“Only that I’m bollocks at it,” he answered.
“Well, I work as a payroll administrator for this American football team called the Los Angeles Suns.”
Again with that up-and-down look. “You don’t look like any money person I ever met. Guy who does up the money where I work has a pocket protector and a terrible hairpiece.”
She laughed. “We have a guy that looks exactly like that in our payroll office, too. It’s actually a really unglamorous job, except that about ten percent of the people we cut checks for happen to be football players. That’s how I met my ex.”
The whole story came out then. She swallowed down the last of her champagne. “But you know, I’ve learned my lesson. No more liars—and no more football players! Not for me. Luckily, I won this trip for six nights in Paris—I really needed to get out of L.A.”
She then realized that she’d been talking for a really long time. Mick, as it turned out, was a really good listener, which she wouldn’t have guessed judging by his scruffy appearance or his unconcealed up-and-down looks. Not to mention his offer to fix whatever she had “sparking off.”
But he’d seemed genuinely interested in the story and hadn’t interrupted her once as it came spilling out. However, her monopolizing the conversation had kept her from finding out much about him, other than what he did for a living. “So how did you come to be in first class listening to me whine about my ex-boyfriend?”
“Won a trip, too,” he answered with a shrug. “All expenses paid, including a room at the Paris Grand, but I only got four days, so you win,” he paused, looking at her glass. “You’re empty.” He then signaled for more champagne.
Kayla was still confused. “Even I’ve heard of the Paris Grand. That’s one of the most expensive places in Paris. And you chose to take this trip alone? No wife or girlfriend?”
“Not one for travel companions. Learned to value the alone time early in life, you might say. I’ll probably spend most of the trip in front of the telly, catching up on Coronation Street and whatnot.” He stopped to study her confused face. “That’s an English drama. I think you call ’em soap operas or something like that.”
“But it’s Paris. I can’t believe you’d want to waste such a nice trip watching TV. In fact, just the thought of you spending four days inside your hotel room makes me feel really sad for you. I mean, there’s so much to do and see.”
“But no one to do it or see it with,” he said, looking a bit thoughtful.
She sucked her teeth. “I’m sorry, but I find that really hard to believe. I mean, yeah, you’re a little rough around the edges. Okay, a lot rough around the edges. But women really like that. Heck, from the way that flight attendant was flirting with you, I bet you could get her to show you the sights.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t want her to show me the sights.” He leaned forward. “In fact, the only sights I want to see are right in front of me and currently all covered up,” he whispered.
She stared at him for few seconds and then snorted. “You’re not serious, right?” She felt a little rude for laughing, but things like this didn’t happen to her. Yes, she was cute with some work. She knew that. Marcus had been forever on her about how good she could look if she just tried harder.
But even at her most made-up, she didn’t look like the kind of woman a guy like this would want to see naked. What else could she do but assume he was joking?
“I’m not kidding,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. Very, very serious.
Her laughter died abruptly, replaced by shock and something else that had her raising her hand to her throat. His eyes were stuck there, and what she saw in them had her imagining what it would feel like to have his lips kiss her there.
“But we only just met,” she whispered.
“Tell you what. You got six nights in Paris. Agree to spend the first of them with me and I’ll make it the most memorable.”
Her mouth parted on a silent gasp. Was he serious?
And again as if reading her mind, he said, “I’m completely serious. I want you, in my bed. Tonight. Say yes.” His eyes bored into hers, making it impossible to look away.
Kayla had to wonder if he was hypnotizing her with those eyes because the next word she heard coming out of her mouth was, in fact, “Yes.”
Chapter Two
The American had started having second thoughts as soon as she got off the plane. Mick could tell by the way she said, “Oh, oh, I should go to the bathroom before I go to baggage claim” at the very first airport toilet they encountered.
Also by the way she couldn’t quite look him in the eye when she added, “Maybe I’ll see you there?”
Mick, who hadn’t picked up his own bags from baggage claim in more than a decade, folded his arms over his chest. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But just in case we miss each other, remember I’m at the Paris Grand. Top floor. Penthouse suite. Only one of those at the Grand far as I know.”
“Okay,” she said as she backpedaled toward the toilet.
“Name’s Mick—don’t forget,” he called out.
“What?”
“Mick. That’s my name. And yours is…?”
“Kayla,” she answered quickly, still refusing to meet his eyes. He noticed she still didn’t provide her last name either. “It was…um…nice meeting you.”
His eyes stayed on her until she disappeared around the corner. He knew she wouldn’t be coming out anytime soon and turned the rejection over again and again inside his head, wondering why it grated at him so much.
He supposed because he wasn’t used to it these days. The five minutes he’d spent getting that original “Yes” out of her was about four more minutes longer than he’d had to spend on any other girl in recent memory. Probably wouldn’t have taken that long if he hadn’t been so thrown by her “No more football players” declaration, which wasn’t the same as “No more footballers.” Still, he’d suspected that letting the pretty American know he was one of the top soccer players in the English Premier League probably wouldn’t help him in achieving his goal of getting into her panties.
