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No boyfriends. Not even a hint of teenage rebellion. She’d been too busy. And she’d believed so strongly in everything her mother had asked of her, had wanted to repay her for the years of travel and lessons by doing well.
By doing what she’d been asked, or rather ordered, to do. And now she was paying for it, since she didn’t know the first thing about real life. She knew about glitz and glamour, but not how to make the money to achieve it for herself. She knew about air kisses and fake praise, but not about real relationships. Real kisses. Ethan had come the closest.
She shivered at the memory.
“Come to work with me?”
“Um … sure.” It wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind, but then, she wasn’t really certain what she’d had in mind. “I’m not going to be spending every waking minute with you, am I?”
“I don’t know, what would you do if you were head over heels in love? In love enough to get engaged only a couple of weeks after meeting someone?”
She laughed as she edged over to the bathroom, conscious of her semi-dressed state. “I have no idea.”
“I don’t either, but I imagine that we very much would spend every waking, and non-waking, moment together.”
His eyes, so hot on her, felt like an intimate caress. One that made her burn inside. She crossed her arms over her breasts to disguise her nipples, beaded tight against the filmy fabric with no bra to help hide the effect he was having on her.
“In any case, going to work with you today might be … fun.”
Ethan gritted his teeth and fought hard against the razor-sharp edge of arousal that was digging into him, cutting into his control. She was barely covered up by a silky, bright-blue confection that looked as though it was designed for the sole purpose of driving a man to an early grave. Or at least to the hospital to see a doctor about an erection lasting longer than four hours …
She wasn’t just an easy tumble though. This wasn’t about sex, and it sure wasn’t about using her body. He didn’t need her body. He could have his pick of any woman he wanted. He wasn’t about to let her control him, not about to let himself believe the attraction to her was special in any way beyond what was normal. He’d let it make an idiot of him last night. He’d flirted with her. Nearly kissed her.
He just hadn’t had sex in so long that his body was trying to convince him she was special. She wasn’t. She was just another blonde. Blondes he’d had. Lots of them.
But her legs. So long and shapely, and her figure, petite and luscious, pert round breasts that called out to him. To touch. To taste. He had a feeling that even if he’d satisfied his libido last week—hell, last night—he’d feel the same way.
Feel some sort of sick craving to possess her in every way. To make sure the deal went through? No, not even he would stoop that low. This wasn’t about her; not about hurting her anyway. It wasn’t even about hurting her mother, not on his part, anyway. It was about showing his father that going through life using people as rungs on the ladder of success and satisfaction didn’t work.
About making sure Damien Grey wouldn’t get rewarded for it.
“Maybe you should go get dressed.”
Her cheeks turned pink, a deep rose that betrayed her embarrassment. That was a novelty, one he wasn’t sure how he felt about. A woman who blushed like that over something so simple, that wasn’t really his thing. And yet for some reason, it made his body harder, more tense, more aroused.
This was a business deal, in a way, and he had to remember that. But he worked with women every day without experiencing this problem. Of course, the women he worked with didn’t come into the boardroom wearing silky lingerie.
He ground his teeth together and tightened his hands into fists, channeling his tension into his screaming tendons. He had to get a grip. On his libido or his body, he didn’t really care, but the attraction to Noelle had to be managed.
“Right.” She slunk off to the bathroom, and he let out a breath he hadn’t been conscious of holding.
The office was safe at least. It would give him a chance to remember why he was doing this. Give his body a chance to calm down. Because he had a goal and he wasn’t about to let an errant attraction distract him from reaching it.
More importantly, he wasn’t about to give in to temptation, to let his body have the control when he despised men who behaved like having testosterone meant they couldn’t be their own masters.
He’d watched his father do it, time and again. Disregarding the feelings of his wife, his children, and for what? For the pursuit of his own selfish pleasure. Casting off every last piece of his honor, his commitments, to chase after a woman who, in the end, wouldn’t even stay with him.
