Indiscreet

It was eight o’clock on Friday night.

It was the seventeenth of December.

Two weeks of vacation loomed ahead. Time she’d set aside to recover from the grueling study schedule she’d kept for the past month, a schedule that had helped her ace her finals, bringing her another step closer to completing her forensic anthropology degree.

Two weeks to explore her options—both career and personal. An exploration best done in solitude, no matter that her partners in the gIRL-gEAR fashion empire, where she held a vice-presidential position, insisted otherwise. They wanted to brainstorm, to role-play, to run aptitude tests, to make introductions, to initiate contacts.

Like Greta Garbo, Annabel simply wanted to be left alone.

She’d done all she could to limit disruptions to her self-imposed exile. She’d set an auto-response on her e-mail accounts, had vowed to check phone messages but once a day. Her voice mail gave emergency instructions on reaching her through gIRL-gEAR’s CEO, Sydney Ford.

It wasn’t as if Annabel wouldn’t be seeing her partners at all during her time away from the office. She was hosting a casual Christmas Eve dinner for those staying home for the holidays, though the finalization of those details would be no more than a minor distraction. And, yes. She had an impending New Year’s Eve catering disaster to divert, which would, unfortunately, take a bit of time and effort.

Neither of those, however, rivaled her most immediate crisis. Because tonight, during the four hours or so that remained between leaving the office and going to bed, she had to give up sex.

Celibacy had never before presented a problem. She wouldn’t have gotten as far as she had in life without learning the value of discipline. She was thirty-three years old and hadn’t been a virgin for a very long time. She’d experienced her fair share of devoted lovers as well as a few whose loyalties had belonged in another’s bed. Never in her life, however, had she been swept away by a man’s body.

Yet for seven weeks now she’d been drowning.

Taking stock of her life required total concentration, unwavering focus. The distraction of sex would be impossible to resist, the temptation to experience mindless oblivion insurmountable. At least this sex, this oblivion, and all of what she had with this man. She had to pour her energies into her self-assessment—not into bed nor a relationship that would never go anywhere beyond.

Arms crossed over her silk power blazer of cinnabar red, she lifted her chin, pleased at the strength she saw in her image reflected in the dark window. Pleased, in fact, with the total picture she made in her straight black skirt, which was short and tight—exactly the inaccessible fit he loathed—and her three-inch pumps in black leather.

Her dark panty hose were guaranteed to piss him off—as would her panties. He liked her to wear stockings and garters and nothing more, and the defiance of dressing exactly as he’d told her not to gave her an edge.

Tonight. She would tell him tonight. Before she left the office and went into hibernation she would call him, arrange to meet him for drinks, and tell him it was over. He wouldn’t be happy. Hell, she wasn’t happy. No sane woman would be, giving up sex that was spontaneous and heated, and cut so close to the heart of who she was.

She never climaxed without feeling she’d left too much of herself behind, and that he would use that weakness against her. That danger was a big part of the allure. She constantly wondered how far he would take her, but only half as much as she wondered how far he’d allow her to go.

Things had become more complicated than she’d ever thought possible after the first time he’d kissed her. The minute he’d backed her up against the alley wall behind the wine and tobacco bar hosting gIRL-gEAR’s Halloween night bachelorette auction, she had known he would become her addiction. Much of her intuition came with the first touch of his tongue.

But she’d known even before she’d tasted him. He’d stood there, his hands flexing at his hips, his chest heaving. What the hell business was it of hers how he’d come by the money he’d used to buy her? That had been his demand in response to her query. The other words that had come out of his mouth had been raw and ragged and totally unfit for civilized ears.

That was when she’d admitted to the wild attraction and vowed to take him to bed. Nothing about him was the least bit refined. He was unpredictable, unruly, totally undisciplined and more than a little bit mad. He was the most intriguing man she’d ever met. He was also the most dangerous. To her, yes, but also to himself.

She was afraid part of her fascination was an urge to free him from the demons keeping him bound. What a stupid endeavor that would be. She knew nothing about the horrors he’d faced, even as she knew firsthand the impossibility of changing those blind to their own destructive behavior.

After all, she’d tried for years to change her mother.

Still, Annabel wanted him in ways that frightened her, despite knowing he could not possibly be a permanent part of her life. He was too capricious, too…damaged. And after surviving her childhood intact, she’d sworn to surround herself with sanity. If that wasn’t possible, then she would live her life on her own.

So when, three minutes later, his long shadow fell across her from the office doorway, she damned herself for ever giving him the building’s front door key. He came here often when she worked late into the night, tempting her by saying nothing, by being unpredictably spur-of-the-moment, by beckoning her away from the life of work and study that consumed her, to show her the world in which he lived.

A world of seedy bars with anonymous faces and the worst liquor imaginable. Of long drives down roads without end, of bowling and batting cages, of running at midnight through downtown streets in the rain. Of making out in the rain forest at the city zoo, with birds cawing and squawking and trilling all around.

