Challenging Gabriel (Knight Security 2)

by Carole Mortimer

  Knight Security Series 2

  Challenging Gabriel

  By

  Carole Mortimer

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2016 Carole Mortimer

  Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper Designs

  Editor: Linda Ingmanson

  Formatter: Matthew Mortimer

  ISBN: 978-1-910597-32-3 (mobi)

  ISBN: 978-1-910597-33-0 (ePub)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DEDICATIONS

  Peter

  As Always

  Prologue

  Eight years ago

  She’s here.

  I don’t know where she is or how I know she’s here. I just do.

  I’ve been coming back to this club night after night for three weeks now. Hoping to see her again. To talk with her. To be with her.

  Finally, she’s back. I can’t see her yet, but I know she’s here somewhere. I can feel her. The air is charged with her presence. My body is charged with the same expectation.

  She’s here, somewhere.

  I fucking know it.

  When I breathe in, I even think I catch faint wafts of her perfume. Citrus and spice, and that unique feminine aroma that’s all her. As usual, it’s caused my cock to harden in anticipation.

  I ignore that ache as I slowly turn and allow my narrowed gaze to scan the booths to one side of the club, searching for that familiar golden hair cascading down the length of her spine. I look at couple after couple. Group after group. But I know at a glance none of them is her.

  The dance floor next. My gaze passes over the gyrating bodies, one by one. Searching. Half dreading finding her again, only to see she’s with another man. That had better not be the case. For his sake. Because anyone who gets in the way of my being with her will be dealt with. Eliminated. Quietly. Efficiently.

  None of the women on the dance floor are her.

  So where the fuck—

  My breath leaves my lungs with a noisy whoosh as I see her standing at the other end of the bar. She’s ordering a drink, laughing and talking with the redhead serving behind the bar.

  My quarry is a little over five feet tall, with long blonde hair and gray eyes, and skin I know is as smooth as silk to the touch, and tastes of heat and honey. She’s so beautiful, looking at her is like gazing directly at the sun. Blinding. Dazzling. Sucking all the air from my lungs.

  My eyes remain narrowed as I step forward, uncaring of who stands in my way as I walk determinedly toward her. No one is unwise enough to check or rebuke me for that single-minded pursuit. Maybe because they know, by the coiled tension that must be rolling off my body, if anyone tries to stop me from reaching her, I’ll walk straight over or through them. Their choice.

  I’ve waited three hellish long weeks for her to come back to the club, and she isn’t going to get away from me a second time.

  Not ever again, if I have my way.

  And I invariably do.

  Chapter 1

  Present day

  She’s here.

  He can sense her. Feel her. Breathing in, his senses are flooded with her perfume, citrus and spice, along with that unique feminine aroma that is all her. He can almost taste the sweet honey between her legs, the hot and heady musk—

  “Your eleven o’clock appointment is here, Gabriel.”

  What the fu—!

  Gabriel gave a start as he was jolted back into the present by his secretary’s announcement. It took several disorientated seconds for him to even realize he was sitting in the chair behind his desk, in the CEO’s office in the Knight Security building.

  One minute he had been leaning back in his chair, staring out the huge picture window at the London skyline as he waited for his next appointment to arrive, and the next he had been transported back into the past. No explanation. No warning. Just there.

  God, so completely there.

  Every part of him had been saturated with her. Touch. Sight. Smell. Taste.

  It had all been so fucking real, his cock was hard and engorged and tenting the front of the tailored trousers of his suit.

  Why the fuck was he thinking about her now?

  He hadn’t thought about her in years. Hadn’t allowed himself to think about her for years. His dreams were another matter, however, and in the early years, he had often woken, saturated in sweat and his own cum, after a particularly graphic dream about her. As the years passed, the memories hadn’t grown dimmer, but his self-control had grown stronger, and he had managed to banish her from his thoughts, from his memory, and eventually from his dreams.

  But even in those early years, he had never zoned out the way he had just now. Becoming so immersed in memories of her, he had no awareness of where he was, or what time it was.

  What could have triggered the memories today? Why the hell—

  “Gabriel?”

  He turned his head round so fast, he gave himself whiplash.

  Standing in the doorway of his office, slightly to the left of his secretary, was another woman.

  A woman who smelled of citrus and spice, and a feminine aroma that was uniquely her.

  Angel?

  The perfume was the same, but otherwise…

  The black tailored knee-length dress the woman wore was sophisticated and obviously expensive, her legs long and silky above three-inch-heel shoes. Her figure was a bit on the thin side, even though she had curves in all the right places. The blonde hair was trimmed to shoulder length, and styled professionally in wispy layers. Gray, long-lashed eyes looked at him coolly, almost dispassionately.

  Without recognition?

  If that was so, then that lack of recognition didn’t quite tally with her familiarity in addressing him by his first name a few seconds ago.

