An Exquisite Challenge

by Jennifer Hayward

  Filling her lungs with a deep breath of the fragrant, sweet-smelling air, she swung her legs out of the car and stood up. Burnt-orange light silhouetted the hills, the staccato chirp of the infamous Napa crickets dancing on the still night air.

  She walked unsteadily up the front porch steps. She didn’t even know if Gabe was home. No time for second thoughts, she told herself, forcing her feet to move. Only forward, Alex.

  The front door was open. She called out and found Elena in the kitchen. The Spanish woman gave her a surprised but delighted look and a big hug.

  “Is he home?” Alex asked, pulling back.

  Elena jerked her head toward the terrace. “You’d think he’d be in a good mood. They bottled the first of the Angel’s Share today. But that is one dark man.”

  Her heart jumped at the thought that maybe Gabe was as miserable as she was. She quickly stomped that thought out. No communication meant no desire to communicate.

  Elena gave her a long look, then set the cloth she was cleaning the counters with down. “I think I’m going to go to bed.”

  Alex made her way toward the French doors that led to the terrace, the flock of butterflies in her stomach so frantic she pressed a hand to her tummy. The problem with winging it was you had no idea what was coming. She turned the knob and stepped out onto the terrace. Gabe stood with his back to her, leaning on the railing that overlooked the vineyard.

  “I hear you corked the first bottle of the Angel’s Share today.”

  He spun around, his gaze narrowing, as if he was confirming it was actually her. Then he frowned. “What are you doing here?”

  She dug her nails into her palms. Not promising. “I’ve had a bit of a date with the past today.”

  He gave her a wary look. “I expect you’re going to elaborate.”

  “Yes.” She forced herself to walk toward him, holding the shattered pieces of her heart together with a bandage she’d somehow managed to fashion. It wasn’t strong, definitely makeshift. And when she stopped in front of him and tipped her head back to look up at him, she questioned whether it would hold. His eyes blazed a conflicted green in the fading light, his hard jaw set tight under a six o’clock shadow. But it was the sensuous, spectacular line of his mouth that affected her the most. The way she needed it on her.

  She cleared her throat, rolled her shoulders back. “So I started the day with a phone call to my father. He listened while I reamed him out for not being there for me and I apologized for causing him so much anguish. Then,” she continued, “I called Jordan Lane and told him I would fly down for his RFP meetings today.”

  He stiffened, a menacingly dark look crossing his face. “I got your check,” she said evenly. “I got the message.”

  “So you walked straight to him?”

  “He asked me to a dinner to review the RFP tonight. Fool that I am, I thought it was a business dinner.”

  His lips compressed. “You didn’t have a problem working for a thief?”

  A stab of pain lanced through her. “I was hurt. You broke my heart on Saturday, Gabe.”

  An emotion she couldn’t identify flickered in his eyes. “So you’ve come to tell me you’re working for Jordan Lane?”

  She shook her head. “I realized tonight I couldn’t work for him. I couldn’t work for someone who is deliberately trying to destroy the man I love.”

  His jaw clenched. “Alex—”

  She held up a hand. “Before I told him I couldn’t work for him, Jordan went to the washroom and I went through the contacts on his phone. Sam Withers was in his contact list, Gabe. They’ve made multiple calls to each other over the past week.”

  His head jerked back. “Withers?”

  She nodded. “You said you weren’t sure about him.”

  “Yes, but—” He muttered an oath. “Let me get this straight. You went to dinner with Lane tonight intending on taking a job with him, decided you couldn’t and went through his phone to find my mole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maledizione, Lex. Have you lost your mind?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  A shadow crossed his face. “Why would Withers do that? I’ve given him every opportunity—everything he’s asked for.”

  “I expect Lane is paying him a lot of money.”

  He rubbed a hand over that dark shadow she was aching to touch. “What did you just say to me?”

  She gave him a confused look. “About Lane?”

  “You said you were in love with me, Lex.”

  “Oh, that.” She took a deep breath. “That’s true.”

