Naked Truth

Naked Truth

Delphine Dryden

A standalone story in the Truth & Lies series.

After pulling herself out of a nasty marriage, Stella Devlin has rebuilt her life. She loves her freedom, loves her business and has two rescued Greyhounds to help keep her warm at night.

But when “just one drink” with an old flame turns into the sexiest night of her life, Stella finds herself hoping it’s never too late for a second chance at love.

Chapter One

Stella thought the second drink was probably the one that set her on the path to ruin.

“Hey, you need a refill,” Paul said,
grinning
his cheeky, lopsided grin at her and waving at the bartender.

“Are you trying to get me drunk, Mr. Maddox?” Stella heard
herself
flirting and hoped she wasn’t doing anything dumb like actually batting her eyes.

“Of course.
That makes it so much easier to take advantage of you. How
are those beer
goggles feeling?
Comfy?”

“They’re great. You’re supposed to have two heads and five eyes, right?”

He still had that adorable chuckle. Why hadn’t she gone out with him in business school again? Oh, that’s
right,
she’d already been engaged to Mr. Wrong. And then she’d moved out of town, and by the time she returned, she’d assumed Paul Maddox had forgotten all about the quiet little redhead from the MBA program.

Until a mutual friend had suggested they get reacquainted.

“So Lindy mentioned you’re running your own business now.
A boutique, right?
Should I be worried?”

It was Stella’s turn to chuckle. “Unless your company is in pretty damn bad shape, I’d say you have nothing to worry about from my little place. I’m just glad you didn’t end up snatching away my favorite designer,” she added.

Paul had come to know Lindy when he tried to recruit her to design for his chain store’s house brand. But Lindy, determined to remain a free agent, ended up contracting for just a few designs instead of a longer-term relationship. Which meant Lindy was still free to sell to stores like Stella’s boutique, much to Stella’s delight.

And when Lindy discovered that Paul and Stella were old school friends, she had pointed Paul in Stella’s direction, also much to Stella’s delight.

“Can I ask you about what happened?” Paul ventured after the next round of drinks had arrived.
“With your divorce and everything?”

Stella shrugged and nibbled at the vodka-soaked apple slice that had garnished her
appletini
.
“About what you might expect.
We got married, he seemed okay,
he
turned out to be a jerk with a drug problem. The main problem being that he wasted a whole lot of our money on cocaine before I figured out what was going on. You know what really gets me?” She pointed at Paul with the tiny pink cocktail sword that still skewered a bit of apple. “All these people told me afterward that they’d known something was going on but they just didn’t know how to tell me. Or assumed I knew.
Or didn’t feel right getting involved.
Or just, ‘I wanted to tell you but, you know…’”

“If they knew and they wanted to tell you, why didn’t they?”

“Exactly.”
She punctuated her comment with the sword and the strength of the gesture flipped the apple slice straight into Paul’s dirty martini with a plunk and a splash. After a moment of stunned silence, they both burst into peals of laughter. Paul fished the fruit out and made a show of patting it dry with a cocktail napkin before he presented it back to her with a flourish.

“I believe you dropped this, madam.”

“Why thank you, kind sir. Wow, who knew I had aim like that? Couldn’t make that shot again if I tried.”

She took an exploratory bite of the apple, found it still palatable if slightly salty, and ate the rest while Paul tasted his martini for traces of fruit contamination. Noticing the splash had extended to his tie, Stella leaned forward and dabbed at it with the napkin she was still holding.

“Sorry, you have a little thing here.”

“With all due respect, I have to disagree. It’s really not that little.”

When she looked up and caught his smirk, she was mortified to realize what she’d said while hovering practically over Paul’s lap. She tried to pull her hand away, but Paul had already wrapped his fingers around her wrist and was holding her hand firmly in place against his chest. His jaw was clenched but he didn’t look upset in the least about Stella’s inadvertent fondling.

“I didn’t know that Coop was a cokehead,” he said, referring once more to Stella’s ex-husband. “But if I had, I would have told you. I
did
think he was an asshole, but you can’t really tell somebody’s fiancée that and come away looking like the good guy.”

