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CHAPTER ONE
“DROP your head a little to the left. That’s right. Good, Amber, good.”
Amber Taylor moved to the direction of the photographer, the hot Spanish sun baking her skin despite the high factor sunscreen slathered on under her body sheen. She didn’t complain, though. The shoot was her first truly big ad campaign as well as her first large international contract.
At twenty-four, she was either on the cusp of making it big in modeling, or sliding into mediocrity. Mediocrity was not an option. She’d been modeling since her early teens and had sacrificed sleep, chocolate and a social life for her chosen career. She was determined to make it big.
It helped that her mom was on her side. A widow, who had raised Amber on her own, Helen Taylor was an amazing woman. She’d sacrificed herself for Amber’s career and loved her only daughter enough to remind her when to exercise and whennot to eat…too much.
Amber had been living on a low-calorie diet so long, she didn’t even get hungry anymore. Helen was careful to make sure that the food Amber did eat was übernutritious. She’d even given up her own comforts so that she could afford to hire a personal trainer for Amber. Helen Taylor had provided Amber what she needed to hone her body into the perfect form for modeling.
Her mom’s support of her dream meant everything to Amber and she had every intention of repaying it with success.
“Okay…lift the phone like a victory fist and smile.”
Amber lifted the trim flip phone high in the air and gave her signature smile, one that her agent said promised the world and everything in it.
A whistle sounded from her left and unexpected tingles traveled up her spine and down her arms. It was if someone with an electric gaze was watching her. Which was just plain silly. Superman might have X-ray vision, but he was fiction and no real person actually had the ability to touch someone else with a look. Only, she felt touched. Caressed even.
Doing her best to mentally shrug off the odd feeling, she turned up the wattage on her smile and the whistle sounded again. This time low and suggestive. It was all Amber could do not to clench her thigh muscles. She never reacted like this.
Never.
A swear word hissed out between her perfect teeth even as she maintained the smile for the numerous clicks of the photographer’s camera. What was wrong with her?
“Call a break.” The voice rang with authority and just the hint of a Castilian accent.
The photographer called the break and Amber dropped the cell phone she’d been holding onto a nearby table. She went to pull on a gauzy wrap, but two elegant, masculine hands were there before hers.
The wrap was held open waiting for her to slide her arms into it. “Come,querida, you must cover such perfect skin from the heat of the sun.”
She allowed him to draw the wrap up her arms, a sense of unreality stifling her. She had not even seen his face yet and felt as if they were intimately acquainted. Impossible.
And just slightly terrifying.
“Whose not so brilliant idea was it to work during the hottest part of the day?” he asked in a voice that carried as far as the photographer.
“It is the light, Señor Menendez. It is perfect right now,” the ad campaign manager said in a much less authoritative voice than Amber had ever heard from him while she saw the photographer hurry over out of the corner of her eye.
“Are we not civilized? Does not the siesta demand rest, not work during the hottest part of the day?”
“I apologize, señor. If we had known you wished to oversee the shoot, we would have arranged it for a different time.”
The man behind Amber laughed, the sound warm and rich, like chocolate sauce pouring over French vanilla ice cream. “It is not myself I am concerned about.”
That strange urge to clench her thigh muscles hit her again and she had to force herself to step out from under the hands now resting on her shoulders. When had she ever wanted to prolong a man’s touch? She could not remember a single instance. Men were business associates or props for photo shoots, nothing more.
She turned to face the man upsetting her equilibrium and got her first glimpse of Señor Miguel Menendez. Her brain immediately began to catalog the information she had on him.
