by Lucy Monroe
“You’re a very determined woman.”
“I’d say that was something you probably understand well.”
“You’d be right.” He pointed his spoon toward her brûlée. “Taste.”
Did he have any idea what the sexy timbre of his voice did to her insides? Of course not, and no way was she letting on either. Better to get over the strange, melting reaction than expose it in any way, but every word was like foreplay to her sexually deprived body.
Bad. This was very bad.
She grabbed her spoon, conversation ceasing while she obeyed his order to taste. She gave a helpless moan of pleasure as the first bite of the perfectly prepared sweet filled her senses. Her eyes closed and she savored the taste she indulged in so rarely.
She’d once had another model describe a chocolate torte as orgasmic, but until this moment she’d never had an erotic reaction to food before. The sensual slide of the vanilla custard across her tongue was just that though and goose bumps formed on her inner thighs as her womb clenched in an astonishing reaction to the delicacy.
Belatedly coming to terms with how her not-so-innocent enjoyment could be misinterpreted, she quickly opened her eyes. Straightening in her chair, she tried to wipe the pleasure from her expression and willed her unruly body to calm down.
Her spoon clattered to the table in her haste to let it go. “Um, it’s very good. You were right.” She forced her gaze to meet his, afraid of what she would see, but unwilling to play the coward. “I guess I got a little carried away there.”
Blue eyes looked back at her with hunger, but he shook his head. “Relax. You look like you think I’m going to pounce.”
“Aren’t you?” She wasn’t an idiot and she wasn’t a tease. She knew what her reaction had to have looked like to him.
A total come-on, despite all she’d said about not wanting to get involved.
“You’ve made your view of a relationship between the two of us very clear, Tara.” He spoke as if instructing a small child and perversely she wanted to tell him she was anything but. “I’m not going to read an invitation in a former model’s obvious love of feeding her starved sweet tooth.”
“Thank you.” And she should feel grateful. Extremely grateful.
Not disappointed.
“No problem. Now, enjoy your dessert.”
He’d let her off the hook with his assurance, so why did she feel even further enmeshed in his web than before?
“So, how was dinner?” Danette asked in a low undertone as she and Tara worked on slides for a presentation their manager was supposed to give to Angelo and the top management string the following morning.
Tara looked around, thankful no one was nearby enough to overhear her friend’s question. The dinner last night had been strictly business, but that wasn’t necessarily how others would interpret it.
After her affair with Baron, she’d been the butt of enough gossip to last her a lifetime. “Shh. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Danette’s hazel eyes widened, darkening to green with a knowing gleam. “So it wasn’t just business.”
“No,” Tara snapped, then realized her answer had come out wrong. “I mean yes…I mean it was business and only business.” If she didn’t count the orgasmic dessert. “Okay?”
“I don’t know. Angelo Gordon is a real hottie and you seem pretty frazzled for a woman who had a strictly business date last night.”
“It wasn’t a date at all.”
“Are you saying he didn’t make a move on you?”
How did she answer that? Had their conversation at the beginning of dinner been a move? She thought maybe it had, but then he’d backed off pretty easily.
She took too long to answer and Danette’s expression turned gleefully calculating. “So, he is attracted to you.”
That was something she couldn’t deny without lying. “Could we drop this discussion? We’ve got work to do.”
“Sure, but, hon, just answer one question…if last night was all business and no play, why are you blushing to the roots of your gorgeous hair?”
Tara still hadn’t come up with an adequate reply to her friend’s teasing comment by the time the other woman left work to get ready for her very real date with a budding journalist.
It had bugged her all day. For something like the hundredth time since waking that morning, she shoved thoughts of Angelo to the back of her mind. She forced herself to concentrate on the papers in front of her.
With no distractions around her and fierce effort, it worked. She was so engrossed that security came to tell her all external entrances but the main one had been secured for the evening before she realized what time it was. She looked at her watch and was shocked to see it was well after seven.
She should have left over two hours ago.
Muscles cramped from long hours of sitting in the same position protested and she stood to stretch. Her tummy growled, but her eyes were drawn back to the almost completed report on her desk. Just another hour or so and she would be done.
“Why are you still here?”
She jumped at the sound of Angelo’s voice, her entire body flushing with warmth and she hadn’t even turned to look at him.
When she did, she felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Why did the man have to be so darn sexy? Most of his management team was at least a decade older, balding and showing the effects of middle age in their belt size, but not Angelo. He was tall and lean with muscles to die for and if he was much over thirty, she’d eat the report she’d been editing.
“I was working on a project and got lost to the time.”
“What about this workplace effectiveness model you’ve been trying to sell to management? Doesn’t that include going home on time?”
She shrugged guiltily. “Theory doesn’t always work in reality.”