  There was a silence, a long, tense silence that raked over her nerves like nails on a chalkboard. Emotions slid in and out of those watchful eyes of his until she had to say something, anything. “You told me once I was afraid to be in a real relationship. So I gave myself to you. You told me all I do is run.” She lifted her trembling chin. “Well, here I am. Fighting for what I want.”

  Emotion clogged her throat, choking her, but she swallowed and pushed determinedly on. “I want you to get down off that self-righteous high horse of yours, Gabe, and give me another chance. You owe it to me.”

  Fire lit his beautiful eyes. “You think so?”

  “Yes.” She stepped toward him, every ounce of the frustration zigzagging through her directed at him. “You made me open up to you, Gabe. You told me baby steps. You promised me that was enough. And then you walked away.”

  “I have trust issues, Lex.” He moved closer, the heat of his big body vibrating into hers. “You had an affair with the man who is trying to ruin me. The one man I could not tolerate, and you didn’t tell me.”

  Frustration turned to rage, surging through her with an uncontrollable force that made her whole body shake. “That’s it, isn’t it? You hate me because it was Jordan. You hate me because Darya left you. But none of that is my fault, Gabe. It’s the past. And I’m through taking the blame for it. Jordan Lane used me.”

  He stood there, feet planted apart, the hard lines of his face so forbidding she felt as if she was battling a brick wall. Her shoulders sagged, her stomach dropped as the fight went out of her. “I’ve told you every secret, every last dark thing about me because I trusted you. Because I love you. But trust is a two-way street, Gabe, and I can see you don’t have it for me.”

  She found the strength to turn her back on him and start walking. Then she stopped and swung around. “You told me that when someone loves you, you can give your heart to them and they’ll protect it. I believed you. I guess I was a fool.”

  She went then, her steps a half run before the warmth gathering in her eyes fled down her cheeks.

  “You think I don’t love you, Lex?” His voice froze her in her tracks. “You think this last week hasn’t been hell for me, too?”

  Her legs were shaking so much she couldn’t move. His footsteps echoed across the concrete, then his hands settled on her shoulders and spun her to face him.

  “You’re right,” he said grimly. “I hate the fact that it was Jordan you were with, and I hate the fact that you had an affair.” She stiffened and would have pulled away, but his fingers dug into her shoulders and held her tight. “I know you couldn’t have known he was married, Lex. I know you. But when Darya left, she ripped my heart out.”

  “I can’t change the past,” she whispered. “I wish I could. So many people were hurt.”

  She saw something shift in him then, a softening in his eyes, in the hard set of his jaw. It made hope flutter in her chest. He reached up and swiped the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. “I need you, Lex. I’ve spent the past week trying to convince myself you can’t be trusted because the way I feel for you scares the hell out of me. Has always scared the hell out of me. But every time I tried to write you off, to tell myself I couldn’t be with you, there was this voice inside of me saying you’re the one.”

  Her heart stopped in her chest. “You have to trust me,” she whispered. “I will make more mistakes, Gabe. It’s what I do
. But I will never lie to you.”

  “I know.” He lifted his hands to cup her face. “I’ve spent the whole day trying to look at the wine I’ve invested two bloody years developing and couldn’t because of you. It’s your wine, Lex.”

  She shook her head. “It’s your wine. You are brilliant.”

  “It’s ours. You named it, tesoro. Every newspaper and blogger in this country is talking about it because of you.”

  She smiled. “We’re a good team, aren’t we?”

  “Sì.” He bent his head and kissed her. “We are.”

  Her heart seemed to lift somewhere up into the stratosphere. She kissed him with all the pent-up frustration and misery from the past week and decided she might never let him go. But she wanted to hear him say it again first. “You need to clearly articulate what you said before,” she murmured, pulling back and drinking her fill of him. “Say it again.”

  “That I love you?” A slow smile curved his lips. “I love you, Lex. And I promise if you give me your heart, I will protect it.”

  Oh. She felt herself slither into a pile of boneless mush.

