Avril Tremayne - Kiss Don’t Tell

Lane raised her chin and Adam couldn’t help a flash of admiration. She had a goal and she was going to tackle it. Embarrassed, uncertain, almost certainly nervous—because how could she not be?—but she was forging ahead. Amazing.

‘I’m very conscious of the fact that this is an unusual proposition,’ she said. ‘It’s not going to be easy for either of us, but if we keep things businesslike, I’m sure we’ll get through it.’

‘Ah, businesslike sex. Who wouldn’t want that?’

She raised one eyebrow, as though he wasn’t worth the effort of raising two. ‘I was under the impression you had more women flinging themselves at you than you could handle. Someone with a less desperate approach should be a welcome change. Certainly less exhausting.’

‘Oh, a change, definitely. I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone like you. But less exhausting? I don’t think so, Lane.’

Another clear of her throat. ‘While we’re on the subject of desperate women flinging themselves at you, I should reiterate the importance of the fidelity clause. In the interests of health, you understand.’

His smile widened, but didn’t warm. ‘Reiterate away. Wouldn’t want to catch anything after going to the trouble of a blood test.’

He shot his signature across the second copy of the contract then looked at her. ‘But we’d better get you up to speed pretty quickly.’ No more smile. ‘A stud like me needs it pretty good and pretty regular.’

CHAPTER THREE

Lane stared at the forlorn-looking smoked salmon on the now-stale rounds of rye bread and groaned. Smoked salmon! Thank God she hadn’t ended up putting the bottle of champagne she’d bought for tonight on ice as well. Just thinking about the look on Adam’s face if he’d caught sight of a champagne bottle was enough to make her wince.

Ah, well, the evening may not have been a success exactly, but it wasn’t a total failure, either. Because he’d signed. That was all that was important for now.

She stretched, as much to release tension as to ease the ache in her back after hunching over the paperwork all night, then she threw out the food, wiped down the glass tabletop, and headed for her bedroom.

Normally, preparation for bed involved a rapid undressing, a quick shower and vigorous towel-dry, moisturizer slapped on without looking, a scramble into pyjamas and a dive under the covers.

But tonight she was obsessed with her appearance, so she lingered, looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. At what Adam had seen. A tall, pale, pencil-thin woman. Oval face. Nondescript nose. A mouth that was neither full nor thin. Arctic blue eyes that looked too village-of-the-damned for comfort. No laugh lines. Not one.

Lane untied her hair and ruffled her fingers through it. The hair quality was good—thick and shiny, hanging in a straight curtain past her shoulders. But the colour belonged to someone altogether more fiery than she would ever be! It was like a confidence trick, her hair.

Last year, Lane’s mother had asked her to dye her hair any colour but red, because the memories of her dead husband—who’d shared his daughter’s unrelenting hair shade—became more painful for her to bear with each passing year. ‘Just a small thing to bring me some peace,’ her mother had said, and Lane would have gladly obliged her if Erica—her staunchest defender—hadn’t hit the roof.

Lane could still recall Erica’s scathing words, the fury in her voice, the merciless look on her face. ‘What the fuck will she expect next, Lane? That you cut twelve inches off your legs so you’re not the same height as he was? There’ll be something else; there always is. Well, you tell Jeanne-the-Martyr that you asked me what colour hair would suit you and I said red. Tell her that I’ll be ready to give her a piece of my mind, the nastiest piece, if you change it. So think about that before you reach for the L’Oréal because it won’t be pretty.’

To say Jeanne Davis’s mournful eyes and trembling bottom lip left Erica chronically unimpressed was an understatement, so Lane was pretty sure Erica wasn’t bluffing. So far, Erica hadn’t ‘Jeanne-the-Martyred’ Lane’s mother to her face, but the fear of her doing so was ever-present—and that was enough of an incentive for Lane to keep her hair red for the foreseeable future, even though her mother had taken to looking at Lane’s hair then biting the knuckle of her index finger in a very tragic fashion.

Ah well, Lane thought as she retied her ponytail, her hair colour was a problem for another day. At least she had one consolation prize she could offer Adam: her breasts. Their size was disproportionate to the skinniness of her frame, but guys liked breasts for their own sake, didn’t they? Not that Adam could have figured out she had breasts under her navy suit. She frowned as she remembered that he’d left two buttons of his own shirt undone, which was an incredibly sexy look. That had to be worth a try.

She unbuttoned her top two shirt buttons and checked the result in the mirror. Hmm. Nothing special to see there. She removed her jacket and undid one more button. She caught a hint of cleavage, but it didn’t seem an especially alluring inducement to her. Maybe the way she was frowning was detracting from the overall look.

Easily fixed. She smoothed out her forehead, raised her chin, added a half-pout to her lips, examined herself in the mirror again—and burst out laughing. There was a touch of booby-beanpole-meets-Bride-of-Frankenstein about that look. Maybe no pouting around Adam Quinn, then.

Okay, enough.

She turned her back on the mirror, undressed quickly and got under the shower.

She’d long ago accepted the fact that although she was attractive enough, her coolly patrician features gave her an untouchable air, characterized by a distinct lack of smoulder. All Erica’s determined artistry—and Erica was brilliant with make-up—had failed to put the sex in Lane’s appeal. It would be interesting, academically if nothing else, to see if Adam Quinn had enough skill to tease a hitherto hidden kernel of sensuality out of her despite her lack of obvious assets.

And academics aside, it would be such a relief to have an experience, any experience, to help put to rest the memory of what had happened with her ex-colleague DeWayne Callaghan four months ago. An utter, utter disaster. Clothes half-on, half-off. Inept fumbling. Pain. Bleeding. A rushed two-minute-forty-seconds—she’d counted every unpleasant second in her head—which had ended with DeWayne orgasming with a loud and somehow comical groan and collapsing on top of her; Lane, having gone nowhere near an orgasm, pinned beneath him.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, DeWayne had then had the insensitivity to post the experience on Facebook. That was when Lane had come face-to-face with the true meaning of the word ‘mortification’, as his friends had obligingly shared it with their friends, and so on, and on until it reached multi-friended Sarah Quinn, who’d not only told Lane what was going on behind Lane’s back but had also gone ballistic at DeWayne, threatening legal action and getting the whole mess taken down.

Sarah had a way with words that was simply masterful and she’d reduced DeWayne to a blubbering mess, but of course there was no putting that kind of evil genie back in the bottle. And so Lane had walked around the office like a semi-smiling automaton, determined to ride out the disaster with her usual coolness. But when sniggers still followed in her wake after two weeks, she could no longer pretend she was handling it and had subsequently changed jobs.

At least there’d been a hint of a silver lining. Leaving the consultancy and joining the bank had not only given her a better job and a much better salary package than DeWayne could ever dream of, but it had also brought her into the orbit of David Bennett, corporate banking executive and hunk extraordinaire, giving Lane a new goal, a new target. A man to try again with.