Decadent

This one is for the wonderful fans and friends

who have done me the honor of becoming

members of my Yahoo Group. You guys are the

best! Thank you for supporting me through even

the toughest times, and know that I will never

forget your outpouring of love and sympathy

when I lost my mother. It meant more

than I can possibly express.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Coming Next Month

1

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 Alderwood, 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.

Twice a day he’d left his hotel to take walks, and his destination was always a different pay phone where he would place a brief call. Obviously he didn’t feel safe using the phone in his room. Who was he calling? He could be a private investigator, an undercover cop or an FBI or CIA agent, calling in from the field. He might even be a master thief planning a heist of the club’s valuable art collection.

How would a master thief make love to a woman?

The thought came from out of nowhere. She tried to force her attention back to the cars pulling into the club, but it refused to stay there. Apparently it still craved the thrill a man like that could give her, pleasure at any cost. That alone should have appalled her. One silly second of fantasizing about a gorgeous man’s hands wandering like a thief’s over her body, stealing her will to resist—to deny him anything—and she was on the brink of losing it.

Pathetic. She had clearly gone way too long without sex. But Ally Danner didn’t do those things anymore. She didn’t lust after inappropriate men, and this guy couldn’t be more inappropriate. Cop? FBI or CIA agent? Thief? Probably he was a straying husband. The possibilities were endless, and she had to know exactly what he was up to before she made her move.

She crouched even lower, moving clear of the crypt for a better view. He’s clever and dangerous, she told herself. Don’t forget that. And you—

You haven’t had sex in a very long time.

Ignoring the hot little tingle in her gut, she moved on. Last night he’d left the club at eleven, and she’d followed him in her rental car to the oak forest behind the club. She’d lost him though when she had to turn off the car lights to avoid being spotted. He and his black Targa had melted into the moss-draped trees, and she’d held back, fearing a trap. Instead she’d returned the next day, and searched the area on foot.

She’d been ready to give up when she came across a path of beaten-down underbrush leading to an abandoned car in a clearing. She’d searched the interior and found nothing. When she opened the hood though, she’d discovered the car had no engine. The space was filled with surveillance equipment that looked designed to pick up long-range audio signals, possibly through the spiral rod that emerged from the opening where the radio antenna should have been.

At that point she’d made a decision. If he were trying to infiltrate the club, that might mean they could help each other. She needed an escort—and she had insider information that could be useful to him. If he were acting privately, she had a better chance of striking a bargain with him than if he were law enforcement, but she had to know which it was, and that brought her to the riskiest part of her plan. Unmasking him.

Strange as it seemed, the only thing stopping her now was his face. The first time she’d seen him, she’d had a nagging feeling of déjà vu. And then, tonight, this dream. Something about the ghost had brought about that same feeling. Not that they were the same man, necessarily, but something.

She was beginning to wonder if her erotic dream had been a warning from her subconscious. Was it signaling that she had something to fear from this man, that he was a danger to her?

She knew what went on inside the mansion walls. The upper floors resembled a lavish Monte Carlo casino. The subterranean level catered to darker, more exotic tastes, to put it mildly. It was accessible only to platinum key members, hand-selected by Jason, who were willing to undergo a deep background search, and of course, to pay a small fortune in membership fees.

Was her man one of those? Did he have such exotic tastes? Maybe that was what the dream had been trying to tell her?

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

Another growling car engine brought her back to the present. She glanced up to see a Targa pull into the driveway. A tuxedo-clad man exited the front door of the club and rushed down the white marble steps, ready as the car roared to a halt. Ally didn’t recognize the valet from her time with Jason, but she knew his résumé would have included thug, bouncer, and perhaps even worse, right along with valet. Most likely he was armed.

Ally watched as her man emerged from the car. She was about a hundred yards away, not close enough to see him clearly, but she knew his features, detail for detail. He was six feet plus with thick, dark blond hair and skin so tawny she was reminded of windswept deserts. Even his eyebrows had a dust-covered look that she found annoyingly irresistible. As the valet drove off in the Targa, her subject snapped his black leather jacket into place, and then casually adjusted his tan slacks, as if the drive had somehow left him a bit out of order down there. It wasn’t a crude movement. If anything, it was gracefully sensual in a male sort of way.

And it sent Ally’s stomach spinning, along with her imagination.

She didn’t even know this man. Why was she reacting to him this way? Unless she did know him.

He checked his watch, possibly to disguise the fact that he was subtly scanning his surroundings as he made his way up the steps. If he held to his routine, he would be inside for at least two hours, maybe longer, and that was more than enough time for her to carry out her plan.

Then he stopped midway—and Ally’s heart stopped with him.

He turned and looked straight at her.

