Total Immersion by Alice Gaines

Chapter One
    “W E HAVE A bit of a disaster on our hands,” Madeline said. “And I’m afraid it involves you.”
    Adam Fairchild didn’t bother to take a seat in the chair across the desk from his boss; he wouldn’t have time to sit and chat. After working with Madeline Shaw for the past five years, he knew when she meant business. Although well into her fifties, Madeline retained the beauty that had made her a top model, but beneath the precise makeup and designer clothing, she had the commanding presence of a seasoned cop. He was here to find out what needed doing and get it done.
    “A young woman came looking for you and is making a scene,” Madeline went on. “A very loud scene. You need to get her to quiet down before she upsets the rest of our patrons.”
    “Why would a young woman come looking for me?” If the person in question were a current or former client, Madeline could handle her without his help. Since he’d become manager of the male sex providers a few months ago, he hadn’t served any of the club’s women customers sexually. An empty gesture, it turned out—too late to save the only relationship that had promised to grow into something else. Now, his personal love life was nonexistent, so no one from the outside should have followed him here.
    What went on at Club Ecstasy, San Francisco’s most exclusive club for women, was by no definition of the word legal. Still, its prices and the quality of all its services—from the spa to the various dining rooms to the male sex providers—drew the elite of the city and of Northern California. Those sorts of customers expected good taste and privacy, and he and Madeline were here to provide that.
    “Why don’t we go see what she wants before she makes enough noise to drive all our clients away?” Madeline rose and left the office, her heels clacking against the hardwood floor, and Adam followed.
    The noise in question came to him before they reached the end of the hallway. Madeline had put the woman in a room as far as possible from the rest of the facility, but her voice penetrated into the corridor. With yelling, they would have generally expected anger, but a lot of what filtered out to here was laughter. Very, very loud laughter.
    She sounded familiar. Way too familiar. But before he could consider how he knew that voice so well, Madeline opened the door, and reality punched him in the gut. Of all people, why her?
    “Susan?” he said.
    Susan McGraw stood in the middle of the room. Images flashed through his mind so quickly he could barely process them. Her smile when she first opened her eyes in the morning. How she’d dance, shaking her butt, while she cooked. And then tears, lots of them at the end. A chaos of feelings lodged in his chest.
    When she spotted him, her face lit up, although her eyes didn’t really focus. “There he is. The sexiest stud in the world, and he used to fuck me regularly.”
    “What are you doing here?” At least his voice sounded calm.
    “Then you do know her?” Madeline said as she shut the door quietly behind them.
    “I do.”
    You could call living with someone for a year knowing them. Sharing a bed, sharing meals, sharing a toothbrush rack. With her long dark hair and pale skin, she looked just as fabulous as she had on their first date at the winery in Jack London Square. They’d discovered a mutual love of zinfandel, and he’d fallen for the way she could pair basic innocence with a wicked sense of humor. Now she stood here flushed with maniacal happiness and obviously intoxicated.
    “I came here to apologize to you for the way we said good-bye,” Susan said. “After our time together, you deserved better than me yelling at you.”
    Yelling hardly covered their last argument, but she was in no shape to discuss it now.
    “Why don’t we talk about this later?”
    “I figured we could see if we could patch things up,” she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “But this turned out to be such a