by Susan Napier
‘Yes, you like that. I know you do…’ he affirmed with crushing satisfaction as he turned his carnal attention to her other breast, circling her begging nipple with a taunting scrape of his nails. He bit at her tender earlobe as he whispered, ‘Do you remember how you felt at the hotel when I suckled your lovely breasts? You almost climaxed when I took your nipple inside my mouth. Shall we do it again now…?’ His fingers tightened to illustrate his shockingly explicit words.
Nora thought she was going to faint.
‘Oh, God—! No—I—Wait!’ She panicked, teetering on the brink of a new emotional precipice, afraid, not of falling, but of actively flinging herself over the edge. Her hands dug into the thickly bunched muscles across his shoulders as she strove to cling to her fast-eroding resolve. ‘You said you’d answer my question if I answered yours!’
His hands froze against her breasts. ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ he groaned in her burning ear.
She shook her head, her curls bouncing against his cheek. ‘We had a bargain,’ she gulped.
He drew back. ‘You’d really rather talk than—’He offered her a string of erotic variations that made her burn with curiosity. Was it really possible to do all those things? In one night?
She shook away the wicked thought and his mouth compressed, his eyes flaring with a ferocious impatience. She half hoped he might arrogantly ignore her shaky resistance, but instead she felt his whole body ripple with a series of pulsing contractions, as if he was fighting to rein himself in, muscle by individual muscle. His hands abandoned her aching breasts to encircle her smooth waist just above the band of her shorts, keeping her firmly compressed between his hard thighs and the soft side of the couch.
‘All right, ask your damned question,’ he said, with a clipped precision that signalled his rigid self-control.
She was dismayed to find that she was suddenly reluctant to put him to the test. There were some things she might be better off not knowing…
‘I just don’t understand why I’m such a threat to you,’ she blurted, aware from his rigid face that she was putting it badly. ‘I mean, why hacking some stupid disk makes me so important. Because if it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t have bothered to find me again, would you? Let alone bring me into your home. We wouldn’t be here, doing this…’ Her voice petered out as his rigid mask slipped to reveal a banked fire.
‘Maybe not here and now, but make no mistake, Nora. This—’ he rocked his flamboyant erection against her quivering belly ‘—would have happened between us sooner or later. Circumstances dictated the urgency but not the impetus…. You created that when you gave me that sexy look of wide-eyed innocence across a crowded room.’
Nora’s body thrilled to his sensual threat, even as her mind shied at the picture his words were creating.
‘Only it wasn’t so innocent on your part, was it, Nora? You were marking me out for your experiment. And when the instant physical attraction between us went too far too fast, instead of dealing with it like a mature adult, you simply bailed.’
She squirmed, unable to deny it. But he was making it sound as if he had been nothing but a helpless victim!
‘I hardly knew anything about you, and what I did know wasn’t exactly reassuring,’ she protested, discreetly wrestling her bra back into position over her tingling breasts. ‘I’m not very good with confrontations—’
He gave a snort and she glared up at him in righteous indignation. ‘I’m not! I’m usually very even-tempered and easy to get along with. But you have an extremely forceful personality, and it can be very overwhelming for an ordinary person like me,’ she said, the spirited challenge in her glowing eyes unconsciously giving the lie to her words. ‘Look at how you steamrollered over my protests this morning! And every time I ask you a question you don’t want to answer you find a way to distract me—’
‘When the stock market opens on Tuesday morning PresCorp intends to buy the rest of the TranStar shares it needs to take a controlling interest in the company,’ Blake interrupted bluntly, shocking her to silence with his unexpected openness. ‘We’re confident we’ll succeed in spite of the board’s resistance because we have what we believe to be watertight deals with a couple of major stakeholders. The only way we can possibly lose out now is if a rival bidder manages to leverage one of our deals out from under us over the weekend, or can lock up a strategic shareholding by off-market lobbying of minority interests….’
Nora’s eyes began to glaze as his frankness blossomed into talk of conditional bids and buy-backs and cross-holdings, but when he paused with a frown, she hurriedly rearranged her features to indicate intelligent life within. An ironic twist of his mouth suggested he wasn’t fooled, and she was not to know that her glassy-eyed uninterest had done more to persuade him of her innocence than any of her heated protestations.
Fortunately for Nora he seemed to have finally arrived at the relevant bit—the bit that was interesting. ‘PresCorp got the jump on everyone else because they expected we would wait to do due diligence before launching a bid, but we’d already run our own confidential investigation. That disk you took—’
‘Innocently acquired—’ she interjected.
‘Accidentally misappropriated—’ he allowed with a stern look of reprimand ‘—was loaded with highly sensitive financial information about TranStar, and PresCorp’s share-buying strategy and tactics, and plans for future restructuring. There were also files containing some extremely compromising and potentially actionable personal material about past and present TranStar shareholders and directors. If some, or all, of that information were to leak out before we make our stand on Tuesday—even a hint that we’d had a breach of security and the knowledge was out there to be scavenged—it could wreck months of planning and create havoc in the market, not to mention damaging a number of reputations….’
