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When she didn’t respond, he continued speaking while he crossed the room to stand before her. “Perhaps a year, now? A bit longer?”
Amara found her footing, nodded slowly. “Something like that,” she said, her voice steadier than she anticipated from her shaky start.
“So you haven’t forgotten me,” he said, more statement than question.
Forget Quint Forbes? Impossible. No one who’d ever met this man could forget him. Especially not a red-blooded, heterosexual woman.
Or, more specifically, not a woman who’d kind of, almost, slept with him. Like Amara.
Chapter Three
MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, Amara met Quint Forbes at a conference on economic development in third-world countries.
Everyone knew who Quint was, billionaire extraordinaire. She’d hardly checked in to the hotel where the conference was held when she overheard the excited buzz that Quint Forbes was attending. She’d had to have been a diehard Luddite living in an underground bunker not to know the man.
Amara had given a presentation on hunger solutions, and Quint was in the front row of the audience. To say he’d thrown her off her game was an understatement. He’d nearly made her forget there was a game at all.
She’d managed to complete her lecture passably enough, but it had been a challenge to keep from staring continuously at the striking man. He drew her eye to him both with his amazing good looks and with his flatteringly attentive regard. And he was older, in his mid-thirties, which was right where Amara liked her men.
After the presentation, Quint had approached her with a load of questions and a heady dose of personal chemistry. Amara couldn’t help but wonder how anyone kept their focus around him. No wonder he got the better of so many business deals.
When he asked her if she’d like to continue their conversation over drinks in the hotel bar, she hadn’t hesitated for even a moment. His obvious pleasure at her agreement set her insides tingling in a delicious, unexpected way.
She may have giggled more than once. But she hoped not.
Amara eventually came back to her normal self, more or less, once they’d settled into a cozy corner booth of the old-world-style bar. They shared a healthy spark of attraction for one another, and for Amara, the spark was made even brighter by the fact that Quint was so interested in her work and philanthropy in general.
Before long, the conversation had moved to dinner. To this day, Amara couldn’t remember what she ate that night, and she kicked herself for it. It was the only time she’d eaten in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and all she recalled was that she had some kind of fish that melted on her tongue.
But her inability to recall what she ate was more than made up for by her memory of the first time Quint touched her. They’d both been reaching for some bread when their hands collided, and Amara half-jumped from the jolt of electricity that passed between them.
She’d never felt anything like it: a hard-wired shock that went up her arm and shot straight down to her lower belly. It was a delicious thrill, and she thought, “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want this man.”
Later, she’d brush off that bit of silliness, chalk it up to the effects of too much fine wine and the potently masculine scent of Quint’s exotic cologne.
But in the moment, it had been a perfect storm of seduction. His interest in her work, in her, his considerable personal charms — Amara defied any woman to have resisted him.
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And when all was said and done, she hadn’t resisted. She wound up in Quint’s lavish suite.
That was where he’d first kissed her, right inside the door. He held her waist and pulled her close, looked deeply into her eyes and said all the right things.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, his deep voice sending delicious shivers down her spine.
She leaned forward in invitation, so there’d be no doubt. She wanted him to kiss her.
And he did.
He tasted of expensive wine and something indefinable, something that was uniquely his. If lust had a flavor, then he tasted of it, and it was intoxicating.
Before she knew it, he unzipped her dress, and she pulled off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.
He had a chest like a Greek statue, all defined curves and hard, unyielding muscle covered by unblemished, smooth, tanned flesh. She pressed her hands against his pecs, and he moaned and pushed her dress down, peppering kisses across the top of her bared cleavage.
Like everything else with him, she was swept up in a whirlwind that was bigger and faster than anything she’d experienced before. He soon stripped her naked, and she didn’t once worry whether she looked good enough, was enough.
She saw in his pale blue, wolf eyes that his desire for her was so pure, there could be no doubt of what he thought of her. In that moment, she was flawless, as was he, to the point that there was no thought attached to it at all.