  Whether this woman was Angel or merely a woman who looked very much like her, Gabriel felt at a complete disadvantage at being caught daydreaming in his office in the middle of the morning, when he was expecting clients. Even when he wasn’t expecting clients. Jesus, Knight Security was his place of work. A serious place, where he carried out serious business. Lives depended on him keeping his shit together. Which meant he didn’t allow himself to go off into fucking daydreams and getting hard-ons thinking about a woman he hadn’t set eyes on in eight years.

  “I’m your eleven o’clock appointment.” The woman spoke evenly in that voice that was Angel’s and yet somehow not. This woman’s voice was cold, controlled, whereas Angel’s had always been infused with life. Or screaming his name as she came.

  He eyed her guardedly. “You are?”

  A cool dip of her head. “I have some…business I need to discuss with you.” She gave his secretary a pointed glance.

  Gabriel checked the screen of his laptop. “You’re Mrs. Sinclair?”

  Her mouth tightened. “I am, yes.”

  He glanced down at her slender left hand, noting the ring finger was adorned with a thin gold wedding band. Which explained why he hadn’t made the connection between her and his next appointment. If this was his Angel, then her surname had been Jones eight years ago. Angela Jones.

  Angel.

  His Angel.

  Until she wasn’t.

  The woman standing in front of him wasn’t his Angel either. This woman was composed, sophisticated, every inch the well-dressed, impeccably coiffured wife of a very rich man. A man who expected his beauti
ful wife to always look perfect and behave with gracious self-confidence. The ideal hostess to his business associates, the trophy wife on his arm whenever they went out together.

  Gabriel’s Angel had been just twenty years old, alone in the world after her mother had died when she was fourteen and her father a year before he met her. She was using the money they had left her to put herself through university.

  The night Gabriel met her, she had been wearing an only-just-decent skirt and a fitted tube top, her almost waist-length hair a cascade of blonde waves. He almost groaned aloud as he remembered how warm and sweet-smelling those curls had been when they moved in a caress across his naked thighs as she bent over to take his cock into her mouth.

  His gaze fixed on the fullness of the coral-painted lips of the woman who had introduced herself as Mrs. Sinclair. Were they the same lips that had once wrapped themselves about his cock and pleasured him? He couldn’t say for sure.

  Gabriel gave a frustrated shake of his head. “I’m afraid Knight Security isn’t taking on new clients at the moment.” Even if it transpired this woman wasn’t Angel, he didn’t want to work with her. For her. This woman brought back far too many memories he would much rather forget.

  That he needed to forget, if he wanted to function properly. He might have tried not to think of her for years, but his brief time with Angel had become the yardstick by which he measured all other women. They always came up wanting.

  She turned to Josey. “Is that true?”

  His secretary looked uncomfortable. “I… Well—”

  “Obviously not.” The woman sighed. “If you will excuse us?” She smiled politely at Josey. “I believe Gabriel is about to spout a load of bullshit, and it’s probably for the best if you don’t stay around to witness my reaction to it.”

  Josey gave a surprised bark of laugher, which she quickly brought under control as Gabriel glared at her. “I’ll be right outside in my office if you need me.” She hurried from the room and closed the door behind her.

  A blonde brow arched over mocking gray eyes. “Are you going to need her, Gabriel?”

  Fuck, this woman certainly treated him like Angel had. He had been thirty years old eight years ago, a soldier, a trained warrior, but Angel had never been in the least frightened or in awe of him. As so many others had been, and still were.

  Gabriel might have tried to convince himself—hoped—this wasn’t Angel, but he knew, in his heart of hearts, it was her. She might look different, act different, but the reaction of his cock didn’t lie. That part of him had known Angel was somewhere near long before Gabriel’s other senses had. There might have been an office wall between them, but he had no doubt her perfume must have wafted through that barrier, and the slightest hint of that perfume had transported him back eight years in time. To Angel. To the hunter and the hunted.

  “Are you?” she challenged.

  Fuck, he had to stop staring at her as if she were an apparition, and start behaving like Gabriel Knight, CEO of Knight Security. One of, possibly the most, prestigious security companies in the world. As Gabriel Knight, head of that company, was known to be one of the scariest bastards in that same world.

  He might have a more sophisticated appearance too, in his tailored suits, and silk shirts and ties. But underneath those civilized trappings he was still the same man who would walk straight over, or through, anyone who tried to get in the way of what he wanted.

  As he had once wanted Angel to the point of obsession.

  “Doubtful,” he drawled.

  “That’s what I thought.” Mrs. Sinclair nodded. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?”

  “No point,” he bit out. “I’ve already told you, we aren’t taking on new clients right now.”

  Temper flickered briefly in her eyes before it was quickly brought under control. “Knight Security isn’t, or you, personally?”

  “I don’t take clients personally.”

  Surprise widened her eyes. “No?”

  His mouth thinned with derision. “I’m strictly a sitting-behind-a-desk man nowadays. I tell other people where to go and what needs doing when they get there.”

  “That’s new.”

