"Steamy sex and tender love... it'll have you
aching for more."
-Sunny, USA Today Bestseller

Available April 1, 2008 from Harlequin Spice Briefs.

When bad times come knocking, all Carinna wants is escape. All Carinna wants is her scorchingly sexy best-friend Jack. Jack is hot for it too--sex with Carinna, that is--but dare he give in, knowing it could mean the end of their lifelong friendship?

I’d been to Carinna’s apartment thousands of times--hell, I even had my own key. Something about tonight was different. From the moment I stepped inside her small but cozily decorated living room, something about tonight had my gut tightening and every nerve in my body going on full alert the way only an all-alarm fire could typically accomplish.

I knew that something had to do with the weakness she let show back at the funeral home, the brief minutes when she’d cried and let me hold her. I knew that letting her more tender emotions show meant she was down and out in a way I’d never seen her before today, and for good reason. I also knew the last thing I should do was sit on the couch beside her and get hammered the way she was asking me to do.

We shared an infinite love for sex, and experience had taught me that mixing sorrow, alcohol, and a member of the opposite gender generally led to precisely that. I valued our friendship way too much to risk ruining it over a hasty screw.

“C’mon, Jack,” Carinna goaded me from the couch.

The bottle of gin I’d picked up on the way to the funeral home dangled from her fingertips, open now and several drinks shy of full. Those drinks seemed to be working their magic on her mood--all trace of vulnerability was gone from her gray eyes, the self-assured arrogance I knew and respected shining through.

A teasingly sultry smile lifted her lips. “Be a man and drink up.”

Precisely the problem here was that I was a man. One who had long ago noted she was more than an average woman. With her centerfold curves and Latino coloring, she was stunning, gorgeous. Thoughts of her body, nude and sweaty on the verge of orgasm, had been my masturbation material for years.

Those X-rated thoughts attempted to enter my mind and harden my body. I quashed them by grabbing the transparent blue bottle from her hand and crossing to the open kitchen. “Tonight’s a martini night.”

Much as she might prefer to get sloshed fast, I knew she wouldn’t say no to martinis. They would still get her drunk and possibly me, as well, but with luck we would pass out before she forgot I was her best friend and I forgot I was a gentleman.

I almost laughed over the irony of that thought--I liked my loving fast, hard and dirty, and for the time being, with no-strings attached. I probably would have laughed if Carinna hadn’t chosen that moment to start undressing.