Avril Tremayne - Kiss Don’t Tell

‘Language!’

‘Fuck my language.’ He glared at Sarah. ‘From now on, what happens between Lane and me is none of your goddamn business. I’m bound by a confidentiality clause, thank God, and so is she!’ He stood, snagging the half-empty bottle of whisky from the table along with his glass, and prepared to storm out of the room. ‘And I don’t remember asking you to wait in my house.’

Sarah smiled, unperturbed. ‘She sure got under your skin, didn’t she?’

‘Leave your key behind on your way out,’ Adam ordered, striding past her.

‘You know you’ll just end up giving it back to me.’

‘Not for three months, at any rate,’ Adam said and slammed the library door after himself to drive home the you-are-barred-from-the-house message.

And then he realized he’d effectively banished himself from his favourite room, leaving the spoils to Sarah, and his satisfaction at getting in the last word vaporized. His sister was such a manipulative wretch; he wouldn’t put it past her to have masterminded the whole evening not to scare Lane off her idea but to get him to sign the contract. She needs people to love her … she can’t see anything inside her that’s worth loving … I’m going to trust you with her … I know you’ll do the right thing. Jesus wept!

Well, if his sister thought he was going to be jumping to anyone’s command when it came to implementing that damn contract, she had another think coming. Lane too. And should the flight attendant ever make an appearance, he’d be only too happy to show her who was boss while he was at it.

Poor vulnerable, valiant, complex-riddled Lane? His arse! Controlling and rigid and uptight is what she was. Surrounded by a force field that zapped out beams to repel any humans from approaching her personal space let alone invading it. He was even starting to disbelieve that he’d really seen that flash of vulnerability—because every other time she’d looked at him, it had been out of cool, assessing, icy eyes. Like he was an object. An ‘alleged’ expert who had to prove himself. And that contract, aimed at getting him to prove it, was so impersonal it was downright scary.

The contract. It all lay in the contract.

He was going to have to read it again, just to make sure he hadn’t imagined the offensiveness of it. He retrieved it from his back pocket where he’d folded and stuffed it into what he’d thought was submission, and took it, and his whisky, to the kitchen. He went through the pages once … and then once more … plus one last time to make one hundred per cent sure he wasn’t missing anything …

And then he smiled.

By the time he stumbled into bed an hour later, his mood had improved to the point where he was actually whistling to himself.

Nothing to do with the dent he’d put in the rest of the single malt.

Everything to do with the contract and his own devious mind.

Because one little detail Lane Davis had left out of her precious contract was what they’d actually spend their two to four nights per week doing . Imagine that! A contract, a three-page checklist—but no mention of an actual sex act!

An amazing oversight, but a fortuitous one. There was a lot he could teach her without actually consummating their relationship. An awful lot.

Tomorrow, he would call Lane Davis and start lesson number one on his agenda: who was the boss in this partnership.

‘And I can tell you one thing for sure, my icy new lover, it isn’t you,’ he said.

But as he lay back and closed his eyes, a sudden, sharp vision of Lane, naked, slammed into his head and stole his complacency so that he wanted to sit up, turn on the lights and banish the image. And yet he kept lying there in the dark, not only seeing her but almost … feeling her too. Tall, slender, pale except for the vivid hair. She was looking at him, and her eyes were hot with lust.

Fire under the ice.

He sucked in his breath as his skin tightened, listening to his pulse whooshing too loudly in his ears. Whisky, he told himself, fuddling his brain, messing with his self-control, turning her into some kind of mental reality. Well, what the hell? Let her stay there in his head tonight. But tomorrow, he’d be putting her exactly where he wanted her.

Tomorrow, the game would begin.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Lane?’

Lane’s heart leapt into her throat and strangled her vocal cords.

‘Lane? You there?’

She clutched the phone to her ear in a death grip, hoping Adam couldn’t hear either her heart pulsing in her throat or the slow, slow breath she eased past it and into her lungs. ‘I’m at work so I can’t talk right now,’ she said when she was sure her voice wouldn’t let her down. ‘Can I call you back?’

‘No. We need to talk now.’

Another please-be-silent slow breath, until Lane remembered she could mute the phone. She muted with a vengeance, and shot an apologetic smile at the analyst with whom she’d been discussing the consumer price index. ‘I have to take this, Rick. Just a minute, okay?’

She hurried away from Rick’s workstation to the closest empty meeting room she could find. She looked at her phone, contemplating disconnecting … but no. That would be unforgivably cowardly. She unmuted the phone before she could give in to temptation. ‘Adam, I thought I’d made it clear that all calls are to be made outside office hours,’ she said crisply. ‘I never take personal calls at work.’

‘You’re hiring me for my expertise, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘No buts. The first lesson is this—anywhere, any time. Starting with this phone call. So let’s schedule our first date, hmm?’

Date? It wasn’t a date . She opened her mouth to tell him so, to snap the words out, but stopped herself when she heard him laugh softly, as though he were reading her through the phone line. She took another breath. Calm, calm, calm . If this phone call turned out to be some kind of test, she didn’t want to stumble at the first hurdle.

Yes, she had hired Adam Quinn for his expertise; it was why she was paying him a small fortune. She therefore had to trust that he knew what he was doing—to do otherwise would mean she was wasting her money. The argument over calls at work would keep for another time, and as for the whole ‘date’ thing, what was the point of quibbling over semantics? If he wanted to call it a date, he could call it a date; as long as she knew the truth, what did it matter?

‘All right, then,’ she said in her best impersonally professional voice. ‘This week I’m free tomorrow night or any time Sunday.’

‘Tomorrow night’s fine with me. I’ll pick you up from work.’

‘Not at the office.’

‘Why not? It’s business, isn’t it?’

Lane couldn’t think of an appropriate answer—she wasn’t expecting such an early and flagrant flouting of the rules she’d set.

Not that Adam gave her a chance to respond.

‘Ah, I seeeee,’ he said, with way too much eeeelongation for it to be anything other than a dig. ‘You’re going to hide me away and only roll me out when you’re ready for a quick fu—’

‘No!’ Lane interjected, then hurried on. ‘I just feel a little … I don’t want the people here, the people I work with, to know … I mean …’ Lane squeezed her eyes closed in an agony of embarrassment.

‘Sorry but you’re going to have to deal with it,’ Adam said, before she could address her own incoherence. ‘Because I’m coming to your office at six o’clock tomorrow, and if you’re not ready to leave, I’ll have no qualms about using your desk as a bed. Anywhere, any time. Got it?’

Without waiting for Lane’s response, Adam disconnected, leaving Lane holding the phone to her ear, stunned into silence.