Evil to the Max by Jasmine Haynes Page A

him.”
    Jules had sounded like he needed encouragement, or at least a friend. And with a boss like Pippa Louise Lamont ... Max brightened. Jules liked to talk. Jules needed a friend. “Of course I won’t bother him, Pippa.” She’d go to work encouraging him to talk the first chance she got.
    “See that you don’t.” With one last arched-brow glare, Pippa stepped forward and shut the door in Max’s face.
    Entering the salon proper, Max caught sight of Jules outside, his head stuck inside the open trunk of a sleek, mint green Mercedes. Damn, Pippa didn’t drive a large, dark car, and Jules almost certainly didn’t have a license. Max’s best bet was still Miles’s Lincoln.
    Jules approached the shop with a two-foot square cardboard box. Max held open the front door for him. Turning to the side, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth, he eased past her.
    As he passed, he whispered, “I like Max. I’ll call you that. Bye now.” He vanished down the hallway and presumably into Pippa’s office.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Pippa had stayed long enough to unpack her box. She’d sent Jules out to her car at least three more times for various items, most of which she could have had him bring all at once. Obviously, Pippa was born to give orders, and Jules appeared to have been born to take them.
    After they left, Max enjoyed the momentary peace and typed the addresses she’d written down into Mapquest.
    When the troops returned, the salon reverted to its natural state of controlled chaos. Max didn’t have a moment to think beyond answering the phone, taking people’s money, and ignoring the Three Stooges.
    Ah, she’d never been so glad to see six o’clock in her life. She crawled into the Miata and listened to the silence for three long minutes.
    “Home, James?” Cameron whispered in her ear, the sensation of his voice inside her melting the last knot of tension. He used to say that as a prelude to hot, delicious sex.
    “Making love, my sweet.” His words were like the trace of fingers along her inner thigh.
    “That’s what I meant.” She closed her eyes, then rolled her shoulders. Oh God, she could feel him. Still. After two years. That was intimacy. She was capable of it, despite what he’d implied the other night.
    A hand slipped between her legs. It wasn’t her own. It was ghostly. She could actually hear the rasp of her zipper. She didn’t stop Cameron. She should have. She was sitting out in the open, the top down on the car. But if she stayed very still, kept very quiet ...
    “What do you want, my love? My fingers, my mouth, or my cock?”
    She wanted everything. She knew she couldn’t have it.
    “My fingers, I think, with my tongue in your ear.”
    Oh God. He entered her with two fingers, scraped her clitoris, and tongued the shell of her ear all at once. She came, just like that. Her only movement was the sinking of her teeth into her bottom lip. The spasms rippled through her, then died away.
    And somehow she was cleansed. Very strange. She’d just had mind-sex in her car, in almost broad daylight, and she felt cleansed?
    It washed away the stink of Tiffany’s workplace, the strange feral rake of Miles’s gaze over her breasts, and Pippa Lamont’s beady green eyes.
    “We’re getting decidedly kinkier, Cameron. I’m not sure this is a good thing.”
    “We were always kinky, my love. Remember that time in the restaurant when you were wearing that skirt with the slit up to your navel and no panties?”
    God. She did. The tablecloths had been very white and very long, and Cameron had ...
    Max straightened, then started the engine. “We’re off to search for the missing husband.”
    “Party pooper.”
    That was one thing she had never been, especially when it came to sex games.
    “Aren’t we going home to freshen up first, my love?”
    He had something up his sleeve, she could tell. “We don’t need to go home.”
    “You’re just afraid the detective will be there.”
    She