A goal he hadn’t been so serious about until she started going on and on about how sad it was for him to be sitting in his hotel room when there was so much to do and see and Paris. It had made him—well, actually want to do and see things. With her, the pretty little tourist, who was down about her breakup but genuinely excited about being in Paris. As any everyday person would be.
He supposed that was it. For the short flight, she’d made him feel normal. Normal like her. And he’d found himself wanting to bring her normal back to his hotel with him. Like something he’d ordered from the catalog in the seat pocket in front of him.
He tried to make himself be grateful that she’d reneged on her yes as he walked toward the first-class lounge, even though he knew that someone would be intercepting him before he got there. But he couldn’t quite get himself there. A wave of now-familiar loneliness swept over him as he made the same trip he’d made at hundreds of airports around the world.
When the inevitable handler approached him, taking his leather duffel off his shoulder, he found himself saying, “Yeah, mate, when you go to pick up my stuff, there’s this woman I’m traveling with. Kayla something or other. Can you have ’em pull her stuff, too? She’s American. Hope that’s all right.”
If the French handler wondered why he would be traveling with an American woman whose last name he didn’t know, he was professional enough not to let the confusion show on his face. “Why, of course. I will pull both your baggage and hers, personally see it through customs and have it delivered on to the Grand.”
Mick nodded his thanks and tried not to think too hard about what he’d just done to ensure Kayla didn’t get away.
“So who’s the new girl? Doesn’t seem like your usu
al type,” Mick’s sports agent, Gerald, said in reply to Mick’s surly “What?” after he answered the phone.
Mick had arrived at the hotel more than an hour ago, and their luggage showed up soon after. But still no Kayla. Not even a ring up to the suite.
“What girl?” he asked Gerald, irritation over Kayla’s absence prickling his skin. She wouldn’t really go on without her bag, would she?
“The girl you were flirting with on the plane,” Gerald clarified.
His focus immediately came back to the conversation then. “How’d you know ’bout that?”
“Somebody took a picture of you two chatting, passed it along to some gossip site and now it’s all over the web.”
“What? You’re having a laugh,” he said. “We only just got off the plane a couple of hours ago.”
“Couple of hours is all it takes these days,” Gerald informed him. “One of my other clients got caught giving it to a lady in the rear of his Jaguar after practice. Wife knew about it before he’d even gotten home for supper.” Gerald heaved a weary sigh. “It’s hard to do damage control most days. You’d want to pay these bloggers not to publish the racy stuff, but they put them up for the world to see before you can even ring in with a monetary offer.”
Mick thought of what Kayla had just been through with her ex. He then thanked the stars she was American and would probably never discover her image currently splashed about European gossip sites. “Did they figure out who she was?” he asked, partly out of consideration for Kayla, partly because he was curious to know more about her himself.
“Not yet. That’s why I’m calling you. I want to get a comment up.”
“You want to leave a comment about the girl I was seen with on a plane?” Mick said, trying to figure out why Gerald would possibly want to do that.
“Yes, of course,” Gerald answered, as if the logic of his request was perfectly clear. “You’re in France to get wined and dined by a football club that’s hoping to poach you, and your own football club has no idea you’re even considering moving on. Can you tell me a better way to cover up why you’re really there than with just this girl?”
Mick sighed. No, he supposed he couldn’t, but he hated all the MI-5 level dramatics that came with playing footie. You’d think it was a matter of life or death the way people treated it, but it was just a game. One he happened to be bloody good at, but a game nonetheless.
“I thought you wanted the club to know Paris was interested.”
“I wanted them to know in the midst of salary negotiations. Not a month beforehand when they still have time to replace you with two up-and-comers whose combined salary won’t be nearly as much as what I’m planning to ask them for you. If we want them to give us what you’re worth, we need an offer from France for them to top. But we’ve got to play this very wisely. No giving away the whole plot before we’ve even set down at the negotiating table. So her name, please.”
Mick sighed. When he’d started chatting up the lovely woman with the soft voice on the plane, he’d merely been curious about why she was crying. But when he saw her face, those big, long-lashed eyes set off by creamy dark skin and a full mouth, he’d become curious about something else. What would it feel like to have her underneath him? Her skin creating a dark contrast against his as he moved inside her.
No more liars, she’d said.
He hadn’t lied to her, he convinced himself now. Not exactly, because it was true—he did hail from a long line of electricians and he was handy around the house. He just happened to make a few million more pounds a year than an electrician, and he never had to fix anything in his mansion on the outskirts of London because he had people who handled that kind of stuff for him.
“I don’t know her name exactly,” he told his agent, once again choosing to tell only a partial truth. “She’s an American.”
“Ah. So she has no idea who you are,” Gerald said, his voice laced with understanding. “Thinks you’re some rough-looking bloke she met on a plane, and you figured, hey, why not take her on for a night.”
