Zero Control Read online

  At the microphone stood the emcee, a lean, long-haired young man dressed like a court jester. He welcomed the guests and then began setting up the scenario for the spoof.

  Dougal took a deep breath. Come on, you’ve been in charge of guarding fighter jets. You can handle this goofy piece of fluff with your eyes closed. Closing his eyes? Was that an option? Right now dental surgery sounded like a more appealing alternative.

  The curtain parted. The audience applauded. His stomach pitched.

  In the center of the stage sat a four-poster king-size bed decked out with a baroque crimson comforter and matching pillows. It looked like whorehouse bedding. Lucy recited her line, and then she shot a glance at Dougal.

  His brain froze. He couldn’t think. He opened his mouth but no words came out.

  Find one person to focus on.

  He didn’t plan it. How could he plan it when he couldn’t think? His gaze swung through the audience and lighted on Roxie.

  Perform only for her.

  Roxie held Dougal’s stare. To his surprise, the words that had been locked inside his head suddenly fell glibly from his lips. “Forsooth, madam, pray what shall I leave thee when I die? Perhaps my second-best bed?”

  Lucy’s advice had worked. Who knew it would be so simple?

  “And which of these trollops shall inherit this, your finest bed?” Lucy waved at the bed and sneered. Then she comically narrowed her eyes and glanced out over the crowd as if they were her rivals for Shakespeare’s affections.

  “It shall be your choice,” Dougal replied, his attention still locked on Roxie. “Select the lass with whom I will be sharing my bed.”

  “Three in a bed seems a bit crowded, husband,” Lucy replied saucily. “Perhaps she and I will kick you out.”

  That line caused a titter to run through the crowd.

  “Or perhaps,” Lucy went on, “I shall select a lad to join us.”

  “Only a lass will do, woman.” Dougal recited his lines. “Pick her and pick her quick or I won’t even leave you my second-best bed.”

  “As you wish.” Lucy started down the steps to select someone from the audience to bring up onstage and a dozen hands shot up to volunteer.

  “Pick me, pick me,” someone called out.

  “I’d love to spend time in Shakespeare’s bed,” said someone else.

  “I’ll whisper dirty limericks in his ear,” hollered the audacious redhead who’d made yummm-o noises at Dougal on the airplane.

  Lucy threaded her way through the tables, ignoring all the women who were straining to volunteer. She continued to speak her lines as she and Dougal bantered back and forth.

  She stopped at Roxie’s table.

  And that’s when Dougal realized Lucy was going to bring her up onstage.

  5

  “HI,” ANNE HATHAWAY SAID.

  Roxie recognized her as Lucy Kenyon, the woman who’d passed out the questionnaires in the lobby when they’d first arrived. She gulped and realized everyone at the table was watching her. Who was she kidding? Everyone in the room was watching her, even Dougal. For crying out loud, there was a spotlight on her. “Um…hi.”

  Lucy leaned in closer. “I saw on our survey that you enjoy acting.”

  “Yes,” she replied, not knowing what else to say.

  “Would you like to have some fun?”

  They were magic words. Roxie knew that she should say no, but in that moment, all the joy of being onstage rushed through her. She recalled the fun she used to have performing at her parents’ dinner theater, and remembered her role as the lead in her high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. In the school’s history, no freshman had ever been given the lead role before her.

  Roxie couldn’t help smiling even as she said, “I don’t know the lines.”

  “That’s what we want, off-the-cuff improv. Come on,” Lucy coaxed. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Go on.” Sam nudged her.

  “You get to be onstage with Shakespeare,” Jess pointed out. “Go for it, woman.”

  Roxie hesitated, but only for a moment. The ham in her took over and she nodded.

  “Wonderful.” Lucy held out her hand to Roxie and led her to the stage.

  Her heart was pounding, but the minute she was facing the audience, exuberance embraced her. It had been so long since she’d done something solely for herself and she felt liberated.

  “Lie down on this bed, fair maiden,” Anne instructed, patting the mattress with a naughty gleam in her eyes. “And pray tell us your impression of my husband’s best bed.”

