Taking the Score (Tall, Dark, and Texan #2) By Kate Meader
Chapter One
Why was everyone so desperate to get him laid?
Pondering that burning question, Brody Kane took aim at the hoop. The ball flirted with the rim, cockteased the backboard, and because Brody’s life these days was not worth spit, fell away without screwing the basket.
“I should go to a strip club,” he said to Flynn Cross. “That’s your best suggestion?”
“It’s not a strip club.” Flynn motioned to the third partner in their Score Property triumvirate, Hunter Dade. “Did I ever mention the words ‘strip’ and ‘club’?”
Maybe not, but Brody had an MBA from Stanford and could read between the lines. “You said I need to stop feeling sorrier than a steer in a stockyard and there’s this place you know with strong liquor, bone-melting music, and cock-destroying women.”
“Half-naked, cock-destroying women,” Hunter clarified.
Brody pointed at Flynn. “Sounds like a strip club to me.”
“No, it sounds like the kind of place a man could get into all sorts of trouble.” Hunter scooped up the ball and bounced it a couple of times on the hardwood of the University Club’s basketball court. Linked by a bridge to the high-rise containing Score Property’s Chicago offices, it had the added advantage of being steps away from Brody’s penthouse. “As for why Cross knows so much about it, I’m mighty curious.”
Good question. Flynn was all loved up and counting down the days to when he’d finally make an honest woman of his fiancée back in Houston. With palms up, he gestured for the ball. Hunter pitched it on his hip and waited.
“It’s just a club I took a client to a few weeks ago,” Flynn explained as if he were talking to fourth graders. “Drink selection was good, female selection was better. Sealed the deal.” While Hunter and Brody stared, he muttered, “Okay, ass*ole
s, it’s a strip club. But a classy one.”
Hunter dribbled the ball and sidestepped Flynn. The two of them duked it out until Hunter finally put the shot away.
“Time to get your mojo back,” Flynn said to Brody after about a minute of what had been shaping up to be a blissful stretch of peace. “It’s been six months, man.”
The words were barely out of Flynn’s mouth when he exchanged a guilty glance with Hunter. The guys knew the broad brushstrokes, but as Brody rarely talked about what happened to send him into self-imposed celibacy, they employed the code and didn’t press. However, no amount of awkward stinking up the joint could keep the Hunter Dade grin down. These days, he was constantly pleased with himself since he’d bickered with, hate-sexed on, and finally married Tess, the fiery redhead of his dreams, a month ago.
“’Course, if you’d just bang Ms. Strickland,” Hunter drawled, “then your mojo problem would be solved.”
Ah, Ms. Strickland, who was up on the twenty-third floor organizing Brody’s schedule, hanging up his dry cleaning, and being an all-around paragon of Girl Friday. The guys liked to rag on him, imagining they sensed some frisson of attraction between Brody and his assistant. God knew why, as the woman gave new definition to the word “frump.”
Which was precisely why he’d hired her.
She couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but her fashion sense, gleaned from Sears catalogs circa 1979, put at least ten years on her. In her cheap suits liberally sprinkled with cat hair, with her brown hair in a tight bun, Emma reminded him of his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hennessy. Guaranteed limp dick.
At least, on paper.
Emma Strickland was the perfect antithesis to the women he was usually attracted to. To the woman he’d almost married six months ago before she screwed him over. The reality? Not so clear-cut.
There was something about her that he couldn’t put a finger on. She never failed to do her job professionally and without complaint, but occasionally, he’d catch an insolent lift at the corner of her mouth. In a blink, it would disappear, but the challenge to delve further had been thrown down. Specifically to delve into whatever she was hiding under that unfashionably long skirt.
Stellar thighs, he suspected. Brody was an evidence guy, so he had no good reason to believe this. Didn’t stop him from spending unreasonable amounts of time trying not to think of whatever assets Emma was rocking under that skirt and wad of fabric she called a blouse. And as soon as he hit the shower, there was nothing for it but to succumb to his fantasy of ripping that blouse off and exposing…what would she have on underneath? Knowing his luck, another damn blouse. But think of the pleasure he’d have finding out.
Hike up that skirt and show me your sweet ass-ets, Ms. Strickland.
Open your mouth, Ms. Strickland, I’ve got something to dick-tate.