When he put it like that, Mick felt like a predator who got off on converting good girls into bedpost notches, though he supposed that wasn’t too far off from the truth. “Something like that.”
“In that case, why don’t you expand that nighter to the length of your trip? You can have some fun off the field, and she’s a great cover story.”
“Gerald, I’m not even sure if…”
He was going to say he wasn’t even sure if he could make the one night even happen, given how they’d parted. But then the suite’s doorbell sounded, and when he opened the door, he found Kayla standing there with Jacques, an older gentleman in a neat red suit who had earlier introduced himself as his personal concierge for the length of his stay.
“Mick? Mick?” Gerald said into his ear.
“I’ll call you back,” he said and quickly hung up the phone.
“I know this is highly unusual,” Jacques was saying, “but you asked that she be sent up, and you dismissed your butler, so I had no choice but to escort her myself.”
Apparently in Jacques’s mind sending a guest up by herself wasn’t an option that existed within the reality of luxury hotels that assigned butlers to their penthouse suites.
Mick’s eyes went to Kayla, and her hands moved up to cling to the strap of her large, practical purse as if she was prepared to bolt at any moment. But she stayed where she was, even after Mick dismissed Jacques with a thank-you.
“So you took my bag?” she asked when Jacques had left.
Mick wasn’t trying to make her any more skittish than she already was, but he couldn’t resist taking yet another long, dragged-out look over her curvy, petite body.
“You said yes,” he said, trying and only slightly succeeding in not feeling like a perv when he reminded her of her earlier choice. Nearly any other girl in England would have happily come back to his room, he told himself. “And as far as I knew, you were planning to keep your word. So I got your bags sorted, assuming you’d be coming back here with me. But if we’re being honest, I was beginning to think you’d never show.”
She winced. “If we’re being honest, I almost didn’t come. I’m a practical person. I’ve had a regular nine-to-five since graduating college. I live below my means, I drive a Camry and I pay all my bills on time. I’ve only done three impractical things in my life. One was dating a professional football player, and that was only because I really did believe he was a normal Midwestern boy at heart. The second thing was taking this trip, and that was only because I won it. I never would have done anything like this, especially on my own if I had to pay for it out of pocket…”
She trailed off into nervous silence.
“And what’s the third thing, then?”
She peeked up at him. “Saying yes to you.”
Mick didn’t know whether to be insulted or amused that she was fighting herself so hard about sleeping with him. Sure, she didn’t know who he was, but it wasn’t as if he would have had a hard time pulling women if he didn’t have the professional soccer thing going for him. “You didn’t believe I could make coming here worth your while.”
She put a hand on his arm and shook her head, like an adult reassuring a child whose feelings she’d hurt. “No, I’m sure you have skills. You look like the kind of guy who has them. I’m just trying to explain that going back to some random guy’s hotel room is way out of character for me, and I’d had two glasses of champagne. So I did the practical thing and stayed in the bathroom for a while, then after I discovered you’d taken my bag, I went to my hotel to rest. It usually takes an hour for each glass of alcohol to wear off, you know, and I wanted to make sure the champagne wasn’t making me stupid.”
Mick prepared to respond to her explanation with grudging respect, even as he braced himself for the letdown. He’
d never met her before, but he was beginning to recognize her from his past. He’d known girls like this back when he was just Mick Attwater, the unfortunate son of his town’s two most notorious drunks. Girls who never got in trouble for hemming up their uniform skirts, girls who kept their hair pulled back in neat ponytails, girls who would go on to sixth form and eventually university, girls who came from homes with two stable parents who didn’t drink themselves into screaming arguments near about every night until they either passed out or the police were called round by the neighbors.
Happy, well-adjusted girls who didn’t give guys like him from sad, ill-adjusted homes the time of day.
“So you only came here because the alcohol wore off.”
“And I didn’t want to leave my suitcase. It’s got all my clothes, and I hear Paris is pretty expensive, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to afford a whole new vacation wardrobe. Also, my e-reader’s inside of there, and even though I was planning on sightseeing, I’ll need a good book to get to sleep—”
He held up a hand to stop her rambling explanation. “So your answer’s changed to ‘no’ now? You’re just going to tail it back to your room and read a book, that it?”
Her eyes widened with surprise. “Oh, no, the answer’s still ‘yes.’ I mean, I’m not that brave. If I had decided against sleeping with you, I never would have come here. Also—”
He cut her off again. This time with a kiss, dragging her body up to his and finally letting himself have a taste of her full lips. She tasted like the bowl of fruit she’d eaten on the plane, plus the champagne. Sweet. Just like he’d known she would.
To his immense satisfaction, after a moment of surprise, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back so fervently his cock swelled against her stomach. He found himself having to drag his lips away before he lost control and took her right there outside his hotel room.
Dim the Lights: Islands of DesireLiquid ChocolateHer Wild and Sexy Nights Page 18