Explosive
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR BETH KERY AND
WICKED BURN
Winner of the
All About Romance
Reader Poll for Best Erotica 2009
“A web of sensual suspense . . . Wicked good storytelling.”
—Jaci Burton, author of
Riding the Night
“Kery gives readers beautifully written prose with amazingly descriptive sex scenes. But be warned—this is a very sensual tale. The well-crafted characters are full of raw emotions that are right on the page for the reader to experience.”—
Romantic Times
“After reading
Wicked Burn
by Beth Kery, I have a new favorite author! . . . With passionate love scenes, poignant romance, and a touching story,
Wicked Burn
is the kind of book that I will read again and again—it will certainly have a permanent place in my personal library.”—
Wild on Books
“A book you will never forget.”—
TwoLips Reviews
“[Kery] brings her characters to life with her descriptive prose and realistic dialogue . . . I held my breath as they came together in some of the sexiest love scenes I have read this year.”
—
Romance Junkies
“Beth Kery has written a tale filled with intense emotion and wickedly hot sex.”—
Joyfully Reviewed
“A poignant contemporary romance . . . filled with real characters.” —
Midwest Book Review
“A remarkable tale that mesmerizes to the core.”
—
The Romance Studio
Heat titles by Beth Kery
SWEET RESTRAINT
PARADISE RULES
RELEASE
EXPLOSIVE
Berkley Sensation titles by Beth Kery
WICKED BURN
DARING TIME
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2010 by Beth Kery.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form
without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in
violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
HEAT and the HEAT design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Heat trade paperback edition / December 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kery, Beth.
Explosive / Beth Kery.—Heat trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44565-5
I. Title.
PS3611.E79E97 2010
813’.6—dc22
2010023003
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due to several people for this book. I’m so grateful to have a husband who knows the world of business as well as he knows technology, tax law, and how to fix a sink. His information is always invaluable to me when it comes down to the details. I’d like to thank Lea, Sabra, Mary, and Robin for beta reading
Explosive
and providing feedback. I’d be lost without you, ladies. Thanks to Sabra and her husband for giving me valuable information on the EOD. And Fi—you’re a saint for helping me brainstorm and putting up with me when I worried incessantly. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the members of my Yahoo reader group, Total Exposure, for cheering me on and offering me support. Your kind words of encouragement keep me going at times.
CHAPTER
ONE
She was so caught up in the lazy mood of the first evening on her summer holiday that at first she couldn’t compute the fact that Thomas Nicasio was standing on her dock. He stared fixedly at the rippling lake, the golden sunlight bringing out the burnished highlights in his uncharacteristically mussed brown hair. If it weren’t for that singular profile she would never have recognized him in these surroundings.
Thomas was an inhabitant of her work world, after all, a denizen of the city and the high-rise where they both worked. For Sophie, he only lived within the confines of 209 South LaSalle, wearing his perfectly tailored Armani suits, always moving with a brisk sense of purpose through the corridors or paging through his BlackBerry distractedly while he waited for his brother in the waiting room of the medical practice where Sophie worked.
They’d shared nothing more until that moment but heated glances, a few flirtatious conversations. On several occasions, she’d noticed Thomas sitting in the waiting room, studying her covertly while she interacted with her patients as she escorted them to the reception desk. It was clear to Sophie that Thomas was attracted to her, but he’d always seemed to make a point of keeping his distance.
The single exception to their sterile acquaintance had been the charged, brief exchange they’d shared in the waiting room of her office just last evening. Thomas certainly hadn’t seemed contained or aloof on
that
occasion.
Still, until that moment he’d always hovered on the periphery of her life, never fully entering it, but never totally absent from it, either. She thought of Thomas Nicasio a lot, usually in a sympathetic manner following her consultations with her psychologist friend, Andy Lancaster.
More recently, she had good reason to consider Thomas with compassion while watching the ten o’clock news.
He might occasionally creep up into her thoughts whenever she saw another tall man out of the corner of her eye while she was grocery shopping or jogging by Lake Michigan. Certainly the faces of her fantasy lovers often morphed into Thomas the closer she got to climax, but surely that was no surprise. Sophie suspected the same was true of a majority of the women who caught sight of him.
Still . . . she wondered at times if his sober, watchful gaze had the same effect on most females that it did on her.
Usually Thomas existed for Sophie only within the confines of her office lobby or the eight-by-eight confines of a crowded elevator, his head easy to see over the other early-morning elevator riders, his eyes unfailingly meeting hers, his gruff, quiet, “Good morning, Doctor,” tickling her ear before the elevator doors opened and Sophie stepped off on the twenty-third floor.
The overlap of their lives was so minimal that it made her wonder if she was hallucinating—conjuring her dreams into reality—when she saw him standing on her dock wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.
Her brain just couldn’t seem to get a handle on the image.
And there was something about his stance that caused a muted alarm to start ringing in her head. She considered calling Andy Lancaster, who had been treating Thomas’s brother, Rick. Thomas had been asking to see Andy just last night.
But what could Andy do, even if she got a hold of him? He was in Chicago, after all, over one hundred fifty miles upstate.
And
Thomas
had never been his patient.
Sophie knew that multiple tragedies had befallen Thomas Nicasio’s family recently. His brother and nephew were dead. Thomas’s adoptive father, Joseph Carlisle, was being investigated for several federal crimes. The FBI was in the midst of building an indictment against the wealthy businessman.
