Marie Donovan - Sex By The Numbers

Dane sincerely hoped not.

“I’ll leave first,” Keeley said, picking up her raincoat. “We don’t want to be seen together.”

“Good idea.” Dane felt foolish about the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but that didn’t keep him from admiring her ass as she strolled away. She paused and looked over her shoulder to catch him staring. He gave a feeble little wave and her lips curved in a small smile.

Then she pushed out the café’s door and disappeared.

Dane exhaled loudly. Had Keeley tried to arouse him on purpose? If so, she’d done a good job. He did have big appetites, and not just for fine food, but for fine women.

And now he had the sneaking suspicion that he could eat a whole can of cherry filling off another woman’s body and it wouldn’t have the same impact on him as the earlier sight of Keeley’s pink tongue licking her finger clean thanks to that cherry tartlet….

Dear Reader,

Keeley Davis, the heroine of Sex by the Numbers, popped onto my computer screen as I was writing my previous book, Bare Necessities. One of the exotic dancers says she needs a costume receipt for her accountant, a former exotic dancer herself.

A stripper-turned-accountant intrigued me. I had no name, no physical description, only that she was a small-town girl determined to lift herself out of a difficult background. But I had just the man for her—ambitious, brawny Dane Weiss, a farm-raised, world-traveling business consultant.

Keeley is all those girls we vaguely wonder about after we leave high school—the girls of whom little is expected, except to drop out of school and work unskilled jobs. What if one of those girls surprised everyone by getting her education and a great career? A surprise to everyone except herself, because she always knew she was tough enough, smart enough and brave enough to succeed.

Here’s to all the girls who make it and the people who help them!

Marie Donovan

P.S. I’m delighted to hear from my readers. Visit www.mariedonovan.com to enter fun contests and learn more about my upcoming books.

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

Marie Donovan, an award-winning author, is a Chicago-area native who got her fill of tragedies and unhappy endings by majoring in opera/vocal performance and Spanish literature. As an antidote to all that gloom, she read romance novels voraciously throughout college and graduate school.

Donovan has worked for a large suburban public library for the past nine years as both a cataloguer and a bilingual Spanish storytime presenter. She graduated magna cum laude with two bachelor’s degrees from a Midwestern liberal arts university and speaks six languages. She enjoys reading, gardening and yoga.

HARLEQUIN BLAZE

204—HER BODY OF WORK

302—HER BOOK OF PLEASURE

371—BARE NECESSITIES

To my mother, a self-made woman,

whose bravery continues to this day,

and to all the girls she’s helped.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

“ARE YOU SURE my breast implants aren’t tax-deductible?” The blond bombshell sitting across from Keeley Davis tapped her acrylic nails on the rich brown maple desk. “That exotic dancer in Indiana got hers deducted and they weren’t that much bigger than mine.”

Keeley turned away from her laptop screen, where she was reviewing Sugar’s tax return. Tax season was finally wrapping up, and none too soon for a poor, worn-out accountant. “Sorry, Sugar—it’d be a long shot. The tax court is cracking down on what they regard as frivolous deductions and I doubt we could get it past them. We can write off your costumes and the tinted latex nipple makeup, but that’s about it. No personal care like tanning, manicures or hair extensions.”

“And we can’t appeal? I only got the implants for professional reasons, you know.” Sugar pursed her pink glossy lips.

Keeley had known her friend and client too long to fall for her act. She peered over the tops of her glasses. “And you get no personal benefits from them?”

Sugar smacked her arm playfully. “Oh, all right, you naughty girl. I didn’t lose any nerve sensation from the surgery and my last boyfriend and I did enjoy them.”

“Thought so.” Keeley pushed her glasses back up her nose to focus on the computer again. “And if we make an issue over this, the IRS might want to look in to how much of your cash tips you’ve been reporting as income.” Keeley wasn’t a novice to IRS audits, but didn’t exactly enjoy them, either.

“Hmmph.” Sugar backed down, like Keeley thought she would. As a certified public accountant, Keeley couldn’t take part in tax evasion in the form of under-reporting garter or G-string tips, but she had a good idea that Sugar salted away her own personal cash stash, and who could blame her? Keeley would do the exact same thing in the same situation.

But Keeley was on the straight and narrow, just taking the figures Sugar gave her and plugging them into the tax program, although sometimes she raised an eyebrow at an obviously low figure. Sugar would revise it upward without blinking.

Keeley added in a couple of last-minute expenses Sugar had brought over today. Sugar, not one to sit still for any period of time, paced around the small office. Her long legs took her rapidly from one terra-cotta faux-painted wall to the other, the beige Berber carpet muffling her sneaker-clad steps. Like some dancers, Sugar had foot problems and only wore high heels onstage and on dates.

