I spent the four and a half hours that it took me to make the drive from Vegas to Los Angeles thinking about the gifts Arabella had received and what they might mean. Running through possible scenarios on such limited intel probably wouldn’t yield any results, but I didn’t have much else to do since I’d packed for the casinos and not a road trip. At least I didn’t have any specific plans except to park my ass at the blackjack table, eat my way through a few high-end buffets, and guzzle down a few bottles worth of whiskey. Changing my plans was an inconvenience, but at least nobody was waiting for me in Vegas.
The same couldn’t be said for LA, even though it was midnight when I pulled up in front of the hotel. After I handed the keys over to the valet, I did a quick circuit around the property since I’d never stayed there before and wanted to be familiar with the building and the surrounding area. After I was done, I made my way to the registration desk. The guy on duty looked like he’d gotten high before coming into work. Not that unusual for a twenty-something kid stuck working the overnight shift, but it pissed me off because it made him a weak link in Arabella’s security.
“I need a key to Arabella Green’s room.”
“Is your name on the reservation, sir? If not, I can’t—” His eyes widened as he looked up from his phone and caught the look on my face.
“Gaige Taylor. There should be a note in the system.”
He jumped out of his seat, grabbing an envelope next to the computer and shoving it at me. “Yes, sorry. Miss Green called down a couple of hours ago and asked me to hold this for you.” I raised an eyebrow. “It’s a key. Room 2039.”
I leaned forward, glaring at the kid. “I could be anyone. You should’ve asked me for identification.”
“I—” He gulped nervously. “But—”
“Never mind,” I growled as I snagged the key and stalked towards the elevators. The security in this hotel sucked, which meant I was going to have to convince Arabella to switch locations until I could get her out of town. I was still pissed about it when I tapped gently on the door to her room. If she was awake, I didn’t want to scare her by barging in. I waited a minute before waving my key near the proximity lock and pushing the door open. I gently shut it behind me after I stepped inside. There were soft footsteps behind me, and then the dark room was filled with light. I swiveled around, my hand on my gun at the base of my back as I was filled with shocked recognition.
“It’s you,” I breathed.
3
Arabella
Holy heck! It was him. The guy at the airport, from back when I’d been running to make it to my flight after dropping off Carissa’s wedding cake. The brick wall I’d bumped into who’d had me wishing I could forget about going home because London would be a lot more interesting if I spent my time there with him. He hadn’t said a word back then, but it didn’t lessen the impact he’d had on me. At six feet and two inches, with a muscular build, dark hair begging to be touched, piercing brown eyes, a strong jawline, and firm lips that looked like they rarely tilted up in a smile; he’d been impossible to forget.
My heart raced as I took in the way he was looking at me. His brown eyes darkened to a nearly black color as they swept down my body and back up again. The heat building in them made my knees shake, and I tightened the sash on the robe I’d thrown on when I heard him knock on the door. A muscle in his jaw flexed, and a satisfied smile spread across his face. Maybe the fascination hadn’t been one-sided, and fate had given us a second chance.
“You’re Vaughn’s friend?”
He nodded and strode towards me. “Gaige Taylor.” His raspy voice sent shivers up my spine. “And you’re Arabella Green.”
“I am.” My reply was as shaky as my knees felt.
He didn’t stop until he was standing less than a foot away from me. He reached for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You don’t need to be scared anymore, sweetheart. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner but I’m here now, and I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
“Sooner?” I echoed. It was hard to think straight with his thumb stroking my palm, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t understand what he meant even if he wasn’t touching me because it didn’t make any sense. None at all. “Celina only reached out to Carissa five or so hours ago. I’d say you got here pretty darn fast.”
I didn’t resist as he tugged me further into the sitting room and settled me on the couch. When he sat down next to me, he still had his hand wrapped around mine. “Airports seem to be our thing. I was walking through McCarran when Vaughn called me.”
Oh, yeah. He remembered me. “Vegas? I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”
He shook his head. “Just a spur of the moment vacation.”
“With your girlfriend?” As soon as the words left my mouth, my cheeks heated. I couldn’t have been any more obvious if I’d tried, something which Gaige was well aware of judging by the pleased smirk he flashed me.
“Nope. I was on my own for this trip.”
“Oh.” Drat, that wasn’t enough information to know for sure if he had a girlfriend or not. He could have been by himself because she couldn’t make it or something.
His thumb stroked across my palm again as he gave me a knowing look. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Arabella.”
“I don’t, either,” I blurted out. His chuckle made me realize what I’d said. Apparently, I didn’t have a filter when it came to him. “A boyfriend, I mean.”
“Good.” He smiled at me. “Not that it’d change a thing if you did. I’ve waited too long to let another guy stand in my way.”
He couldn’t have meant what he’d said how I was taking it, but I found myself asking for clarification and hoping I’d get the answer I wanted. “You waited too long”—I coughed to clear my throat—“for what exactly?”
“For the woman who knocked me on my ass.”
I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes at him. “But —”
“Proverbially speaking, of course.”
