Hotter Than Hell
up onto the stool, ordered a scotch, and waited. The crowd had thinned and those who remained were moving around the room like cats after a kill—slow, deliberate, sensual. The box of CDs on the end of the bar had emptied as people paid for the chance to take the sensation evoked by the music home.
    Brandon stood just off the stage, brushing damp tendrils of the redhead’s hair back off her face while Travis stood beside him, one hand gently kneading her boyfriend’s broad shoulder. All four of them glanced down at her chest, and she half turned, pointing toward the bar.
    As Brandon’s eyes met hers, Ali raised her glass and smiled.
    Travis laughed, the sound falling into the room like pebbles into a pond, the ripple of reaction spreading. Someone dropped a glass. Someone else moaned. Brandon leaned toward his brother, asked a question, and when Travis nodded, led the way up onto the stage and toward the door at the back. They paused at the door, standing close enough as they turned that Ali knew they had to be touching shoulder to hip. Still smiling, Travis beckoned.
    Given the sunglasses it should have been impossible to tell who he was beckoning to.
    It wasn’t.
    His teeth were very white.
     
    Backstage was nothing more than a long, narrow room between the rear wall of the stage and the brick, outside wall of the Atlas. The air was cooler and smelled more like dust than like sex and alcohol. Following the two men past stacked chairs and empty boxes to where a small lounge had been set up in the far corner, Ali wondered a little at her willingness to throw caution to the winds. If the brothers could make anyone do anything…
    The possibility smoldered in the cradle of her hips, the heat shifting and flaring as she walked.
    “So, Alysha Bedford of Bedford Entertainment…” Travis dropped onto one corner of the disreputable-looking couch, Brandon perching on the arm beside him. “…you’ve got our attention.” His right hand rose to rest on his brother’s thigh, long fingers absently stroking the faded denim. “What is it you want?”
    Ali drew her tongue over dry lips. She wanted them to touch her. To drag rough fingers over her skin. To open her. To fill her. To feast off her. That was what she wanted but it wasn’t why she was there. She was there because they had something she needed and she had to convince them that they in turn needed her. “I know what you are,” she said.
    Travis laughed but Brandon tossed his hat down on the other end of the couch and drew both hands back through damp hair, pale eyes never leaving her face. “I think she does.”
    “Do you?” Travis stretched out one long leg, the room narrow enough his boot ended up thrust between Ali’s ankles. She looked down, saw the black leather and barely stopped her hips from rocking forward. “All right then,” he murmured, “what are we?”
    “Sirens.”
    In the silence that followed, her heartbeat sounded unnaturally loud.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” Brandon growled at last.
    “Probably,” his brother agreed. He beckoned and Ali found herself moving forward, straddling first the outstretched leg, then both legs, then his lap. It wasn’t so much a compulsion as a mutual acknowledgement of the need to get closer that she knew had to be showing on her face. She was still standing but only because the couch was so low.
    A little voice—a voice that sounded remarkably like Glen—reminded her this wasn’t the business meeting she’d planned but she was too turned on to care. Besides, she’d always prided herself on being adaptable and nothing in the rules said business couldn’t be discussed over friction.
    “So…” Travis reached out and lightly stroked the inside of her leg with his thumb. “…you’re half right.”
    His touch was distracting but then, she could see from his smile that his touch was supposed to be distracting.
    “Momma was a siren,” Brandon continued, shifting enough to watch his brother trace
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