“Don’t joke! You know Johnson’s a thug! Oh, my God! What if he tries to hurt you?” Her voice rose, lingering just this side of panic. Her eyes, meanwhile, were the size of golf balls. “Maybe you should get a restraining order. Maybe—”
Mike hung his head, his entire body clenched with frustration.
See?
Mixed message. Mixed message. Mixed message.
We can’t do this, Mike, she’d said, yet she unraveled at Johnson’s threat to hurt him. She held him at arm’s length, where she stared at him with hot eyes.
Go away, Mike. Come back, Mike.
“Dara,” he said tightly, lifting his head again, “I swear to God, you’re like my own personal plague of locusts. One of these days, you’re going to drive me right out of my fucking mind.”
He punctuated the last two words by pounding his hands on his desk.
Blushing, she stared him in the face. “I really don’t want anything to happen to you.”
9
The following Saturday, the night of the gala, Dara waited for Mike in the lobby outside the ballroom.
It was the story of her life these days. Her thoughts and desires revolved around him. Her breath reacted to him. Everything in her world now seemed to matter only as it related to him.
Tonight, for example, she’d dressed with exquisite care.
For him.
She’d chosen an off-the-shoulder black knit silk sheath, simple almost to the point of severity, except that it clung to her curves like a second skin. The slim skirt skimmed the floor, with slits on both sides that revealed glimpses of her bare legs and ankle-strap heels. Her hair was in a high, loose ponytail. Shimmering crystal chandelier earrings dangled from her ears.
Sex goddess was pretty much the look she’d gone for, and all because she craved his approval and needed to see that hot gleam of want in his amber eyes when he looked at her.
And yet she was too weak and scared to take a chance with him.
She told herself she was doing the smart thing by keeping her boss at arm’s length, sure. It was an easy lie to tell. What was the alternative? Admit she was doing the cowardly thing because of her paralyzing fear of being hurt?
Yeah, no thanks. So much simpler and safer to be a hypocrite.
God, she made herself sick sometimes.
Weaving through the crowd, she stepped around a huge potted palm, and there he was, standing ten feet away with Jamal, his searching gaze covering the room in wide sweeps.
Seeing her, he stilled.
She straightened, waiting, her head emptying of all thoughts other than how amazingly sexy he looked in his plain black tuxedo—her own James Bond.
No, not hers. Never hers. No matter how much she wanted him.
After an arrested pause he strode toward her, leaving Jamal behind without a word.
Her feet hurried her forward, meeting him halfway until they both stopped. Stared.
Neither of them spoke.
His gaze, glittering and hungry, skated over her, taking its time with a silent inventory: Hair, face, lips, shoulders, breasts, hips, legs, shoes, breasts again.
No part of her was too small or insignificant to escape his notice and warm approval. She felt deliciously feminine under his unabashed intensity—and helplessly out of control. His attention turned her body into an unknown entity, one with a heart that thundered erratically, straining lungs, breasts that swelled and ached to be rubbed and sucked and an insistent throbbing at the apex of her thighs.
She was terrified that if he touched her, she would ignite.
And, worse, she was terrified that he wouldn’t touch her.
At last he looked her in the face again. Tried and failed to smile. Cleared his throat.
“Another black dress, I see,” he said hoarsely, the most lavish compliment she’d ever received.
“Yeah, well. You can never go wrong with a black dress, can you?”
“No. You certainly can’t.”
Mike lost himself inside her smiling eyes for a second. Or maybe it was an eternity. They were soft and seductive tonight, filled with a woman’s secrets. She was gloriously beautiful, aglow in a way that put all the other women to shame.
His interest dropped to her breasts again but, seriously, who in their right mind would blame him for that? He could see the upper third of them—maybe more—over the neckline of her dress. They looked so soft and smooth, such a warm, velvety brown that he wanted to bury his face between them, to rub his cheeks all over them.
And her hips, flaring away from that tiny little waist. Those were womanly hips, hips he wanted to hold, to anchor her while she rode him and ...
She took a step closer, and her dress shifted. His attention moved abruptly to the mile-high slits in her dress.
Jesus.
Look at those legs—
A shadow fell across Mike’s peripheral vision as someone new arrived.
“You’re hurting me, Dara!” Jamal cried. “Look at you!”
Mike frowned at the interruption.
Dara laughed. “Do I look okay?”
Jamal took Dara’s hands and held her at arm’s length to study her more closely. “You look good enough to eat.”
“Scram, junior.” Propelled by the sight of some other male holding Dara’s hands, Mike edged between them. “Go find someone your own age to play with.”
“Dara is way closer to my own age than she is to your old age,” Jamal said, chuckling.
Mike bristled at this unwelcome reminder of yet another reason why he should give Dara a wide berth.
“Sean asked me to keep young hounds like you away from Dara,” Mike snapped.
Jamal studied Mike’s possessive and protective stance at Dara’s side, his eyes glimmering with amusement. “Yeah, but who’s going to keep you away?”