He looked at the closed bathroom door and tried not to imagine Noelle’s nightgown slithering over her curves and pooling onto the floor.
He wasn’t his father. And while she wasn’t her mother, she was the one woman who was patently off limits.
“You do have a nice office.” Noelle leaned back in his office chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her, black tights covering all that tempting, creamy skin, but doing nothing to disguise the shape.
Turned out she was just as sexy when she was fully dressed. Which he’d known after last night, but when he’d invited her to the office he’d imagined she’d put on something more business-casual. He had discovered that ex-performers didn’t have much in the way of business-casual. What she did have was a brief, black dress, black tights and a pair of gold high heels that glowed from fifty paces away.
And all that pale blond hair, hanging loose around her face like a halo … she was just impossible to put in a corner and ignore. And that was problematic on many, many levels.
“Gets the job done anyway,” he said.
“Is there something I can do?” She straightened, crossing her legs at the ankles. It did not help make her look any more demure.
“You can get out of my chair.”
She turned crimson and popped up. “Okay, done. Anything else?”
“You want to work?”
“Well, I’m here.” She shrugged. “It seems like I ought to do something. Won’t people think it’s funny I’m just hanging out?”
“I don’t think anyone thinks it’s funny at all. I think they assume we’re in here not working.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Really. Did you see the paper this morning?”
“No, I didn’t have the chance to grab it.”
“We’re the new hot couple, you know.”
“Can I see?”
He rounded the desk and leaned over, typing in the web address for the newspaper they’d been featured in. “There you are.”
She leaned in next to him, that sweet vanilla scent teasing his senses, making his body harden with tension and arousal.
A small smile curved her lips. “They know my name.”
“You sound surprised.”
“No one’s missed me much over the past year. Which I actually consider kind of a blessing. I haven’t really been keen on sharing my downfall with the world.”
“What? That your mother stole your money?”
“That she abandoned me because she knew she’d gotten everything she could out of me. Because my sales—album sales, ticket sales—were dwindling to nothing.”
“So what have you been doing then, this past year?”
She shrugged again, her blue eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind him. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
She looked at him, pale eyes filled with anger now. “Maybe I haven’t done the best I could with my time. But I didn’t really know what to do. I only know how to do one thing.” She looked away. “My mother made sure I only knew one thing. I tried to … I tried to talk to my old booking agent. Tried to see about playing venues I used to play. I called my label and asked them if they wanted to release a greatest hits album. Turns out, they don’t think I have any.” She laughed, a hollow, bitter sound that made his chest ache. “So in that sense, I did something. But I just … I didn’t know what else to do when all of that was shot down.”
“What about playing piano bars and things like that?”
“Ironically, that’s the kind of thing I am a bit too famous for, and I don’t mean that in a snobbish way, I mean … I didn’t want that to show up in tabloids.”
“That’s not really a great excuse, Noelle. You basically just sat there and let everything fall apart.”
“No. No I did not. Everything was wrecked, utterly wrecked by my mother. She smashed everything to pieces—I didn’t let it fall apart. And yes, maybe I could have done something, maybe I should have, but every night I’ve gone to bed hoping … hoping that somehow in the morning it would be fixed. That things would go back to normal. I tried to force it to go back to normal.” She looked at him, blue eyes intent on his, an impact he felt all the way through his body. “Now … now I don’t even want things to go back to normal. But I just … I felt burned out. I was just so tired. This, having a chance to hold onto something, this at least makes me feel like I can fight. Like I have something to fight with.”
His chest felt strange. As if it had gotten smaller, or his heart had gotten larger. He didn’t like it. “You could learn something else.”
Her frame slumped. “I don’t know if I have the energy anymore. To devote myself to mastering something other than music, I mean. I’ve done that. Practicing, improving, every day without stopping since I was a child. It didn’t really get me anywhere, did it?”
He didn’t know why he felt compelled to try and offer her … something. Comfort maybe? He only knew that he did. “Very few people live their lives that way, Noelle. With drills and practice for eight hours a day, in addition to performing and promoting and traveling.”