He smiled, white teeth flashing in his gorgeous face. “No, it doesn’t, but if you’re going to convince my management team of your theories, you’re going to have to live and work by them.”
“You’re right, of course.” She sighed, wishing life was as easy as putting ideas down on paper. “I guess you got caught up in something, too?”
His expression cooled for no reason she could discern. “I was putting together the plans for a new acquisition.”
“You’re buying another company?”
Satisfaction flashed in his eyes, but they remained strangely chilled. “Yes.”
“Um…congratulations.”
“Thank you.” He ran his fingers through the short, dark curls on his head, leaving them mussed and looking way too enticing for her own good. “Have you had dinner?”
“No. I’ll stop and get something on the way home.” She turned and grabbed her suit jacket off the hook on the cubicle wall behind her desk.
As she did so, she realized the sheer white camisole that looked perfectly acceptable under the jacket was much too thin for a business environment without it. It had gotten warm and she hadn’t even been aware of taking the jacket off, but now she wished she hadn’t gotten quite so engrossed in her work.
Looking down, she could see the shadow of nipples that had hardened upon her boss’s arrival and was darn sure he could, too.
“Have dinner with me.” His voice betrayed nothing, but he made no pretense of ignoring the display. Dark indigo eyes flicked from her breasts to her face. “Well?”
Sensation zinged through her, making her tight peaks sting and she shoved her arms into the sleeves of her suit jacket.
Panicked at how tempting the invitation was and the desperate reaction of her body, she blurted the first excuse that came to her mind. “I’m really not all that hungry.”
Her stomach gave immediate lie to her words with an audible growl and she had to bite back a groan of embarrassment.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Uh…”
“Look, Tara, I’m simply interested in sharing some company for dinner. I eat enough meals alone to get tire
d of it. Stop worrying. I’m not going to pounce.”
That was the second time he’d assured her on that score, but she was beginning to think it wasn’t him pouncing she had to be concerned about.
“I’m sure you’re not short on companions you could call on.” She couldn’t keep the cynical conjecture from her voice.
“You’d be surprised. I’ve never found the company of women with dollar signs in their eyes all that alluring.”
She gave him a frank once-over. “Like women are only interested in you for your money.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes.” She’d never been good at prevaricating. She hated lies, no more so than since she’d been lied to so spectacularly by Baron Randall.
“If you find me attractive, why not have dinner with me?”
“Because you are who you are and I am who I am.”
“You mean the whole multimillionaire and junior-management trainee thing?” he asked with droll humor.
She found herself smiling. “Yes, that thing.”
“Why don’t we pretend to be nothing more than an unattached man looking for the company of a woman he admires a great deal for dinner?”
He admired her a great deal? That was a different line than Baron’s had been anyway. He’d been so focused on her beauty and then her sexual innocence, he’d barely given credence to her brain.
“All right, but let’s keep it simple. It’s late.”
“Do you have any suggestions?”
She did and couldn’t help being surprised when he willingly let her direct him to a chain restaurant known for its quick and friendly service. The food was good, but not exactly five-star. Apparently, Angelo didn’t care about eating only in the best restaurants.
She liked that and told him so.
He shrugged. “When you have the freedom and finances to eat where you want, why limit yourself? Besides, this was one of my dad’s favorite restaurants when I was growing up.”
“You grew up in the Pacific Northwest?”
“Seattle.”
“Wow…I guess I thought all big business tycoons came from New York.”
He laughed. “I have an apartment there. Does that shore up your image of me?”
“That depends…do you call it home?”
“I don’t call anywhere home. I travel too much. I have a house in Palermo that would probably be the closest thing.”
“Do you speak Italian?”
“Fluently.”
“Oh…I took French in high school, but I was always more interested in numbers than languages.”
“I’m fluent in several. It comes with the territory, but my mother spoke Italian to me always and we spent part of every year in Sicily with her family.”
“You said she was Sicilian earlier…is she no longer alive?”
“She and my father died within two years of each other.”
“I’ve heard about that kind of devotion…one can’t go on living without the other.” She’d always questioned it though…wondering if two people could ever really be that necessary to each other.
His face contorted as if in pain, but then went so blank she had to wonder if she’d imagined the first expression. “They loved each other very much.”
He said it so coldly, as if he was unmoved by his parents’ emotion.
Still…“Their deaths must have been very hard on you.”
“I survived.”
She nodded. He was too strong not to have done, but she wondered for just a second what the cost had been for him to be so detached about it now.
“My dad walked when I was two.” Tara said after a silent pause. “He didn’t know the meaning of the word devotion.” Or commitment. Or love for that matter.
“Did your mother remarry?”
“Eventually. I had a few uncles who were every bit as allergic to the c-word as my dad before Darren Colby, my step-father, came into our lives.”
“That doesn’t sound like an ideal childhood.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” She laughed, shocked at herself for sharing so much with a man she was determined not to get involved with.