The dinner and speeches went on forever. Dara stared listlessly at her plate: chicken, mixed vegetables, rice. It might as well have been two shoes and a brick. She couldn’t possibly eat. She was far too busy staring at Mike, who sat as a guest of honor up at the head table.
“Why don’t you give Mike a break?” Jamal whispered in her ear, startling her.
“What?”
“Don’t mess with me.” He speared a bite of chicken and shoved it in his mouth. “You’re making him crazy. Ever since you came, he’s been walking around like there’s a big black thundercloud hanging over his head. He screwed up some dates with some depositions last week, I don’t know if he’s eating, and he practically lives at the office. All your fault.”
She hesitated, fidgeting with her earrings. “How is any of that my fault?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” he said impatiently. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
She smoothed her hair uncomfortably, embarrassed to be discussing her personal life with a teenager, but not embarrassed enough to stop.
“There might be ...an attraction,” she admitted. “That’s all.”
“That ain’t all,” he said darkly.
“Did Mike say something to you?”
“Of course not. I know people, Dara. You don’t need a high-school diploma for that. I’ve seen you and Mike together. You want to be with him as much as he wants you. You just can’t figure out how to get there from here.”
Dara, still in her dress, stood in front of her bathroom sink back in her apartment, staring at herself in the mirror. Her unrecognizable reflection was a wreck of over bright eyes, flushed cheeks and flaring nostrils, and she wasn’t sure whether to laugh with relief or sob with despair. It would be nice to take a few deep breaths and calm herself down, except that the growing knot in her stomach had expanded up to her throat.
The beautiful gala was over. Mike hadn’t spoken to her again.
That was as plain as a signal could get, she kept telling herself. All for the best. Nothing good had ever come to a woman foolish enough to hook up with her boss. Plus, he was Sean’s brother, and Sean was one of her best friends. Not to mentio
n the fact that Mike had never made a declaration of love, or anything close. Come to think of it, they barely got along half the time.
Yet her body seethed with unfulfilled desires, unspoken words and unfinished business, and she felt like her too-tight skin was suffocating her by slow degrees.
She fished the bobby pins out of her hair until it fell down around her shoulders, resisting the urge to scream only because it was nearly midnight and her neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate it.
Her hands, she noticed dully, were unsteady.
Knock-knock-knock.
Startled, she wheeled around and listened hard, the last of the pins slipping out of her fingers and clinking on the floor. For an arrested beat or two, all she heard was her heart’s relentless pounding, but then: Knock-knock-knock.
The second she heard the quiet rapping again, she flew to her front door, knowing it was Mike.
“Who is it?” she called breathlessly anyway.
“You know who it is.”
She opened the door, something inside her soaring wild and free, and there he was in his shirtsleeves with his bow tie undone and dangling on either side of his collar, several inches of his shirt open to reveal a snowy undershirt and his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
There was no greeting. Just a hard and lingering once-over as he brushed past her and walked into her apartment.
10
Dara fumbled with the door, taking two tries to swing it shut because all her attention was focused on Mike. It didn’t help that the unsteadiness in her hands had graduated to trembling. Her control slipped another few notches when they faced off in her tiny foyer and he pinned her in place with a narrow-eyed glare.
A chill shivered down her spine, but her blood ran hot. Nerve endings danced to life beneath her skin. All the tender places in her body—belly, sex, breasts, nipples and lips—tightened with delicious expectation of things she didn’t dare allow herself to consider.
Yeah, she was in big trouble—the kind she could no longer weasel her way out of or ignore. Her back was, literally and figuratively, up against a wall, and there was a healthy portion of relief swirling around in her cocktail of emotions.
This was Mike as she’d never seen him before, teetering on the edge of his control with one foot already off the precipice. A dangerous Mike who seemed to think she’d committed some heinous offense and was here to demand justice, if not extract revenge.
She waited, the trembling inside her jumping from her hands to her knees.
“I asked you the other day,” he began, his low voice as seductive as a Barry White song and as dangerous as a hissing cobra. “Do you remember? I said, ‘What are we going to do about this, Dara?’ Remember that?”
Some primitive survival instinct told her not to answer, to be still and forget about blinking, moving or doing anything likely to enrage him further, which was everything.
His cruel mouth twisted. “And you said, ‘Nothing.’” He paused, his tone raspy. “Is this ringing a bell, Dara?”
Too impatient to wait for answers she wasn’t about to give, he paced away. Came right back. Crept closer, deep into her personal space.
Standing her ground was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
“You stood there and you told me, ‘Nothing,’ like we could ignore it. Ignore it. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers and laughed, a humorless bark that ricocheted off the bare walls. “That was like saying we could ignore a hydrogen bomb detonating in the backyard, don’t you think?”
She kept her mouth shut.
Sneering at her continuing refusal to engage, he pulled one of his hands out of his pocket, shoved it through his hair and rammed it back into the pocket.
The movement drew her attention to his heavy arousal.
She gasped helplessly, trying not to stare and staring anyway.
This seemed to set him off.
“Does this look like I’m doing a good job ignoring you?” He grabbed himself, rubbing her face in what she’d done to him, but it was as though his fingers had found the slick cleft between her thighs and stroked her there. A moan rose up her throat and lingered in her mouth, waiting for the second she relaxed her vigilance so it could escape.
