chapter THREE
STEPHEN’S nostrils flared, though his smile remained fixed in place. “Now, what was it you were saying about a previous commitment?”
Colette swallowed nervously and avoided his eyes. “I said I couldn’t stay today. I have an appointment.”
Still tall and broad, he wore his power as easily as his designer suit. The inscrutable expression he wore possessed the same seductive persuasiveness it always had. “Cancel it.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Anything can be rescheduled.”
“True,” she improvised, unwilling to renege on her promise to Emma. “But I’d prefer not to.”
When he didn’t respond, she raised her eyes to his, only to find his blue gaze glinting with challenge. “Is this really how you wish to play it?”
She felt her neck tighten defensively. “Play it?”
“Colette,” he scolded with a patronizing smile. “You know me. I know you. And you’re far too intelligent to think I’m interested in these games.”
Up close, he was even more beautiful than she remembered. Except, like a faded photograph that had been brought out into the light too many times, her memory of him was softer. More gentle. Now he looked inaccessible in a way he hadn’t before. Strong, remote and polished. He made her wonder if any of his grim smiles ever contained the warmth of her memories.
“It’s not a game. This is my only day off, and my schedule is impossibly tight.” She made a show of checking her watch. “I’m late as it is.”
“Then meet me after you’re done.” The quiet command, delivered in a low, dangerous hum, resonated through her body, reminding her of the way he’d dismantled every barrier she’d ever thrown up. No wall, no door would ever keep Stephen Whitfield out. Once he saw something he wanted, he went after it with a single minded purpose no defenses could protect against. Surrender, no matter how short-lived, was guaranteed.
“No,” she blurted, withdrawing from the heat of his nearness until her heels bumped against the closed door. “We already have an appointment tomorrow morning. I’m sure anything we have to discuss can wait until then.”
He arched a brow. “There are a few items in your personnel file we need to address. Items I’m sure you don’t want Henri to hear.”
A fresh wave of panic flooded her chest. Had Bill written something in her file about Emma? “What items?”
“Your file indicates that you’ve been here for four years.”
“Yes,” she hedged, studying his eyes for any hint of what he already knew. “So?”
“So where were you for the year between London and here?”
I was having your child. “Does it matter?”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of what matters and what doesn’t?”
She inhaled as she cast about for reasonable excuses, knowing she navigated a fine boundary between placating him and raising his suspicions. “The job market was tight when I first returned. It took me a while to find a position that fit my skills.” And my childcare schedule.
“Perhaps you should have asked me for a reference.”
She let the statement pass without comment.
His gaze flicked over her body, managing to be both dismissive and unnerving at the same time. “How did you manage to acquire the Renaissance position without any documented work history?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged. Licked her suddenly dry lips. “Perseverance? Luck? Pounding the pavement for long enough that Masters took pity on me?”
Narrowing his eyes in speculative assessment, he flattened his mouth into a grim line. “Right. Masters pitied you enough to hire you despite your apparent lack of experience.” He paused, the accusation beneath his words as clear as if he’d spoken it aloud. “Why do you suppose that was?”
Defensive without having any reason to be, she hitched her chin. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“I did,” Stephen admitted smoothly. “He claims he took a chance on you. A chance he seems to be quite proud of taking.”
“Well, it has nothing to do with what you’re thinking,” she insisted. “He just likes to support the locals.” “The locals?”
Uncomfortable with her slip, she bit back a silent curse.
“Yes.”
“Since when are you local?”
She exhaled noisily through her nostrils. “Since I was born.”
His brow hitched high. “How did I not know that?”
There’s a lot you don’t know.
When she didn’t answer, he moved closer, crowding into her space and forcing her to tip her head back to maintain eye contact. “You never did tell me much about your past, did you?”
She felt her body flush hot and then cold. “No, I didn’t, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Challenge flashed in his expression, firming his mouth and making his jaw bunch. “I’m not surprised. And I suppose you’d like to pretend we don’t know each other as well, right? Pretend to be strangers when we’re anything but?”
“Of course,” she blurted, grappling for a tone of normalcy despite her racing pulse. “It’s been five years. We’ve lived on different continents, led separate lives. I think it’s safe to assume we’ve both moved on.”