Keeley rotated her own brown-pump-clad foot under her desk. Her shoes matched her hair, her eyes, her jacket and her skirt. She was a big brown wren in comparison to her flashier blond friend, but accountants couldn’t exactly sport cleavage T-shirts and midthigh denim miniskirts.

Sugar stopped to eye a pair of watercolor prints of Florence, Italy. Keeley had never been there, but the red tile roofs matched the whole rich, Tuscan, trust-me-with-your-finances theme she wanted to emphasize. After all, accountants working in Renaissance Florence had invented double-entry bookkeeping.

Keeley printed the return and eyed it one last time before passing the pages to Sugar. “Read these over before I file electronically.”

Sugar sat and speed-read through the papers. She looked as if she was skimming, but Keeley knew she was tallying every number to the penny. She finally raised her blond head and smiled. “I suppose that’s as good as it gets without writing off the breast implants.”

Keeley shrugged, palms upward. “If you really want me to try…”

“No, I guess not. After all, pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.” Sugar signed the bottom page for her own records.

“That’s right.” Keeley’d heard that saying more than once growing up in downstate Illinois. Not that there had been enough to even get slightly plump on. “Off it goes to Uncle Sam. Since you’ve made your quarterly payments, you don’t owe any more than usual.”

“Whoopee. I’ll have to schedule myself at Frisky’s a couple more nights to make up for it.”

“If any of your clients work for the IRS, charge them double.” And now that Keeley’s highest-earning season was almost over, she’d have to save her money to make it last as long as possible until next winter.

Sugar passed the papers to Keeley. “By the way, Keel, I recommended your accounting services to an old friend of mine.”

“Oh, who?” That might help tide her over while she built her client base.

Sugar grinned. “Binky Bingham.”

“Boy, when you said ‘old,’ you weren’t kidding. I thought he croaked last fall after hot-tubbing with that dancer from Chicago Gentlemen’s Club.” And why on earth would Binky Bingham, billionaire, need accounting services from her fledgling business?

“Alive and kicking. He’s still one of her regulars, in and out of the club.”

Keeley made a face. Binky fancied himself quite the ladies’ man and had the money to make it so. Sugar was Binky’s occasional arm candy, especially when he wanted to scare his children and grandchildren into thinking he was going to leave his money to her. He was lucky they hadn’t had him declared legally incompetent and locked him up somewhere.

Sugar laughed. “Don’t look at me like that. Aside from dancing for him at Frisky’s, I sure never spent any time naked with him, hot tub or no.”

“That’s a relief.” Binky Bingham was older than dirt and twice as ugly. Keeley was glad to hear Sugar hadn’t slept with the old goat.

“You’re telling me. Not even all of his money would be enough. For such a financial genius, he sure wasn’t thinking with the right head. Viagra, a hot tub and a previous heart attack? Why didn’t he just step in front of a bus? Potentially less fatal and definitely less embarrassing.”

“You know Binky is incapable of embarrassment.”

Sugar raised a perfectly French-manicured finger. “Personally, no. But professionally, yes. That’s why your name came up.” She leaned over the desk. “You absolutely cannot tell anyone what I’m going to tell you. Promise?”

Keeley narrowed her eyes. “I can’t be party to anything illegal, you know that.”

Her friend shook her head. “Not illegal—not so far.”

“So far? Sugar, this doesn’t sound good at all.”

“It’s about Binky’s company. He thinks one of his executives is stealing money from the trust funds.”

Keeley gave an astonished whistle. Bingham Brothers was the granddaddy of Chicago’s financial companies, managing hundreds of millions of dollars since before the 1929 stock market crash. “It’s possible, of course, but there are so many safeguards to theft. These huge companies have hundreds of people overseeing the books.”

“Binky grew up with those books, and he has a gut feeling they’re bad. He went into the office several times to poke around and says the atmosphere is pure poison.”

“Hmmm.” Keeley turned over possibilities in her mind. “Why doesn’t Binky call for an audit?”

“And flush his company’s reputation down the toilet? Not to mention his family’s reputation. Hot-tub hijinks are one thing, but missing money is unforgivable.”

Keeley nodded. A whiff of scandal and the company would bottom out. It had happened before to Chicago financial firms, usually involving bankruptcy, corporate dissolution and prison terms. “So what does Binky think I can do? I can’t exactly walk in off the street and look at the books. It would take months for a whole team of auditors to examine everything.”

“He has a smaller, specific group of accounts to audit first. When I told him you’d completed a certificate in forensic accounting, his wrinkly little face just lit up. He said his representative would be in touch to get you inside for a covert audit.”

“A covert audit?” Despite her misgivings, Keeley’s investigative antennae perked up. She loved digging for money, ever since she was a kid checking the couch for loose change.