Frozen, her back still glued to the door, she closed her eyes so she could block out his sensuous mouth and raw intensity, so she would no longer see the evidence of the way his body strained for her.
But closing her eyes didn’t stop the lurid images from dancing through her brain: Mike naked in her arms, the two of them tangled together in her bed; Mike inside her, endlessly thrusting, finally easing the insistent ache in her sex whenever she thought of him; Mike on top of her, his heavy, sweat-slicked body owning hers, his taste saturating her mouth.
Mike. God, Mike.
When she raised her heavy lids again, he was still there, closer than ever, his eyes a watchful glitter, and her passion for him was no longer anything she could keep at heel on a leash or blocked behind a wall. Her need for him escaped its iron lockdown and streaked out, into the world, before she could capture it again.
“Mike.”
The husky caress in her voice gentled him; she saw it in the way his expression softened and the tension eased out of his shoulders.
“You need to understand, sweetheart.” The velvety murmur—so close now, so insistent—was as seductive as the endearment. “It’s all you. I can’t see straight. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can barely work.” Shaky laugh. “And I can’t stay away from you. Do you get that?”
This time, for once, there was no hesitation.
“Yes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
He crept close enough for her to see the fine sheen of perspiration across his forehead as his gaze dropped to her mouth.
“So I’m asking you again, and I want a real answer this time. No more mixed messages. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. What. Are we going. To do. About this?”
Dara hesitated.
Even now he was leaving it entirely up to her. The ball was in her court, and hers alone. If she told him no, he would leave and that would be the end of the matter.
But she did not want him to leave. The thought of him touching her was terrifying, but the thought of him leaving was infinitely worse.
As if in slow motion, she peeled herself away from the door and crept toward him.
His eyes widened. His breath hissed with surprise.
She stopped right in front of him, where the scalding heat from his body pulsed over her. Watching his eyes darken, she moved half a step closer, so her entire body pressed along his, breasts to chest, belly to groin, thigh to thigh.
Mike stiffened.
Dara crooned as she reached for his body, which felt strange and new, but also familiar and comfortable. Thrilling. She planted her hands on his sides beneath his jacket and slid them up his chest, where his heart thundered under her fingertips. Her lips found the hollow in his neck beneath his jawbone and nuzzled him, soaking up his delicious, just-showered scent.
Mike gasped.
Finally, she stroked his hard jaw with both hands, savoring the prickle of his five o’clock shadow beneath her fingertips.
His face twisted as his eyes rolled closed.
She tipped her chin up, pulled him down, and slowly, painstakingly, fitted her lips to his.
She brushed her mouth over his ...once ...twice ...three times.
He never moved, although she could feel his gathering energy, as if something deep within was sprinting toward a critical mass.
But when she touched her tongue to his lips, he sprang to frantic life, crying out. She laughed with triumph as he pulled her into his crushing embrace, too feverish to be gentle. A large hand closed over her sensitive nape, anchoring her, pulling her closer, and she went eagerly. His mouth—hot, wet, and demanding—slanted over hers, insisting on complete surrender. She gave it. She parted her lips and greedily sucked him in, savoring the flavor of wine in
his mouth. Her hands went to the back of his neck, then into the coarse silk of his hair. Every new taste and texture stoked the fire in her blood until she felt she was burning alive, melting inside her skin. Tormented, she pressed her body against his until every part of her was hermetically sealed to every part of him.
And still she couldn’t get him close enough.
Mike’s frenzied hands roamed her body the whole time, his fingers first twining in her hair, then massaging her bare shoulders, then dipping to the small of her back. He cupped her ass, his hands strong and insistent.
Love words poured out of his mouth in an endless flow. “You feel so good, angel. I want you so much. I want you—”
“I want you. I want you.”
He gripped her butt and, lifting her on her toes, insistently rubbed his raging erection against her sex. His hard, demanding body found the place at the top of her thighs that answered his touch and begged for more.
“Mike.” The tension spiraled inside her until she thought she’d explode and shower to the floor in a thousand shimmering pieces. “I need you, Mike. Please. Please.”
With an animalistic sound that was purely male, he backed her against the wall and stooped to press his lips to the valley between her breasts, his hands squeezing them together.
“Ah, God,” she cried.
His hot breath singed her skin. His mouth found her nipple and bit gently, sending a piercing jolt of pleasure directly to her sex.
“God.” She tightened her arms around his neck, holding his head in place.
Straightening and murmuring incomprehensibly, he rubbed his lips all over her face before finding her mouth again. Rough and greedy, he consumed her in insistent nips and licks.
She reveled in it.
Sliding her hands over his shoulders and beneath the heavy silk of his jacket, she pushed it down his arms and out of her way, but his shirt, crisp with starch, blocked her. Dara had never been so frustrated. She wanted to rip his shirt open down the front and hear the satisfying skitter of his buttons on her floor. She jerked the undershirt down, clearing a patch of smooth brown skin that her mouth and tongue could reach.
Trouble Page 12
