He led her from the hotel bar, her hand laced with his, and Jenny found that she couldn’t breathe. And that she didn’t much care.
Everything seemed too bright, too intense, and yet at the same time, not quite real.
There was only Brax. There was only the velvet slide of his palm against hers. There was only the anticipation humming between them and pulling taut, like a physical rope she could feel wrapped tighter and tighter around her.
The lift was a gleaming slide and then Jenny was walking down another hushed, magnificent hallway, but this time she wasn’t alone. This time the anticipation had less to do with her plans and everything to do with his.
Brax ushered her into his suite and Jenny had the frantic impression of stately golds and soothing creams. Restrained elegance and a killer view. And then she was caught in Brax’s grip as surely as if he’d put his hands on her.
He didn’t. He simply shut the door and she felt it. Like a bolt straight through her.
‘A drink?’ he asked as he followed her deeper into the suite.
The lights were soft and beckoning, and her heart was so wild in her chest she thought it might catapult itself straight out and onto the floor between them. She didn’t know how it was possible he couldn’t hear it.
‘No, thank you.’ But she hardly sounded like herself.
His smile was a male thing, dark and greedy, and she loved it.
And everything shifted again. She found herself standing in the middle of a sitting area arranged to take in every inch of the glorious spread of London on the other side of the great window, and between one dizzying heartbeat and the next, she was different. Changed.
She’d never done something like this before. She was almost certainly on the rebound and likely to make nothing but terrible decisions and regrettable mistakes for the foreseeable future. This man was so far out of her league she was fairly sure the noise in her head was altitude sickness.
And none of that mattered.
Because the way he was studying her as she stood there, looking back at him in the dress he’d given her as if everything that had happened tonight was a prelude to this moment and this moment had never been in any doubt, made her feel the way she had earlier. When she’d walked in the front door of this magical place and had felt born anew in all that splendour. When she’d understood her own power.
And even that had been only the faintest and foggiest echo of this.
She smiled at him, feeling dark and greedy herself, and the curve of his sensual mouth edged into something else entirely. Something so hot it made her pull in a breath to keep her knees steady beneath her.
He strode towards her, shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it onto one of the sofas.
‘Come here,’ he said, as much a command as an invitation. ‘This time you can take the shirt off me yourself.’
‘I’m not your valet.’ But she was already moving towards him.
‘Do it nicely,’ he murmured, ‘and who knows? Maybe I’ll let you keep it.’
The shirt or the man? she almost asked, but didn’t, because she wasn’t entirely sure that it would be the joke it should have been. And something moved in that dark gaze of his, like he knew it.
She stopped when she was in front of him and indulged herself at last, sliding her palms up over the flat, hot planes of his pectoral muscles and feeling that touch all over her, like he was the one doing it. She heard her breath shiver out, and felt the low thunder of his laughter deep inside his chest.
‘I don’t know why we bothered with that masquerade in the hotel bar,’ she said as she started to unbutton him. ‘It seems like a great deal of trouble to go to just to get back here.’
She pulled the ends of the shirt from his trousers and then pushed it over the mouthwatering perfection of his shoulders and it seemed to drop to the floor in slow motion. The same way it seemed to take a thousand years for him to reach up and spear his fingers deep into her hair, tugging her face gently towards his.
‘Don’t you understand?’ he murmured, his mouth so close to hers she felt like she was coming apart. She wanted to come apart. ‘The trouble is the point.’
And then he simply took her mouth with his.
Chapter Eight
She tasted even better than she looked, which Brax would have said was an impossibility.
He’d meant this to be a seduction. Something slow and gleaming to suit the hints of uncertainty he’d seen in her lovely dark eyes—but one taste and he forgot himself. One taste and he was lost. Ravenous.
He angled his jaw for a better, slicker fit. He indulged himself with his hands in the gleaming, shiny mass of her dark hair. He pulled her to him, irritated that she was still wearing clothes, that he wasn’t already inside her, that there were all these steps to take, despite what he’d just said about trouble—
‘Off,’ he muttered, pulling his mouth from hers with a heroic effort when he thought he’d be happy to drown in her, just like this.
She shuddered against him and she looked dazed as she blinked up at him, her mouth so pretty and so close and too much of a temptation.
He shook his head, though that did nothing at all to clear it.
‘Take that thing off,’ he told her, and everything contracted around him when she smiled at him.
‘By ‘that thing’ I’m to assume you mean the dress you made me put on in the first place?’
He didn’t like not touching her, so he reached over and ran a finger over the ridge of her collarbone, and he opted not to examine too closely how much better he felt the moment he had her skin beneath his. ‘If it was up to me, Jenny, you’d never wear anything that wasn’t dark pink and a little bit shocking.’
Her mouth opened slightly, and she let out a startled laugh. ‘You saw that?’
‘Why do you think I came out of the sauna? I’m not sure I’ll ever see anything else. It’s burned into my brain.’
‘Then far be it from me to torture you any further,’ she said, her voice gone husky, and he gave up the sweetness of her smooth skin for the riotous thrill of watching her as she reached down to the hem of the tight, stretchy dress and shimmied it up the length of her luscious body.
