And that was when she kissed him.

He hadn’t seen it coming.

He knew the soft teasing press of her mouth to his was part of the act, but he hadn’t expected it, and he wasn’t thinking straight, and he was running way low on resistance, so he did what any healthy red-blooded male would do with a healthy red-blooded female wanting to lock lips.

He kissed her back.

He caught her off guard. She was bargaining on compliance, thinking he would accept her doing her thing without interfering, interrupting or doing his back. But Caleb wasn’t cut from a compliant cloth. And kissing Candy Cane was fun. Or it was until he realized he was the one who was stirred.

Lips on lips was one thing, but this was more. Way more, and his blood heated and rushed. He opened his mouth to taste her. She gave in, letting his tongue inside to flirt and slick over hers.

He had a vague sense of people around them clapping and whistling, cheering them on, of the pianist’s fingers lingering over his instrument’s keys, drawing out the moment that had already gone on too long.

But mostly he was aware of Candy’s scent like a field of sweet flowers around him, and the touch of her fingers against his nape, the tiny massaging circles she made there too personal for a public display.

He had to let her go before things got any further out of hand, he realized, realizing, too, that he had sobered. He pulled his mouth away and tilted his head back to get the best look that he could into her eyes.

He saw her surprise, then her fear. The first he’d anticipated; he’d felt it himself. The second emotion set the pump on his snoop-and-scoop machine to maximum. Fear? What the hell did she have to be afraid of?

“Who are you?” he asked as she got to her feet, the smile she gave him reaching no farther than her mouth and as much for the crowd as for him.

“I’m the woman you’ll never forget,” she told him, blowing him a parting kiss before returning to the stage.

Once there, she took her final bow with a flourish, gave props to the pianist then vanished behind the curtain that came down to swallow the stage.

She had it right. He wouldn’t forget. But what she had no way of knowing was that, impending retirement or not, big-time screwup or not, he planned to dig up a whole lot more stuff to remember. Stuff he was pretty damn sure Ms. Candy Cane didn’t want anyone to find out.

2

WELL. That had been interesting, Miranda Kelly mused ruefully, standing in her dressing room, staring at her reflection and finding Candy Cane staring back.

She had yet to remove her costume—a costume that was more than the dress or the shoes or the colored contacts or the wig. The whole persona of Candy was everything she wasn’t.

As Miranda, she wore glasses, though she did accessorize with fashionable frames to emphasize the green of her eyes. Her own hair was auburn in contrast to Candy’s strawberry-blond, and cropped close in a wispy elfin cut.

Her skin was nowhere as smooth as Candy’s, plus it was ridiculously freckled—a fact that she’d hidden from Baltimore society when she’d lived there behind a cool façade of flawlessly made-up skin, French twists and perfect posture, the veneer of a high-profile life.

She was nothing if not a chameleon.

But, wow. Kissing an audience member? Had she really been so stupidly careless? She’d told Corinne several months ago that her biggest fear about testifying at Marshall’s retrial was suffering a repeat of the media madness and losing her sanctuary in Mistletoe as a result. It was imperative that she draw no attention to herself to keep that from happening.

Oh, sure, she flirted and toyed with and played with and teased members of the crowd every night, but she did so as Candy; Miranda was off-limits to the visitors at the inn. That personal touch was part of Candy’s act and the only outlet Miranda had to keep her feminine wiles from rusting.

She hadn’t dated at all in the five years she’d been here, and hadn’t enjoyed more than conversation with the male company she regularly kept. Mistletoe, Colorado, was not a hotbed of sexy, intelligent, available men.

It was a lovers’ resort, a place where the people listening to her sing would not be focused on her but on their partners. And that was exactly as it should be. Her rumination was not at all a complaint. Her complaint was that she had behaved so rashly, so…thoughtlessly. With Marshall once again in the news, she couldn’t afford to stand out, to be noticed.

So who was he, the man she had kissed, the man who had let her, who had kissed her back with a mouth that tasted like aged Scotch and heat? And what was he doing alone in a town that catered to lovers—most of whom had sought out the hideaway specifically because of the privacy it afforded?

She sank onto her vanity bench, still shocked. She could not believe how impressively she had screwed up.

No one passed through Mistletoe by chance, or planned a night out at Club Crimson unless they were staying at the Inn at Snow Falls. The town was off the beaten path, the inn stuck in its own time warp. Visitors were here for a reason.

That meant the likelihood she would see him again was spectacular. And with this combustible thing between them having flared in such a sparkling display, her odds of screwing up again were even higher. She couldn’t let that happen—not with the publicity from Marshall’s trial looming.

Before the career move a decade ago that had taken her from Denver to Baltimore, and before meeting Marshall and marrying him in the same church where she sang in the choir, she’d spent all but her college years in Mistletoe, growing up an only child of parents who worked in the school district here.

When her life as Mrs. Gordon had soured—not a surprising development considering her husband’s indictment for fraud and the dredging up of his affairs during his trial, she’d found herself thinking back to the simple, uncluttered magic of this place she still thought of as home.

In Mistletoe, discretion was paramount. It was even more so at the Inn at Snow Falls. The resort’s staff was merciless in vetting credentials, checking IDs and keeping out media riffraff.

She’d seen them in action, and knew that facet of the hideaway’s reputation was what brought celebrities and public figures here for intimate trysts, photos of which they didn’t want splashed across tabloid covers.

That was the atmosphere she, too, had needed, and with the help of trusted friends, she had escaped the East Coast, leaving the gossips floundering.

For months after, newsmen who followed society scandals had hunted her, wanting the exclusive of her exile. She’d watched from the safety of her snowy cocoon and experienced a flurry of emotions, her feelings ultimately boiling down to one.

She hated the press. H-a-t-e-d reporters and their supposed journalistic integrity. They were vultures. They’d treated her like carrion during Marshall’s trial and the divorce. They were as responsible as her ex for making her life hell. But no more.

She refused to spend another moment feeling bared and naked, flayed, exposed to her bones like an instructional cadaver or a plasticized body in a museum display. That’s how it had seemed, having the population of the northern Atlantic states knowing minute details of her life….

Her propensity for speeding through traffic lights. How she spent more time on her own charity work than socializing with Marshall or at home. The way an hour of Ashtanga yoga left her smelling as though she hadn’t bathed in days. Whether her salon’s beauty technician gave her a bikini wax or a Brazilian. And if any of those things sent Marshall into the arms—and beds—of all those other women.