“And yet here we are. Together again.”
“We aren’t together,” she corrected with a thin, brittle voice, while both hands wrapped tightly around the strap of her purse. “We’re simply boss and employee. Nothing more. I don’t see any reason to acknowledge we have any history together at all.”
His gaze flicked to her knotted hands and strained expression before he leaned even closer. Close enough for the safe distance she’d shored up between her heart and the pain of leaving him to vanish in an unwelcome surge of heat. “So you’re … comfortable … pretending we never had an affair?”
Too unnerved to form a reply, she simply stared up at his achingly beautiful features, trying to make sense of his sudden reappearance in her life. Why wasn’t he in London? At the Whitfield Grand where he belonged? “Of course,” she finally managed. “Our … involvement … is hardly something I’ve been proud of, and hauling it out for inspection now, five years after the fact, will only complicate matters for everyone.”
His expression, as hard and inscrutable as granite, didn’t change as he stared at her for a long, tense moment. “For everyone? Or just for you?”
A flash of pique washed over her, sharpening her tone. “I was the subject of malicious hotel gossip because of our … whatever it was we had, and I’ve no desire to repeat the experience. I’d ask that you respect my decision to keep my personal life private this time around.”
“This time? I’d say privacy is a permanent state for you, Colette.” The sultry pitch of his voice called up memories she’d spent the last five years trying to eradicate. It made her skin buzz with awareness and brought a terrifying weakness to her knees. His gaze dipped to her mouth, her throat, the scalloped neckline of her dress. “It took me months to excavate even the tiniest crack in that shell of yours.”
Heat burned a fiery path from chest to hairline, and Colette swallowed in an attempt to regain her composure, to quell her body’s response to his nearness. “Yes, well, I let my guard down with you when I shouldn’t have,” she said, clearing her throat. “What we shared was … temporary. We were on a fast track to nowhere. You knew it as well as I.”
His eyes reclaimed hers. “While you made sure we had no detours along the way, didn’t you?”
She hated the accusation in his tone, the unwelcome sting of guilt his words wrought. “Why are you even here, Stephen? You own the Whitfield Grand, and a place like that doesn’t run itself.”
His mouth tipped into a cold, grim curve. “Did I imply it did?”
“You’re not there. What else am I supposed to think?”
“I only own fifty percent of the Grand. And ever since the family’s economic downturn, several other partial owners have taken a renewed interest in its day-to-day operations.” His nostrils flared with palpable annoyance. “I find I don’t like sharing the wheel.”
She stared at him in surprise, unable to envision the Whitfield Grand with anyone but Stephen at the helm. “Surely they’d want you to remain in charge, given how successfully you ran it before?”
“You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.” His controlled expression only hinted at his carefully corralled temper. “The Whitfields and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things and it’s proven … interesting, to say the least. Fortunately I’ve spent the past few years expanding my holdings beyond the Grand, and I’ve been able to disengage on occasion.”
“But why New York?” she asked. “I’d have thought you’d be quite content dominating Europe.”
“Don’t be modest,” he said. “You know my interest in America all began with you.”
She flushed and dropped her gaze to the knot of his maroon tie. “Don’t be absurd.”
“I’m not,” he said, with the same whiskey heat of their past, firing her blood with a disconcerting blend of fear and awareness.
She clung to the fear, determined to dispel the memory of his voice caressing her in the dark.
“You didn’t even know I was in New York,” she reminded him as she raised her eyes. “I had nothing to do with your decision to buy the Renaissance.”
A small, triumphant smile crooked his mouth, straying nowhere near his eyes. “Then I guess fate has intervened, hasn’t it?”
“I don’t believe in fate.”
He cocked his head, his gaze flashing with heat before a sweep of dark lashes shuttered his response from view. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? You’re still stubborn. Still secretive. Still confident that you can control everything.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being in charge of my own life.”
“You can’t control the world. Other lives will intercept yours whether you want them to or not.”
“Not if I don’t allow it,” she insisted, scuttling sideways. Away from him.
“I see you’re still good at pushing people away.” He tracked her retreat, robbing her of her equilibrium and the false sense of security her space provided.
