by Dani Collins
Okay, her hormones cried excitedly.
She had to get out of the sun. She was blistering.
Moving to the bottom of the outside stairs, she wavered, but told herself she couldn’t leave without at least saying goodbye.
Yes, wanting to see him again is all about good manners, she mocked herself.
She climbed with trepidation, heart pounding as though she was descending the basement stairs in a thriller movie. So silly. He wasn’t going to attack her. That kiss had been a surprise, but invited and totally mutual. She had wallowed in it.
The part of her that wanted it to happen again and maybe go further was what scared the daylights out of her. She wasn’t that girl. She wasn’t blasé about intimacy. She wasn’t desperate or angry or deluding herself into love at first sight.
She was just really, really enticed by everything about him.
As she reached the top of the stairs, she grew cautious, feeling like a burglar, afraid she’d catch him indisposed.
“Roman?” she tried.
A very deliberate noise sounded, like someone striking a single key on a keyboard, hard. “Yes,” he said from his office.
“I’m afraid I have to ask you to call me a cab.” She tried to act casual as she moved forward. “I didn’t bring my phone and...”
She came even with the open doors of the office and discovered him standing before his clear screens. He had changed, dispensing with a shirt altogether, and now wore only a pair of drawstring linen pants that hung with rakish sexiness off his hips, accentuating his smooth, powerful back and the curve of his buttocks.
“I’d ask Ingrid for hers, but she and Huxley just left...” She could hardly speak. Her throat had gone dry.
He turned. His flat abs and nicely developed chest fixated her. Animal attraction gripped her.
Why? She didn’t understand it, and lifted her gaze to his, trying to work out where this attack of sexual craving was coming from.
He was scanning down her low neckline, taking in the outline of tiny triangles that barely covered her nipples beneath the translucent cotton, eyeballing the towel that she gripped around her hips.
His Adam’s apple worked. “Why are you here, Melodie?” His tone was graveled with intolerance and something almost erotic. Desire?
“I— What do you mean?”
“Here, in my home.” He joined her on the balcony, confrontational and ominous, arms and shoulders tanned and powerful, bare feet planted firmly. “Why are you here?”
“The wedding,” she stated, nerves strummed by the suspicion in his tone.
“Be honest.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t plan this,” she said, waving at her borrowed garb, suddenly realizing how it could look. But she hadn’t made this happen. She wasn’t using it as an excuse to stick around and throw herself at him. Not really. Okay, maybe she was throwing herself at him a little, but—
Oh, good grief. Could this get any worse?
“I didn’t bump you,” he bit out, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t even touch you.”
“No, I know. I was just...nervous,” she stammered, attacked by the same hit of discomfiture that had made her avoid him by the pool. She’d instinctively known his touch would have a devastating effect on her. She’d leaped back from his reaching hand as though he could have burned her. He had burned her. When he’d kissed her in the cabana, the contact had seared all the way to her soul.
“Nervous,” he charged, brows elevating as if he’d caught her out. “Why?”
Because he was a force, not a man. Her reaction to him was so strong it petrified her.
“You’re different,” she hazarded, but couldn’t explain it even to herself.
“How?”
Boy, he was like an extension of his technology with those robotic commands for more information.
She crossed her arms, annoyed, but Ingrid’s words were ringing in her ears. Was he reacting to her and feeling as out of sorts by this situation as she was?
The thought brought a soaring of buoyancy that she quickly tried to tame. A million things were running through her head, all her thoughts coming back to the fact that she was finally meeting a man who made her feel alive. She was interested and excited. Running away like a teenage girl too shy to speak to him would be silly. She’d kick herself forever if she did that. They were grown-ups. She was, by nature, an honest person.
“I find you attractive,” she admitted, and immediately blushed. It was as if she’d deliberately stepped onto a gangplank high over the concrete. Her footing seemed wobbly and threatened to drop her into a hard fall.
“Do you,” he disparaged.
His tone peeled a layer off her composure. She told herself she was being mature and didn’t have enough invested to have anything to lose, but her self-respect grew thin and strained. Bug eyes. Don’t talk to my friends. They all think you’re ugly anyway.
At the same time, she put herself into Roman’s shoes and thought she knew the source of his cynicism. “If you think I’m making some kind of awkward play for the rich guy, that’s not true.”
“You’d think I was just as attractive if I lived in a cardboard shack in a back alley?” he scoffed, arms folding and chin coming up with arrogant challenge.
Dear Lord, he was attractive. Like a Greek god with all that burnished skin over toned muscle, his aura one of superiority and might.
She almost blurted out how she’d walked away from the sort of wealth and education that would have made any job unnecessary for the rest of her life. If he only knew how much contempt she reserved for powerful men and how sorry she felt for the women who loved them...
But all that was behind her, and this moment was only about her and him. Who they were in this moment.
“I might,” she allowed with a weak shrug. This was a physical thing. She suspected no matter where she had encountered him, she would still be unable to control her response to him.
“You don’t even know me,” Roman derided. “Why—?” He bit off the word, looking out to the water, gripped by an angry frustration that went beyond his response to her. He closed his hand on the rail, trying to retain his grip on the situation.
