It was a wrap! Shay wanted to jump up into the air and click her heels together.

“Do it again,” Richard said with exaggerated patience.

Shay couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d doused her in cold water. “What?” she demanded. “Richard, that take was perfect!”

“It wasn’t anything of the sort. I want more emphasis on the word ‘shock.’”

He was repaying her for all the barbs they’d exchanged and that knowledge infuriated Shay. “I think this gunk in my hair makes that point on its own, don’t you?”

“No,” Richard responded flatly.

He made her go through the scene half a dozen times before he would admit to any sort of satisfaction with it, and that, when he gave it, was grudging.

Shay muttered as she stomped back into the RV and slammed the door behind her. Refusing help from the vacuous Chrissie, she slathered cleansing cream onto her face and carefully wiped away the glittery makeup. After that, she squeezed into the vehicle’s miniature bathroom and took a tepid shower, muttering through shampoo after shampoo. A bathrobe that probably belonged to Marvin was hanging on the hook inside the door, and Shay helped herself to it.

When she left the bathroom she was startled to find Mitch Prescott sitting at the RV’s tiny table, his hair moussed into an elongated crew cut rising a good four inches above his head. “May I say,” he told her blandly, “that I was shocked by your behavior this morning?”

The utter ridiculousness of the moment dissolved Shay’s foul mood, and she began to laugh. “You’re crazy!”

Mitch caught her hand and pulled her onto his lap. “About you,” he said, on cue.

Shay knew that she shouldn’t be sitting on this man’s lap in an oversized bathrobe with all of Reese Motors’s employees gathered outside, but she was powerless to move away. She looked at Mitch’s hair and into his laughing brown eyes and she thought, I love you. God help me, I love you.

Mischievously he opened the front of her robe, revealing her breasts, and she could not lift a hand to stop him. “It’s a good thing you washed that stuff out of your hair,” he mumbled distractedly, and she could feel his breath on her right breast, feel the nipple tensing for the touch of his tongue. It came soon enough, and Shay gasped, the sensation was so wickedly delicious.

“Why?” she groaned.

“Because we might have mated and produced a punk rocker,” he answered sleepily, still busy with her breast.

Using laughter and the last bit of her willpower, Shay thrust herself off Mitch’s lap and out of his reach. Watching her, he helped himself to a hairbrush left behind by Chrissie and returned his hair to some semblance of normalcy. Shay wanted to use that time to dress and escape, but she couldn’t seem to work up the momentum.

When the maestro held out his hands, she moved into them, moaning softly as she stood before Mitch, shivering as she felt the robe open. The intermezzo was a sweet one, brief and soaring, underscored by Shay’s own soft cries of pleasure as she was taught a new tune, note by glorious note.