By the time she pulled it over her head, baring all of those curves wrapped in that marvelously dark pink confection of slippery silk and tempting lace, he was a stranger to himself. A man at the furthest edge of his usually ironclad control, and he’d only kissed her.
He had never met a woman as irresistible as this one. He didn’t believe one could exist.
‘There it is.’ His voice was a rasp. All but guttural. He saw goose flesh rise on her skin, and he imagined the smile he gave her then was ferocious. ‘God help me.’
‘I think you’re on your own,’ she replied, and her voice was as altered as his.
Brax didn’t know why he advanced on her then, or why she retreated, when their mutual need was a living thing between them, so bright and imperative it made all of London seem dim in comparison. It was the dance of it, the push and the pull, and he didn’t understand how this woman he hardly knew could have inserted herself this far beneath his skin. Only that she beat there like a heartbeat, insistent and wild.
He backed her up until she hit the window, and he allowed himself a dark laugh when she let out a small sound that only made him hotter. Hungrier.
And she knew that too, because she raised her hands up high, stretching them over her head until she was splayed there against the window like entirely too many of his favourite fantasies. She held his gaze, arching her back so her perfect breasts jutted forward and he couldn’t keep himself from following the sweet line of her curves all the way down to the little bit of pink covering her below.
Brax thought he might burst like an untrained boy if he didn’t get some kind of a hold on himself, so he did the second best thing he could think of. He sank down on his knees in front of her, sliding his hands over her hips and holding her still when she shook so hard he thought she m
ight fly apart.
‘Soon,’ he promised.
Then he leaned in close, inhaled her scent, nudged the edge of the dark pink thong out of his way and finally—finally—tasted her the way he’d wanted to do from the start.
Chapter Nine
Jenny exploded.
One moment she was solid and the next she was a great shattering, pieces and shards and broken things like a cascade, and it was glorious.
She came back to herself to find her hands flat against the cool glass, her heart still turning cartwheels in her chest, and Brax still on his knees before her.
And the look in his dark eyes made her feel as wild and out of control, as shattered, as she had only moments before.
He rose in a single swift movement that made her mouth water, and then he simply swept her up and into his arms. He strode through the suite, leaving the lights behind them as he bore her into the darkness beyond.
It took Jenny a moment before her eyes adjusted to the dark of his bedroom, and he was already placing her down on the wide bed, a sleek and elegant affair piled high with linens so soft she sighed as she moved against them. The lights from the city beyond lit him as he kicked his way out of his trousers, a work of art in shadows and all the steel perfection of his deeply masculine form.
She sat up and moved to take off her bra, but the low noise he made, a growl of protest, stopped her.
‘Don’t touch that.’
He crawled towards her over the coverlet, a predator in every way and this time, she already knew what awaited her as his prey. Her whole body was alive with want. With near-excruciating need. It should have been impossible after what had only just happened, and yet all he had to do was look at her and she went electric.
‘What if I want to be naked too?’ she asked.
He kept going until he’d braced himself above her, leaning down and trapping her with his arms on either side and that temptation of a mouth just there.
‘Trust me, Jenny,’ he murmured, already moving to test the tender place just below her ear and laughing slightly when she shuddered. ‘We’ll get there.’
And he was as good as his word.
Again and again and again.
***
Outside the windows, dawn had started to creep its way through the London skyline and Jenny was a soft and pleasing weight against his chest.
Brax had lost track of the number of times they’d come together throughout the night. He ran his fingers through the silk of her hair and told himself he felt nothing outside the usual range. He liked sex. He had a lot of sex. This was sex.
But Jenny was something different and there in the half-dark morning, he couldn’t muster up the necessary energy to lie to himself.
She shifted as if she was attuned to his mood, as if it could wake her from her sleep. He didn’t want to examine that part of him that wanted—with a fervour that should have terrified him—for that to be true.
‘You’re on the rebound from your awful Scot,’ he said gruffly, his voice overloud in the quiet room.
He thought she laughed against his chest. She moved, one hand coming up to rest over his heart and there was no reason at all he should feel an ache there, as if she’d plunged a knife through him instead.
‘Obviously,’ she agreed. ‘Though to be honest, I’m finding it hard to remember what he looks like at the moment.’
That was only a thing to say. A few words strung together that probably weren’t true. He’d uttered similar things a thousand times before and they hadn’t quite been lies. They’d been his bedside manners, nothing more.
But he wanted her to mean it far more than was healthy for either of them.
‘You will regret all of this,’ he told her, and he didn’t know why he said it or why, when he did, he tightened his arm around her. ‘You will wake in the morning and hate yourself, me, the hotel, the entire world. You will consider yourself a fallen woman and use this night as a cautionary tale for your friends.’
She lifted her head, propping her chin on his chest and regarding him in that solemn way of hers that did things to him.