  Giddily Roxie slid onto the bed and lay back against the pillows. The silky material of the pink, flower-print Renaissance frock she’d picked out from the costume room rubbed erotically against her skin. The tight bodice pulled across her nipples, causing them to bead beneath her camisole. Belatedly she realized she should have worn a bra instead.

  “Wife,” Shakespeare aka Dougal said, “you have chosen a comely lass.”

  “I did so for the benefit of my eyes, sir, not thine own.” Anne gave Roxie a seductive look.

  “However, wife, I am enjoying your feast.” Dougal was looking at Roxie as if she were dipped in chocolate. He angled his head, licked his lips.

  The crowd chuckled.

  “So, maiden—” Anne swept across the stage “—what is thy opinion of the master’s bed?”

  Relishing her role, Roxie bounced up and down. The bedsprings creaked loudly. “’Tis a bit loud, milady. Might it wake the children?”

  “Ah,” said Dougal. “Shouldn’t children learn that squeaky bedsprings are simply a part of grown-up life?”

  “It’s a bit too hard, as well,” Roxie observed, flopping about on the mattress for effect.

  “I told him it was too hard.” Anne looked pointedly at Shakespeare’s crotch, inducing catcalls from the audience.

  Shakespeare and Anne bickered back and forth over the prone Roxie, each line of dialogue filled with ribald statements and sexy innuendo. Roxie rolled her eyes and heaved exaggerated sighs over their squabbling. “Married couples,” she said as an aside to the audience.

  The more she hammed it up, the louder the laughter grew. She was aware of—and exalting in—the fact that she was stealing the show.

  Anne Hathaway said something to Shakespeare, but he didn’t answer. A momentary silence fell over the crowd. Roxie turned her head to see Dougal staring at her as if they were the only two people in the room.

  The expression on his face stole her breath. Her pulse skittered, and she felt twin dots of heat rise to her cheeks. She pursed her lips and crossed her arms chastely over her chest. It was as if he’d stripped her stark naked with his inscrutable gaze.

  Lucy repeated her line, nudging him in the side with her elbow.

  “Um…er…” Dougal sputtered.

  “I can see the fetching vixen has stolen your tongue, husband,” Anne said.

  “No vixen, she,” Dougal said, finally finding his voice. “But she is the very muse that moves my soul.”

  As Dougal stared into her eyes, Roxie felt as if the words were suddenly, oddly, illogically true. Her body grew heavy with sexual awareness and she felt herself go slick between her thighs. She gulped, disoriented.

  Shake it off. What are you doing?

  A corporate spy should fly under the radar. Getting up onstage was not the way to keep a low profile. But while her professional side berated her for this dumb move, her personal side was secretly reveling, having fun, doing the unexpected.

  That is, until Dougal walked across the stage and plunked down on the bed, never breaking eye contact with her. He was beside her again as if he belonged there, turning her on.

  She’d had daydreams like this, midnight reveries. Imaging herself a throwback to the Renaissance era. Such a romantic epoch filled with great art and music and the concept of chivalry. Dougal was the embodiment of her sexual fantasies.

  Oh, dear. She couldn’t tear her gaze off him. What to do? What to do? And
here she’d thought falling into his lap on the plane had been erotic. But this was a hundred times more intense. They were side by side.

  On a mattress.

  Lying mere inches apart.

  With a roomful of people watching their every move.

  She could feel the power of his muscular body underneath his costume. She appreciated the natural mahogany highlights in his neatly trimmed beard. Surely no man in history had ever looked so manly in snug, black leather pants, a billowy white poet’s shirt and knee-length black boots.

  Eat your heart out, William Shakespeare.

  The shadow falling over his face lent his expression a darkly dangerous air that was so damned sexy the hairs on her forearm lifted in response. One close-up glance at his angular mouth and all she could think about was kissing him. Her breathing quickened and her heart tripped over itself.