“Are you telling me you work any less hard?” she asked.
“No, I work a lot. But I choose to. There are plenty of people who go nine to five, five days a week.”
She looked down, her throat working. “What if I can’t do anything else?”
Everything about his carefully laid plan, her being in the office, her being anywhere near him, suddenly felt wrong. Like he was joining in the queue of people who’d used her.
A bit too late to feel that way.
Much too late. And she was walking in with her eyes open.
“Of course you can. Here,” he slapped his palm on the leather back of the chair, “get in the chair.”
She sat back down, her expression confused. Damn, but she made him feel every inch the Big Bad Wolf to her Little Red Riding Hood. He didn’t really like the feeling.
He shoved his conscience to one side. He’d deal with it later. “Do you type?”
She grimaced. “Not really. Not fast.”
“Well, you’re going to learn.” He pulled out a stack of papers he’d set aside for his PA. “I want you to enter this into the computer. These are specs for different building plans. If you enter the numbers in these cells, the computer will do the math for you. You just enter it in.”
“I can do that.”
“Okay, do that. I’m going to go down the hall and make some phone calls, and I’ll be back to check on you.” Distance was definitely necessary.
He walked out of the office and closed the door behind him, his chest still tight. He didn’t know why it mattered, but he wanted to show Noelle that she could do something. Something other than doing drills every day for a career that had crumbled to nothing right in front of her.
More than that, he didn’t like what he saw in her eyes. That look that said she saw herself as a failure. He’d watched his mother go through that. Watched her pin her self-worth on the perception of a fickle public.
There was no happiness there.
When and how had he started comparing her to his mother? He ought to be comparing her to her own. Actually, the truth of it was, he shouldn’t be putting this much thought into her either way. She was just the means to an end, and he was the same to her.
This wasn’t personal. Not between the two of them.
He ignored the kick in his gut that said otherwise.
The sense of accomplishment that filled Noelle when she moved the last piece of paper to her finished stack was silly, and she knew it. It had been an easy job, one that she was sure anyone with fingers could do, and yet, it was more than she’d pushed herself to do recently.
She’d been so determined to live in the past. All the time she spent still doing drills she could have used to learn any number of job skills. She simply hadn’t. Part of her hadn’t believed she could. But Ethan had believed in her. Enough to leave her in his office on her own, to trust her to do the work.
The door to the office opened and Ethan walked in. “I did it,” she said, not quite able to wipe the idiot grin off of her face.
“Good,” he said, not half as thrilled as she was.
“Thank you.”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “It’s nothing. My PA will be happy that she doesn’t have to do that today.”
“It was something to me.”
His eyebrows locked together. “You can do things, Noelle. You aren’t stupid. You aren’t handicapped in any way. You can do whatever you like. Don’t leave it up to the public to decide how much you’re worth.”
Did she do that? She supposed she had. She’d been so worried about what people might think … that was one reason she hadn’t gone and gotten a job. That and the lingering hope that someday she’d be able to fix things.
But she hadn’t fixed it yet. And she’d let things get too bad. So much of this had become her fault.
“You’re right.”
“Yeah, well, of course,” he said.
“Really. I could have done something. I didn’t.”
“Well you can do data entry for me if you like. It’s boring, but my PA thinks so too, so she’ll be glad to do other things.”
Noelle felt her throat tighten and then she just felt silly. Getting emotional over a desk job.
“Thank you.”
“It will allow you to be around the office more, which will be good as far as setting the stage for our wedding.”
She swallowed. “Yes, it will.”
“No working late, though. I plan on keeping you very busy at night.”
CHAPTER SIX (#u8e1d154a-0a08-5a69-8957-0ec84d46c3a9)
KEEPING her busy at night turned out to mean something very different from what she’d immediately thought. She was slightly embarrassed to admit, even to herself, exactly what her first thoughts had been.
But what he actually meant turned out to be something far beyond what she’d imagined.
