This was hot, frantic. It felt so good to have Emma naked and stretched out beneath him.
When he couldn’t stave off the inevitable any longer, he braced his forearm on the floor beside her head, and shoved his free hand beneath her hips, changing the angle and sending her to the stars seconds before he joined her there.
CHAPTER NINE
“I’M STARVING.”
Max turned his head on the shaggy, faux-sheepskin rug, looking big and sleepy and smug. “Yeah, okay. But I need a minute.”
Emma couldn’t help her giggle, which was a little embarrassing, but spread out on the floor next to a man with a body that excelled at being naked, she was too sated to care. This playful side of Max was completely new to her. “I meant for food.”
He grunted and slung his forearm across his eyes. “That sounds good, too.”
“I’m going to order pizza.” She allowed herself a moment to stare at him, all muscles and sinew, like a jungle cat in repose, before she pushed herself up off the floor and walked over to the sofa.
“Make it a large.”
With a smile, she crawled onto the couch on her knees, leaning over the arm rest to grab the phone, intimately aware that Max had shifted onto his side, his head propped on his hand, his eyes roaming every inch of her skin.
“Stop looking at me like that.” Her voice sounded breathless, as though the flicker of heat in his gaze had used up the oxygen in her lungs.
“Like what?”
“Like you want to eat me.”
He lifted an eyebrow in confirmation of her phrasing, and that flicker became a flame.
“I meant that you keep sizing me up.” Emma did her best to smother it. “Like a panther looking for its next meal.”
Max repositioned himself on the rug, his muscles shifting and bunching with the movement, doing nothing to dispel the metaphor.
“A panther?” he asked, and to her surprise, a hint of smugness laced his deep voice. “I think I like that.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Panther. Weasel. Anteater. Any kind of predator, really.”
His chuckle was low, and it prickled over her skin. “Suddenly I’m less flattered.”
“I’m sure your ego will recover.” He was far too sure of himself for her peace of mind.
“I suspect so. My recovery time is known to be above average.”
Self-preservation and non-sexual hunger had her grabbing the receiver and dialing the number she knew by heart so she could order a large Guido’s Supreme with extra cheese before he managed to distract her from her task completely.
“They have pizza at the hotel,” he advised as she hung up.
The look she shot him as she got to her feet dripped with reproach. “I’m sorry. This place might do a lot of things well, but there is no way they know anything about pizza.”
Emma walked back toward him, caught in his gravitational pull.
“They probably make it all frou-frou, with thin-crust, and caramelized pears and goat cheese or something. I got you a real pizza. A man’s pizza.”
When she was close enough, he reached up and grabbed her fingers, rolling onto his back and pulling her down on top of him. He captured her mouth in a slow, deep kiss that woke her libido and sent it pacing low in her belly.
“A man’s pizza, huh? You think you can handle it?”
“Please.” She rolled her eyes as she slid off him so he could sit up. “I handled you, didn’t I?”
Oh, Jesus. That smile.
The air left her lungs in a rush. So much for getting Max out of her system. The more she touched him, the more she wanted to touch him.
He stood up and held out a hand for her, which she accepted.
“Maybe you should handle me again,” he suggested, pulling her up onto her feet and against his body in one fluid move. Then he leaned in for another decadent kiss. “How long until the pizza gets here?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Just enough time for a shower. C’mon,” he said, giving her hand a tug and she realized for the first time that he hadn’t let go of it during the kiss. She let him lead her out of the living room, through the hallway and the master suite, and into the bathroom, not stopping until they were standing in the most incredible shower. Sleek tiles, with a giant fixture in the ceiling above them, and several other showerheads at staggered heights.
Max reached around her to turn it on, and warm water rained over them. Emma watched, entranced, as Max tipped his face up, pushed his dark, wet hair back with both hands as water raced along the dips and planes of his body. She was caught in a beautiful storm with a beautiful man, and she didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
“Got any shampoo in here?”
He tipped his chin toward a recessed space under one of the showerheads, and she noticed three nozzles.
“The left one,” he instructed, and Emma reached in tentatively. It whined out a handful of delicious smelling shampoo.
“Fancy.”
As she sudsed up her hair, Max shoved his palm under the nozzle on the far right and began lathering the clear gel across his chest and arms, down his stomach...lower. Body wash never looked so good, and she resented having to close her eyes to rinse her hair.
She didn’t want to miss anything about this glimpse into the real Max.
He was always so elusive, and she wanted to know more about the man who ruled over Whitfield Industries. The man who pushed her, and the entire SecurePay team to do the best, be the best, every single day because he wouldn’t settle for anything less.
He’d always intrigued her, but after she’d accepted Charles Whitfield’s deal, after she’d realized that she’d been had, she hadn’t felt she deserved to know anything personal about Max. She’d never even googled him.
But here, in this alternate universe they’d created, she gave herself permission to indulge her curiosity...just a little.
