“It’s not for work,” he said. “Do you know how to make a pasta sauce from scratch?”
Charlotte was momentarily lost for words at the unexpected question. “Why are you cooking?” As far as she could tell, he lived on ordered meals—healthy, balanced ones created by the best chefs in the city.
“I want to impress a girl.”
Charlotte’s smile faded, the bubbles in her blood fizzling out. “I can talk you through it.” She hoped her voice betrayed nothing of her humiliating crush. It was all her own fault for seeing too much in what had clearly been nothing but a little light flirtation on his part.
Something crashed in the background on Gabriel’s end. “Shit.”
She frowned, hearing pain in his tone. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just smashed a glass, cut my finger.” He sounded like he was moving around. “I don’t think I’ll be practicing any cooking today.”
Charlotte worried her thumb over the knuckle of her middle finger. “Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?”
“Yeah, I’m a big boy.”
Her toes curled again despite all her intentions and admonitions to the contrary. “Okay, good night.”
“So eager to get rid of me?”
Charlotte didn’t know how to deal with Gabriel when he got like this. “Aren’t you sick of the sight of me?”
“Careful, I might take that as a not-so-subtle hint about your own feelings.”
Her face cracked into a smile she simply couldn’t fight. “Can I have a long lunch on Tuesday?”
“Meeting your friend Eggplant?”
Charlotte choked back her laughter, not about to encourage him in his determined and irrational dislike of poor Ernest. “I want to buy a few things for a care package for Molly from a couple of stores near the office.” She could go into the city over the weekend, but it’d be crowded and noisy because of an outdoor festival, and she didn’t do well in crowds.
“Isn’t her rock star taking care of her?”
“I just thought it’d be a nice surprise to send over her favorite snacks from home.” Impulsively she shared something else. “She already sent me a whole box of American chocolate bars.”
“Oh yeah? Which one was your favorite? Tell me so I can buy it for you the next time you get mad.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes. It was easy, comfortable, except for the stupid compulsion inside her toward him. He wasn’t for her, she reminded herself—he was planning a meal for his next conquest.
That fact should’ve poured ice-cold water on her fantasies. Too bad her brain didn’t want to listen.
That night, she dreamed of straddling his lap while they were in the office, those hard thighs under her own and his big hands on her hips as she undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. Dream Charlotte was confident, pushing him back in his chair while she licked and kissed her way across all that hot, satiny flesh.
She didn’t mind when he fisted his hand in her hair and ordered her to her knees in front of him, told her to use her mouth on his cock. Dream Charlotte was so aroused she could barely breathe as she did exactly that, as she allowed him to direct her mouth with his grip in her hair, as she moved her mouth over the hardness of him, the veins beneath his skin plump and inviting the stroke of her tongue.
Her shirt was suddenly open, her bra gone, and when Gabriel reached down to squeeze and caress her breasts with one warm, rough hand that wasn’t gentle but demanding, she moaned and—
Charlotte’s eyes snapped awake on the moan, the sound cutting through her sleeping mind. Pulse a rapid thud and skin hot, she looked down to see that her nightgown was bunched at her waist, her hand under the waistband of her panties. Thighs clenching around that hand, she turned to her side and buried her face in her pillow.
Then, for the first time since she’d survived hell, she stroked herself to pleasure, all the while imagining that it was Gabriel’s big hand taking care of her while his body burned hot and hard around her.
14
A WOMAN NAMED TIFFANY (UH-OH)
FOUR HOURS AFTER WAKING, Charlotte was still inwardly blushing over what she’d done. She was also in the office. On a Saturday. Gabriel had asked her to come in to help him finalize the documents for a major deal that had acquired legs overnight, sending a car to pick her up after her two-hour “Working with Pastry” master class. She’d been grateful—the public transport into the city was no doubt shoulder to shoulder today.
They’d been working for ninety minutes and Charlotte was in the outer office printing out a financial report on the small French company Saxon & Archer was about to purchase as part of Gabriel’s plans to control production of their higher-end inventory, when security called up from the ground floor.