“True. I wouldn’t have believed you back then anyway. He wasn’t an asshole to me. Not yet, anyway.” Stella could feel Paul’s heartbeat through the fine linen of his shirt and the silk tie. His chest was solid, muscular,
warm
. She was struck with a sudden desire to press her face against it and fling her arms around his waist. Paul reminded her so much of the years before her marriage, back when she was willing to risk herself with people. She wanted so much to feel like that girl again.

“I mostly knew that he was one lucky son-of-a-bitch who didn’t deserve the girl he was marrying.”

He had started to move his thumb in steady circles around the base of her wrist where it joined her hand, and the nerve endings were sending signals to parts of Stella’s body that had been resting quietly and bothering no one for the past five years. Now they were coming alive, and she was embarrassed to realize she was getting wet between the legs.

Stella finished her drink and tapped it down on the bar, daring herself to meet Paul’s eyes. He looked interested.

“I’m not married to him anymore. Let’s change the subject and have another round.”

* * * * *

No, clearly the fourth drink was the problem. If it hadn’t been for that fourth
appletini
, Stella thought, she would have been fine.
In control.
Smooth.

Instead, she was leaning on one elbow on the bar and tugging at Paul’s half-undone tie with the other hand, giggling to beat the band while she contemplated how to cop another feel of his manly chest.

“Thanks. I don’t think anybody’s ever just come out and told me my chest is manly before. And you can cop all the feels you like.”

“Did I say that out loud?”

“You did,” he confirmed, not seeming too bothered by it. His dark blond hair was slightly mussed, and Stella cast her mind back to recall that she had mussed it herself under the guise of pushing it back from his forehead. His hair was thick and curly and silky to the touch. It also smelled incredibly good.

“Damn. I don’t usually drink this much.” She released his tie and picked up her drink, swirling the last few sips in the bottom of the glass.

“What was I saying before?” Paul asked.

“I can’t remember. I was too distracted by your manly chest.” Stella tossed back the last of the drink in one swig.

Paul watched Stella’s pale throat move as she swallowed, trying not to think about her swallowing other things. He marveled at the translucence of her skin. He had always had a thing for redheads, but he’d forgotten just what a perfect example Stella Cooper—no, it was Stella Devlin again now, he reminded himself—was of the type. Even in the low light of the bar, her coppery hair shimmered with spun-gold highlights and he could almost see her every thought express itself on her fair skin.
Blushing
when she was embarrassed, angry red spots on her cheeks when she was mad, and her green eyes growing vivid and bright in their rose-and-ivory setting when she laughed. He had lost count of the times he had pictured what she might look like in the heat of passion.

He’d also forgotten that laugh, how it curled around his heart and drew a smile from him every time. She was so warm, so funny, so very much more than Don Cooper had ever deserved. It didn’t surprise Paul to hear that Coop had been on coke, as that explained quite a bit. Nor was he surprised that Stella had the strength to leave him once she finally saw him for the jerk he was.

But he was sorry Stella had to go through all that. She’d been kindhearted, thinking Coop was just misunderstood, assuming the best of him. Thinking she could save him, fix him. And she’d learned the hard way that you can’t fix somebody who doesn’t want to be fixed.

Paul thought it was high time she learned what it was like to be with somebody who didn’t really need much fixing.
Somebody who would value her as she should be valued.

“You
are
going to let me drive you home, right?”

* * * * *

“See? You should have accepted my dinner invitation,” Paul said as he steered expertly along the dark two-lane road. “Just meeting for a few drinks was bound to lead to trouble.”

Stella groaned and shifted in her seat just enough to glare at him. “Please don’t talk about food,” she said through clenched teeth.

Her biggest fear at that moment was throwing up inside Paul’s car and ruining his leather upholstery. The alcohol magnified her usual carsickness by a horrific factor.

“So I’m guessing that when you were living large in Chicago’s financial jungle you didn’t adopt the three-martini lunch habit?”

“I never had time for lunch,” she confessed. “I was lucky if I got a chance to nuke a Lean Cuisine and eat it hunched over my keyboard.
Which probably explains why I was thinner then.
” Looking morosely out the window, she forced down a wave of nausea by breathing through her nose and trying to send her mind to a happy place. “This isn’t the alcohol. Not entirely, anyway. I just get carsick easily.”

