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‘Holly.’ I hear the pleading tone in the way I say her name, my desperation so very obvious. She sways unsteadily as she steps towards me; it would be callous of me not to catch her. But fuck, I wasn’t prepared for how her skin would feel beneath my palm. My hand drops, curving around her arse, feeling her sweet roundness, holding her against the answering hardness of my aching cock.
She moans, her sweet cherry-red lips parting as her eyes find mine. Her throat is exposed and I want to run my mouth over it, to taste every single inch of her—all of her.
‘Please,’ she whispers and pushes up on tiptoe, trying to kiss me, looking for more of me.
I have about half a second to make my decision and it is so far from being easy. Because I want to fuck her. I want to fuck her hard, to make her all mine, to make her beg and make her scream, but she’s drunk and, as I said, I have discovered I am a better man than I knew. A fact that is borne out by the way I once more lift her, this time cradling her to my chest, holding her against me and taking her up the exposed stairs that dangle from wires in the ceiling, leading to the mezzanine bedroom. I am gentle when I place her on the bed. She reaches for me and I kiss her gently, tasting the champagne and need on the tip of her tongue. I press my body over hers and I swear I could come. There is something within her that calls to me and I am desperate to answer it.
But not now. Not like this.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WHAT TIME IS IT?’
I lift my eyes to the clock in the kitchen. ‘Three.’
‘You’re still not sleeping.’ Gabe’s disapproval is obvious. I grip my neck, massaging it hard as my eyes lift, without my permission, to the mezzanine. She is almost completely silent, but for the occasional rustling of bed linen as she turns her near-naked body in my bed.
For three hours I have grappled with the fact that I have Holly Scott-Leigh in my bed and that I am down here, staring at a pixelated screen rather than being up there with her. Holding her. Kissing her. Worshipping her body.
‘I take it you didn’t keep your appointment to see the therapist?’
It’s useless. I stand, walking into the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of rum down from above the fridge. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
There’s a pause. ‘Really?’
I can understand Gabe’s surprise. I love him like a brother—hell, we are brothers, courtesy of the foster system that birthed us both—but I nearly flattened him when he gave me the ultimatum. When he told me I’d lost my grip and needed help.
‘So you’re going to see her?’
‘I saw her this afternoon,’ I say, pleased I can be so frankly honest with him. I don’t add that she’s flat-out refused to see me as a patient. That her sense of ethics has made that impossible. She’s now just a woman I’m going to fuck—no, more than that, but I can’t express that to Gabe.
I don’t tell him that I’ve spent tonight with her. That I’ve felt her sweet, soft skin and tasted her delicious lips. That professionally I don’t want a bar of Holly Scott-Leigh, but in my bed I want all of her; all that she’s got to offer I’ll take.
‘Good.’ I feel like a lying bastard when I hear the relief in Gabe’s voice. ‘I know how hard it was to lose Julianne...’
A familiar chasm in the region of my heart opens wide. My fingers shake a little as I half fill the tumbler, staring at the beautiful golden liquid. I lift it to my nose, inhaling its intoxicating aroma gratefully.
‘I’m fine,’ I lie. ‘What’s happening in New York?’
There’s a longer than normal pause and then Gabe expels a breath. ‘Nothing new.’
A frown tugs at my brows. I know Gabe better than anyone, and I know when he’s lying. He doesn’t lie. He’s the most outrageously honest to a fault person I’ve ever met, even when being honest causes him to come off as an out-and-out bastard. He doesn’t care. The truth is his thing.
‘Gabe?’
‘Sì?’
My lips twist at the way he slips into his native tongue. He had six years in Italy before his mother stole him away, dragging him to her native Australia before abandoning him into the foster system. I didn’t know him until much later, but he’s told me that he spoke not a word of English. That he spent the first year in Australia being bullied for his accent and called ‘dumb’ despite the fact he is, and always has been, incredibly intelligent and focused.
Now he spends much of his time in Italy, and sometimes that language is at the fore of his brain more than English. Particularly when he’s stressed.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I demand, cutting to the chase.
‘Niente. It does not matter.’
‘But something is wrong? Is it the Calypso?’ Calypso is the code name for the smartphone we
have under development. It’s incredibly confidential—one team of thirty-seven engineers has been working on it for fourteen months—but it’s obsessed Gabe and me much longer than that and we’re close to launch.
