Lauren Dane

Kate turned and tried to keep a pleasant expression, pretending she hadn’t ever heard the groan he made at the back of his throat when he came. When really, as she watched Charles Dixon approach, all she wanted to do was fall into his arms and kiss him.

She felt like a teenaged girl. Crap. All the schooling, all the years she spent smoothing out any professional edges and it all threatened to slip through her fingers. He was the highway to hell and she suddenly wanted to wrench the wheel and take off. Oh the clichés!

Buck the hell up, Katherine!

Tugging the hem of her jacket down, she straightened her spine, took a deep breath and tried to keep her smile professional.

When their eyes met…holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

She froze as green eyes bored into hers. Unable not to, she ate him up with her gaze. Perfectly cut dark-brown hair, as dark as the sinful chocolate he represented to her, tempted her fingertips. The suit he wore fit him well enough she knew it was made for his body alone. And when he smiled he showed white teeth, not blindingly so, but perfect enough she remembered what they felt like closing over the sensitive skin of her shoulder.

He took her hand and the shake was professional enough, but there was no mistaking the intent in his eyes. Or her body’s response. Utterly mutinous hormones shot through her, nipples hardening, pussy slickening, blooming, cripes, she had to squeeze her thighs together to try and relieve the tension.

‘Hello, Dix,’ she said, one eyebrow rising as she struggled to get her bearings. She wasn’t some newbie. Not to being a woman and certainly not to her job. Tonight they’d meet and have sex. She could last. She’d meant to masturbate the night before to take the edge off but she’d had a few too many tequila sunrises and had fallen asleep before she’d been able to do more than run the idea of making herself come through her head.

‘I take it your incredibly interesting seminar on confidentiality agreements went well yesterday?’ One corner of his mouth lifted and he looked like a pirate in a business suit for just one fleeting moment.

He smelled good. Really good. Dark and spicy. She knew what he smelled like covered in clean sweat after a rousing bout of sex, what he smelled like first thing in the morning. What he tasted like. Inwardly, she took a shuddering breath.

Beside her, Leah shifted and Kate latched onto her friend’s presence to bring her back to shore before she lost it and sniffed at him for real.

She pushed Kate away and pulled Katherine around her like a shield. ‘Yes as a matter of fact it did. I’ve actually got some material for you. We can go over it later if you like. I took the liberty of drawing up a few memos for you on the non-compete stuff as well. I just finished a case that has some corollary issues with yours.’

‘Sounds good. We can talk after the sessions today. Legal is only needed in the morning and early afternoon.’ He indicated with an arm that they should precede him into the conference room but she felt him at her back.

Throughout the morning session Katherine listened to the company president drone on. There wasn’t much to say at that point so she frowned in the appropriate places. Allied had some problems that might very well end up in court. They’d come up with several innovations in both packaging and shipping but their contracts were open to interpretation in some cases with regard to their non-compete and confidentiality clauses.

Meaning some of the people who knew the freaking secret box formula or whatever the hell it was, could take it to another packaging company without problem.

Dix had taken over the in-house legal counsel position for Allied Packaging and Shipping eighteen months prior and the horrific problem had slowly come to light. Leah had suggested Katherine as someone to consult on the issue and that’s how she’d first come in contact with Charles Dixon.

He’d called and something about his voice and his manner had made her respond. Made her let him push her buttons. She secretly liked it because it was something just between them. He flirted but nothing too outrageous. He didn’t waste her professional time, which meant a lot to her. Something about the slight accent, the dark masculine bass of his voice always made her want to melt into a puddle of female goo.

After her past experience with office romance, she’d kept co-workers strictly off the sex menu. That would fall under the utterly wrong choice category. Until him. Why was she even thinking about fucking? They were not paying her three hundred and seventy five dollars an hour to have fantasies about Charles Dixon shoving her against a wall, ripping her panties off and fucking her until she wept.

But he wasn’t precisely a co-worker. She was of-counsel, he wasn’t her boss. Technically, there wasn’t really an issue.

She dug her fingernails into her palm to make herself stop thinking about Dix driving himself into her cunt over and over, his pants pooled around his ankles, the scratch of the wall at her back, his fingers digging into the flesh of her bare ass, her skirt bunched up around her waist. The delicious tang of his sweat tickling her senses as she held on and let him take her.

Jeez-a-lou she did not just have a Dear Penthouse letter fantasy while sitting in a conference room! Flushed, she shifted in her chair and met green eyes that knew exactly what she’d been daydreaming about.

Dix pushed his very sexy glasses up the bridge of his nose and the whisper of a smile touched the corner of his mouth before he shifted his attention back to the endless, Charlie Brown-like drone of the president again.

Lea at Closetwriter says: I found their combined voices in this novel to be wonderful. I got to know these characters easily and despite the strong personalities of the men and women I could sense their vulnerabilities and angst in taking tentative first steps in new relationships. I have to say the dry wit and clever verbal sparring, particularly between “Kate and Dix”, and certainly some of the sarcasm, had me laughing out loud.

Blanche says: I really enjoyed this book and actually told Lauren that I wished it was a little longer because I would have loved to see where the relationship between both couples went!! I highly recommend this book, I’m a huge Lauren Dane fan and I have a few Megan Hart books in my TBR and I plan to get busy reading Megan and looking for other books by her!!

Mad at Novel Thoughts had this to say: Usually when it’s two stories going on in the same book, I always come away feeling that one of the couples was cheated of getting the reader to see their full story. That wasn’t the case with TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. It completely flowed for me with no lagging and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for the couples in the sequel.

Jo at Joyfully Reviewed said: I found a very complex book that combined both women’s lives during a conference they will never forget. The hot and erotic sex that each couple have was enough to all but turn on my fire alarms. Kate and Leah are both very strong women who know what they want and are not afraid to fight or ask for it. Brandon and Charles have fallen for the perfect women for them and now just have to get them to agree. Sometimes when two authors write the same story, I can tell who did what, however this is not the case in Taking Care of Business. Everything blends so beautifully that if I hadn’t seen the cover, I would have thought only one author had written it. If you are looking for an escape involving strong and professional women and equally strong and hot men, you cannot go wrong with Ms. Dane’s and Ms. Hart’s Taking Care of Business.

Jackie at Literary Escapism says: I’m not sure if this was what I was in the mood for or what, but I just ate this novel up. Seriously, I started it in the morning and I could not put this down. There was just something about the characters that made me continue reading, even though I knew I should be doing something else. Even though we were bouncing between two different romances, they were connected rather well, so the jumping around flowed smoothly. We were also given some great development for having to focus on four different characters and nothing was really taken away from the story.