She firmed her jaw. “Yes.”
“I wonder how long it’s going to take for you to figure out that I always push back.”
Facing the only man with whom she’d ever lowered her guard, the only man who’d been persistent enough to chip through her walls, she marshaled her defenses anew. She couldn’t allow him to drag her into a discussion of their past. Too much was at stake. “You kept me here to talk about my file,” she reminded him. “So, unless there’s something else you need to discuss, I really am expected elsewhere.”
His intent blue gaze told her he wasn’t to be diverted. “What did you tell Masters about your time in London?”
She scowled, trying desperately to ignore the little flip in her stomach his question elicited. “Why were you discussing me with Bill?”
“I wasn’t. He volunteered things without a single query from me.”
Sucking in a shallow breath, she squared her shoulders and prepared for the worst. “Bill talks too much.”
“He gave me the distinct impression that you’d been wounded in London. He intimated that you were skittish, single, and still smarting from an emotional hit you’d suffered overseas.”
She was going to throttle Bill the next time she saw him. “He tried to set me up with his grandson a couple of times,” she said, lifting her chin as she kept her expression unruffled and calm. “When I refused, he must have assumed the worst.”
Black lashes drifted over his probing blue gaze. “Assumptions are the damnedest things, aren’t they?”
She steeled her features and stared at him without blinking. She didn’t dare catalog the simmering intensity of his question, didn’t dare acknowledge the climbing heat in her veins. “Do you have a point?”
A smile, lazy and far too seductive, tipped to claim one side of his mouth. “I always have a point.”
“Then please make it so I can leave.”
“Right. I forgot.” He tossed her an enigmatic look. “Things get a little uncomfortable, a little personal, and rather than face it you run.”
“I don’t run,” she protested, while nervousness beat against her throat. “I leave. There’s a difference.”
“Then explain it to me.” He moved to bracket her shoulders between his powerful braced arms. “Explain how dropping everything—your job, your life and your lover—and disappearing across the Atlantic without a word to anyone isn’t running.”
“I didn’t leave without a word,” she said, while panic coiled low in her gut. He was too close. Too big and imposing and distracting. “I told you I wanted out. And you said you understood.”
“You also agreed to wait until I returned from Paris.”
She stared at him in desperate, defiant silence, refusing him the explanation she couldn’t risk giving.
He dipped his mouth even closer and murmured, “Explain why, if you weren’t running, you couldn’t wait two weeks for me to come back.”
Awareness winnowed through her, bringing a flush of heat to her face, her neck, her breasts. “Maybe I just decided there were more important things to do than while away the hours in bed with a man,” she said.
He obviously didn’t believe her, and the knowing glint of fire in his blue eyes made a reciprocal flare of heat coil deep in her belly. “Used to be you couldn’t spend enough time in my bed,” he reminded her.
“Yes, well, I was young and foolish,” she insisted. “I’ve grown up since then.”
“Tell me.” His tone, laced with sarcasm and a hint of bite, told her she’d insulted him. “What precipitated this amazing foray into maturity?”
Becoming a mother to your daughter.
His gaze trapped hers and the silence stretched out between them, a palpable weight in the air. “Did I wound you, Colette?” he taunted.
Her chest felt tight and a knot of pain she’d thought long buried thickened her throat. “Of course not. I’m the one who left, remember?”
“Yes, I do remember,” he said, and his focus tracked the line of her neck before returning to her face. “It’s you who wants to forget.”
She shifted from beneath his accusatory gaze, pressing back against the sturdy support of the door. “Do you blame me?”
“You realize, don’t you, that memories of our passion will intrude whether we wish it or not?” His eyes, heated and heavy lidded, dipped to her mouth. “All those nights and days and hours spent worshiping each other’s bodies won’t just disappear because we want them to.”
She licked her lips while her pulse gathered speed in her chest, her belly, her hands. “It doesn’t mean I have to acknowledge them.”
“You think?” he asked as his fingers slowly rose to graze her brow. “Because when I saw your file and realized we’d be working together again, I was worried. Worried about how you’d respond once you realized I was here. And the necessity of keeping things on a professional footing became undeniably clear.”
