Hearts Unleashed Read online

  HEARTS

  UNLEASHED

  ALSO BY JULIA DUMONT:

  Sleeping With Dogs and Other Lovers,

  A Second Acts Novel - Book 1

  Starstruck Romance and Other Hollywood Tails,

  A Second Acts Novel - Book 2

  “The misunderstandings and mischief will keep readers turning pages… erotic adventure for readers more interested in an entertaining read than deep thought.”

  – Kirkus Reviews of Book 1

  “Dumont’s second foray into the turbulent, sexy, often-hilarious world of celebrity dating provides a delightful diversion. A sexy romp through glamorous modern Hollywood as seen through the eyes of a self-possessed matchmaker who cannot find her own match.”

  – Kirkus Reviews of Book 2

  “Think Stephanie Plum meets Sex and the City wearing Fifty Shades of Grey – L.A. style. In Julia Dumont’s funny and erotic romantic novel, Sleeping with Dogs and Other Lovers, sparks fly as matchmaker extraordinaire Cynthia Amas tries to make sense of her own increasingly complicated -- and steamy -- love life.”

  – Kindle Nation

  www.TruLoveStories.com

  Where Passionistas Play!

  BroadLit

  January 2013

  Published by

  BroadLit ®

  14011 Ventura Blvd.

  Suite 206 E

  Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

  Copyright © 2013 BroadLit, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-9887627-4-9

  Produced in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.TruLOVEstories.com

  To all the women, like me, who are taking a

  second chance at love, life and new ventures.

  I would like to thank first and always, Barbara Weller, Cynthia Cleveland and Nancy Cushing-Jones, who are not only the inspiration for this story, but also my dedicated and crazy but brilliant editors and the best girlfriends ever. I also want to thank my husband, Dilbert, whose nightly visits to the neighborhood donut shop sustained me throughout those long nights burning the midnight oil at my computer.

  HEARTS

  UNLEASHED

  by JULIA DUMONT

  A BROADLIT BOOK

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 1

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  Three fingertips caressed Cynthia’s trembling lips as five others traveled slowly from hip to thigh. The hot late-morning sun was the least of what was warming her now. “Oh, Pete…” she whispered softly, gazing at an expanse of blue, framed by gently swaying palms.

  Breathing together, gaining momentum, Pete felt the sting of perspiration and sunblock in his eyes. “Cynthia,” he sighed, smiling, but his mouth barely open, “we can’t…go on meeting like this.”

  She gasped and laughed a little, but that didn’t impede her descent into that brief moment of stillness she always arrived at just before climax, holding her breath, clinging to those two or three seconds of order before all control slipped away. 3…2…1…”Oh, god,” she cried out, shoulders compressing, fingers trembling, her entire body spasming as she sank deep into the cushion, bracing herself with one hand to avoid melting off the couch and onto the floor.

  “Cynthia!” cried Pete, “You’re out of frame!” She quickly moved in closer, giving her lover a better look at her face, her neck, her breasts. And then he finished too, falling back onto the bed, his legs swinging upward, his toes pointing like a dancer’s.

  He was in his hotel room overlooking breathtaking Balekambang Beach in East Java and she was in her living room in Los Angeles. They shared passions, compliments of FaceTime via the iPad propped on her coffee table and his phone, clutched tightly with his free hand. Cynthia had sometimes only been looking at parts of his thumb and fingers.

  But visuals are not nearly as necessary for women at such moments. They have better imaginations. Andvisual recall. Cynthia knew the exact color of Pete’s eyes, the contour of his lips, the perfect imperfections of his face.

  “I swear,” she said, pushing her hair off of her forehead, “if it weren’t for this 4G network, you would completely forget what I look like.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, rolling over onto his side and staring at the phone.

  “Okay,” she said, first kissing the screen and then turning the iPad around, giving Pete a view of the coffee table and the dining room in the distance, “how many freckles do I have on my face?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Pete, “and a trick question, because, my dear, you have no freckles anywhere.”

  Cynthia felt disappointed and vindicated at the same time. She didn’t say a word. She just stood up and proceeded to take Pete on a tour. She pulled the screen in close, aiming as best she could at the bridge of her nose.

  “Welcome aboard the Freckle Bus. If you look out the window to your left, you’ll see a sweet cluster of delicate specimens, right there on the main thoroughfare. What’s that, sir? Why yes, that’s true, this little enclave is literally as plain as the nose on my face.”

  “Oh, right,” said Pete. “Those freckles. Well, yeah, obviously. I was merely saying that you don’t have any freckles besides those freckles.”

