Nothing.

Dropping the girl’s hand like a pile of hot coals, Travis bit out, “I need two first-class tickets to Rome for Wednesday.”

If he couldn’t fight Lily’s lure, he was going to have to do the next best thing.

He was going to have to drown in her until he was completely, totally sick of licking her, kissing her, sliding in and out of her incredibly tight pu**y.

Until he never wanted to touch her again.

Chapter Five

The next morning, Travis made a beeline for Janica’s design studio. If he was going to take Lily to Italy, he wanted her to look good. Apart from her red suit and Janica’s dress, Travis couldn’t remember ever seeing Lily in something that didn’t make her look frumpy. So he needed clothes. Incredible clothes. And from what he had seen during the fashion show, even though she was just starting out in the business, Janica was going to be one of the best.

He found her J Style studio in a refurbished warehouse ten blocks from his office. As the blocks dropped off, the neighborhood grew seedier. Travis paid a homeless man twenty dollars to watch his Jag and rang the bell.

Janica called down through the voice box. “Who’s there?”

“Travis.” She didn’t buzz him in, so even though he’d known her since she was in pigtails, he said, “Travis Carson.”

“You’re kidding me,” she said, and he would have grinned at her reaction if he weren’t so stupefied by what he was doing. “What are you doing here?”

“Let me in, Janica,” he growled.

The buzzer sounded, and he opened the thick metal gate. It slammed shut behind him as he made his way up the concrete steps to the second level.

Janica leaned against the door, scowling at him. “What do you want?”

Travis had always admired Janica for sticking up for her older sister. Even though she was a perfect size two, Travis had the sense that Janica wasn’t the kind of woman who disrespected women larger than she.

On the contrary, she seemed to go out of her way to make them look beautiful, as was evidenced by the line of plus-sized clothes Travis saw hanging from a rack by the window.

“What are those?” he asked, ignoring her biting question.

She gave him a triumphant look. “Lily was such a hit at my show that I’ve been asked by a local boutique to design an entire line of clothes for plus-sized women. Real women, like Lily. Not like those plastic uberidiots you always date.”

Her stance was tense. She looked ready to spring and strangle him at any moment, the bear cub who would do anything to protect its mother.

“Relax,” he said, “I’m not here to malign your precious big sister.”

“Watch who you’re calling big,” she said as she approached him, a menacing look in her eyes.

Travis held his hands up and took a step back. “I didn’t mean big as in big,” he said. “I meant big as in older.”

“Whatever,” she said, not looking the least bit appeased by his explanation. “Tell me what you want, then get out.”

“I need an entire wardrobe for Lily.”

“What?”

“By tonight.”

“Excuse me?”

“For Tuscany.”

Janica sat down heavily on a dusty windowsill. “You’ve completely lost me. When did Lily make plans to go to Tuscany?” Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And what do you have to do with the trip?”

“I’ve hired her to furnish one of my clients’ houses. We’re going on a quick buying trip.”

“You’re kidding me,” Janica exclaimed, before her doubts returned full force. “Then again, I shouldn’t be so excited. I’m sure you have a perfectly nefarious reason for asking her to do this. You always do. Just like that time you showed up at Luke’s house with some total slut and completely ruined her birthday dinner. I know you did it on purpose, just to hurt her, shoving some skinny bitch in her face like that.”

Travis tried to shake of a sense of guilt that he felt at Janica’s words. Sure, he might have accidentally crashed Lily’s birthday party a year ago, and he might be taking Lily to Italy out of some self-serving need to get her out of his system, to teach her what happened to women who dared to say that he wasn’t a good lover; but in his own defense, hadn’t he just given her the professional opportunity of a lifetime?

The fact that it was one he knew she couldn’t say no to, one that included rights to her body whenever he so desired, didn’t make it any more unfair than business as usual, did it?

So what if all the balls happened to be in his court? It happened to be where he liked all of the balls to be. Which only made him think of the way she had caressed his balls earlier by the pool___

Forcing himself to turn off his libido, Travis deftly switched the facts around to suit his needs. “She quit her job at Barker’s yesterday.” It was the truth, or nearly, even though he was leaving off some pertinent details, like the fact that he was the one who convinced Lily to quit. Hopefully, if he presented it right, he could get Janica off the scent of his actual nefariousness. “I found out about it and wanted to help her out.”

“You wanted to help her out?” Janica’s disbelief rang out loud and clear. “I never would have expected this in a million, billion years,” she muttered. Staring at him, no, staring straight through him with those damn all-seeing Ellis eyes, so much like Lily’s, Travis saw the first hint of smile and wondered where it was coming from.

“Tell me what you need,” she said, her demeanor changing from black to bright white. “If I have anything to do with it, Lily is going to look like a goddess in Italy, you can count on that.”

Janica picked up her phone the minute Travis left the office. “Luke,” she said, calling her sister’s best friend. “It’s Janica.”

“Is Lily all right?”

Janica had always appreciated how well Luke looked after her sister. She used to wonder why they weren’t boyfriend-girlfriend, but over the years, Janica had decided it was a good thing. Maybe one day she could convince Luke to see her as a woman instead of Lily’s kid sister.

“She’s fine, at least I think she is.” Getting straight to the point, she said, “I heard that Lily went home with you after the fashion show. Is that true?”