Not Just the Boss's Plaything(3)

Afterward, she'd decided that she'd had more than enough fun for one lifetime.

"Sorry," Alicia had said to Rosie then, smiling the painful memories    away. "Are you talking about love? I was certain we were talking about    the particular desperation of a Saturday night shag...."

"I have a radical idea, Saint Alicia," Rosie had said then with another    roll of her eyes toward the dark sky above. "Why don't you put the  halo   aside for the night? It won't kill you, I promise. You might even  find   you like a little debauchery on a Saturday night the way you  used to   do."

Because Rosie didn't know, of course. Nobody knew. Alicia had been too    embarrassed, too ashamed, too disgusted with herself to tell her    friend-to tell anyone-why she'd abruptly stopped going out at the    weekend, why she'd thrown herself into the job she hadn't taken    seriously until then and turned it into a career she took a great deal    of pride in now. Even her mother and sisters didn't know why there had    been that sudden deep chill between Alicia and her dad, that had now,    years later, only marginally improved into a polite distance.                       
       
           



       

"I'm not wearing my halo tonight, actually," Alicia had replied primly,    patting at her riot of curls as if feeling for one anyway. "It clashed    with these shoes you made me wear."

"Idiot," Rosie had said fondly, and then she'd brandished those guest    passes and swept them past the crowd outside on the pavement, straight    into the clutches of London's hottest club of the moment.

And Alicia had enjoyed herself-more than she'd expected she would, in    fact. She'd missed dancing. She'd missed the excitement in the air, the    buzz of such a big crowd. The particular, sensual seduction of a good    beat. But Rosie's version of fun went on long into the night, the way  it   always had, and Alicia grew tired too easily. Especially when she'd    only flown back into the country the day before, and her body still    believed it was in another time zone altogether.

And more, when she wasn't sure she could trust herself. She didn't know    what had made her do what she'd done that terrible night eight years    ago; she couldn't remember much of it. So she'd opted to avoid anything    and everything that might lead down that road-which was easier to do    when she wasn't standing in the midst of so much cheerful abandon.    Because she didn't have a halo-God knows, she'd proved that with her    whorish behavior-she only wished she did.

You knew what this would be like, she thought briskly now, not bothering    to fight the banker for Rosie's attention when a text from the   backseat  of a taxi headed home would do, and would furthermore not   cause any  interruption to Rosie's obvious plans for the evening. You   could have  gone straight home after the curry and sorted out your   laundry-

And then she couldn't help but laugh at herself: Miss Misery Guts acting    exactly like the bitter old maid Rosie often darkly intimated she was    well on her way to becoming. Rosie was right, clearly. Had she really    started thinking about her laundry? After midnight on a dance floor  in a   trendy London club while music even she could tell was fantastic    swelled all around her?

Still laughing as she imagined the appalled look Rosie would give her    when she told her about this, Alicia turned and began fighting her way    out of the wild crowd and off the heaving dance floor. She laughed even    harder as she was forced to leap out of the way of a particularly    energetic couple flinging themselves here and there.

Alicia overbalanced because she was laughing too hard to pay attention    to where she was going, and then, moving too fast to stop herself, she    slipped in a puddle of spilled drink on the edge of the dance floor-

And crashed into the dark column of a man that she'd thought, before she    hurtled into him, was nothing more than an extension of the speaker    behind him. A still, watchful shadow.

He wasn't.

He was hard and male, impossibly muscled, sleek and hot. Alicia's first    thought, with her face a scant breath from the most stunning male  chest   she'd ever beheld in real life and her palms actually touching  it, was   that he smelled like winter-fresh and clean and something  deliciously   smoky beneath.

She was aware of his hands on her upper arms, holding her fast, and only    as she absorbed the fact that he was holding her did she also fully    comprehend the fact that somehow, despite the press of the crowd and  the   flashing lights and how quickly she'd been on her way toward  taking an   undignified header into the floor, he'd managed to catch her  at all.

She tilted her head back to thank him for his quick reflexes, still smiling-

And everything stopped.

It simply-disappeared.

Alicia felt her heart thud, hard enough to bruise. She felt her mouth drop open.

But she saw nothing at all but his eyes.

Blue like no blue she'd ever seen in another pair of eyes before. Blue    like the sky on a crystal cold winter day, so bright it almost hurt to    look at him. Blue so intense it seemed to fill her up, expanding  inside   of her, making her feel swollen with it. As if the slightest  thing  might  make her burst wide-open, and some mad part of her wanted  that,   desperately.

A touch. A smile. Anything at all.                       
       
           



       

He was beautiful. Dark and forbidding and still, the most beautiful    thing she'd ever seen. Something electric sizzled in the air between    them as they gazed at each other, charging through her, making her skin    prickle. Making her feel heavy and restless, all at once, as if she  was  a  snow globe he'd picked up and shaken hard, and everything inside  of  her  was still floating drowsily in the air, looking for a place to   land.

It scared her, down deep inside in a place she hadn't known was there until this moment-and yet she didn't pull away.

He blinked, as if he felt it too, this terrible, impossible, beautiful    thing that crackled between them. She was sure that if she could tear    her eyes from his she'd be able to see it there in the air, connecting    their bodies, arcing between them and around them and through them,  the   voltage turned high. The faintest hint of a frown etched between  his   dark brows, and he moved as if to set her away from him, but then  he   stopped and all he'd done was shift them both even farther back  into the   shadows.

And still they stood there, caught. Snared. As if the world around them,    the raucous club, the pounding music, the wild and crazy dancing, had    simply evaporated the moment they'd touched.

At last, Alicia thought, in a rush of chaotic sensation and dizzy    emotion she didn't understand at all, all of it falling through her with    a certain inevitability, like a heavy stone into a terrifyingly deep    well.

"My God," she said, gazing up at him. "You look like a wolf."

Was that a smile? His mouth was lush and grim at once, impossibly    fascinating to her, and it tugged in one hard corner. Nothing more, and    yet she smiled back at him as if he'd beamed at her.

"Is that why you've dressed in red, like a Shoreditch fairy tale?" he    asked, his words touched with the faint, velvet caress of an accent she    didn't recognize immediately. "I should warn you, it will end with    teeth."

"I think you mean tears." She searched his hard face, looking for more evidence of that smile. "It will end in tears, surely."

"That, too." Another small tug in the corner of that mouth. "But the teeth usually come first, and hurt more."

"I'll be very disappointed now if you don't have fangs," she told him,    and his hands changed their steely grip on her arms, or perhaps she  only   then became aware of the heat of his palms and how the way he was    holding her was so much like a caress.

Another tug on that austere mouth, and an answering one low in her    belly, which should have terrified her, given what she knew about    herself and sex. On some level, it did.