Page 96 of Decidedly Off Limits

By some large miracle I kept my mouth from flopping open. Oh. Wow. Why didn’t I know about this?

She flipped the pages and held the calendar up again for me—and everyone in Owen’s group—to see.

“Oh, my,” a woman behind me said.

“Oh, my” was right. The girl in the silver dress was holding up a picture of me and Trent, with my naked breasts pressed against his equally naked chest. Despite how we were posed, the woman in the picture was clearly me.

Oh. Fuckity. Shit.

Next to me, Owen stiffened. He’d never even received a heads up about the photo. I hadn’t seen the point of telling him, not when I believed no one would see them—and certainly not at the event he had invited me to.

“Am I right?” the girl asked. “Is this you?”

For a second I thought about claiming the woman in the photo was my twin.

That was plausible.

If I had a twin.

But before I could say the words, my body betrayed me and I nodded instead.

“Can you sign it for me?”

“You…you want me to sign it?”

“Well, yes. Trent signed it. All the men in the calendar signed their pictures.” She held it out for me and my brain finally got its crap together. I took it from her and flipped through the calendar. It contained the hottest bachelors in the San Francisco area, but only Trent was half naked in his pictures. The other men were fully clothed.

Trent’s half-dressed state wasn’t the only thing that made his picture unique from the other months in the calendar. His photo was the only one with a woman in it.

The girl handed me a Sharpie, and I signed the picture for her, my face heating at the memory of that day…and at being asked to actually sign the picture. The moment I handed it back to her, four other calendars were shoved under my nose.

“Is he your boyfriend?” one girl asked, but she wasn’t looking at Owen. She was referring to Trent.

“Of course not,” another girl said, rather sharply. “He wouldn’t be in the calendar and auction if he had a girlfriend or wife. That’s why he’s aba-che-lor.”

The first girl rolled her eyes, no doubt used to the other girl’s attitude. All were too busy to notice my heart had stopped beating at the news that Trent was part of the auction.

“So how come you’re in the picture with him?” The girl in the silver dress sighed, as if wishing herself into the photo instead of me.

And right now, I was wishing the same.

“I was helping out a friend,” I simply said. “He needed someone to pose for the picture and…and I did.” I didn’t dare turn around to confirm what I already suspected: the horrified expressions on everyone’s faces, especially Owen’s.

“I love the picture,” she said, “but I love the one on the front even more.” The one in which Trent wore low-rise jeans and the white dress shirt, but the shirt was unbuttoned, revealing his taut abs and pecs. He had a come-fuck-me look on his face that made anyone with ovaries swoon.

I grinned. “Thanks.”

The girls looked at me like I was crazy. It took me a second to piece together why. “I’m the photographer,” I explained.

The calendar was yanked from the girl’s hand. She scowled at the thief. “Hey, that’s mine!”

The woman studying the cover held up her hand to silence her. “You’re extremely talented, Kelsey. I would love to see your portfolio sometime.”

“I’ve only just started doing this. I don’t have much of a portfolio.”

She removed a business card from her purse and passed it to me. I read it and almost fainted. Jennifer Ashton, CEO of Ashton Crawford Inc.

“You work for an ad agency?” I knew the name. It was a rival agency to where Erin worked, with an impressive clientele.