‘I see why your man Doug is such a favoured employee; you must keep him awfully busy.’ Her vodka-blitzed brain remembered tedious graphs and dreary stock projections interlaced by screens of crackling-dry prose, but nothing of any personal scandals. She must have nodded off before she even got to the juicy stuff! ‘You’ve actually blackmailed people into selling you their shares?’ she commented incredulously.
A muscle flickered in Blake’s cheek, but his voice remained cool. ‘There’s always cut-throat manouevring and mud-slinging behind the scenes in situations like this. Fortunes can turn over on a rumour. Grudges and loyalties get played out, especially in third generation family-founded companies like TranStar. Knowing who’s sleeping with whose wife or who’s over-extended himself buying a new yacht can give you an edge in negotiations. I don’t break any laws, but there are always plenty of loopholes in the rules and regulations for the lawyers to dispute afterwards. Meantime everyone scrambles to protect their own personal positions and maximise their financial gains.’
‘In other words it’s every man for himself,’ Nora said disapprovingly.
‘Or woman. There are plenty of women out there ready to slit a company’s throat for the promise of a seat on the board.’
‘And you think I might be one of them?’ she said, using scorn to disguise her stab of hurt.
His thumbs stroked her hip-bones, a glint of humour resurfacing at the sight of her furiously fluffed feathers. ‘Somehow I don’t see you as boardroom material,’ he murmured.
More bedroom material? Nora bit the tip of her unruly tongue to prevent the old cliché from spilling out, but from the lucent spark in Blake’s eye she might as well have uttered the provocative words out loud.
As an oblique form of apology it had bordered on a pretty good insult, she thought, trying to whip her hurt into a defensive outrage. She might not be brimming with management savvy, but she was clever enough to learn to run a company if she put her mind to it, albeit something small and interesting, like maybe her own IT business….
‘So I’m here because you’re afraid that my venal nature is going to get the better of me if I’m not u
nder twenty-four-hour guard, and to make sure I can’t escape with my ill-gotten gains if it turns out that I’ve already been corrupted! I’m surprised you want to sleep with me if I’m so obviously untrustworthy,’ she said bitterly.
He met her stormy gaze with a compelling calm. ‘There’s a wider issue of trust involved here. I have to deal with the facts as they stand here and now, not as I want them to be. I have a responsibility for those I work for and with—a lot of people have put their faith in the soundness of my judgements. Every day they take huge risks based on my recommendations. If I start to make critical business decisions based on my personal feelings rather than best practice, then I wouldn’t be worthy of their trust. And this buyout is set to cost Scotty several hundred million dollars, so he’s not going to be very sympathetic if it all suddenly turns to custard and my excuse begins, “Sorry, but there was this bewitching young woman with stunning golden eyes…”’
Several hundred million dollars? Nora’s stomach jumped at the notion. God, no wonder Blake was so paranoid! ‘Personal feelings?’ she ventured tentatively.
‘Extremely personal,’ he answered with a tantalising shift of his hips. His eyelids drooped, giving her a brief warning he was about to say something calculated to unsettle. ‘And, by the way, Nora, I never said I wanted to sleep with you….’
‘Oh!’ Elation turned to instant mortification and she tried to wriggle out from between his thighs, only to have him bend to hook his arm behind her knees, sweeping her off her feet and up against his chest with a deep satisfied laugh.
‘Because sleep will definitely be the last thing on my mind when I finally get you into my bed,’ he concluded in a wicked undertone, carrying her across the room as if she weighed no more than a feather. He turned down the hall, adjusting her more securely in his arms, and Nora’s head fell back against his shoulder as she contemplated her choices, knowing that there was only one she really wanted to make. Had wanted ever since she met him. This fascinating, infuriating, impossibly complex and wholly desirable man was like an elegant encryption, designed expressly to test her mettle.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, her voice husky with nervous anticipation, convinced that she knew.
‘My mother always taught me to escort my date to her door,’ he teased in that same low, intimate tone.
Her door? Hadn’t he mentioned his bed?
But of course every bed in the house was technically his, she supposed, her body suffused with warmth.
He set her down gently, in a slow, erotic, mutual caress of bodies, at the darkened entrance to her exotic room, and Nora willed her wobbly legs to support her as she prepared to take the scariest leap of her life. A leap into the dark. A leap of faith.
She swayed to meet Blake’s lingering kiss, but when her hands moved eagerly up to cup his face he gathered them to his lips in a gallant, but chaste, salute.
‘Sweet dreams, Nora. I’ll see you in the morning,’ he said, and with another brief goodnight kiss on her stunned brow he strolled back down the hall without a backwards glance.
CHAPTER TEN
THE THIRD TIME that Nora woke up in the big white-swathed bed on Sunday morning, it was with a smile of rapturous bliss. Instinct told her it was still early and her eyelids fluttered dreamily open as she rolled over on her side, reaching out to run a lazy hand over the sun-burnished body of her thoroughly decadent sultan.
Instead of warm bare muscles toned by energetic bouts of lovemaking under the hot Arabian sun, Nora found cool, crisp one hundred per cent Egyptian cotton.