  The collective laughed in response to something Anne Hathaway had said as she tromped in mock fury away from the bed, reminding Roxie where she was. Why had she agreed to come up onstage? Ego? The opportunity to live out her childhood fantasy of becoming an actress? To recapture her past? A chance to be near Dougal again?

  Roxie feared the third option was the most accurate. What was it about the man that made her want to live out a very X-rated adult fantasy?

  “Forsooth,” Anne called out to the audience, hand clasped to her bosom. “You are all my witnesses. Look upon my husband and see how he stares at the temptress. Has she not cast such a spell on him that he is left both speechless and brainless?”

  Dougal looked stunned, as if he, too, had forgotten where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. Immediately he leaped from the bed, hair tousled and shirt askew. He placed a hand at the nape of his neck and stared down at Roxie, then quickly shifted his attention to Lucy.

  “You are right, wife, I have been bewitched,” he exclaimed.

  “Trollop.” Anne pointed an accusing finger at Roxie. “You have stolen the bed that should have been rightfully mine.”

  Okay. This wasn’t fair. Roxie didn’t have any lines and she had no way to know what was expected of her.

  Improvise.

  “Perhaps, milady,” Roxie dared, going up on her knees in the middle of the bed, “if you had but satisfied your husband in this very bed, then he would not seek solace within my arms.”

  Both Shakespeare and his wife turned to stare at her, while the audience hooted with glee.

  Roxie grinned at Dougal.

  He grinned back, clearly enjoy her improvisational skills. “She has a point, good wife.”

  Anne looked a bit confused as what to say next. Roxie’s input had knocked the skit off its trajectory. “All I want,” Anne said at last, “is what’s rightfully mine.”

  “Your husband?” Dougal said, stepping across the stage toward Anne with his arms outstretched.

  “My bed,” Anne cried, made a comical face and hopped onto the mattress beside Roxie.

  The crowd dissolved into guffaws.

  Dougal shrugged, raised his palms to the audience as if to say, “Easy come, easy go,” and then held his hand out to Roxie. “Take the bed, wife, and I will take my muse.”

  Roxie didn’t take his hand.

  Dougal repeated his line, wriggled his eyebrows at her and added, “Come along, Muse.”

  Swept away by the thrill of performance, feeling decidedly impish, Roxie collapsed against the pillows. “My lord,” she said. “This mattress is too desirable to leave.”

  “I thought it was too hard.”

  “Perhaps I was hasty in my judgment. For now it feels just right.”

  “Muse!” he bellowed and strode toward the bed, hand still outstretched. “Come here at once.”

  Excitement welled up, pushed against Roxie’s chest, sent tingles shooting out through her nerve endings.

  “Go get her, Shakespeare,” a woman in the crowd yelled out.

  “Shoot for the ménage à trois, Willie,” countered a man.

  Anne flashed a suggestive look at the audience that said she was intrigued by the prospect.

  Shakespeare stopped, pivoted on his heel and peered out at the gathered guests. “Some men are foolish enough to think they can handle more than one woman at a time. I, however, am smart enough to know it’s best to be a one-muse man.”

  “What about me?” Anne lamented.

  “You, milady, have not been so much muse as nag,” Shakespeare answered.

  That brought fresh laughter.

  Shakespeare turned his attention back to Roxie. “Now, Muse, come along, I have a sonnet in want of being written.”

  “What?” Roxie crossed her arms over her chest. “I do all the work and you get all the credit? The deal does not sound so fetching to me. How about this? I write my own sonnet.”

  “He gets bossy like this,” Anne interjected. “Is his best bed really worth putting up with his high-handedness?”

  “I need you, Muse.” Dougal’s words sounded so heartfelt that Roxie’s pulse quickened. He extended his hand. “Pray, do not abandon me.”

  “He’ll abandon you,” Anne warned, studying her nails with a nonchalant expression. “Next thing you know, it’ll be a younger, prettier muse booting you out of bed.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” he said. “She’s jealous.”

