Decadent - Softcover

Forster, Suzanne

3.09

43 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0373792921 ISBN 13: 9780373792924

Publisher: Harlequin Blaze, 2006

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Club Casablanca—an exclusive gentlemen's club where exotic hostesses cater to the every need of high-stakes gamblers, politicians and big-business execs.
No rules apply. And no unescorted women are allowed. Ever. But Ally Danner has to get in—to rescue her sister from the club's obsessive owner, Jason Aragon. And undercover FBI agent Sam Sinclair is just the man to help her. In return she'll use her inside knowledge to get Sam the evidence he needs to put Jason away.
Only, once they get caught up in the club's hedonistic allure, the only favors they end up trading are sensual .

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RUN, ALLY! Stop staring at him and run. He's evil. Don't let him touch you!

But as the forbidding figure moved through the mist toward her, Ally couldn't run. His physical domination of everything surrounding him in the ancient cemetery seemed to hold her like a net.

She'd heard the tales about the Wolverton legend and the ghost that haunted The Willows, an elegant old mansion. According to folklore, the estate had been stolen from the Wolvertons nearly a hundred years ago, and Micha Wolverton had been killed trying to reclaim it. His dying vow had been to be reunited with the spirit of his beloved wife, who'd taken her life for reasons no one would speak of, except in whispers. But Ally had never put much stock in the fantasy. She didn't believe in ghosts.

Until now—

She didn't understand what was happening. The figure had just materialized out of the mist, his body solidifying right before her eyes.

His face was familiar...so familiar. She stepped back as he approached.

"Don't be afraid," he murmured. His voice wasn't what she had expected. It didn't sound as if it were coming from beyond the grave. It was deep and sensual. Commanding.

"Who are you?" she managed.

"You should know. You summoned me."

"No, I didn't." Two minutes ago, she'd been crouching behind a moss-covered crypt, spying on the mansion that had once been The Willows, but was now Club Casablanca. And then this—

If he was Micha, he might be angry that she was trespassing on his property. "I'll go," she said. "I won't come back. I promise."

"You're not going anywhere."

Words snagged in her throat. "Wh-why not? What do you want?"

"If I wanted something, Ally, I'd take it. This is about need."

She tried to back away, but her feet were useless. "And you need something from me?"

"Good guess." His tone burned with irony. "I need lips, soft and surrendered, a body limp with desire."

"My lips, my bod—?"

"Only yours."

"Why? Why me?" This couldn't be Micha. He had wanted only one woman, Rose, and he had died trying to return to her.

"Because you want that, too," he said. Wanted what? A ghost of her own? She'd always found the legend impossibly romantic. How could he have known that? How could he know anything about her? Besides, she'd sworn off inappropriate men, and what could be more inappropriate than a ghost? She shook her head again, still not willing to admit the truth. But her pounding heart wouldn't play along. The mere thought of his kiss, his touch, terrified her. This wildness, it was fear, wasn't it?

When his fingertips touched her cheek, she flinched, expecting his flesh to be cold, lifeless. It was anything but that. His skin was smooth and hot, gentle, yet demanding. And while his dark brown eyes were filled with mystery and wonder, there was a sensitivity about them that threatened to disarm her if she gazed too deeply.

"These lips are mine," he said. In truth, it was just that. She couldn't stop him...and didn't want to.

"I've come back to claim them," he whispered as his mouth descended onto hers and his powerful arms encircled her body.

If he were to touch her breasts, he would know how hard her heart was beating. She realized that as the promised kiss became a reality. His mouth ravished hers. Not gentle or tender, he kissed her with dark, whispering force, his lips moving over hers, claiming, then taking, brushing and licking, softening her mouth until it could do nothing but respond to him.

With a sigh of resignation, she surrendered to his advances. His hand stole up her body and stroked her breasts. Beneath her clothing, her nipples responded, tightening as he brushed them with his thumbs.

The tingling she felt was quick and sharp, creating a surge of desire.

Was he going to make love to her? She didn't know. As his kiss deepened, she gave way to the hypnotic power of his spellbinding caresses. Her entire body was thrumming and buzzing. Alive and free again.

Buzzing and buzzing...like...an insect? It filled her senses, growing louder.

What was that sound? A bumblebee?

Ally's eyes blinked open, and she smacked her arm with an open palm. Not a bumblebee, a mosquito—a bloodsucking mosquito! She must have dozed off. The seventy-plus hours without sleep had caught up with her. She would never have fallen asleep in a cemetery unless she was exhausted. No one would.

She took a quick look around to make sure she hadn't been spotted by any of the club's security guards. She didn't see anyone headed her way, nor were there any tall, dark figures fleeing the scene.

A dream. Of course, what else? The question she ought to be asking was why she was slinking around an abandoned graveyard on a cloud-swollen, moonless night. It wasn't the place most women went to look for a man, especially considering why she needed one, but Ally had no choice. Some things had to be done—and in her twenty-eight years of life, little had been more crucial than her mission tonight.

Her younger sister, Victoria, was being held captive in the mansion not a hundred yards from where Ally now hid. Originally, Club Casablanca had been the country estate of the Wolvertons, a genteel farming family. They had it built about sixty miles north of New Orleans where the water table allowed for basements, tunnels and other subterranean secrets. Once a graceful Georgian plantation house, it now reminded Ally of Count Dracula's castle. In some dark, terrifying way it was even more beautiful than before with its turrets and arches, especially at night. But it was also a den of depravity disguised as an exclusive, private gentleman's club.

