To Sin with the Tycoon(30)

‘You’re not wearing a bra...’ He was turned on beyond belief. Her nipple was hard and he was gripped with an insane urge to tell the driver to turn around so that he could take her back to his hotel room and...have her. Rip the dress off her, get her down to her underwear and take her as fast and as hard as he could.

‘The back of the dress is too low...’ She didn’t want him to talk. She wanted him to carry on kissing her. Her whole body was on fire, as though she had been plugged into a live socket. Her nerve-endings were charged, her thoughts sluggish, the blood hot in her veins.

She felt the heaviness of his hand resting on her thigh, gently pressing, edging between her legs, and sanity shot through her. She pulled back and made a show of straightening her dress, giving herself time to come to her senses.

Her breasts were tingling and her nipples pinching from where he had touched her.

What the heck had she done?

‘What’s the matter?’ Gabriel was so turned on that he could hardly string that simple sentence together. He wasn’t sure whether it was the taste of the forbidden, or the fact that she was a novelty after a steady diet of Georgia clones, but he had never been so turned on in his life before.

‘What’s the matter? What do you think the matter is, Gabriel?’ She glanced furtively at the chauffeur but he was seemingly indifferent to what had taken place in the back seat of the limo. Gabriel was right—underlings knew the wisdom of playing dead when it came to the shenanigans of their wealthy employers.

‘I have no idea,’ Gabriel drawled, settling back against the car door to look at her calmly. ‘One minute you were kissing me and the next minute you’d decided to play the outraged virgin. What blew the fire out?’

How could he sit there and look at her as though she had made a mistake with her typing, misfiled something or put through the wrong call? How could he be so...cool?

‘That should never have happened,’ Alice told him tautly. ‘And it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had two glasses of wine.’

‘One and a half, and if you kiss men after a glass and a half of wine what do you do after a bottle? There’s nothing worse than a woman who blames alcohol for doing something she actually wanted to do but then had second thoughts about doing.’

Alice reddened. ‘Well, it won’t happen again. I made a mistake and I won’t be repeating it. And I don’t want it mentioned ever again.’

‘Or else...?’

‘Or else my position with you will become untenable and I don’t want that to happen. I like my job. I don’t want one small, tiny error of judgement to end up spoiling that.’

Gabriel allowed the silence to lengthen between them until she was compelled to look at him, if only to find out whether he had heard what she had just said.

One small, tiny error of judgement, he thought, amused at her naivety in assuming that she could shut the door on what had happened and pretend it hadn’t happened. She had wanted him. Her warm body had curved into his and he had felt her desire throbbing through her, hot, wet and feverish. If he had slipped his hand under that long dress, if he had found the bareness of her thighs, he would have found her ready for him.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever had any woman say that to you before.’ Alice broke the silence which was driving her crazy. ‘And I don’t want to offend you, but that’s how it has to be.’

‘In response to that statement, you’re right. I’ve never had a woman say that to me before. I’m not offended.’ He raised both his hands in a gesture that was rueful but accepting. ‘And of course, if you decide that denial is the right course of action, then that’s not a problem. We’ll pretend it never happened.’

‘Good.’ She felt a hollowness settle in the pit of her stomach.

‘There’s our destination straight ahead.’ Gabriel pointed to the bank of lights leading up a tree-lined avenue towards a manor house that resembled the Place des Vosges. Expensive cars were dotted around the courtyard and along the avenue, half on, half off the grass verge. He began giving her a potted history of the place, which had been in the family for generations.

But he was alive to her presence next to him. She had opened a door and he had walked through; did she now expect him politely to turn around and walk back out because she’d had a change of heart?

Frankly, if he believed for a second that her response had been wine induced, he would not have hesitated to put their five-minute interaction down to experience.

But she had wanted him and she still did. He could feel it in the way she wasn’t quite managing to look at him, in her breathing which she was trying to control, in the way she was ever so casually pressed against the car door. It was almost as though if she got too close to him she would burst into flame. All over again.