Paul eyed her briefly before returning his gaze to the road. “If you were thinner it must not have been very flattering. You look perfect now.”

Stella snorted, the humor distracting her from the nausea just a little. “Well played, Mr. Maddox.”

“You said three and a half miles, we’re right about there. Is the turnoff coming up?”

“See the red reflector on the right? That’s the edge of my property. The driveway’s coming up in another hundred yards or so.”

“Big.”

“The land is. The house is tiny. But I like it.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m getting a chance to see it. If I recall, you always had pretty good taste. And you’ve got dogs, right? I love dogs, as you know.”

“I’m sure you’ll love Kitty and Beau. Everybody does. Here’s the driveway.”

Paul was already slowing down, easing into the sharp right turn onto the long asphalt driveway. “So what are they? With those names, I’m picturing little
Westies
or
Bichons
or something like that.”

Stella just laughed.
“Not exactly.”

“Just park in front here? Hey, I like this. You got into modern architecture.”

“I got lucky, actually. I mean I do like modern architecture, yes, but mostly I happen to know the architect and he happened to be selling his own house pretty cheap. Oh, standing up was a really bad idea.”

She had opened the car door to get out as soon as Paul stopped the car,
then
had to lean against the side of the Jag to regain her equilibrium. Stella was determined not to throw up in front of Paul. Four
appletinis
was nothing she couldn’t handle. Or at least it would have been nothing on a full stomach, or if she ever drank anything more than the occasional glass of wine. The car ride on top of it, though, was almost too much. She let the chilly night air soothe her senses until her foggy head and queasy stomach started to clear.

“Home sweet home,” she said after a moment, straightening up to find Paul waiting patiently next to her.

“Let’s get you inside.”

“Have I apologized?”

“Several times.
I’ve told you every time that no apology is necessary. This was all part of my evil plan to get you to invite me in. Here, give me those keys.”

A weighty thump and a deep
whuffling
sound against the door startled Paul as he turned the key, and he looked back to see Stella smirking just a tiny bit.

“Not teacup Poodles either, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Okay. Here goes, then.”

“Don’t let them get past you,” Stella recommended. “They’ll run off and they’re impossible to catch.
For obvious reasons.”
She stepped forward to help fill the gap in the doorway when Paul opened it and the house seemed ready to burst at the seams with happy Greyhounds.

“Cool!” he said instantly, letting the dogs sniff him as Stella secured the door behind him. “Hey, I have a Scottish Deerhound. Sherlock looks just like a bigger, shaggier one of these guys.
Guy and gal, sorry.
What a good boy, Beau. Yes, you’re a pretty girl, aren’t you, Kitty?”

To Stella’s amazement, Paul leaned over and let Kitty snuffle at his face in her version of a doggie kiss. Both dogs settled down fairly quickly after that, to Stella’s relief.

“We’ll have to get all the dogs together for a play date,” Stella suggested.

“Sounds like a plan. You look a lot less pale, are you feeling better?”

“Much. I really was mostly carsick,” she confirmed. She still felt lightheaded, but no more than she could blame on the lingering effects of alcohol.

Paul cocked his head to one side and contemplated her. “So can I ask you something now?”

“Sure.”

“Have you really not gone out with anybody since your divorce?”

He leaned toward her and Stella was suddenly very aware of how small the entryway was, how close Paul’s body was to her own, how wonderful he smelled. Had he smelled this good back in graduate school? Had she ever let herself get close enough to find out?

“Oh. Well, yes. I mean no. I mean, I haven’t been on any dates.
Or anything.”

“For five years?” He sounded incredulous, which Stella could certainly understand. “I can’t believe that nobody has asked.”

“I haven’t really been putting myself out there.” Stella whispered this, as she was having a little trouble breathing since Paul had put his hand very carefully against her cheek. When his skin touched hers, all the air seemed to swoop out of the room, leaving only frantic heartbeats and clear gray eyes that wouldn’t let her go.

“It’s actually been about a year for me.
Which is a twenty-year record.
”