by Lynne Graham
‘Shall I tell you how good you are?’ she murmured teasingly and he clasped her fingers between his and kissed them one by one.
‘That would be nice, and you can take your time. Feel free to be as descriptive as you like.’
‘You’re so egotistic, Gabriel.’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t like it.’ He kissed her and then settled his hand comfortably between her thighs. ‘In fact, you have to tell me that you like it. I’m your boss.’
A timely reminder. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ornate ceiling.
In the act of making love, she had lost the ability to think, but she was thinking now, remembering what he had said to her, how he had warned her off involvement: his little ‘don’t get attached to me’ speech, the same little speech he would deliver to all his bed mates, of which she was now one.
Well, she might number among them, but she wasn’t about to join their ranks in wanting more than he could give. She wasn’t going to turn into another hysterical Georgia who had been silly enough to think that she could domesticate the jungle animal.
‘You are,’ she agreed lightly. ‘Which is why this is only going to last for the duration of Paris.’ Belatedly it occurred to her that she might have been a one-night stand. Had she jumped to the wrong conclusion?
‘Is that a fact?’ Gabriel murmured. He withdrew his hand to cup one breast instead and he gently stroked her until her nipple hardened.
‘Being here is like playing truant...time off from normality.’ Alice knew her body was reacting with wild abandon even though her voice was calm and controlled. She wanted him to flick his tongue over the tender nub of her nipple as he had done earlier; she wanted him to lick her between her legs until she couldn’t breathe properly and then she wanted him inside her all over again, thrusting hard and sending her into glorious orbit.
Four days with him wasn’t what she wanted but there was no way that she was going to lose control. She wasn’t going to become his puppet.
And she wasn’t going to let herself fall into the trap of thinking that, because maybe she had been harder to get than he was used to, he somehow was no longer the lazy guy who took what was on offer because he couldn’t be bothered with the tedium of pursuit. She wasn’t going to be another idiot who thought that he was capable of change.
‘Normality being...?’
‘Normality being London and the fact that I work for you. I’m being serious, Gabriel. I don’t want to jeopardise my job. I can’t think when you’re doing...that...’ He had slipped his fingers inside her and was absently teasing her tender, sensitive flesh.
‘That suits me,’ he drawled and Alice fought down the sudden flare of irrational disappointment. ‘You’re the best secretary I’ve ever had.’
‘And besides,’ she said drily, ‘you like a quick turnaround when it comes to women, don’t you?’
‘Always.’ Gabriel thought it best to remind her, although she was not like the other women he had been out with. She might be young, but she was cool, controlled, not in search of the inaccessible. Hadn’t she told him that he wasn’t her type? What, he wondered, was her type anyway?
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t risking anything. She wouldn’t get emotionally involved with him any more than he would get emotionally involved with her. They understood one another.
‘But while we’re here playing truant,’ he drawled huskily, ‘I might see fit to limit the amount of client entertaining we do. You’ve never been to Paris and I know this city like the back of my hand. You’re under orders to follow my lead...’
‘Yes, sir!’ Alice grinned. This was her big adventure and she was going to enjoy it while it lasted.
* * *
‘Where did you learn to speak French?’
They sat in the sunshine outside one of the smart cafés close to the Louvre, where they had spent a couple of hours admiring the great works of art. He had been true to his word and work had been minimal for the past two days. They had entertained Francois and Marie after the deal had been officially signed, and had had lunch with another prospective client who had been charming and informative. But mostly they had made love.
She felt vibrantly, wonderfully alive. She had been living life in the slow lane and now she had been pulled into a Ferrari and was speeding up a highway, enjoying every second of the ride. It was thrilling, frightening and she was dreading the end, the brick wall at the end of the highway.
‘Self-taught.’ Gabriel sipped his strong coffee and looked at her, admiring the purity of her skin, the sharp fall of her hair, the fullness of her pink lips.
She was a revelation. They were lovers, but that did not impact on her ability to focus and work. They made love, but she didn’t demand his constant attention. Neither did she give any hint that she intended what they had to last beyond Paris.
Which was good. In fact, it was great. They were having a no-strings-attached affair. She hadn’t mentioned what exactly her type of guy was but he wasn’t it. Admittedly, it irked him...
‘Amazing.’ Alice laughed. ‘You must pick things up fast.’
‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ Gabriel said drily. If only she knew...
Without the benefit of an expensive education, with his formative years spent either getting into trouble or else avoiding it, he had had to learn fast to compete once he’d got out into the big, bad world. His natural ability, talent and sheer untapped intellect had propelled him forward, but he had known from very early on he would need an edge, and that edge would be a second language. He had befriended a native Frenchman as soon as he’d hit the trading floor and had trained himself to speak only in French when they were in each other’s company. He had learned to understand finance in another language, had learned the dialect of the stock exchange in French. He had earned his edge and it had come in very handy over the years.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning it’s time for us to get back to the hotel. Looking at you is doing some very active things to my libido.’ He drained his cup and stood up, and Alice followed suit.