“Did you grow up around here?”
Max nodded and reached for the shampoo. His forearm slid along her upper arm, and she shivered at the contact, despite the warmth of the water.
“Beverly Hills,” he provided, soaping up his hair.
She should have known.
“You?”
“El Segundo.” She took a chance on the middle dispenser, glad when a dollop of conditioner appeared in her hand.
“Did you like it there?”
“I have good memories, but it was hard after my dad died. The whole place kind of felt like him, you know? But my mom and I couldn’t afford to leave. My parents weren’t wealthy people. They worked for wealthy people.” She smiled against the sad memories, working the cream rinse through her wet hair. “And now I work for you. I’ve been a voyeur of the life of rich people my whole life.”
She’d meant it as a joke, an escape valve on a conversation too close to her heart, but the evocative nature of her comment reignited the charge in the air. A fact that wasn’t lost on Max, judging by the suggestive raise of his brow.
“And? Do you like what you see?”
Hell yes.
He was wet and naked, and shampoo suds were streaming over his wide shoulders, slipping down the length of a body that had gotten her off more in the last two days than she’d managed in the two years prior.
She liked what she saw a lot.
Emma licked her lips and his eyes darkened. Her hands had stilled in her hair, and she had to force herself to resume finger-combing conditioner through the strands. “What’s not to like?” Even to her own ears, the words sounded breathless, needy. “You fascinate me.”
Max shoved his hair back from his forehead again.
“Oh?” He was surprised, and she liked that she could knock him off balance.
“You live in a hotel. You take a car service. You order your meals from room service. What s
ort of man sets up his entire life as a business trip?”
Max looked more contemplative than put out. “My priority is seeing that Whitfield Industries succeeds. My father did his best to kill it, and now it’s my job to resurrect what’s left of the business my grandfather built.”
“Your job, yes. But your life?”
Now he did frown. “That’s a very naive view of the situation.”
“Is it? I watched my mother lose everything. She was a bright star, lovely, vivacious, full of life. And I had to stand by and watch her fade. And it didn’t happen right away. It didn’t happen when she wasn’t fit to work anymore.”
Emma held her hands under the spray of the closest showerhead, watching the drops erase the remnants of the conditioner on her palms.
“It happened when she started losing pieces of herself. She didn’t remember the song we used to dance to in the kitchen while she cooked. Her eyes stopped lighting up at the mention of my father. She didn’t run her fingers over the picture of him she kept beside her bed. And after a while, she looked right through me. Like a stranger.”
The memory still squeezed at her heart. She’d never doubted for a second that her mother loved her, but that slow erosion had seemed far worse, far crueler, than losing her all at once.
“And it hurt. It killed me to watch her disappear, even though she was right in front of me. But I realized that, as much as it hurt to watch her lose those memories, that life she led, it was ultimately a gift. Because how awful would it be to not have any memories for Alzheimer’s to steal? To not even realize that you were losing someone because nothing about them had changed?
“I want those memories, Max. I don’t want my life to be an indistinguishable montage of workdays that mean nothing when I’m looking back at my life.”
Max frowned. “You don’t like working at Whitfield?”
Emma angled her head so that the water would rinse her hair clean. “It’s been incredible. It’s pushed me and challenged me. Launching SecurePay will be the culmination of work that I’m incredibly proud of. But I don’t want it to be the only thing I ever did in my life. I want to walk the beaches of Dubrovnik and see where my mother grew up. I want to know that I’ve lived my life.”
They stared at one another, water falling like rain around them, in an envelope of silence that she found surprisingly comfortable.
“I never looked at work like that. Leaving a lasting legacy has always been important to me.”
She smiled at that. Leave it to this man to have such a succinct, straight-forward explanation for eighty-hour work weeks.
He stepped close, brushed his lips against hers, but when she would have kissed him back, he slid his mouth along her cheek, to her ear.
“Turn around. I think you missed a spot.”
She licked water from her lips as she obeyed. God. The things this man did to her with just his voice. Made her want. Made her wet.
He kissed her shoulder as he reached for the nozzle full of body wash. Then he was running soapy palms down her back, palming the globes of her ass.
The delicious pressure over-balanced her, and she braced her hands on the slick tile in front of her.
“The pizza will be here any minute,” she reminded him shakily. Reminded herself.
He slid a hand up her torso, brushing his knuckles along the underside of her breast. “I’m hungry now.” His tongue on her neck made her breath catch.
“We’re never going to hear the doorbell in here. And no matter how good you are, you’re never going to be better than Guido’s.”
“If that’s a challenge, I’m up for it.” He pressed his hips against her.
She did her best not to moan, flipping around to face him, the tiles chilly against the heat of her back, his body, big and warm and wet in front of her.
“Despite what you might have heard, a woman can’t live on salad and sex alone.”
“Who said anything about salad?” he asked, capturing her mouth and licking inside in a seductively lazy rhythm that pushed her to the brink of capitulation.