  “And your body,” he murmured, heat filling his gaze as he pressed his palm to her back and brought her closer. “Definitely your body. We are spectacularly hot in bed together, cara, and mine has been very, very cold this past week.”

  “I think we should go fix that right now,” she murmured, his hard, sexy body turning hers to liquid.

  “Did you leave a bathing suit in your stuff upstairs?”

  She blinked. Nodded.

  “Go put it on.”

  “Does that mean I’m staying?” she asked archly.

  His gaze softened. “How about forever?”

  Oh. He did the sappy, romantic thing so well. “I was thinking,” she ventured carefully, “that maybe I could have a bicoastal office.”

  His gaze glittered. “How about we discuss that in the hot tub?”

  She slanted a look at him. “If that’s where we’re going, we’re not discussing living arrangements. I have experienced your technique.”

  A smile curved his lips. “Go.”

  She tripped on her way up the stairs, she was so eager to get there with her boot-camp-sore body, but nothing could wipe the smile off her face—it might be there permanently. Pulling on her bikini with eager fingers, she joined Gabe on the terrace. He was wearing those drool-inducing low-slung navy trunks that drove her to distraction.

  “Come,” he said, holding his hand out. But he didn’t take her to the hot tub, choosing the path to the winery instead. Alex dug in her heels when he started down into the cellar.

  “Forget about that. She’s down there.”

  He made her go anyway, the stone floors echoing under their feet. Alex clung tightly to his hand all the way into the tasting room, where he retrieved a bottle and two glasses. No footsteps. And there were none on the way out.

  “I think you were imagining it,” Gabe murmured as they walked down the hill toward the house. “Or maybe one last party put her at peace.”

  Alex could only hope.

  She lowered herself into the hot tub, moaning her thanks to the god of the jets for his ability to soothe her aching body.

  Gabe eyed her. “Is that just to turn me on, or are you sore?”

  She gave him a baleful look. “I went to boot camp every morning at six this week to work off my excess anger.”

  He slid into the water, Alex’s hands aching to touch every hard, muscular inch of him. “I have a surprise for you.”

  “I like surprises...”

  He handed her the bottle. It was beautiful—a tall, elegantly shaped cylinder—but it was the name on the front of the label that made her breath catch in her throat. The Angel’s Share.

  “The very first bottle,” Gabe murmured.

  “It’s stunning.” She turned her gaze on him. “Excited?”

  “Immeasurably so.”

  The lust in his gaze made her pulse sprint. “Turn the bottle around,” he instructed. “Look at the bottom near the Made in Napa line.”

  She tore her gaze from him and scanned the fine print. There, at the bottom in an elegant scroll, were two words. For Alex.

  Her heart went into free fall.

  “You’d better love me,” he said huskily, “or I’m going to have to stare at five million bottles of that, and it isn’t going to be pretty.”

  They managed one sip of the thoroughly brilliant wine before Alex was in his arms, her legs curled around him, and this time, this time there was no unfulfilled fantasy. This time she got all of him and with him the knowledge that sometimes in life you did get everything you wanted. It just might not happen the way you thought it would.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from A BARGAIN WITH THE ENEMY by Carole Mortimer.

  PROLOGUE

  ‘DON’T WORRY, MIK, he’ll be here.’

  ‘Take your damned feet off the desk,’ Michael snapped in reply to his brother’s reassurance, not even glancing up from the papers he was currently reading in the study at Archangel’s Rest, the secluded Berkshire home of the D’Angelo family. ‘And I’m not worried.’

  ‘Like hell you’re not!’ Rafe drawled lazily, making no effort to swing his black-booted feet down from where they rested on the front of his older brother’s desk.

  ‘I’m really not, Rafe,’ Michael assured mildly.

  ‘Do you know if—?’

  ‘I’m sure it can’t have escaped your notice that I’m trying to read!’ Michael sighed his impatience as he glared across the desk. He was dressed formally, as usual, in a pale blue shirt and neatly knotted navy blue silk tie, dark waistcoat and tailored trousers, the jacket to his suit draped over the back of his leather chair.