This was what they were all about. She knew that just as she knew that she had done exactly what she had set out not to do: she had fallen under his spell. In London, she had seen the brilliant, inspired businessman, the man with formidable levels of energy who poured that energy into work.
But here she had seen the other man. The witty, charming, highly informative, sexy guy and she had fallen under his spell.
No, worse. With painful honesty, she knew that she had fallen in love with him. For her, this wasn’t just a simple case of lust. No, this was the vast, unchartered territory of absolute love, the one-hundred percent absorption in another human being; the yearning and craving and not being able to envisage a life without them. In a perfect world, this was the sort of intense, soaring feeling that would be reciprocated. In her imperfect world, however, this was the nightmare that couldn’t be contained and couldn’t be ignored. Just thinking about her stupidity made her feel sick.
She had had searing sex with a guy who found her attractive but that was the end of it. She had launched herself down a one way street, had given her heart to a guy who certainly wouldn’t be returning the favour, and it hurt. Gabriel Cabrera didn’t do love. In fact, he didn’t even do anything that remotely bordered on intimacy, or at least what she understood by intimacy. She hadn’t failed to notice that when she asked questions he didn’t want to answer, he abruptly, smilingly but very firmly, changed the subject.
The essence of the man remained hidden. That was the way he liked it, and that was something that was never going to change. How much more foolish could she have been? Against all the odds, against every scrap of common sense she possessed, she had handed over the most precious of emotions into the care of a man who would have run a mile had he but known. A wave of dizziness was
hed over her and she had to fight her way back to some semblance of normality.
They made it back to the hotel in record time. Dinner was going to be at one of Gabriel’s favourite restaurants in Montmartre, somewhere chilled with an eclectic crowd.
It left them a couple of hours and she knew how those hours would be spent.
In his bedroom, in his bed...
She always made sure to return to her own bedroom, even in the early hours of the morning, but they always made love in his bedroom.
‘I can’t seem to keep my hands off you.’ He pushed her back against the closed door. ‘Touch me,’ he groaned. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled down the zip to relieve the throbbing in his groin.
The touch of her cool hand as it wormed its way into his boxers was bliss, enough almost to send him over the edge.
‘Let’s make use of the bath...’ He broke away to lead her into the bathroom, which was the last word in indulgence. A ridiculously large bath took centre stage with a walk-in shower to one side and twin sinks on the other side rested on black granite with a huge mirror behind.
He ran the bath, flinging in bath salts, and Alice watched him. He was poetry in motion and she couldn’t get enough of him. He had stripped off her protective layer and the only one blessing was that he didn’t realise that he had done so.
She had made sure to reveal as little about herself as he had revealed about himself, although he knew her thoughts on so many things. They had discussed literature, art, the paintings and sculptures they had seen, the food they had eaten and the wine they had drunk. They had talked about the people they watched, sitting outside and sipping coffee. They had compared notes on music. They had even talked about work and about the accountancy course she was due to embark upon.
‘I can feel you watching me,’ Gabriel said with a grin in his voice.
‘That’s because you’re so egotistic. You think that every woman on the planet’s watching you.’
‘Ah...’ He turned around, still smiling, and slowly got undressed. ‘But you’re the only one I care about.’
If only.
She had shed all her inhibitions in front of him. She had no idea how she was going to return to her role of perfect secretary—not when she was crazy about him, when he had seen her naked, when he had touched her in her most intimate places. But men were brilliant at detaching and she would be as well.
The water was beautifully warm and blissful. The bath was easily big enough for two and she slid between his legs, her back against his stomach, her head tucked against his neck.
He squirted some liquid soap into one hand and took his time massaging her breasts. She could feel him pressed against her, a shaft of steel, proof positive of how much she turned him on.
She sighed and slipped down lower into the water and, eyes closed, she lost herself in pure sensation as his hand moved from her breasts down over her stomach and between her thighs.
‘Don’t...’ she protested as he found the sensitive bud and began rubbing it, eliciting broken, gasping groans.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Stop or I’ll...’ Too late. Her body shuddered as she climaxed. Her breathing quickened and she cried out and turned in the water, thankfully not sending too much over the side of the bath, and she sat on him, but she knew as well as he did that without protection it was too risky.
So, instead, she did what he had done to her. Watching him climax was such a turn-on that she couldn’t wait for them to get out of the bath and find the bed.
Was it her imagination or was there an urgency to their love-making that had not been there before? They would be leaving the following evening.
Gabriel could have just kept touching her, making love with her, and skipped dinner altogether but with just an hour to get ready and leave the hotel he turned to her and smiled.