But his gaze tracked unerringly back to Melodie. The low neckline of her shirt accentuated her slender neck and delicate collarbone, offering a teasing glimpse of the upper swells of her breasts. Her damp hair fell in waves around her bare face. She had the sensual innocence of a maiden from a primitive jungle culture, pure temptation in her open regard, Eve-like in her patience for him to succumb to the desire drumming through him. The message was subliminal and as irresistible as a siren’s.
Come to me.
All he could think was, This is a damned sight more than attraction. He was blind with lust, trying to hang on to a cool head while his body still felt the writhe of hers nudging against his erection. She’d inflamed him with their kiss, promising untold pleasure, appealing straight to the basest part of him and completely undermining his capacity for logical thought.
Thank God Ingrid had interrupted them. He was disgusted with himself for kissing her in the first place, let alone allowing her response to ignite his own. The moment he’d walked away from her, he’d begun grasping for rationalizations to explain how he’d reacted so uncontrollably. Maybe he had it wrong. Maybe she wasn’t Gautier’s daughter. Maybe her presence here wasn’t by design.
But he’d reviewed everything and it was all too neat. Her mother hadn’t been in society in years, yet her funeral had been a who’s who of the Eastern Seaboard. Melodie had not only started her new wedding business the minute she had put her mother to rest, but had immediately curried favor with an old family friend who happened to be the mother of his PA. The timing was auspicious indeed. And her fall into the pool, orchestrated so beautifully, allowing her to linger in
his home while her clothes dried, was equally suspicious.
Not only that, since yesterday he’d learned that Gautier Enterprises was bleeding red ink by the gallon. And he’d turned up additional photos showing Melodie under her father’s wing, all of them beautifully stoic in the face of her mother’s death. Most significantly, sly moves were happening behind the scenes. Roman’s customers were being offered exorbitant discounts if they signed exclusively with Gautier. False promises were being made about the performance of the most recent Gautier product, and dishonest warnings were circulating about Roman’s.
A fresh rush of hatred had encompassed him a moment ago as he’d looked at a photo of her with her father. Grim anger coiled through him that Melodie had anything to do with the man. He wanted her to be real, not a weapon her father was wielding. Not a willing foot soldier against him.
And he hated himself for being susceptible to her. He’d fallen for Anton’s lies once and was edging dangerously close to being taken in by Melodie’s. It was intolerable.
He’d learned all her weak points, though. Her father might have insulated himself very thoroughly, but she was wide-open. All his plans were in motion. With a tap of a key, he had ensured Ingrid would pick up his email insisting she fire Melodie, and with another ensured Melodie would have no home to go back to in Virginia. The rest of the false front she’d built would collapse like a row of dominoes over the next hours and days.
All while she continued to look at him with those Bambi eyes soft with invitation, a hint of irreverent humor in her smile.
“How well do you usually know the women you’re attracted to when you first meet them?” Melodie asked, pulling him back to the present moment.
Touché. He snorted, privately admitting that physical attraction was typically the reason he set out to learn a woman’s name. Ironically, he had learned more about Melodie before he’d kissed her than he’d ever learned about most women he’d slept with.
Of course, he’d been more attracted to Melodie at first glance than he’d ever been before. He’d only become more intrigued as each minute had passed. And now, despite everything he knew, despite already taking steps to crush her plans, he could barely take his eyes off her breasts, rising and falling in a shaken tremble that was utterly fascinating.
The basest male in him wanted to kiss her again. Feel her under him. Be inside her and see how high the flames would fan.
“Do you think I’m not struggling with this, too? I don’t kiss strangers. I don’t...” She offered a helpless palm, averting her face so he only saw a look of confusion and longing in the profile she turned to the water.
The rest of her was pure temptation, nipples peaking in excitement beneath the tiny red bikini top. Her legs went on forever and his hand itched to find the skin beneath the drape of that oversize, yet completely inadequate, shirt. He was hardening at the thought.
“I just keep wondering how else you get to know someone except by spending time with them?” Her gaze came back to his, earnest and unsure.
He shook his head, amazed by how good an actress she was, relieved on some level that she wasn’t genuine because he would have to do some serious soul-searching before involving himself with such a multifaceted yet sincere woman. He wasn’t cut out for relationships with a future. That was why he was careful how and when he fell into the loose ones he did enjoy.
Fortunately she was a huckster peddling a shell of such relationships, amazing him with her tenacity and smooth attempts to manipulate him, her mouth trembling in a struggle to smile as she offered a hesitant, “Of course, if it’s not a mutual thing, I’ll...”
She took a few steps closer, gaze drifting to the patio below, lashes lowering and brow pulling together in a wince of rejection.
He didn’t move. How could she be this good? How could he be feeling like this? He didn’t want anything to do with her, but he wanted to understand why he was this easily taken in so he could guard against such things further down the road.
“What do you really want from me, Melodie?” he asked in his deadliest tone, willing her to come clean.
