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The ring of the phone on the bedside table jarred into the silence. Roman came up on his elbow, damp skin brushing hers as he leaned across her, lifted the receiver and promptly dropped it back into its cradle.
Melodie peeked at him from under her arm. “Booty call from your Swedish friend?”
“For you, I imagine. I only booked the room an hour ago. No one I know would think to look for me here.” Continuing to loom over her, he slid his leg across hers, pinning her erotically to the mattress as he picked up the receiver again and punched a number before bringing it to his ear. “Put my phone on Do Not Disturb,” he ordered, then lowered the phone to ask Melodie, “Do you want anything?”
“I should go,” she said, shifting restlessly under the weight of his leg.
Holding eye contact with her, he said into the phone, “We’ll need a pair of overnight kits, toothbrushes and—” He paused to listen, then said, “Perfect. Thank you.” He hung up. “The drawer in the bathroom likely has everything a couple might need, including more condoms.”
“They said that?”
“It was implied.”
“Did I imply that we needed more? Because I think I said I should go.”
“Exactly. Should. Not that you were intending to.”
“I begin to see why women tire of you,” she said in a pert undertone. “Apparently you don’t tire at all.”
His grin flashed as he settled more of his weight on her and began searching her hair for pins. “Look, I’m no expert, but I’m thinking this hairdo of yours is not going back to the ballroom. So you might as well stay.”
She should have taken her own hair apart, but instead she turned her head on the pillow to allow him to find the rest of the pins while she played delicate fingers across his collarbone and down to his biceps, where he braced himself on his forearm.
This was nice, she thought. It was the sort of sweet moment that should happen after lovemaking. If only...
“Why the sigh?” he asked, making her aware she’d released one. The last of her hairpins went onto the night table and he slid lower so they were eye to eye. “Regrets?” His tone held a fresh note of reserve.
“No,” she said halfheartedly, then more sincerely, “No, this was...” Nice? Hardly. It had been basic and regressive. The blatant way he’d watched her come apart in the mirror, then devoted himself to her pleasure before stamping her with guttural thrusts rushed back at her. The burn of a self-conscious flush crept into her throat and face. “I’m embarrassed, if you want the truth. I don’t fall into bed with men. I don’t behave like this at all. Ever.”
“Except with me,” he said, as though making the statement of a closing argument.
“Except with you,” she agreed softly, shifting her head so she felt his forearm under her cheek and had her lips against the smooth skin inside his biceps. He tasted faintly salty against her openmouthed kiss and smelled dark and masculine as she drew another fatalistic sigh.
“I’m not intuitive, Melodie, but you don’t sound happy about that.”
“Because even if I stay the night, I still have to leave in the morning. I’ll never feel like this again and that’s depressing.”
“You don’t have to leave.”
“I do. We’re flying to, um, gosh, I’m losing track.” She looked to the headboard as though it had the answer. “Hartford, maybe. Leaving really early.”
“You don’t sound as if you enjoy this job. Quit.”
“I can’t. If I finish my contract and Trenton gets his nomination, I get a bonus.” As she brought her chin back down, she adjusted the pearls so they weren’t strangling her. “Before you think I’m all about the money, it’s for Mom. She always wanted to go back to Paris. I promised her I’d sprinkle her ashes in the Seine.”
“I’ll take you,” he offered smoothly.
“Please don’t ruin this by suggesting I become your mistress,” she admonished, both tempted and slighted. She’d thought they’d acted as equals here.
“I have companions, not mistresses,” he corrected, pulling back and letting his hand fall on her stomach, but at a subliminal level, he’d pulled way back. “I don’t buy women.”
“Really. You don’t support your lovers? Buy them clothes or jewelry? Take them on trips?” she asked skeptically.
“I meet their needs while they’re with me, yes, and sometimes that extends to after we’ve stopped seeing each other. But it’s not an exchange for sex.”
“You’re just that generous?”
“I try to be.”
He sounded truthful, if stiffly reserved. Insulted?
“Well, I only have to get through the fall with this job and then I can look for something else. So I will,” she said.
His lips twitched with dismay. “I don’t like that answer,” he informed her. “Quit now and look for something when it suits you.”
Yes, she was a fool to think they were equals. Here was the rich tycoon who got what he wanted without regard for other people’s wishes.
Proceeding delicately because she didn’t want to ruin this fragile accord they’d managed to find, she said, “Roman, my mother put her fate in the hands of a powerful man, then birthed me into the same situation. It didn’t work out well for either of us. I need my independence so I don’t feel trapped or obligated.”
“I’m not trying to trap you,” he said with a scowl. “You could leave anytime.”
“Then, I’ll leave in the morning,” she said gently.