  Just like that, Roxie’s improvisational skills evaporated. She whipped her head around to look at Anne, searching for a clue as to what to say next. Anne shrugged. Her expression said, You’re on your own. Roxie was suddenly aware that every eye in the ballroom was on her, waiting to see what she’d do next. The urge to flee smacked her hard.

  “Come.” Dougal reached out; his hand barely grazed her knuckles and yet she felt blindsided.

  Helpless to deny him, she rested her palm in his hand and he tugged her to her feet. His eyes hooked on hers, and she could not look away no matter how much she might desire to do so. Then, in his spine-tingling, baritone voice, Dougal began to recite a Shakespearean sonnet.

  She knew the verse. She’d been forced to memorize it as part of a high school English assignment. Sonnet number twenty-one: “So is it not with me as with that Muse.”

  Kismet.

  Dougal said a line, and then Roxie jumped in with the next one. His eyes lit up. They went back and forth with perfect timing as if they’d practiced this duet for weeks. He was holding her hands and they were staring deeply into each other’s eyes and it was pure magic. This shared verbal intermingling was simply the most erotic thing she’d ever done with her clothes on.

  The audience went wild for it.

  “Woot!” she heard Jess holler. “Rock on, Roxie.”

  “Shake it, Willie!” Sam shouted.

  Roxie recited the last line in a throaty whisper.

  Dougal’s jaw tightened. His chest muscles—readily visible through the deep V of the undone buttons on his shirt—flexed. The pulse at the hollow of his throat strengthened, slowed. He drew in a deep breath and slowly exhaled it as if by controlling his breathing he could control other responses.

  Her body reacted to his physical clues. A warm gush of awareness oozed through her skin already heated by the overhead spotlights. She hadn’t realized it until now, but the entire time they’d been reciting the sonnet, they’d been inching closer and closer to each other. Mostly unconscious of what she was doing, Roxie ran her tongue over her lips, tasting the poetic beauty of the sonnet.

  His fingers were interlaced with hers. When had that happened? The tips of his leather boots were touching her sandals. Barely an inch of space existed between them. Their hip bones were almost touching, his chest so close she fancied she could hear his beating heart, and then realized it was her own heart she heard pounding with alarming power.

  He glanced down. Her gaze followed his and she saw the tightness across the front fly of his pants.

  This was insanity. They were total strangers. Not to mention that they were onstage in front of dozens of people with spotlights trained on the
m. Yet all Roxie could think about was throwing her arms around Dougal’s neck to see if his mouth tasted as good as it looked.

  Before she had a chance to do something rash, though, he took the reins. He slid an arm around her waist and pulled her tightly against him. She saw his eyes darken with desire, and she wondered if her own were undergoing the same changes.

  The next thing she knew, they were kissing.

  DOUGAL HAD FOUND HIMSELF lost in a fairy tale—the audience disappeared, Anne vanished, the spotlight no longer existed, the stage faded away. The only thing left in his world was her.

  It was hard to say who made the first move. It was simultaneous really. When Roxie pulled his head down to meet her lips, Dougal breathed in the taste of her and tightened his grip around her waist. He’d been aching to kiss her from the moment he’d seen her in the plane, and damn if he didn’t just let it happen.

  She tasted as good as she looked. Better even. Her flavor was fresh and lemony and sensational. Initially, kissing her made him think of his mother’s kitchen—warm and safe and comfortable. But underneath that soft comfort roused a stronger, more primal instinct.

  Lust. Hot and heavy and intense.

  And in spite of the wide-eyed innocent image she projected, what she was doing to him with her mouth was anything but innocent. He could get seriously addicted to this.

  Dougal swallowed back a groan of pleasure at the feel of her thigh against his. She curled her fingers into his scalp, pressed her body into him, crushing her soft breasts against the silky Shakespeare shirt. His entire body caught fire. Without meaning to do so, he raised his hand to cup her buttocks.

  She gasped.

  It was only then he realized he’d closed his eyes, gotten washed away on a dream. Startled by the thought, his eyes flew open. Roxie’s eyes were open, as well, and she was looking at him with a mixture of curiosity, amazement, excitement and mortification.