  “Okay, everybody,” said Cynthia to imaginary tourist-passengers, putting on a megaphone-like voice straight out of vaudeville, and moving the iPad down her body, making a small-car putt-putting noise. “Next stop, Titty City,” she announced, pushing in tight to her left nipple, making a soft squealing-brake sound and there, to Pete’s utter surprise, were three tiny freckles nestled sweetly near her areola. “This,” she said, “is known as the Maliboob Colony, an exclusive dominion reserved for only the most exclusive Hollywood denizens of the melanin pigment variety.”

  “Wow,” said Pete. “I have to admit I missed those too.”

  “Right,” she replied, moving the iPad downward to her belly button and stopping there. “Would you like this tour of shame to continue? Next stop, Upper Thighville.”

  “Oh, if I have to,” said Pete, now totally on board, the em
barrassment over his less than stellar powers of observation gladly giving way to his deep interest in the subject matter.

  As for Cynthia, she realized that her style of FaceTime seduction was directly indebted to her ex-boyfriend Max Ramsey and his remarkably creative methods of long-distance foreplay. But she didn’t care…she was making it her own with Pete. Perhaps this was Max’s one enduring legacy.

  She was also feeling inspired by the challenge. Cynthia and Pete were beginners in the realm of phone romance, not to mention any kind of romance with each other, having just resumed dating after a very long hiatus—actually since high school when they were each other’s first crushes. The whole thing was sort of crazy. She had planned on joining Pete somewhere on the Asian leg of his music tour with his band, but it hadn’t worked out. Opening Second Acts Dating Service’s new office in Los Feliz, just down the hill from her residence in Runyon Canyon, blocks away from the Hollywood sign, had turned out to be even more demanding of her time than she’d imagined. For one thing, she had hired a new assistant who decided to quit and run off with her boyfriend after three weeks, so now she faced training her new new assistant_____Paloma Rodriguez, a beautiful, young U.C.L.A. graduate who had deep roots in L.A. and was almost positively going to stick around. She was an aspiring actress, so although there was a chance that she’d snag a career-transforming role, Cynthia was pretty sure she’d be a reliable employee for at least a year or two, which was about as much one could hope for in star-struck Los Angeles.

  But back to the matter of the challenge of multiple go-rounds. It seemed almost unthinkable. There was a level of silliness about the whole thing. It felt a little cold and futuristic, staring into an electronic facsimile of the object of one’s lust. That said, once you went with it, really went with it, it was surprisingly erotic.

  “Okay, big boy,” she whispered, “come with me.” She was completely aware of her double entendre.

  She moved the iPad back upward, turning it sideways, filling the entire screen, and framing her breasts like a work of art. She reached down with the other hand, and brought back a sliver of ice between her index and middle fingers from her water glass on the coffee table. She fondled one breast, then the other.

  Pete moved his phone in close to his face, making her wet erect nipples larger than life, like he was in the front row of an Imax theater. He exhaled, fogging the screen slightly.

  From time to time throughout this “conversation,” notices popped up on the top of Cynthia’s screen: You have 23 new notifications on Facebook. You have eleven new emails. Sig Alert on the 405. Congress filibusters jobs bill again. She was very good at blocking all this out in order to concentrate on Pete. But one particular text message caught her eye. Well, rather it was the sender of the message: one Ava Dodd Radcliffe. And there really could only be one of those. Radcliffe was a well-known, incredibly rich, relatively young, recently widowed ex-actress. She had married Jonathon Radcliffe, the movie-TV-internet-oh-let’s-face-it-everything mogul, when she was incredibly young, and dropped out of acting, a la Grace Kelly. And then, about two years ago, Jonathon died of a massive heart attack while hang-gliding off Bixby Bridge on Route 1 in Big Sur. Ava had leaped off right behind him and didn’t know until about halfway down_____when her trajectory happened to afford her a clear view of his limp body dangling like a marionette_____that he had in fact expired. The stunning natural beauty of the site_____soaring arcs of the bridge’s buttresses, rugged cliffs laced with green, the breathtaking beach and surf below_____made the horrible tragedy that much more shocking, heartbreaking…beyond operatic.

  Why on Earth is Ava Dodd Radcliffe texting me?

  Meanwhile, Cynthia had forgotten all about Pete, who suddenly cried out with pleasure, falling back onto the bed and losing his grip on the phone, which flew across the room, striking something hard_____wall, ceiling, headboard?_____with a loud crack.

  Whatever it was, it transformed his smart phone into a deaf, dumb, and blind phone, and caused Cynthia’s iPad to go black.

  Cynthia burst into laughter. Merely one of the hazards of long-distance romance, she supposed. She pictured Pete in post-orgasmic stupor crawling around looking for the runaway device and wished more than ever she was there with him. Her phone buzzed: Pete calling from the hotel phone. She answered.

  “Was it as good for you as it sounded?” she asked with a smile in her voice.