Ally brushed the dirt and leaves from her black suit, a Chanel look-alike with a skirt she'd shortened herself. She planned to say she was job hunting if the guards should spot her. In case the short skirt didn't convince them she'd make a red-hot hostess, she'd worn a low-cut cream silk camisole under her jacket. Thank God it was spring or else she would have frozen in so little clothing.

She'd chosen the graveyard for her stakeout, knowing the club's security cameras didn't survey this area. Actually, there was a lot she knew about Club Casablanca from personal experience, all of which she'd tried very hard to forget. Her sister's disappearance, however, had made that impossible. Just three days ago, Vix had sent a bizarre e-mail, implying that she was being held here against her will. She didn't say much more than that, but sirens had gone off in Ally's head.

Ally had worked at the club as a hostess in her early twenties, and had foolishly let herself be drawn into a destructive relationship with its owner, Jason Aragon. She'd barely escaped Aragon with her life. This e-mail suggested that she may not have escaped him after all. She had little doubt that he was trying to lure her back, using her sister as bait—and her sister was much too young, naive and rebellious to resist the pressures and temptations of such a place.

Just as Ally had been.

She tugged at her skirt, but the hem kept crawling up her thighs and making her feel naked—a nagging reminder of the mistakes of her past. Perhaps her fall had been preordained, given her childhood. Overprotected from the cradle, her life choices rigidly controlled, supposedly for her own good, but she'd felt confined, suffocated. It hadn't been quite so bad for Vix, but almost.

Ally still went to great effort to keep everything about her past secret, mostly to protect her aristocratic family from any more embarrassment. She and her sister were heirs to a throne that no longer existed. Their mother had been a sitting queen, strange as that seemed in today's world, and her arranged marriage to their father had been a happy one until the royal couple had been deposed and exiled from the small European monarchy where Ally's mother's family had reigned for over a century.

Ally had been thirteen when the family had fled to London. Soon after, she had been sent to America to an exclusive all-girls' boarding school, but it turned out not to be the move toward independence Ally had hoped for. The bodyguards her family had hired to protect her made her already lonely and isolated life seem like a prison. The last straw had come when she'd graduated Alderwood Academy and learned that her parents were intent on marrying her off to a man she'd never met, a wealthy German industrialist.

That had been when Ally had discovered she had a will of her own—and a wild streak, which Jason Aragon had been happy to help her explore.

A sigh of regret escaped her. There really hadn't been any other men in her life except a couple of fleeting summer romances with prep school boys. But she'd made up for it with Jason. She'd gone wild, reveling in everything that had been forbidden to someone of her background, and then some. It had been a temporary lapse, but bad enough that she'd disgraced the family name. Now Vix seemed ready to take up where Ally had left off. And Ally felt responsible.

Her sister had lived with their parents in London until four years ago when they'd decided to send Vix to Alder-wood, too. The school had a sterling reputation, and Ally had begged her parents to let Vix attend, promising to keep a close eye on her. Ally had seen it as a chance to redeem herself in her family's eyes and to renew the bond with her younger sister.

Vix had lived at Alderwood, spending weekends and holidays with Ally in her Georgetown apartment in Washington, D.C. If anything, Ally had been overly strict. However, a few months ago she'd snagged a promotion that had made it impossible to keep such close tabs on her sister. About that same time Vix had begun missing classes and staying out after curfew with her latest boyfriend, whom Ally didn't approve of.

A revving car engine jerked Ally out of her reflections. She peeked around the crypt, reminding herself to keep an eye on the club's entrance. She'd already used up three days of her personal leave, and she only had a week in total. Her new position as director of development at the Smithsonian involved finding deep-pocketed donors for the institute's conservation projects. The job was high-profile, as well as high-pressure, but luckily, she'd been there several years and had taken off so little time that her boss approved her request for leave without question. Ally had been on a flight out of Dulles within hours of receiving Vix's e-mail.

She'd debated calling the New Orleans police, not sure they would investigate based on one vague e-mail. In any case, Vix's e-mail had asked her not to involve the police. So Ally was on her own.

Her first task had been to set up a surveillance plan. Now she needed to get inside the club. For that she had to have an escort, a member of the male-only kind. Women were welcome, only as guests of members or as club employees. That was the tricky part. If she approached the wrong man in the wrong way, both she and Vix might be put in grave danger.

She continued to peer around the crypt watching cars pull into the club's crescent driveway. She was looking for one in particular, and hoped she hadn't missed the mystery man who drove the sleek black Porsche Targa.

Ally glanced at the luminous dial of her watch—8:58 p.m. If he kept to his routine, he should arrive in the next two or three minutes. When it came to punctuality, he was as reliable as a Swiss timepiece. Still, over the course of the last seventy-two hours—long, exhausting hours in which she had attempted to stalk his every move—she'd become convinced that he wasn't just another member of the club. He was up to something clandestine.

She'd singled him out the very first night, after watching dozens of men arrive and leave. It didn't hurt that he was tall and ruggedly built. She'd had a gut feeling about him, and that was as precisely as she could define it for now. That was when she'd begun tailing him as he went through his daily routine, which was anything but routine.

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