Bared Read online

  EMMA WILLIS STOOD NAKED, surrounded by a few flimsy sheets and bamboo poles, somewhere on the northern tip of Kauai, all courtesy of her sister Amber.

  It was unbelievable that she, a known anal-retentive workaholic, had landed herself in this position. But she had and she’d have to deal with it.

  Just as she’d dealt with every other Amber emergency over the years. And there’d been far too many to count.

  Emma looked at the little triangular patch of white silk in her fingers that made up the bottoms of the costume. Just put the thing on, she told herself. But how did it go on? There was no way this would come anywhere close to covering her. Hoping against hope, she shook it out and held it up, but nothing changed.

  It wasn’t meant to cover her.

  She could see now that the thin strap of silk was actually a thong.

  A thong.

  She was sure Amber Willis, actress, model and all-around hell-raiser, would love wearing such a contraption, but Emma Willis, lowly soap-opera scribe and all-around pansy, hated thongs.

  Amber was going to owe her big.

  She had to laugh at that. Amber always owed her big, and hadn’t paid up once. What did that say about her, Emma wondered wildly, that she just kept saving her sister, no matter what? Far too much to contemplate at the moment, she decided, and reached for the top.

  Which turned out to be even worse than the bottom.

  She’d had high hopes for the filmy material because there was a lot of it, but when she placed it against her skin, she might as well have been as naked as a newborn. She supposed that was the idea of the thing. Virginal sacrifice was the theme of this shoot and she was about to look the part.

  She certainly felt it. The rain drummed the sheet around her, soaking through so that water ran down the sides of the changing area. Still, the air felt refreshingly cool, not cold, and in an odd contrast, the ground beneath her bare feet was warm.

  Amber had called her two days ago from some island in the Caribbean, where she’d been lounging for a few days with her latest boy toy. “This guy can give me an orgasm from the next room,” she’d exhaled dreamily over the thousands of miles to Emma. “I think he’s The One.”

  Right. The One.

  There was no The One and after years of watching Amber make a fool out of herself over and over again, Emma just wished Amber would realize it as well and stop falling in love at the drop of a hat.

  Or a nicely filled-out pair of Levi’s.

  But before Emma could sing that old refrain and remind her sister how many times “love” had turned out to be sheer lust, the kind that always faded, Amber had begged Emma to take on this job, the one that Amber had already signed to do and had been paid for, because this calendar was going to “launch her as nothing else had.”

  There had been many such declarations over the years from Amber, but Emma still had such high hopes for her sister, who despite all her wildness was still her sister.

  Who couldn’t handle responsibility to save her life.

  But Emma could, even if she couldn’t see how parading half nude in filmy white material would boost Amber’s acting career, when not even a bunch of real acting jobs had done that.

  But love and stupidity kept Emma wishing. And hoping.

  And helping.

  Besides, maybe this job would be the one to launch Amber’s career, maybe this guy would finally be The One. Who was Emma to decide they weren’t?

  And, anyway, how was this any skin off her nose? She was in Kauai, a place she’d seen only in pictures, getting drenched by the daily rain she’d wanted to see so badly. In Los Angeles, she could only dream about daily rain. And for once, she wasn’t holed up in her small office, fingers cramped from all the pages she’d produced for the soap opera she wrote for.

  How many times had she promised herself she’d do something fun for herself? This could be that fun. Yes, she was worried about missing two days away from her script, but they were weekend days and, theoretically, her own.

  “Theoretically” because the soap opera and the studio who owned it had taken complete advantage of her over the years, and she’d let them. She worked directly beneath the head writer—a coup for any twenty-six-year-old—but the head writer was a tyrant who worked her people to the bone.

  And still Emma did it, week in and week out.

  Well, it was time for a little break. Hard as it was to believe, she really was going to put this itty-bitty costume on, and use her beauty instead of her brain. Just because the design was everything she wasn’t, and just because being in front of a camera made her nervous, and just because she was shaking in her bare feet, didn’t mean a thing.

  In the name of Amber, in the name of having some of her own “fun,” she’d do this.

  “Let’s go,” came the forceful, impatient voice from the other side of the sheet.

  At the sound of him, her heart leaped into her throat. She didn’t have to see him to remember how potent he’d been upon first sight. He was everything Amber had said he was—tall, imposing, with a set of dark, dark eyes that she had a feeling saw just about everything. Though he’d looked unhappy to see Amber, Emma supposed she couldn’t hold that against him. She knew exactly how difficult Amber could be, and imagined he had braced himself for a nightmare shoot.

  He wouldn’t take lightly to being fooled—if he found out. Telling him now was out of the question. Her sister had been clear on that. If Rafe knew Amber had bailed, he’d bail, too, and then the calendar would be cancelled and she’d be back to square one.

  This job was a coup and she needed it.

  Emma had agreed, so she stepped into the thong. She tried to adjust it, but there was no adjusting to be made. The thing was going to ride up her butt no matter what—and it did—and yet…not so bad.

  Laughing at herself now, she held up the “top.” Looking at it, thinking about how it would look on her, made her feel—this was such an embarrassing admission, even to herself—sexy.

  Bring on the fun, she thought. She was on an island far from home with no one she ever planned on seeing again. She might as well enjoy it.

  “Come on, damn it,” Rafe growled from the other side of the curtain, apparently out of patience. The sheets ripped apart, leaving her staring one irritated, wet photographer in the face. All six feet two inches of him. His hair was slicked back from his forehead, his lean jaw tense as more than a few drops of water ran off his cheeks and down his throat. His plain dark blue T-shirt stuck to him like a second skin and was tucked into a pair of faded Levi’s, both of which exhibited a body in its prime.

  The costume was definitely getting to her if she was thinking about him that way. She hurriedly wrapped the filmy material around her torso and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not ready.” Not sure if she ever would be, now that the moment was at hand.

  “But I am.”

  Clearly Amber had managed to annoy him in the not-too-distant past. Emma would have to deal with that, and the fact he was startlingly handsome, so much so that he could be in front of the camera.

  Except, she couldn’t imagine him looking virginal.

  “Not that you care, but I need the light that we’re losing with each passing second.” Without so much as a glance at her body—so much for the ego she hadn’t even realized she had—he took her wrist and tugged her out of the protective covering of the sheets.

  He walked quickly and smoothly on the rough path, forcing her to jog to keep up with him. She ran alongside while simultaneously trying to keep the material around her and her thong in place. By the time he got her to the set, she was huffing and puffing.

  She really had to find the time to exercise more thoroughly than the occasional yoga tape. But she knew she wouldn’t. If she wasn’t writing, she was sleeping and if she wasn’t sleeping, she was plotting.

  Work ran her life.

  Work was her life.

  So how she’d ended up in paradise half-naked still boggled the mind, but here she