  When they met all those years ago, Gabriel had still been in the army and hyped up from the years he had spent on special ops all over the world. He’d been the one to plan and execute dozens of those successful missions.

  One of them had been to hunt down and capture the woman he wanted.

  This woman.

  He shrugged. “I’m eight years older.”

  She quirked a brow. “And wiser?”

  “One would hope so.”

  Angela wanted to reach across Gabriel’s desk take him by the shoulders and shake him, hard, all while screaming at him that he had to help her. Had to help Daniel.

  She didn’t, of course. Too many years of guarding her emotions, expecting nothing and so never suffering disappointment when nothing was given, held her back from displaying such uncontrolled emotion.

  Besides, Gabriel wasn’t only those eight years older, he was no longer the same man who had chased her down until he caught her.

  The man she had never been able to forget, no matter how hard she tried.

  She knew from her search for him that he had never married. Not for want of trying on the part of the women who had shared his bed, she was sure. At thirty-eight, Gabriel was not only everything that was tall, dark, and handsome, but the joint ownership of Knight Security with his three brothers had made them all extremely wealthy men.

  Instead of the mellowing that marriage and having a family could have given him, those intervening years had made Gabriel even harder, with a more dangerous edge. His body was raw, defined muscle beneath the perfectly tailored suit he wore, but it was also leaner, more finely honed, and filled with a restless energy no amount of sitting behind a desk had succeeded in taming. His hair was still short, but the darkness was now tinged with gray at his temples. There were also fine lines beside his mesmerizing green eyes and chiseled lips.

  But Gabriel still looked ready to take on the world with the absolute certainty that he would win. Because he always won. Losing had never been an option for Gabriel. It wasn’t even in his vocabulary.

  Which was the reason Angela was here. The only reason she was here. She needed someone who would win, no matter what the odds were against him.

  “Tell me why you’re here, Angel?” He snapped his impatience with her lengthy silence.

  Angel.

  God, hearing that name again, after all this time, was almost enough to drive her down to her knees. Only Gabriel had ever called her that. To everyone else, her husband, friends, she was always Angela. To the staff in the Sinclair homes, she was, respectfully, Mrs. Sinclair. She had never ever been Angel again after Gabriel left her life.

  But she was determined to be Angel again now, an Amazon warrior, despite her short stature, to match Gabriel’s combat training.

  Even so, and despite having steeled herself for this meeting, seeing Gabriel again was affecting her far more deeply than she would have wished. She felt an ache deep inside her. Remembered things she would rather not. Naked and sweaty bodies intimately entwined. Hot breath against her skin and between her thighs. Hands caressing, igniting desire wherever they touched, as Gabriel took possession of every part of her. She even imagined she could hear those words, “Angel mine!” reverberating inside her head. Those same words Gabriel had murmured over and over again as he thrust inside her, claiming and marking her as his forever.

  Except she hadn’t been.

  She wasn’t.

  Angel pushed those thoughts of the past to the back of her mind as she faced Gabriel. “I’m here because I need your help.”

  “With what?” His gaze swept over her with obvious scorn. “Did you lose a diamond earring? Crash your sports car and you’re afraid to tell Hubby? Or maybe you lost your pet poodle Fifi?” His tone dripped with contempt. “Knight Security deals with real se
curity issues, Mrs. Sinclair, not the whims and fancies of a spoilt and pampered socialite.”

  Rage bubbled up inside her, fierce, overwhelming, unlike anything she had ever experienced before. “How dare you!” She was shaking with fury. “You don’t know me. Don’t know anything about me. You certainly don’t have the right to sit behind your desk making contemptuous assumptions about me or my life.”

  “They were educated assumptions.” His emerald gaze swept over her from her head to her toes and back again. “Your hair is professionally styled. Your makeup is top of the range. Your dress cost thousands rather than hundreds. Shoes likewise.” His gaze met hers. “Were any of those assumptions incorrect?”

  None of them, Angel conceded heavily. Not a single one.

  Gabriel still had that ability to dissect a person merely by looking at them. To know more about them than they might ever have been willing to tell him. Or be comfortable with him knowing.

  Obviously, he had looked at her and decided rich bitch.

  She wasn’t either of those things.

  She still had some of the money left to her by her parents, which was how she had been living these past few weeks, but if Gabriel decided to take on her case, she had no idea how she was even going to pay the Knight Security fees. And, even if she might have good reason, she sincerely hoped her years as Clive’s wife hadn’t turned her into a bitch of any kind. Her air of cool self-confidence was worn as armor, not arrogance.

  “No,” she conceded quietly. “But I reiterate, you don’t know anything about me or my life now.”

  Gabriel regarded her through narrowed lids as he leaned back in his chair and swung his feet up to rest on his desktop—something he would have lambasted any of his three younger brothers for doing in front of a client. It was a disrespectful attitude that seemed wholly appropriate to the present situation. “Is it the earring, the car, or the missing poodle?”