Hollywood Hills Collection. Lynne Marshall

escalators for, when they’d both stopped talking as the sound of Cuban heels had rung out on the marble floor. And they had stopped talking with good reason. Tall, tanned, with shaggy, curly black hair, he had walked past them in dark jeans and tight T-shirt, carrying a large backpack. He had been just so sexy that he’d simply stopped conversations. Both women had watched him go up to the desk to check in and then shared a guilty smile once they’d finished checking him out.

      And now Freya was in the lift with Him.

      ‘And your theory is?’ Freya asked.

      ‘That all the good girls are taken.’ He asked her which floor she wanted. ‘I’ve already pressed...’ Actually, no, her selection had been erased. ‘The mezzanine level.’ She watched as long suntanned fingers pressed said level and then he pressed for floor twenty-eight and she wished, how she wished, she had given the thirtieth floor as her choice of destination, just for a minute or two more alone with him.

      ‘Shouldn’t brides be smiling on their wedding day?’ he asked, and Freya tried to place his accent.

      ‘Believe me, the bride is smiling,’ Freya said in a dry voice. ‘I’m the bridesmaid.’

      ‘Did I hear the word maid?’

      Freya laughed at the cheeky inference and the slow smile he gave in return had her stomach tighten. Sexy green eyes were looking right at her, and he didn’t make her feel like an old maid in the least...

      Freya blinked at her own thought process.

      The hotel events coordinator had, when they’d been watching him, sighed that he was probably gay and Freya had said if that were the case, again, then she really had to get out of LA.

      Oh, he was so not gay. His eyes might as well be blowtorches because he had her face just turn to fire.

      Sadly the doors pinged open.

      ‘Enjoy the wedding...’ he said.

      ‘Oh, I shan’t, it’s going to be a very long evening,’ Freya replied, peeling herself from the wall, when she really didn’t want to get out.

      ‘Yeah, I get it.’ he said. ‘I do my best to avoid weddings.’ He met her eyes. ‘Especially my own.’

      Was he telling her that he was single?

      She thought back to the flirty emails that she would live to regret tomorrow, but flirting was kind of fun, Freya was finding out, and she was very single.

      ‘And me,’ Freya said.

      The elevator doors were open but the conversation wasn’t closed and he put one big boot out to keep them open as he asked Freya a question. ‘Why did she want a big white wedding on a Thursday?’

      ‘Because it’s New Year’s Eve.’

      ‘So it is! Well, thanks for reminding me, I’d be in trouble if I didn’t call home.’

      ‘You’re Australian?’ Freya asked, now that she’d placed his accent.

      He nodded.

      ‘LA’s a long way from home.’

      ‘It is,’ he answered. ‘And I’m suddenly lonely.’

      He didn’t look lonely in the least, not with that smile.

      ‘Poor you,’ Freya replied, and met his smouldering gaze. His deep green eyes were thickly lashed and she looked down to a dark red mouth and stubbled jaw.

      He was so hot, so direct, so bad, so sexy and her reaction to him so acute that Freya could possibly have forgiven herself if she’d hit the button to close the doors and leapt up onto those lean hips.

      ‘I’d better go,’ she said, because, yes, she’d better. ‘It was nice to meet you...’ Freya fished for his name.

      ‘We don’t need names, do we?’

      She ought to have been offended, Freya thought. She ought to be very, very offended and yet she wasn’t.

      ‘Enjoy the wedding,’ he offered, ‘and thanks for messing up my theory.’

      ‘But I haven’t,’ Freya said, simply unable to resist prolonging this delicious, rare flirt and, just as when she had hit ‘send’ on that blasted email, she offered a verbal response that would be just as hard to retract. ‘I’m not a good girl.’

      ‘It would seem that you are,’ he answered smoothly, ‘given that you’re about to get out.’

      The bow around her middle was killing Freya. She wanted to tear it off, and the dress too, and stamp on them. Instead she stood as his eyes performed a long and slow perusal of her aroused body and Beth would be furious because her nipples were throbbing. They needed his mouth. Oh, yes, they did.

      Oh, she was in no position to take offence as his gaze lingered and lingered, because Freya was doing the exact same thing to him. Down that wide chest her eyes went. He was wearing a silver-grey T-shirt and he too had two nipples, she knew that because she counted them slowly and carefully. Then she looked down to his flat stomach. His T-shirt was half-tucked in and she fought not to lift it free. He had on a heavy leather belt that made her thighs want to press together. She looked at the thick bulge in his jeans and was frustrated by the button-up flies, because she’d break her nails tearing at them just to get to him. What the hell was happening? Freya wondered. Because she completely wanted to sink to her knees and to do just that.

      It was, for Freya, the oddest feeling. She wasn’t very free in bed and she wasn’t the most generous lover. She just hoped to have her needs met. ‘One for you, one for me’ type of thing, and if her needs weren’t met then she’d lie twitching with resentment. Actually, even if they were met, it was so underwhelming that she lay twitching anyway, wondering why she couldn’t enjoy it. Freya controlled everything that went in her mouth and what she was looking at now wasn’t one of them.

      Freya licked her lips, not deliberately but very provocatively, it would seem, because he just grew before her eyes. She watched as that lovely hand that had earlier pressed the button had no choice but to make a little room and he rearranged himself to her eyes.

      Freya tore them from his bulging crotch and he gave her a slow, appreciative smile in reward for her lovely effort to get him so hard and so soon.

      ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

      ‘With what?’ Freya breathed. She could hardly speak.

      ‘It takes great skill to be such a turn-on in that dress.’

      And Freya had more than seen just how turned on he was. ‘I have to go.’

      ‘Then go.’

      He didn’t remove his boot from the door, and Freya could either step over his leg or walk around him. The scent of him mingled with her arousal and Freya had this terrifying moment of absolute conviction that she wasn’t going to make it to the chapel in time.

      He was sex.

      And suddenly, for the first time in her life, so was she.

      Freya didn’t walk around him, she put one high-heeled foot over his calf and proceeded to step over the hurdle.

      She’d never gotten over them at school and was having the same trouble now.

      He was terribly polite, for such a filthy animal he really was extremely polite, because his hand settled on her arm to help her over.

      Oh, she needed help because the feel of his warm fingers on her bare skin had Freya wanting to straddle his calf and she knew that the bastard knew it.

      ‘Do you want to come up for a drink?’ he offered in that low, sexy, deep voice but, really, why bother attempting to be polite? Freya thought. A drink was the very last thing on either of their minds.

      ‘I have a wedding to get to,’ Freya croaked. ‘I really do.’

      ‘Then you’d better go,