She swallowed, the glancing touch of his fingertips against her bare skin sending a shiver along her spine. “There’s no need to worry. I can keep things professional.”
“But I didn’t know that, did I? That’s why we needed to speak privately.” He stared at her from beneath hooded eyes. “Without the other employees overhearing. I needed to set the parameters of how we’d act together so there’d be no confusion.”
She maintained a tenuous hold on her composure. “I’m not confused.”
“Good.” His thumb grazed the sensitive transition from brow to cheek. “Because I can’t afford for our past to interfere with the plans I have for the Renaissance and its future.”
Flames licked low in her belly and her mouth felt perilously dry. “I know,” she said, praying she spoke the truth. “It won’t.”
“Even when we’re in your kitchen together?” he asked. His blue gaze challenged her to deny the memories of all the conversations they’d shared while she baked for him, all the times they’d explored each other’s bodies with wild, passionate abandon. “Or when I’m sampling your creations before they’re added to the menu?
“You already know my recipes,” she rushed to reassure him, lifting her face from his touch. “And the dessert menus are set.”
A single black brow questioned her assertion. “You’ve created nothing new in the five years we’ve been apart?”
Besides a beautiful child you know nothing about? “I’ve been too busy with the management side of my job.”
“That’s disappointing.” Heat gathered behind the blue of his eyes. “I was looking forward to learning another recipe or two.”
As if she’d dare to teach him again. She’d taught him every unique blend of spice, liqueur, and specialty flour she knew. She’d taught him to measure with his hands, to see with his mouth and tongue and to taste with his nose and eyes and skin. Their culinary lessons had invariably involved far, far more than mere food. Her flesh heated at the memory and she ducked her head to hide her blush.
He tilted her face back up again with one fingertip, the seductive curve of his mouth saying far more than any words he might have uttered.
“I wouldn’t teach you regardless,” she said, clearing her throat and forcing the memories aside. “It wouldn’t be a good idea for either of us.”
“Yes. I suppose it’s better to keep things impersonal,” he said he tracked the damning evidence of her blush, that single point of contact between them radiating out to every cell.
“Definitely,” she said, hating how her body craved his touch, how it rebelled at the thought of never being with him again. She wanted to maintain her distance, to keep Emma safe. So why this inconvenient yearning to connect with him as she had once before? To dissect every minute of the past five years they’d spent apart? To learn all the secrets of his past that she’d never had the courage to uncover?
Inhaling against the urge to press for details she had no business knowing, she lifted her chin and said, “You’re right about the Renaissance. It’s struggling. We all need to be focused if we’re going to turn it around. We can’t afford any distractions or rumors.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” His voice, smooth as silk, jarred her with its undertones of controlled, tempered steel.
Though he appeared to be relaxed, something was dangerously off. She could feel it humming in the air between them, making her skin prick with awareness.
She swallowed noisily and tried to muster a smile. It felt horribly forced and strained. “Well, then, I’m glad we got that cleared up.”
“As am I.”
She dropped her gaze to her watch, lifting her wrist between them. “I really need to go.”
“This appointment of yours … is it personal?” The question, delivered in a light, conversational tone, felt like a test. A test she had no chance of passing.
“Does it matter?” she asked in a thin voice.
“Unfortunately …” he began. His unrelenting focus trapped hers, and then he slowly lifted his palm to her cheek and stared down at her before saying, “I find it does.”
“But it can’t,” she answered on a thready exhale. “We agreed to keep things professional.”
“You’re right,” he said with a sardonic smile. “But our bodies don’t seem to be listening, do they?”
“Mine is,” she lied, while the seductive warmth of his hand sent a current of longing down her limbs. She wanted to bolt, to lurch away from his commanding touch, but her brain’s ability to control her muscles seemed to have shut down.
His eyes dipped to her traitorous body, taking in the flush of her skin, the agitated rise and fall of her breasts, and then returned. “Liar.”
She trembled with her denial. “I’m not lying,” she whispered. “I don’t want this.”
“Prove it.”
Unable to speak, she sucked in an unsteady thread of breath while his thumb tracked back and forth along her sensitive lower lip.
“What if this is just fate’s way of dealing with the past we never resolved?” he asked. “What if I was meant to find you again? To pick up where we left off?”