“Just, um... Honestly?” She blinked up at him, practically virginal with her defenseless gaze, her mouth working to find words. “For you to kiss me again,” she said, her voice a thin husk. “To see if...” She licked her lips, leaving an expectant silence.
“Come and get it, then,” he said gruffly, trying to scoff, telling himself he was only seeing the extent she’d go to in this industrial espionage of hers, letting her demean herself when he had every intention of rejecting her.
But it didn’t happen that way.
She absorbed his command with a small flinch, then lifted her chin as though gathering her courage. As she stepped up to him, her hands opened on his rib cage in a feathery tickle that made his entire body jerk in reaction. His nipples hurt, they pulled so tight. She was tall enough that when she lifted on tiptoes, her mouth easily met his.
She pressed pillowy lips to his. He told himself to shove her back and tell her—
The rocking of her mouth parted his lips. He caught the first damp taste of her and his tongue shot out instinctively, greedily plunging into her mouth the way he wanted to plunge into her body. He closed his arms around her, pulled her into him with a strength he barely remembered to temper, and slanted his mouth to take full possession of hers.
She opened to him, arched and pressed into him and moaned capitulation.
Rational thought evaporated in a groan of craving.
CHAPTER FOUR
MELODIE HAD JUST wanted to see, that was all. See if he really did make her feel like this. See if something special existed between them.
But, oh, things raced out of control quickly. As their lips met and the kiss took hold, she stopped thinking, only vaguely aware that no man had ever run his hands over her skin like this. Such strong hands. Such an amazing feeling to be petted and shaped, firm fingers digging in as he pinned her tightly to his naked chest, then explored her with a touch like velvet.
Her body’s reaction was a study in biology, skin growing so sensitive his touch was almost abrasive, yet inciting at the same time. She could feel the scrape of his chest hair through the light shirt she wore, could feel the burn of his body heat, and even though she could barely stand the conflagration, she wanted to be closer and closer still. Her arms went around his neck so she was belly to belly with him, loins to—
He was hard.
His hands cupped her buttocks and his teeth closed on her nape, making her bones turn to sand while she rubbed instinctively against that hard ridge. Something deeper than desire, a craven need, punched like a blow right there, where she felt him against her most private flesh. The ache was hurtful and demanding. Nothing like she had ever felt. Never had sensations overwhelmed her like this. It was stunning, absorbing, erasing all thoughts except primal want. Please. More. Now.
Her fingers went into his hair. She was pure reflex, wanting his mouth over hers, wanting to open and give and take.
He smothered her with his passionate, hungry kiss, hands smoothing up the contracting muscles in her belly to cup her breasts, making her sob with relief at the pressure of his touch on those tender, aching orbs. The cups of the bathing suit went askew and then he had her bare breasts in his palms, massaging, fondling, rubbing at her nipples so streaks of white-hot arousal shot straight into her loins.
She whimpered, seeking pressure where desire was pooling like thick lava. She didn’t know how to tell him, only knew that his skin was as taut as a drum under her searching hands, his tongue erotic as he played with hers. A distant part of her wondered how this was happening, but another part didn’t care, only wanted him to keep touching her, keep playing with her nipples, keep stirring and stimulating her.
His hand went to her hip and eased the bathing suit down. He stepped back to l
ook as the bottoms dropped around her ankles. Watching his own hand, he slid his touch to the front of her thigh, up to her belly, then down, fingers combing, pressing—
“Oh!” she gasped, never having felt her body respond like this. Sharp and wicked and wanton sensations prickled through her as he sought with a fingertip and toyed with her, pulling her in for another kiss with a hand behind her neck, utterly devastating her with the waves of pleasure he was rocketing through her.
She caressed him with restless hands, wanting to touch everywhere at once, wanting to fill her palms with him, wanting to excite him the way he was doing to her. She no sooner cupped his hard shaft through linen, though, and his hand bumped hers, ceasing to caress her so he could release his drawstring.
His pants fell and he stepped out of them, completely naked. He was ferociously aroused, dark and thick and ready. She hadn’t got a proper glimpse of her first lover, and Roman wiped all thoughts of the past from her mind. He fascinated her.
She wasn’t frightened. No hint of hesitation struck. She was pure eagerness and excitement as she took in his nude frame, so perfect he was like a statue sculpted by a master, formidable and flawless, rampant and ferociously masculine.
Catching her up hard against his front, he lifted her as he moved, muscles shifting under her hands as he held her nose to nose, feet off the ground and dangling. His mouth nipped at hers, inciting her to kiss him back. She curled her arms around his neck, ran her tongue over his bottom lip, then drew on it, sucking flagrantly, liking the way his hands hardened on her. He took the few steps to his bed where he followed her to the mattress, spreading her legs as he came down over her.
Yes, she thought. It was the only word in her head. Her body was in a state of undeniable demand. Her entire being yearned for the feel of Roman’s hard muscles and his weight and yes. The feel of his aroused flesh rubbed against hers, parting and arousing, teasing and dampening. Seeking.
Her arms cradled his head, her mouth pulled at his parted lips, licking and panting as he breathed raggedly along with her, breaths mingling, their gasps and growls carnal and unfettered.