  “Cynthia. Would you please get on a plane and get the hell over here?”

  Here we go again she thought.

  “Why don’t you come here?”

  “You know I would if I could. We have twenty-one concerts in the next twenty-five days. There’s literally not enough of a break in there to even get to L.A. and back…without pausing for a quickie with you on the tarmac. Can’t you just take off two or three days? Can’t you do almost everything via email and phone anyway?”

  Cynthia was a bit irritated by this.

  “Pete…we’ve been over this. No, I can’t. I just opened the place. The whole point is that my service is personal.”

  “Yeah,” said Pete, “well, it would be nice if what we’ve been doing for the last two months was just a tad more personal too.”

  He was obviously right.

  “I know, sweetie…but…” she said, immediately realizing she had nothing to follow that “but” with that either or both of them hadn’t already said at least once over the past weeks. It was one of those uncomfortable phone silences that occur when neither party can find words to express the upside of a situation that clearly had no upside.

  “Okay,” said Pete, pulling on shorts and shirt, “well, I guess I might as well see if there’s an Apple store nearby. See if they can hook me up with another of their kinky sex toys.”

  They both laughed now.

  “Maybe while you’re there you should pick up an iPad too. I recommend it.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Maybe I’ll do that. I’ll call you tonight after the show. I trust you will be ready for your close-up?”

  “Ready and willing, Mr. DeMille,” she smiled, loving that their cultural points of reference were so in tune so much of the time. And again wishing they could be together. She had dated a younger guy a few years back who didn’t know that Sunset Boulevard wasn’t just a street.

  “Okay, see you later then,” he said.

  “Bye, bye, baby,” she replied, clicking off. She felt a pang of sadness about their situation. She really adored him. Except for the absurd geographic dilemma and all the problems that presented, they couldn’t be better suited for each other.

  Chapter 2

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  But back to Ava Dodd Radcliffe. Cynthia re-read her message.

  “Dear Miss Amas…I admire what you’re doing with 2nd Acts. I have a proposal. Perhaps we might meet at your earliest convenience?”

  Perhaps we might meet at your earliest convenience. Sheeven texted wealthy.

  Cynthia thought about Ava Radcliffe’s situation. Aside from the occasional notice in the news about her appearances at dry fundraisers for one of the many cultural institutions on whose board she sat, there had been no indication that she was back in the dating market. At all. Judging from published group photos, she still seemed gripped by an overwhelming sadness that even vast worldly riches had no discernable effect upon. It was understandable. She had married Jonathon, more than twenty years her senior, when she was barely out of college. And although she’d had a short but lucrative modeling career in her teens and a few early plum roles in film, including True Love Lost, for which she had been nominated for an Oscar and broken the hearts of millions of teenage boys, she immediately abandoned all work within months of her wedding day. As in most such cases, people speculated about whether their plan was to quickly start a family. But no babies arrived, which of course instead bred more speculation. As time went on, it appeared that they were just deeply in love and loved being together almost all of the time…traveling, sailing, polo-playing, mount
ain climbing, all kind of rich-people activities, including, yes, tragically, hang-gliding.

  Cynthia had always been intrigued by Ava Dodd Radcliffe as a public figure. She was indisputably a true beauty, but she also radiated intelligence and talent. In addition to acting, she was an accomplished artist, a painter…another passion lost through the miracle of matrimony. Cynthia had wondered, long before Jonathon died, if Ava might have been possessed with some level of sadness and regret over the choice to turn her back on her personal dreams and goals, however blissful the marriage appeared from the outside. All that was moot now, of course. Her sadness was now the very first thing one noticed about her.

  Cynthia looked back at the text.

  “I have a proposal.”

  At first Cynthia had taken that sentence to mean simply the proposal that they’d meet. But when she looked at it again, it occurred to her that maybe she meant a business proposal. Did she want to be partners in Second Acts? Did she want to buy the company outright? Or was it some other separate business idea? If Cynthia’s memory served, the Radcliffe fortune was somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. In that neighborhood why go looking for headaches? On the other hand, if Ava had merely decided to become a Second Acts client, why characterize that as a proposal?

  Only one way to find out, she thought. She wasn’t sure about the etiquette.

  Hi Ms.Radcliffe.

  Wait, she had called Cynthia “Miss.” Nobody had called her that since the 1980’s…since way before she’d been married and divorced. Cynthia had been using “Ms.” for so long it no longer occurred to her to use anything else. Until now. But “Miss” was even less appropriate for Ava than for herself. And “Mrs.” seemed so old-fashioned. But maybe billionaires, even relatively young ones, are old fashioned.

  Hi, Ava, maybe? Too familiar.

  Hi, Ava Dodd Radcliffe? Verbose.