He couldn’t see her in the dark, could he? She was down on her knees. Fear set fire to her lungs as he strode back down the steps. She inched back toward the stone, certain that she’d been spotted. There was nothing she could do now but hug the ground and beseech the heavens. If she moved, she would give herself away.

She heard footsteps coming her way, and felt the ground shake.

“I’d heard the club was haunted,” said a faintly sardonic male voice. “Instead of a ghost, I find a beautiful woman crawling around the graveyard. Obviously you’ve lost a contact lens, right?”

Ally felt something inside her go cold as she looked up at him, and it wasn’t just fear that silenced her. It was the odd sense of recognition she’d experienced before. How strange that he’d mentioned the club was haunted, and just now for a second she’d thought she was staring into the eyes of a ghost. Her ghost. The one she’d dreamed about. Too weird. It was fatigue, stress.

“You can’t speak?” he teased.

She never got a chance to try. The guards were shouting at him from the entrance.

“Need any help?” one of them called out.

“Did you find anything over there?” the other yelled.

“Looks like I caught a little cemetery mouse,” the man told them, still gazing down at Ally so intently she didn’t dare move. She’d gripped a handful of leaves, and she couldn’t let go of them. They were crumpled in her fists.

What was he going to do?

“It’s probably a freaking rat,” the first guard said. “I’ll take it out.”

Ally peeked around the man and saw the guard draw his gun. He started toward them, and she let out a tiny squeak of alarm. She was going to be shot.

“Too late,” the man said. “I scared it away.”

His gaze commanded Ally to get back behind the stone, yet she couldn’t move. The guard broke into a jog, obviously relishing the chance at some action even if it was a measly rodent. He was just ten feet away when the man wheeled around and walked straight at him, stopping him in his tracks. The man’s voice was hard enough to dent steel.

“Put it away!” he ordered the guard.

“Absolutely, sir, sorry!”

While the guard struggled to holster his weapon, Ally crept back behind the crypt. She nearly collapsed with relief as the two men returned to the club. Close call. Much too close. She had no idea why the man had given her a break. This well might be her only chance to escape. Her car was parked on the other side of the cemetery, far away from the club’s entrance, and she wasn’t sure she could make it.

Sheer nerve and adrenaline drove Ally to her feet. When she looked back at the mansion, the man had just entered the club and the valet was busy helping guests out of a limo. Both guards were engaged in conversation, probably about the rat that got away, which meant Ally still had time. All she had to do was find her way through the graveyard.

She hadn’t gone far before it became apparent that she was trying to outrun a storm. The tumultuous night sky promised to become violent. She moved faster. He’d diverted the guards when he could just as easily have turned her in. What did that mean? She could only speculate. Was he playing with her? Did he have some plan to trap her?

She would have to take that chance. Her gut was still telling her this was her man. She’d already determined that he wasn’t an established member of the club, with an allegiance to Aragon. The valets were trained to recognize members on sight, and none of them had recognized this man. They’d each given him a claim ticket when they parked his car. Even more significant, he was spying on the club himself.

With luck, she could be back in New Orleans in less than an hour. And with a little more luck—and a key card obtained from a surprisingly helpful young hotel maid—she would be searching the man’s hotel room. If her search proved what she already suspected—that he was trying to infiltrate the club’s inner circle—then she could be of help to him. More than anything she needed this stranger to be the right man, and so far it looked good. He had already accomplished what she could not accomplish alone. He had entered the belly of the beast.

As she drove through the night, she went over what she knew about him, gleaned from the hotel staff where he was staying. He was said to be a corporate raider of some sort. Supposedly wealthy. He loved high-stakes gambling. He didn’t have a woman with him. And his name was Sam.

2

SAM SINCLAIR had a woman on his mind. Too bad it didn’t happen to be the attractive security guard creature in the form-fitting uniform busily frisking him. Her happy little fingers delved inside his jacket, playing patty-cake with his pecs and abs. Roaming upward, she smiled at him as if this were all in a day’s work for her, which was pretty accurate from what he’d observed.

“You have thirty minutes to stop that,” he said as she dropped to her knees and proceeded to pat down his privates. Nothing very private about the way she fondled him, although it was certainly thorough.

So, with all this attention coming his way, why was he fantasizing about his dark-haired stalker out there in the graveyard? If he’d had his choice of a woman down on her knees in front of him, it would have been her.

He could still see her big bright eyes peering up at him in dismay. She’d looked a little dazed and disheveled, her mouth open in surprise. Call him a perverse bastard, but that had struck him as incredibly sexy. Even now, the image of her parted lips elicited a warm, full sensation in his groin, and he warned himself to be careful. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, but the security guard might soon have reason to think so. He’d be as primed and ready as the gun he kept concealed in his car. At least it had a safety switch. Somehow his dark-haired stalker had unlocked his.