There was no doubt about it; he was talking about me. He’d stopped me from literally falling on my butt in the airport, and we’d both been affected by it. He’d been waiting for me, the same way I had him. Even though the odds were against me ever seeing him again, I judged every other man by the memory of that moment with him. Since nobody else measured up, I put all my energy into building my career and left dating until I found the right man. And it looked like my wait was over. I didn’t need to find another man like Gaige. Not when Gaige had found me.
His hand released mine, and he trailed his fingertips over my wrist. When I shivered, he leaned closer as his fingers glided up my arm and across my collarbone to cup my chin and tilt my head back. “Fuck, you’re even more gorgeous than I remember.”
Blushing harder, I nervously pushed my hair away from my face. I knew I didn’t look my best. Even though I was exhausted, I hadn’t been able to fall asleep. I’d tossed and turned, which had left my hair a mess. The make-up that had been professionally applied at the studio had been washed off hours ago. And my robe wasn’t one of those sexy, silk numbers designed to tease a man. It was a rose red, terry cloth robe that my sister had bought me because I’d complained about how cold I was in the mornings when I’d moved to New York to study under one of my idols for a year. I’d worn it every day over the last three years. Although it had held up fairly well under all those washes, it was the furthest thing from flattering. “That can’t possibly be true.”
“It is, sweetheart,” he breathed against my lips. My eyes drifted shut just before his mouth brushed against mine. His lips were warm and soft, making me sigh. Then a groan bubbled up his throat, and he slanted his head. He nipped at my bottom lip, and I let out a startled gasp. He didn’t waste the opportunity, and his tongue swept into my mouth to tangle with mine. As the kiss deepened, I ignited in his arms. My hands reached for his shoulders, trying to tug him closer. His grip tightened on my chin, and he tilted his head more to get better access to my
mouth.
He switched between quick nibbles on my lips, gentle sucking tugs of my tongue, and leisurely strokes into my mouth. I was out of breath when he lifted his head, but I wanted more. So I slid my hands into his dark hair to try to hold him in place.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’m not done yet,” he murmured against my ear before kissing his way down my neck. “I’ll let us have a little more before I do the right thing and let go.”
I whimpered at the thought of this ending. “Only for now. Not forever,” he promised. Then he scraped his teeth against the skin at my pulse-point. Deft fingers untied the sash at my waist, and he pushed the material aside to kiss his way along the scoop-neck collar of the cotton night shirt I’d worn to bed. I moaned at the feel of the heat of his mouth against my skin, the sound loud and ragged in the quiet room. It had been too long since I’d been touched by anyone. Years. And the teenage groping back then had nothing on Gaige’s expert caresses.
“Damn, Arabella,” he groaned. “I couldn’t forget you after getting a look at you and feeling your hands on my chest. It didn’t matter that I didn’t even know your name. But if I’d had even the tiniest taste of you back then, I never would have been able to let you walk away.”
I grinned at him, feeling about ten feet tall with his admission. “Really?”
“Fuck, yeah. You’re potent, sweetheart.”
“It’s you, not me,” I confessed shyly. “I’ve never been”—I paused because the word he’d used seem so foreign when it came to me—“potent before.”
His mouth crashed back down on mine, harder than before. After he’d kissed me senseless, my lips felt puffy and tingly. He rested his forehead on mine, and his dark eyes burned with jealousy as he growled, “The last thing I want to hear about is you with other guys.”
“That’s not something you need to worry about,” I reassured him. His caveman reaction had me admitting something all the dating books would have told me to keep quiet about. “I haven’t so much as kissed another guy in more than two years. No first dates. No random hook-ups. Nothing.”
My bravery was rewarded when he rasped, “Neither have I.”
4
Gaige
It had taken everything I had in me to keep my hands off Arabella and get her settled in bed last night. I’d wanted nothing more than to rip off all our clothes and climb in beside her, but I’d managed to hang onto my control for two reasons. The purple smudges underneath her beautiful green eyes were visible proof of how badly she needed sleep. Plus, I didn’t want to run the risk of her thinking that I only wanted sex from her. After spending two years thinking about her, I knew this was going to be more. My gut told me that she was my chance to have what Vaughn had found. That Arabella was the woman with whom I’d build a life. And another thing my experiences in the Army had taught me was to trust my instincts, even when they were telling me something that most people would think was completely insane.
“That’s the last of my stuff,” Arabella called out from the bedroom.
I wandered into the bedroom and shook my head at the two suitcases at the foot of the bed. The rose gold colored, hard-side pieces were an exact match to the four other pieces waiting at the door. “How many days were you planning on staying in LA?”
“Ten,” she admitted sheepishly. “I guess it’s too late for me to hide that I’m a little high maintenance?”
I looked her up and down, taking in all the beauty standing in front of me. “You don’t need to hide anything from me, sweetheart. I can handle high maintenance.”
“Good.” She beamed at me. “And luckily, I can handle bossiness since you’ve got that covered in spades.”