A world no one she knew would ever believe she visited.

A world that wasn’t real.

And here he was again, unexpected yet…not. She wasn’t surprised, but neither was she ready. She hadn’t been able to pull up the drawbridge to her protective walls. She needed more time to gird her loins before going into battle.

Yet all she could do was close her eyes and increase the pressure of her hands holding her arms to her body. She would turn and reach for him if she let go, and tonight she had too much to say.

With every step he took toward her the tension heightened, growing as thick as the flow of blood through her veins. Her pulse raced, an exhilarating rush prickling her skin.

His hands settled at the base of her neck, and it was all she could do not to step back into his body. He was hot; he was always hot, as if his temperature—much like his temperament—was not what most considered normal. But then, nothing much about him could be considered anything but out of the ordinary. And that was the crux of his appeal.

He squeezed the base of her neck; Annabel closed her eyes and called on her inner strength to pull away. And she would have. Oh, yes, she would have.

But before she could move, he slid his hands down her arms, massaging from her shoulders to her elbows. She let it go on too long and was lost because he touched her in ways no man had touched her at any time in her life.

When he skated his palms over her breasts to her collarbone and parted her jacket lapels, she allowed the intimacy even though she wore nothing beneath but a black silk camisole tucked into the short black skirt. Turning him down seemed great in theory, but the reality was he had her under his spell. She took a desperately needed deep breath.

“We have to talk.”

“No. We don’t.”

Hearing the words come out of his mouth was as intoxicating as champagne bubbling on her tongue. So when he tugged her arms away from her body, she complied, letting him strip her blazer down and off. He tossed it into her chair as if it cost $2.98 rather than one hundred times that.

And then he pulled her camisole from her skirt, not even giving her the courtesy of a chance to tell him no.

No. A word the power and meaning of which he’d given her cause to forget.

The urge to slip her camisole up and over her head was an itch she resisted scratching. It was a small measure of control, but one she maintained and refused to give away. He had no need to know the strength of will it took to keep from lying back and inviting him between her legs anytime he came near.

His fingertips softly grazed her bare shoulders as he reached for the camisole’s narrow straps. He rolled them down her arms using only his palms, binding her elbows with the silk and then with the grip of his hands.

He didn’t understand his own body’s power or the strength of his passion. He didn’t understand so many things about civilized behavior. Either that or he didn’t care.

Right now what she sensed was his struggle with the savage side of his nature, the very side responsible for the tingling dampness between her legs. She knew him well enough to recognize his desire to get her out of her clothing without a care for preserving the fabric or the fastenings.

He managed to hold himself in check as he moved his hands to her skirt’s rear zipper, though he still jerked it down forcefully. It would be a wonder if she didn’t have to send it out for repair, anyway.

The price, she supposed, of taking a pirate for a lover.

When he pulled off her skirt to discover her wearing panties and panty hose, he cursed. He wasn’t unkind toward her—never that—but toward the situation. He wanted her naked, wanted to bare the parts of her body to which he sought access. And like a child, he was often neither patient nor subtle when it came to getting his way.

She’d grown used to his demanding nature. It fit so well with her own, which made him work for what she wouldn’t be above paying him to take. She kicked out of her skirt, but that was the extent of her participation in her own disrobing. The fact that she’d betrayed her vow to stay clothed was humiliation enough.

He shrugged out of his black leather bomber jacket, whipped his white T-shirt over his head. Then he moved in behind her, his hands holding her waist, and fitted his knees to the backs of her thighs, her bottom to the bulge of his sex. She shivered from the contact, the anticipation, as well as from his image reflected in the dark window—an image that relentlessly captured her thoughts with the same intensity his body devoted to taking hers apart.

His skin still glowed from three years spent under the Caribbean sun. His hair, bronzed and wildly untamed, hung to his shoulders. His ropey muscles spoke of hard labor; his physique hummed with a lean perfection. He’d left the States a know-it-all frat boy and returned with the hands and the mouth of a devil—hands that were making quick work of sweeping her camisole from her body to the floor.

In the mirrored window, she watched those same hands settle on her ribs before pressing upward to cover her breasts. At his practiced, near artistic touch, her neck arched. She rested her head on his shoulder, slid her back against the smooth skin of his chest. His heat was already too much to take, and her nudity offered a respite.

She longed to know the origin of his inner fire, but he refused to share the details of his captivity or his prior life. That got to her at times, the way he had of holding back even while so generously giving. She wasn’t sure she understood the separation of his selves. She doubted even he was able to make the distinction.

Eventually he moved, his hips grinding in a way that brought to mind the sound of bongos and bass drums, his hands working their tortuous way down her torso to her panty hose. He slid one hand between her legs and fondled her sex until she swelled to the point of bursting. His other hand dug into his pocket.