‘Regret is how you know it was worth doing, if you look at it closely enough.’ She laughed when he shook his head at her. ‘I might be on the rebound but what do you care? You’re a playboy, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think anyone uses that word unless they’re a sad old pervert living in a Hollywood mansion.’ He had absolutely no reason to scowl then, and yet he did. Fiercely. ‘Which I am not.’
‘A player, then. A cad. A Don Juan. A lover and a leaver of multitudes of women.’ That was definitely laughter then and it should have relaxed him. It shouldn’t have made his chest feel so tight. She leaned closer and kissed him softly, in the place where her hand had been. Another knife, sharp and deep. ‘I suspect, Brax, that this is not the first night you’ve spent with a woman you just met.’
‘No,’ he agreed.
And he didn’t know how to tell her that this—that she—was nothing like anything that had come before. He didn’t know what it would mean or what he would do if she really did look at him in the morning with nothing but regret in her gaze.
So he did the only thing he could, until they both fell off the side of the world in a great rush, and then into a deep sleep, tangled up together like they’d never let each other go.
Chapter Ten
When Jenny woke up, she was bathed in sunlight.
It poured through the window, heating her the way Brax had all night long, and for a moment she simply let it. She basked in it.
Everything that had happened the night before and well on into the morning came back to her in a lazy stream, and she let out a long, happy breath.
She had no regrets. Brax wasn’t the sort of man a wise woman regretted, she thought as she sat up slowly and stretched her arms up over her head. He was the sort of man one mourned, which wasn’t quite the same thing.
Jenny moved to the edge of the bed and stood up, looking around until she found the bra and panty set that had started all of this in the first place, flung to opposite sides of the vast room. She thought of Daniel then, and the awkwardness that was sure to descend on their shared accommodation now. She thought of that blonde who was almost certainly his ex and wondered if he’d have the gall to plead his case further when she saw him next. She certainly hoped so. Jenny imagined she’d have a great deal more to say on the subject once she was less surprised. And more clothed.
But she still couldn’t bring herself to care too much about any of that at the moment. Not when the worst night of her life had turned into the best and she was still standing in the splendour of the Chatsfield, like Cinderella still wafting around after the ball, wishing for one last dance.
She could do the adult thing, she decided then. She could simply walk out the door the way her friends had always told her was expected and take nothing but her memories and that black dress with her.
Jenny paused at the bedroom door and listened, but she couldn’t hear a thing from the rest of the suite. She pushed open the door and peered out, momentarily dazzled by all the bright light on the gold and white furnishings. She padded across the floor and scooped up the black dress, pulling it over her head and smoothing it down into place—while she tried not to remember what had happened right there at the window.
Nice try, she told herself. She wasn’t certain she’d ever think of anything else.
She swallowed hard but kept on, digging her shoes out from beneath the coffee table and then stopping where she stood, because his shirt was still where he’d left it when he’d shrugged it off. A little smile moved across her face and she couldn’t help herself.
She only wanted a memento, she told herself as she slipped it on like a coat, inhaling his scent. Because the truth was, this didn’t feel like the Walk of Shame. Jenny couldn’t remember ever feeling better in her life. She felt… full. Right. As if Brax hadn’t simply shown her all the marvelous things her body could do with the right m
an, but proved that what really mattered was that she was the right woman—and that Daniel was a fool.
Jenny wished she could thank him. But she imagined the best way to thank a man like him—a playboy in every way, no matter that he didn’t like the term—was to make herself scarce.
She started towards the door, determined to ignore the hollow feeling in her chest, because she’d meant what she’d said last night. Regret was all in how she chose to look at it. It only meant that all of this had been worth doing.
‘It’s official.’
Brax’s voice came from behind her and she only admitted then, when it washed over her, so dark and perfect, that she was relieved she wouldn’t have to leave without seeing him one more time.
She turned slowly and he was there, leaning up against a door that led to another room she hadn’t investigated the night before, and it was like last night in the sauna all over again. He was absurdly perfect. He stood there like he was carved from marble, wearing nothing but a low-slung pair of some kind of loose, black trousers.
He looked like a god and she felt a deep, rousing need to worship at his shrine. All over again.
‘What’s official?’ she asked calmly, as if he hadn’t turned her into an addict in a single night.
‘You look better in that shirt than I ever could,’ he said quietly. ‘Keep it.’
She smiled, even though she was pretty sure this part was supposed to be awkward. She didn’t feel awkward. She felt hungry. Maybe she was doing it wrong.
‘Thank you,’ she said, very politely. ‘That’s so kind of you, especially as I was clearly stealing it.’
‘Again.’
Her smile widened. ‘Yes.’
He only studied her for a long while. She noticed that the bright, relentless glare of the sun made him look even more beautiful than he had in the dark. That wasn’t fair. But it certainly made her happy enough to stand there for a little bit longer, soaking him in.
‘I should go,’ she said eventually.
He pushed away from the doorway then and prowled towards her, and her stomach went acrobatic. She held her breath as he approached, then let it out in a rush when he stopped right there in front of her, forcing her to tilt her head back if she wanted to meet his dark gaze.
Strangers in the Sauna Page 3
