Make Your Move - By Samantha Hunter Page 0,1

She was an old-fashioned girl in one way: she liked a real man in her bed, not a battery-operated boy toy. Call her a purist, but there really was nothing like the real thing and she didn’t settle for facsimiles.

“You make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back,” she said with sexy promise in her voice.

Her weekend was off to a perfect start. Sex and fun on Friday night to ease into the weekend, followed by busy Saturday and Sunday mornings at the bakery, and then Sunday afternoon and Monday off to relax and have time to herself. It was a routine honed to perfection over the years. She’d worked hard to get her bake shop, Just Eat It, off the ground. Four years later, now that she was doing well, she’d taken on help and made sure she had time to enjoy life, too.

“Hurry back. Please,” he said it so politely, so focused on her and still visibly erect, that she couldn’t resist kissing him one more time. She enjoyed it when her lovers were this eager, and begged a little. Taking in his moony-eyed gaze she hoped her science guy wasn’t tenderhearted. This was strictly a one-night thing, and she’d make that clear in some gentle way before they hit the sheets. It was better to be honest up front, then everyone could relax and enjoy.

She moved into her bathroom, washed up quickly, spritzing on some perfume and picking a black lace gown from her lingerie closet. Something told her Jason was a traditionalist. She took her hair down from its knot and shook it out, approving of her image in the mirror.

On her way back out to the living room, she saw her cell phone light up on the dresser where she’d left it. She looked down to see who had left her a message.

Dan!

Without hesitation, she picked up the phone and called her voice mail to check.

“Jodie? You there? It’s me, Dan,” he said in the message, as if she wouldn’t recognize his voice. “I’m back a few days early, and the guy subletting from me isn’t out of the apartment until Sunday. I’m at a hotel, but call me on my cell if you want to have dinner or get together. I’ll be up late, so don’t worry.”

She smiled, holding on to the phone for a second. She hadn’t realized until she heard his voice how much she missed him.

Dan was a very busy guy. Since college, he’d been in high demand as a speaker and guest lecturer. He still did that now that he was a professor at the university—when he wasn’t working on government contracts associated with the department’s high-security experiments. When someone had a gift like Dan’s, everyone seemed to want a piece of him. He’d been teaching less in recent years, away more often than not, so they didn’t hang out as regularly as they had in the old days, although they tried to spend time together in between his varied engagements.

Those speaking engagements had always paid quite well, as did his many publications. As his college years had been completely funded by a scholarship, he’d been accumulating quite the bank account since he was young.

Not so for Jodie, who’d worked her way up and, even with her scholarship, had worked all through college to be able to afford the necessities. However, Dan was never arrogant about his accomplishments, and he never acted as if he was better than everyone else. Quite the opposite, when she’d met him, he was a bit of a loner.

They became friends, and eventually he became her silent partner, bankrolling the bakery at the beginning. He’d also developed their “secret ingredient”—a cookie icing that held pheromone additives that enhanced female sexual attractiveness. In other words, eat a cookie or two with that icing on it, and any woman would attract men that she was also attracted to, releasing the pheromone along with the usual chemical something-or-others that all combined to create lust.

Dan had explained how it all worked—in painful detail—and Jodie had listened, though she only understood about five words of what he was saying.

Dan’s invention was the thing that had put her on the map of the Chicago specialty foods scene with her Passionate Hearts cookies—for adults only, of course. After a few write-ups in food and women’s magazines, she was even considering a Web site and online sales.

To do that, she’d have to hire another baker, but she needed to make sure she was hiring