The Passion Agency Part 3: Smoldering Hearts: The Passion Agency, #3

By Rebecca Lee

Book 3 in the Series! Every "Passion Agency” book is also available.

Donna "Passion" Casteel was a beautiful woman who felt her beauty slipping away with age. Unable to keep a man, drifting from one meaningless fling to another, her life seemed dull and pointless.

Then a series of unlikely and strange events brought her to the brink of money and fame. She had a million dollar idea but barely enough to cover the rent. She had a boyfriend who was a former pro athlete, but she didn't have love. Worst of all she had nothing to fulfill her wanton naughty desires.

Determined to succeed and to find her dream lover, she reaches deep inside and will accept nothing but the best. Follow her rise from living paycheck to paycheck to the head of one of the world's hottest modeling agencies. Find out just what it means to make it to the top as a woman coming from nowhere.

This is the best of today's hottest erotic romances from Sylvia Day and EL James. "The Passion Agency" is a hot page turner that explores the life of a woman on the rise and going for what her heart desires.

“The Passion Agency” is hot contemporary romance and suspense with mature situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Handy
• Release date: Nov 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502273963

Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee is a former swimsuit model, and now a successful dating coach for men. She is one of Author John Handy's Attraction Masters and is the author of the Forbidden Attraction Secrets for Men series. Her motto for men having success with her or any other woman they desire: "When we're face to face, if you are bold, fearless, and seek what you want, trust me you have us. Everytime." "A Slave to the Fantasy" is her first fiction series. Rebecca is single and lives in Southern California with her cat  and her beagle.

Book preview

Be sure to stop by Rebecca’s blog at   http://authorrebeccalee.blogspot.com to receive exclusive previews and offers!

Chapter 1—Against the Tide

Did you see that?! a wiry Asian surfer said to his partner as they paddled out for one last ride before dark just north of the Venice Pier.

See what? his  brown haired partner said. It’s getting near dusk. Kinda hard to see anything. Plus, I didn’t wear my contacts being we are in the water. It always scares me I’ll lose them.

I think I saw a chick just jump off the west side of the pier! he said paddling furiously in and at the same time south from about 200 feet out. I gotta alert someone. The tide might make it easier to find her now before it gets dark.

He paddled on forward.

Mikey you go be a hero, his partner with the bad eyes said.I don’t think you saw what you saw man. Stuff can look like people and we didn’t hear anyone make a sound on the pier. The damned thing is packed and you know someone would have yelled out. Hell with cell phones I’ll bet there are already people on the way to help out. That is if something actually did happen. I don’t think it did. But suit yourself. I see you in a few.

Mikey Sparo did keep paddling progressively harder until his feet could hit bottom. Then he ran through the water with his board at his side. The angle he took to the shore brought him close enough to the north end of the pier.

He saw a couple walking arm in arm off the pier reentering the mainland and shouted to them:

Did you all see that?! he said. I thought I saw someone jump from the end of the pier or at least I saw what looked like a body go falling in. I didn’t see the actual jump.

This just happened to be the same couple that had been having a romantic walk and moment on the pier a couple minutes earlier when the man thought he saw a woman disappear out of thin air and then heard a loud splash.  He had seen that skinny little girl and then she was gone. In an instant.

His partner didn’t see anything or hear anything and dismissed it outright as waves crashing  against the support beams.

While it bothered the man on the pier with his girlfriend, he had moved on until he was called out by Mikey Sparo from the water’s edge below.

Call somebody! Sparo yelled. I would but I can’t like this. If we’re wrong, we’re wrong. We’ll back each other up!

Yeah you’re right, the man named Trey yelled back down.

Trey called 911 and within about ninety seconds two squad cars pulled up. After interviewing the men, the LAPD officers determined the best course of action was to scan the Pier from both sides. They alerted the lifeguard station north up the beach near the skateboard park and Muscle Beach The order: get your resources down here immediately including two life boats.

There wasn’t a definitive identification by either witness and taxing resources beyond what was already there near the scene didn’t seem justified.

The lifeguards were there with their rubber dinghies and oars and in the water in under ten minutes. It was quickly turning dark and flashlights were being used to visually aid amid the murkiness of the ocean. 

A lifeguard brought a megaphone which the two sets of cops on foot used.

They called out on either side of the pier hoping to compete with the ceaseless wave sounds. It was a losing battle.  The waves of the Pacific near shore can be so loud.

After nearly an hour, the eight of them comprising the rescue team, called it a night. Their conclusion was there was likely no one in the water in the first place.

That consensus stood until the next day when a tannish brown wool scarf was found tangled around a large bushel of seaweed caked against one of the columns about twenty feet from the high tide shoreline.

...

Donna Casteel returned from her meeting in Beverly Hills with Rachel Evans with her head still spinning. It was a combination of excitement and a feeling of being on a ride moving too fast to get off.

She hadn’t recalled connecting with anyone the first time she met them in person like she did when she met Rachel.

First, Donna didn’t try to hide from her past. She was an imaged obsessed popular girl back in high school who agonized over the right clothes and the right lipstick to go with the right hair accessory. On and on it went.

She was totally different from the decidedly frumpy but sweet Rachel. It was made clear to Donna right away in the meeting that Rachel wasn’t restricted from wearing make-up by any third party. She just thought it was stupid to be something you are not to get people to like you.

At the core, Rachel was a rebel against social conformity. Rachel had an extreme viewpoint but that was what kept her from selling the rights to the Beauty Lies channel to the big agencies. They showed her they didn’t share her beliefs and they were attempting to manipulate her for profit.

To Rachel, money wasn’t going to change the negative feelings she was having over the way the beauty snobs at her school were treating her. In fact, she looked at money and the frivolous overuse of it as a problem.

Donna could tell right away Rachel was not a person of grand designs even though she was sitting on a total powder keg of an idea.

Fundamentally Rachel was just seemed like she was fighting back against people who treated other people badly because of the way they looked or dressed. These people being mean were one thing, but it wasn’t just them, Rachel explained to Donna as they each nursed glass of Coke on ice in the huge hot tub in her room.

It was everyone else who, while nice, who bought into the beauty lie.

Those people know better, she said nearly breaking into tears. I show them my videos and it hits them over the head. They can’t believe what they are seeing and it sticks with them. It’s all a big made up thing. Yet they give it so much power to it. It’s so wrong.

Rachel liked Donna’s honesty and listened as she outlined her plans. Rachel really didn’t have any.

Luckily, a large impactful plan was what Donna did have.

The Passion Agency exists, Donna told her more assuredly than she had actual accoutrements to back up the claim. But it needs mass popularity from like minded people. I don’t have models but I have real women. Real role models.

For not having had  much time to sit and plot any of the particulars since the sudden birth of this sort of agency thing, Donna was pleased. It sounded great when she said it.

She thought about it as Rachel got out of the hot tub wearing a long t-shirt over her bathing suit. It was a one-piece suit with very conservative cuts.

Rachel  checked her phone and shook her head.

My mom said my dog is pottying where she shouldn’t and it’s all because she misses me, she said. I miss my little friends.

Hey Rachel, can I ask you something? Donna called across the room taking in a mouthful of ice from her empty small tumbler that was once filled with Coca Cola. Why are you covered up? Isn’t the Beauty Lie channel about being unforgivingly honest with the world about things like our bodies?

No I don’t think so, she said. "That’s I guess the goal. I never gave it deep deep thought. You can probably tell that.