With a groan of frustration Nora continued rolling until her face was buried in the depths of the smooth, undented pillow that lay next to her. She couldn’t believe that Blake had once again sent her to bed with only her erotic fantasies for company. She was starting to wonder if he had any intention of living up to his bad reputation!
She had bounced out of bed on Saturday morning with the firm conviction that Blake’s gentlemanly conduct at her bedroom door had merely been his clever way of ratcheting up the sexual tension between them. She had been sure that, having asserted his dominance, he would swiftly make good his sensual threats and seductive promises.
Instead she had spent the day with a man who had been by turns infuriatingly casual and maddeningly friendly.
He had fed her breakfast while chatting about the difficulties involved in the building of the house five years ago, and how it had been designed by the same architect who had built his home on Auckland’s waterfront.
Afterwards he had given her a guided tour of the sprawling upper level, whisking her in and out of his aggressively masculine bedroom without a single suggestive comment, seemingly more interested in her opinion of the architecture and furnishings than in seduction.
Then he had chivvied her into changing and going for a run with him along the beach, taking her down the winding gravel road in the jaunty beach-buggy.
‘My nieces tortured me into buying this!’ he shouted above the roar of the engine and the wind in their ears as they shot on to the beach, but Nora could tell from the white grin that gashed the hard face below the black wrap-around sunglasses that he hadn’t taken much persuading.
The tide was only halfway up the wide sweep of black sand and apart from a few hardened surfers out amongst the waves the beach was empty but for a family with a dog out on the rocks by the point.
They jogged the kilometre or so to one end of the beach on the hard-packed sand just below the high-water mark, but when they got back to the dune where he had parked the buggy, and Blake showed no signs of stopping, Nora collapsed panting into the sand and waved him on. With an insufferably superior grin he took off towards the other end of the beach at double their speed and did another couple of complete laps of the beach in the same pounding rhythm, while Nora fetched a towel and water bottle from the bag he had stowed in the cockpit of the buggy. Kicking off her sneakers, she stripped down to her pale bronze bathing suit, a sleek one-piece with a deep V neckline and detail around the high-cut hips.
When Blake returned, his tank top and shorts clinging to his sweat-soaked body, it was to find Nora sitting on a towel absorbed in conversation with a sun-bleached young surfer who stood, his wetsuit peeled down to his waist, his muscled arm holding his upright board to one side of his smooth, deeply tanned torso.
‘Steve.’ Blake’s voice was as curt as his nod.
‘Blake.’ The surfie nodded back, grinning down at Nora.
‘Going out?’ Blake demanded even more curtly.
‘Coming in.’ The flick of a calculated hand through his long blond hair made Nora gasp as a glittering arc of cold drops splattered over her hot skin and slid down between her breasts.
‘Sorry. Shall I lick that off for you, darlin’?’ he offered with a playful grin that had her smothering a giggle.
Blake took a menacing step closer. ‘Beat it, kid. You’re playing out of your league. Especially if you want that summer internship you’ve been pestering me for….’
The fearless grin widened. Steve tipped a wink at Nora as he tucked his surfboard back under his arm with a flourish and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. ‘Just remember, I’m the first on the left going up the road if the old man pegs out on you—I have a soft bed, a great stereo and a fully stocked drinks cabinet….’
Nora turned her stifled giggle into a choked cough as the young man sauntered on his way up the beach.
‘You didn’t have to be so rude,’ she chided. ‘He was just being friendly.’
‘I suppose you were so busy simpering up at him you didn’t notice he was leering down your suit,’ he said tersely. ‘You do realise that’s his parents’ liquor cabinet he’s boasting about!’
Secretly encouraged by his dog-in-the-manger attitude, Nora stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned nonchalantly back on her braced arms.
‘So he said.’
‘Did he? What else did he say?’ He dropped to his knees, removing his tank top and mopping
his forehead, throat and chest with it. His brows twitched together. ‘What were you two talking about?’
‘I was telling him all your TranStar secrets, of course,’ she said sweetly. ‘We were plotting a way to get rid of you and take over the company ourselves.’
The snatched eyebrows melted into a laugh. ‘Did you happen to mention I’d brought you here against your will and beg him to take you back to Auckland? I mean, this was your big chance to escape my wicked clutches and cause me maximum pain and embarrassment.’
Wicked? If only!
‘I—He—As you pointed out, he’s only a boy. It wouldn’t have been fair to involve him,’ she floundered, trying to disguise the betraying fact that it hadn’t even occurred to her. ‘And, anyway, since you’re neighbours and he’s obviously applied to you for some sort of holiday job, I doubt he would have risked crossing you—’
‘But you didn’t know that when you spoke to him.’ Blake twisted the top off a second water bottle and she watched, fascinated, the rippling of his strong throat as he drank. Then he tilted his jaw to one side and splashed some of the water down on to his sweaty chest, causing the skin to tighten and his nipples to visibly contract. The muscles in Nora’s arms went lax, and to hide her sudden weakness she lay flat on her back, wriggling her bottom to form a comfortable hollow in the sand beneath the towel.