I chuckled, knowing she was right. I’d always been someone who liked being in charge. But with Arabella, it was a necessity that went to a whole new level. It could have been because she was in danger, but I was fairly certain I would have been the same way with her without the circumstances that led to me finding her again. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t use her mystery admirer as an excuse to get her to follow my orders, just like I’d done when she woke up this morning and I’d told her we needed to check out and switch to a room under my name at a new hotel. She sighed in agreement without arguing, and it had made me want her even more.
“Can I get that in writing?” I teased, moving towards her and pulling her into my arms.
“Why? Do you plan on being this bossy after you figure out who’s behind all of the gifts?”
“Damn straight.”
She beamed up at me, looking impossibly beautiful with her blonde hair falling in curly waves down her shoulders and her green eyes shining up at me. “Good.”
“Good?” I cocked my head to the side, confused by why she was so damn happy about that when it should have irritated the shit out of her.
“Yeah, because it means that you think you’re still going to be around.”
“Oh, I don’t think it. I know it,” I corrected her.
Her smile grew wider, and I was driven by the need to feel it against my lips. I cupped her cheeks in my palms and bent my head low to give her what I’d intended to be a quick kiss. It didn’t turn out that way, though, and I didn’t lift my head again until the bellhop knocked on the door to help us with the luggage. I had them load it all into my rental and called to have Arabella’s returned. If the person sending her the gifts knew where she was staying and what she’d ordered for dinner, then it only stood to reason that they also knew what car she was driving.
My first goal was to limit this guy’s access to her as much as possible, and the second was to do some digging and figure out who the hell he was. We left the hotel with the taste of her in my mouth and her laughter ringing in my ears. It set the tone for the rest of our day, even with that task hanging over my head. When we got to the studio, I did a quick check of Arabella’s dressing room while she waited in the doorway, and a much more thorough one while she got ready. Then I spent the day making calls and searching for information on the internet, all while keeping Arabella in my line of sight.
I hadn’t gotten very far, and it worried me. Whoever was behind it all had covered their tracks fairly well. The chocolates and flowers had been handed off to different production assistants when they’d been dropped off. They hadn’t come with cards, and Arabella hadn’t kept them. Neither of the assistants remembered much about the deliveries since they worked their asses off for hours on end each day. The flowers were a dead end for sure, but I was hoping to be able to track something down on the chocolates since their only location in the United States was in Hawaii. Odds were good that they’d been shipped to LA, and if so there must be a record of it somewhere. I just needed to hunt it down.
By the time they were almost done with taping for the day, I was beyond frustrated with my lack of progress. My mood wasn’t improved in the least by how closely she worked with her fellow judges, both of them men. The Italian one was a terrible flirt, but he was old enough to be my father. So I didn’t worry about him too much. But the blond one everyone seemed to defer to in the kitchen? I kept my eye on him.
They were a perfectly matched pair, standing side-by-side as they talked to the remaining contestants. They would have made a striking couple, with their made-for-television looks and complementary skills in the kitchen. The same couldn’t be said for Arabella and me. We were total opposites. She was super girly, and I was all man. Her world was filled with decadent desserts, while mine had been all about danger for too many years. If I was a better man, I’d leave her to someone like Owen Walker. But there was no way in hell that was going to happen. I wasn’t willing to walk away from the undeniable chemistry between us.
Arabella finished demonstrating a technique for the chocolate soufflé that helped her win the show when she’d been a contestant, and Owen beamed at her in approval. I wanted to storm over there, get between the two of them, and beat the bastard’s pretty-boy face into a bloody pulp.
“Don’t worry. He’s n
ot flirting with her.”
I shifted in my seat at the amused feminine tone. I found a dainty brunette standing a couple of feet next to me, staring at the same scene I’d been avidly watching.
“I wasn’t—”
“Oh, please,” she laughed. “I’m way too familiar with the expression on your face to not know exactly what it is. The guy you’re glaring at?” She pointed at the tall, blond chef standing too damn close to Arabella. “That’s how he looks whenever another man gets too close to me.”
I glanced back and caught the dirty look he was sending my way. Any guy who was that territorial about their woman wasn’t going to be interested in mine. I chuckled and relaxed back into my chair. “Okay, maybe I was.”
“There’s no maybe about it. You definitely were.” She laughed softly as she dropped into the seat next to me. “How come Arabella’s never mentioned you? I don’t know her that well since we only met this week and things have been insane since we’ve been here for filming. But girls tend to chat about the men in their lives, and it’s a little odd that she hasn’t said a word about you. I got the impression that she was single.”
“It’s a relatively new development,” I answered, mostly in the hope of stemming the flow of words from her.
“Ah, I’m familiar with those.” She wiggled her left hand, showing off a huge diamond engagement ring. “Owen had me moved into his house and sleeping in his bed the night we met, and three weeks later he was sliding this on my finger.”
“Hmm,” I murmured, my gaze sliding to Arabella again, easily picturing my ring on her finger—marking her as mine to any man who got too close.
“Why do I feel like I just sparked a competitive streak in you?”
Passion, Vows & Babies: Feed Your Soul (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 2