  It had always been something of a family joke that their mother had chosen to name her three sons Michael, Raphael and Gabriel to go with the surname D’Angelo, and the three brothers had certainly taken their fair share of teasing about it when they were at boarding school. Not so much now they were all in their thirties, and the three of them had been able to utilise their names by making the three Archangel auction houses and galleries in London, New York and Paris the most prestigious privately owned galleries in the world.

  Their grandfather, Carlo D’Angelo, had managed to bring his wealth with him when he fled Italy and settled in England almost seventy years ago before marrying an English girl, and producing a son, Giorgio: Michael, Raphael and Gabriel’s father.

  Like his father before him, Giorgio had been an astute businessman, opening the first Archangel auction house and gallery in London thirty years ago, and adding to the D’Angelo wealth. When Giorgio retired ten years ago and he and his wife Ellen settled permanently in their Florida home, their three sons had turned that comfortable wealth into a veritable fortune by opening up similar Archangel galleries in New York and Paris, resulting in them now all being millionaires many times over.

  ‘And don’t call me Mik,’ Michael instructed harshly as he continued to read from the file in front of him. ‘You know how much I hate it.’

  Of course Rafe knew that, and he considered it part of his job description as a younger brother to annoy the hell out of his older sibling!

  Not that he had as many opportunities to do that nowadays with the three brothers usually at a different gallery at any one time. But they always made a point of meeting up for Christmas and each of their birthdays, and today was Michael’s thirty-fifth birthday. Rafe was a year younger and Gabriel, the ‘baby’ of the family, another year younger at thirty-three.

  ‘I last spoke to Gabriel a week or so ago.’ Rafe made a face.

  ‘Why the grimace?’ Michael quirked a dark brow.

  ‘No reason in particular—we all know that Gabe’s been in a bad mood for the past five years. I never understood the attraction myself.’ He shrugged. ‘She looked a mousy little thing to me, with just those big—’

  ‘Rafe!’ Michael cautioned in a growl.

>   ‘—grey eyes to recommend her,’ Rafe completed dryly.

  Michael’s mouth thinned. ‘I spoke to Gabriel two days ago.’

  ‘And?’ Rafe prompted impatiently when it became obvious his older brother was doing his usual clam impersonation.

  Michael shrugged. ‘And he said he would arrive here in time for dinner this evening.’

  ‘Why the hell couldn’t you have just told me that earlier?’

  Rafe swung his booted feet impatiently down onto the carpeted floor before rising restlessly to his feet. He ran an irritated hand through the short thickness of his sable-dark hair as he paced the room, tall and leanly muscled in a fitted black T-shirt and faded denims. ‘That would have been too easy, I suppose.’ He paused his pacing to glower at his older brother.

  ‘No doubt.’ Michael gave the ghost of a smile, eyes dark and unreadable, also as usual.

  The three brothers had similar colouring, height and build; all a couple inches over six feet tall, with the same sable-black hair. Michael kept his hair short, his eyes so dark a brown they gleamed black and unfathomable.

  Rafe’s hair was long enough to curl down onto his shoulders, his eyes so pale a brown they glowed a deep gold.

  ‘Well?’ he rasped impatiently as Michael added nothing to his earlier statement.

  ‘Well, what?’ His brother arched an arrogant brow as he relaxed back in his leather chair.

  ‘How was he?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘As you said, as bad tempered as ever.’

  Rafe grimaced. ‘You two are the pot and the kettle!’

  ‘I’m not bad tempered, Rafe, I just don’t choose to suffer fools gladly.’

  He raised dark brows. ‘I trust I wasn’t included in that sweeping statement...?’

  ‘Hardly.’ Michael relaxed slightly. ‘And I prefer to think of all three of us as perhaps being just a little...intense.’

  Some of Rafe’s own tension eased as he gave a rueful grin in acknowledgement of the probable reason none of them had ever married. The women they met were more often than not attracted to that dangerous edge so prevalent in the D’Angelo men, as much as they were to their obvious wealth. Obviously not a basis for a relationship other than the purely—or not so purely!—physical.