‘So...’ he drawled, nestling her against him. They had barely bothered to dry themselves. They had been too hungry for one another. ‘We leave tomorrow.’
‘We do.’ Alice lowered her eyes and placed her hand flat against his hair-roughened chest.
‘What do you think of Paris?’
‘I think one day I’ll be back. It’s beautiful. I love the architecture, the art galleries, the museums... There’s nothing about it I don’t love.’
‘And London? I don’t think this thing we have has run its course...’ He was as hot for her now as he had been on day one—as he had been even before then, if he was entirely truthful.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, my dear secretary, that I’m not ready for our spate of truancy to come to an end.’
Alice raised clear eyes to his. He wasn’t ready for this to end. She knew exactly what he meant—he meant that he hadn’t yet grown bored with her. But he would, and when that happened she would be utterly destroyed.
More than that, having her around would begin to exasperate him. She would be just another woman to be discarded, except he would find that she was still there, still working for him, still visible. Would she end up buying a bouquet of goodbye flowers for herself?
‘That’s not how I see this panning out,’ she told him and he drew apart and looked at her with a frown.
‘What do you mean?’ He smiled. ‘We’re still hot for one another. No point denying it, Alice. So you work for me and I’ve always had a policy of not mixing business with pleasure—but what’s the saying about stable doors and a bolting horse...?’
‘When we leave, Gabriel, it’s over. That’s what I said at the beginning and I haven’t changed my mind.’ Would she have responded differently if she hadn’t done the unthinkable and fallen in love with him? Would she have been able to keep it as something fun and casual and then, when it was over, cheerfully return to life as she knew it?
Temptation to take that road dug into her and she fought it with the gritted determination of someone swimming upstream against a strong current.
‘You don’t mean that.’
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and began flinging clothes on, eyes firmly averted from his face. ‘I mean every word of it, Gabriel,’ she said. ‘It’s been amazing, but...’
Gabriel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had never suffered rejection from any woman. He had always been the one to do the rejecting.
‘But we can’t keep our hands off one another!’ he exploded, leaping out of the bed and snatching his boxers. He glared at her, challenging her to refute that, which she didn’t. ‘I don’t see what the problem is!’
Fully dressed now, she at last felt strong enough to meet his glittering, bemused, demanding gaze but she still had to keep her distance.
‘The problem is that we don’t think alike, Gabriel. You take because you can and then, when you’re bored, you move on to someone else. That’s not me. I don’t want to waste my time having an affair with someone unless I think it’s going somewhere. Which is not the case here,’ she added quickly, just in case he got it into his head that she was asking him to define what he felt for her.
‘I’m just saying that we need to keep things black and white. This was a bubble. It’s too late to say that it wasn’t a good idea, but what’s done is done, and now we can move forward and continue our working relationship and put this behind us as something enjoyable that won’t be repeated.’
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he rasped, still incredulous. ‘I’ve had my fair share of difficult women in my time, but you’re not one of them! Or are you...?’
That cut to the quick. She was anything but, if only he knew. And thank goodness he didn’t.
‘I’m not,’ she said shortly. ‘But I’m realistic. Just like you. Except we have different realities. I want a man for life and I’m prepared to do my utmost to find him. You want a woman for two minutes and you’ll never look
further for anything longer.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THEY HAD LEFT London with spring promising to be a fine one. They had returned to dank drizzle and the grey, cold weather had continued for the two weeks since they had been back.
Paris seemed like a dream. A wonderful dream to be locked away and only taken out at night, when she remembered everything—where they had gone, what they had talked about and, most of all, the heady excitement when they had made love.
She had been right to do what she had done. He had railed against her decision for five minutes, had tried to convince her that carrying on their affair was a good idea, but she hadn’t failed to notice that in the end, when she had refused, he had ultimately let it go, already moving on.
And now...
She sighed and frowned at her computer, trying to focus. There wasn’t a minute of the day when she wasn’t aware of him. When he stood next to her to explain something, she could feel her weak, treacherous body begin to go into meltdown. Her head might try and box him up neatly but her body remembered the way it had felt under those roving hands and that exploring mouth.
He, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem with the way their working relationship had continued.
In her darker moments, she thought that he might be quietly relieved that she had made the decision that she had. It had certainly spared him the effort of having to engineer a break-up while maintaining the status quo.
The connecting door between their offices was pushed open and she tensed and looked up with a brittle, polite smile.
‘I need you to book two tickets to the opera. Source me one that isn’t too challenging. Best seats.’
Alice nodded. The rictus smile never left her face but something inside twisted painfully.
This was bound to happen. She had braced herself for it, for the moment when he found himself a replacement. A fortnight! What they had shared had barely been given a decent burial.