He swore. “Walked into that one, didn’t I?” He set his teeth. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “I suppose I’ll have to use other methods of persuasion.” His gaze tracked back to hers and the heat in his eyes made her heart leap with panic.
“Don’t!” She pressed her hands to his chest, holding him off as he started to tuck her beneath him.
He went motionless, only his head coming up slightly as he dragged his gaze from her nudity beneath him to the conflict that must be evident in her eyes.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Melodie,” he said, brows coming together with concern.
“I think you might,” she said, feeling her lips start to tremble. “You scare me, Roman. The way you make me feel. Please. If tonight is about making peace, please don’t use my weakness against me.”
He absorbed that in silence, only a small tick in his cheek letting her know he’d heard and was processing. Finally his mouth flattened in annoyance. “You’re telling me I have to help you resist what we both want? That will hurt you, Melodie. I don’t want to do that.”
She didn’t know much about computers, but she knew what circular logic was, and that was a big bunch of it right there. At the same time, her hands moved restlessly on him, smoothing his tight skin to his shoulders, pressing with involuntary invitation for him to lower onto her and kiss her.
They stole one brief kiss. Another. She could feel him hardening and opened her legs so he could settle properly between her thighs.
“I’m not going to deny you,” he warned, smoothing her loose hair back from her face. “I’m going to give you everything you ask for. I’ll stay just this side of barbaric as I ravish the hell out of you. If you can bring yourself to leave after that, I’ll let you go.”
Her heart trembled in her chest. Words stayed locked in her throat. All she could do was reach between them to guide him, telling him what she wanted. He teased her for a few moments, letting her feel his naked length against the growing ache in her loins, kissing her deeply until she was writhing with need beneath him. Then he covered himself and thrust, both of them catching ragged breaths as the agony of anticipation ceased and the perfection of joining commenced.
He was a man of his word; however, he dragged a pillow under her bottom so he could service her as thoroughly as possible, leaving her near weeping from the power of her release. Then he drew away, still hard, and proceeded to coax her down the road of sexual play all over again. He found all her erogenous zones and took his time stimulating her until she was ready for a firmer touch. A more insistent pull on her breast with his lips, a more erotic caress that he watched, soothing her when she tried to close her legs, claiming it was too immodest.
He gently dominated her then, rolling her so her stomach was on the pillow and covering her, but not taking her. He just stroked her with his body in a mimic of what they both wanted.
“Hurt?” he asked in a rasp. “I want everything in you, Melodie. Every last scream, but I won’t take them. You have to give them to me.”
She was sobbing, so aroused she was trembling. Shifting, coming up on her knees, she drew him to where she wanted him and clenched her fists in the sheets as he caressed her while he thrust. It was elemental and primitive, both of them stripped down to the very core. All her romantic notions of how men and women should come together dissolved in a flood of carnal hunger, decorum gone, both of them filling the room with erotic noises.
When they hit the peak, his fingers bit into her hips, locking them together as she cried, “Deeper, harder, yes, yes.” He bucked and she gave up a long cry of gratified fulfillment.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u2868e7b7-5d68-5e1c-bf5c-de0ebcfd8b2d)
ROMAN SWORE, SNAPPING Melodie from a doze.
“What’s wrong?” she asked sleepily.
“Can’t you hear it? Does he think he owns you?”
She lifted her head off his chest, where the steady thump of his heartbeat had lulled her. She heard the distant hum of her phone vibrating in the other room. Glancing at the clock, she said, “He’s probably worried I’ll miss the flight.”
Roman’s arm tightened on her.
She rolled onto him, growing addicted to the feel of his body against her own, loving the freedom to be like this: more than familiar or intimate. Close.
Nuzzling her nose into the fine hairs at his breastbone, she hid the dampness that rose behind her eyes as she drank in his scent, murmuring, “I have to leave soon. Not should,” she clarified. “Have to.”
“I heard you,” he grumbled, massaging her scalp through the thick fall of her hair. “I still want you to stay.”
“I’m glad,” she said with a crooked smile, thinking of the way he’d thrown her out the first time. The remembrance didn’t hurt as badly now. She had this incredible memory to replace it. “But I think in the long run we’d wind up in conflict. I do want love and marriage and kids, Roman. You were right about that.”
His caress gentled to a light comb of his fingers through her hair. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t try to convince her he was a changed man, that they had a future. The silence caught at her tender heart, telling her she was making the right decision.
“But I could shower here,” she suggested, lifting her head to offer a sultry look through tangled lashes, a smile pouted with invitation. “Rather than in my own room, alone.”
“Deal.”
* * *
Roman was jealous. He wasn’t just annoyed on Melodie’s behalf that her boss thought he had first call on her time. He was illogically threatened and nursing an uncomfortable state of rebuff as he walked away from her closed hotel room door and forced himself back to the elevator and his own room.