“I told you. I don’t believe in fate.” A sharp flare of desire shot through her belly as he abandoned her mouth to align both hands along the sides of her jaw. Immobile, her heart clamoring against her ribs, she remained frozen as she felt the imprint of his fingers along her flesh.
“I miss seeing your hair down,” he told her. “Do you remember how you used to wear it loose around your shoulders and down your back?”
Yes, she remembered. She remembered the way he’d buried his hands in its length, pulling her head back to expose her throat to his mouth. She remembered the way he’d drawn strands of it over his lips, tasting her scent while he stared deep into her eyes. She remembered, too, the way it had fallen like a rippled curtain of candlelit gold over the two of them while she rode them both to completion.
Before she realized his intention his hands moved, his wide palms skimming her ear and nape as he released her giant hairclamp in one smooth, efficient move.
Her hair tumbled down her back in a single coil and she immediately reached to repair the damage. But before she could lift the heavy mass from her nape his hands stalled hers.
“Don’t,” he murmured. His fingers tunneled through the mass of her hair, spreading the curls over her shoulders. “Do you know I still dream about your hair?”
The low rasp of his voice, soft as velvet, made her tremble. He must have detected the subtle shiver along her flesh because his grip tightened against her shoulders and he dragged her closer. As much as she wanted to pull free, another part of her responded to the demanding strength of his touch, to the command underscoring his nearness.
Lifting her hands to push him away, she froze when her fingertips touched the warm thickness of his wrists. Her thumbs pressed against the channel of tendons at the base of his palms while her fingertips involuntarily recalled the hard landscape of bones and flesh in his forearm. She heard his swift intake of breath, watched his chest expand and rise, and her hands refused to abandon his smooth, hair-dusted skin. Time stretched, grew taut, while the silence beat between them.
His head sank lower, until she felt the heat of his breath against her neck. “Colette—”
Dismayed by her irrational response to his nearness, she pressed him back, releasing his wrists and breaking the tenuous contact. “No,” she told him, retreating a sideways step. “We can’t do this.”
“Why not?”
Confusion warred with her need to escape. Now.
“Tell me you feel it, too.” He followed her, his low voice urging her to reconsider. To relent. “Tell me you remember how good it was between us.”
Hypnotized by the fiery intensity of his blue eyes, she knotted her fists at her sides and swallowed. He didn’t move again, simply waiting in silence while she battled her desire to touch him again. “It doesn’t matter. We’re over.”
His mouth pressed into a sober line, lending a grimness to the perfection of his face. “Are we?” he asked quietly.
Before she had a chance to prepare herself, his warm palms cupped her face and tilted her mouth toward his. Her startled inhale did nothing to deter him, and his dark head dipped toward hers with unerring accuracy. Her fingers flew to his forearms even as the muscled wall of his chest bumped her breasts, pressing her against the closed door while his mouth covered hers. The fiery, voracious, delicious assault of his lips stunned her. Consumed her.
An incendiary blaze of sensation tore through her and her hands tightened at his wrists, floundering between the urge to shove him back or pull him closer. He made the decision for her, releasing her head and dragging her up against the granite cove of his body. Curving over her, he possessed her within the hard circle of his arms, the wide arc of his shoulders and chest. She felt secure … desired … needed. All the things she’d always felt with Stephen. All the things she knew could never be trusted. It was all happening so fast. Too fast. She inhaled raggedly through her nose, filling her senses with a combination of crisp cotton, cedarwood, and the clean bite of his soap.
His mouth released hers and then withdrew, to create a hair’s breadth between them. He hauled in a deep breath and then exhaled, wafting mint-scented warmth over her trembling lips. She felt the bump of his nose against hers, and then the glancing brush of his mouth against her temple while the splayed fingers of his hands against her back and shoulderblades kept her from sinking to the floor in a boneless heap.
Stephen had always kissed her this way, hauling her close enough to sample her flesh with his lips and tongue, tasting her as if she were a banquet and he a starving man. It made it difficult to remember that being with him was a risk she couldn’t afford to take.
“I think you should go now,” he whispered, leaning close to her ear. “You don’t want to be late.”