The same thing had happened the night before. It bothered her, but a barrier that existed between her and the rest of the world seemed to be missing with him. Odd, but apparently it wasn’t something she could do much about.
It was like her normal privacy filter was switched off around him.
Thank goodness he was only in Portland for a visit to his company and would be gone soon.
“Your mother must have had lousy taste in her partners,” he said.
“That depends on how you look at it. She’s drawn to dynamic, powerful men. Men a lot like you.”
“For you to have had several male figures in your childhood, they must have been drawn to her, too.”
“For a while anyway. She’s beautiful.”
“You say that like it’s a curse.”
“None of the men who dumped on my mom would have given her the time of day if she’d been plain.”
“And perhaps Baron Randall would not have been attracted to you if you were not equally as beautiful?”
“I prefer not to talk about him.”
“But he is the reason you are so reticent about becoming my friend.”
“I never said that.”
“Do you deny it?”
“No.”
“And the man your mom married, Colby. I bet he was also attracted to her beauty.”
“Darren would love Mom if she was fifty pounds overweight and had a mole on her chin.”
“He sounds like a great guy, but wasn’t he first attracted by her beauty?”
“I suppose.”
“So, it isn’t always a curse.”
“No, but then there aren’t that many men in the world like Darren.”
“Maybe there are more than you think.”
Did Angelo want her to believe he was one of them?
The prospect that he might was even scarier than her own urge to find out.
Over the next few days, Tara couldn’t help feeling he was trying to convince her of that very thing.
Against her will, she found herself more and more attracted to the business tycoon who admired her brain and never criticized the fact she played down her beauty. He was charming to everyone, making Danette practically faint with excitement when he accepted an invitation to an informal barbecue at her place on Thursday night.
Under her brazen front, Danette was actually pretty shy and this would be the first major event she’d hosted at the condo her parents had insisted on helping her buy. Members of the city’s elite, they had no problem providing their daughter with a home most people couldn’t afford after working twenty years.
Even so, Danette had been worried about the success of her party and told Tara so. Having Angelo’s attendance was a major coup, especially since so many other partygoers would be from Primo Tech.
“And don’t you even think about trying to get out of coming now that you know he’s going to be there,” Danette said seconds after Angelo exited their work area.
“I told you I don’t want to end up with another Baron Randall.”
“Good gosh, Tara! Are you blind, or something? Not only is Angelo a good ten years younger than that swine, but the two men are so different they could be opposite species.”
“Oh really? How are they so different?”
“First of all, it’s no secret Baron Randall built his empire using other people.”
A piece of information Tara wished she’d been privy to before meeting him.
“Angelo buys and salvages struggling companies. He’s gotten where he is through the sweat of his own brow.”
“Please.”
“You know what I mean. He worked to build those companies up, just like he worked on this one. He’s earned his tycoon status, not stolen it. And he’s also not a womanizer.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. Ra
y did some checking for me at his newspaper. Angelo hasn’t had a steady girlfriend in more than two years and he doesn’t sleep with other men’s wives.”
“Like Ray could know that for certain.”
“Angelo’s newsworthy enough that if he had been caught with the same woman more than once it would have made at least one headline.”
“The operative word being caught and one of the great benefits of being filthy rich is the ability to buy a newspaper’s silence.”
“Baron Randall is rich too, but there are still stories about his womanizing ways in more than a few scandal sheets.”
“Maybe he didn’t care enough to have them squelched.”
“What makes you think Angelo would?”
“Okay, so you’ve got a point. He’s probably not a womanizer. Happy?”
“If you’ll cut the guy some slack, yes.”
She wasn’t going there. “Is Ray going to be at the barbecue?”
“Sure. He’s bringing his camera and taking pictures for my scrapbook.” Danette smiled dreamily. “It isn’t every day you get such a hunk of a multimillionaire in your backyard eating grilled steak.”
Tara couldn’t help laughing. “You are incorrigible.”
Her friend grinned, her eyes filled with infectious laughter. “That’s why you like me so much.”
“So, are things serious between you and Ray?”
It had been her experience that when her friends started making cooing noises about settling down, they went into matchmaker mode with a vengeance and this barbecue invitation couldn’t be seen as anything but.
Danette chewed on her bottom lip. “I think so. At least for me. He hasn’t said anything about love, but he spends all his free time with me.”
“That’s a very good sign.”
“I hope so.”
And if it were true…what did that say about her and Angelo? They weren’t dating, but he certainly managed to fill up most of her free time.
Thursday dawned bright and clear, the Oregon sunshine for once unclouded by threats of rain. Tara walked to work from the light rail terminal with a smile on her face. It was a good day to be alive.
A strong masculine hand gripped her shoulder before she walked into the building. “You look happy.”