Emotions.
He eschewed them at every opportunity. Hope, happiness, pride. Those were all harbingers of a fall to come. That was what he’d learned through a very hard childhood. Better to focus on sensory pleasures and external goals that had a hope of being accomplished than seek some sort of inner fulfillment.
Melodie was right in saying they would run into conflict in the long run. She might act tough, but she was very sensitive, and he would wind up hurting her with his active attempts to feel nothing.
Which was exactly what he tried to do after walking her downstairs and returning to his empty suite. He was exhausted from lack of sleep, muscles aching from their night of marathon lovemaking, but he wasn’t interested in crawling back into their wrecked bed. It looked too cold and empty. Unwelcoming.
Finding his scotch from the night before, he sipped it. It wasn’t yet six and he hadn’t slept, so that meant it was still last night, right?
One night. Since when did he feel depressed about any woman leaving, whether it was within hours of their coming together or months?
Forget her, he insisted, thumbing across the screen on his phone to check his emails. Just as quickly he swept that screen aside and flicked to Melodie’s contact card. Her number was still there. It hadn’t accidentally been erased. Checking was completely juvenile, but asking her for it had been even more adolescent. He didn’t chase women. He wouldn’t call her. He had just wanted to know if she was willing to give it to him.
He wished he’d taken another shot of her this morning, clean faced and wearing a hotel robe, ball gown slung over her arm as she’d slowly closed the hotel room door on him. Her expression had been soft with sensual memory, her smile sweet and wistful.
How the hell did he even know what wistful looked like?
It looked like wanting what you couldn’t have, he supposed, which was something he understood all too well. His childhood had been nonstop wishing. As an adult, he’d learned to get what he wanted or stop wanting it, very seldom coming up against a situation such as this.
I do want love and marriage and kids, she’d said. He turned that over in his mind, thinking how determined he’d been to find her in Virginia and take care of any child they might have conceived. There hadn’t been any hesitation in him on that score, but what would things look like now if she had been pregnant? Would they be married?
He supposed there were conditions under which he would seek a lifetime commitment, but those conditions weren’t love. His chest started to feel tight just thinking about opening himself up to that depth of emotion.
Damn it! Why the hell couldn’t she have simply forgotten her pearls again and given him an excuse to call? She’d taken them off at one point, but had asked for his help after her shower to put them back on.
He wandered the suite, scanning for forgotten items, finding only the hotel toothbrush she’d left in a glass next to the sink. Leaning in the bathroom doorway, staring at himself wearing his tuxedo pants and the shirt he’d been too lazy to close all the way, eyes dark with sleeplessness, shoulders slumped in defeat, Roman faced the fact he wasn’t going to forget her. Ever.
Which tightened the vice in his chest a few more notches.
You don’t tell me what you’re thinking. He heard female voices complain from the past. You go through the motions, but I don’t feel like you really care.
He cared. Cautiously. When it came to Melodie, he cared quite a bit. She was too sweet a person to deserve the battering of the Gautier gauntlet. He wanted to protect her from them, and he didn’t care for this new, overbearing boss of hers one bit, either. He should have given her his number, told her to call anytime. For any reason.
Not bothering to overthink it, he dialed her number to tell her exactly that.
A male voice answered.
“Sadler?” Roman guessed, even though it didn’t sound like him.
“This is his aide. Who’s calling?”
“I’m looking for Melodie. It’s Roman Killian.”
A muffled conversation, then a voice he recognized. “Killian,” Sadler said. “Melodie is no longer with us.”
The worst emotion, the one she seemed to bring out in him most and which weighed the heaviest—guilt—descended on him. “You fired her,” he deduced instantly. “For spending the night with me.”
“I need my employees to be accessible at all times,” Sadler said.
“But you told her to be nice to me,” Roman said with false conciliation. The man was lucky the sounds of traffic and car doors were coming through behind him, or Roman would be hunting him down in this hotel right now.
“Sluts become a liability,” Sadler said. “You know that.”
Roman closed his eyes, fighting the fire of rage that roared alive in him. Too intense. It had the power to murder. “I think you fired her because she wasn’t nice to you. You’re going to be very sorry you were not nicer to her.”
Roman ended the call and strode out of his room, straight to Melodie’s.
She didn’t answer his knock, so he took the stairs down to the registration desk, asking them to ring her room.
“She’s checked out, sir.”
He bit back cursing aloud, his fist so tight on the marble desktop he could have shattered the stone with a single pound. She was probably in a taxi heading to the airport and back to Virginia—
Wait. A woman sat in the lobby restaurant wearing a fitted business suit. She had her shiny brown-gold hair pulled into a clip at her nape. Coffee steamed next to the tablet she had propped before her.