She wrapped her arms around his neck to reciprocate, but as she did, she realized the water had stopped.
“This pizza had better be life-changing,” he warned, pulling back after dropping a quick kiss on the tip of her nose.
She followed his magnificent ass out of the shower, accepting the fluffy white towel he handed her. She wrapped it around her body watching as he grabbed one for himself and toweled off, gloriously, unself-consciously naked and semi-hard and in no particular hurry to cover up either fact. Not that she minded.
To be honest, she was a little sad when he finally knotted it around his hips and headed for the bedroom. She used her moment alone to wring the excess water from her hair and exchange her towel for one of the plush hotel robes on the shelf beside the shower. Then she stole his comb from the counter and restored some order to the wet tangle of her hair as she considered the pieces of Max that she’d learned, mentally fitting them into the beautiful, enigmatic puzzle of him.
The doorbell shook her out of her musing.
“Emma! Man pizza is here.”
She cleaned the strands of blond hair from his comb and threw them away. It wouldn’t do to leave a part of herself here. This was convenient sex and fast food. Nothing more.
“Be right out.”
CHAPTER TEN
MAX GLANCED UP from the bar cart as Emma joined him in the living room. She looked fresh and lovely wrapped in the large hotel robe, her wet hair slicked back from her face. She smiled absently at him as she curled into the corner of the couch and flicked open the pizza box he’d left on the coffee table. She grabbed a slice and took a giant bite. He wasn’t sure if she knew she’d verbalized her hum of pleasure as she swallowed, but every cell in his body was vibrantly aware. She was so effortlessly sensual, and it grabbed him right in the gut.
Emma chewed thoughtfully as she eyed him from her perch. She trailed her gaze from his face to his shoulders, down his bare chest, then all the way to his feet, before she swallowed.
“Never really took you for a sweatpants kind of guy,” she said, drawing her legs up under her and arranging the terry cloth robe to cover them. His eyes lingered for a moment on her bare toes peeping out, before he met her gaze again. “But they’re probably made of cashmere or something, huh?”
They were.
“Did you want some wine?” he offered. She nodded as she took another bite of pizza, and he poured two glasses from the bottle he’d uncorked while he was waiting for her to appear.
He joined her on the couch, placing a glass of wine on either side of the square box.
“It’s so good,” she encouraged, gesturing toward the pizza, her mouth full.
With a smile at her enthusiasm, he grabbed a slice. It smelled fantastic—spicy and savory—and he realized how hungry he was.
The flavor exploded on his tongue in some magic ratio of pizza toppings to grease, and he savored the glimpse of gustatory heaven. Emma hadn’t been kidding. It was the best pizza he’d ever tasted.
“The greatest, right?”
“It’s good,” he said, downplaying the review just to enjoy the look of outrage on her pretty face. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s shower-sex good, but it’s solid.” He took another bite.
She rolled her eyes. “Now I know you’re lying. There’s no way this isn’t the best thing you’ve ever had in your mouth.”
His grin was involuntary. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth, and I haven’t even gotten to taste you like I want to yet.”
“Stop sexualizing my pizza,” she admonished with a frown, shoving the last of her pizza in her mouth.
Despite the rebuke, he noticed that she started absently spinning the ring on the middle finger of her right hand. It was a habit of hers he’d noticed lately. She te
nded to play with it when she was uncomfortable. Or deep in thought. He wondered which one it was right now as he finished off his slice.
“What’s with the ring?” he asked, grabbing his wine glass.
Emma looked down at her right hand, back up at him. “It’s my mom’s wedding ring.”
Not the answer he’d been expecting.
“I sold most of her stuff, but I couldn’t bring myself to part with this.”
“Why did you sell her things?” He took a sip of the full-bodied red.
She shrugged her shoulder, and the neck of the bathrobe parted, exposing her collarbone. “Medical bills have a way of multiplying. And they don’t stop just because the treatment does.” A hint of bitterness coated her grief. She looked small to him right then. Alone.
Max set his wine back on the table.
He was struck with the realization that her mother’s death seemed recent enough that the emotion was still perilously close to the surface. Hadn’t Vivienne mentioned something about her mother being in the hospital recently? “When?” The question fell out of his mouth without thinking, and he dreaded the answer.
She bit her lip, like she was as wary about telling him as he was about asking. But she did. “Six months ago.”
Well, damn.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
It was a stupid question. They’d never talked about this kind of stuff before. Personal stuff. He felt like an asshole, the vague memory of signing off on a week of vacation for her around that time worming its way into his brain. He recalled that he’d resented it. How he’d thought it was bad timing, with the SecurePay launch approaching, and so much to do in the meantime.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said simply.
He understood that. But he was still an asshole.
He didn’t realize he’d reached for her until he felt the softness of her cheek against the back of his knuckles. He tucked her hair behind her ear.
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