AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he looked at her again, his expression was smooth, steady. Not an ounce of the emotion she’d heard in his voice or the need she’d imagined in the press of his arms around her. No sign of the tension she’d felt in his back and shoulders.
He was the Christian the world knew—smooth and shallow with a ruthless edge.
“I’ll arrange for a license as soon as possible.”
She nodded, still chasing that emotion in his face. It was like a roar in her head—this need for what she’d found in his voice just moments before. Even when it wasn’t the quietly sensible thing she always did.
“Just remember why we’re doing this, Pree. Your parents can go on that trip to India without feeling guilty. I can get the board off my back. And you can continue to live in the apartment. I won’t even be in your hair once we land that collaboration with the Swiss team. The infrastructure itself will take six months to get set up and needs a lot of oversight.”
“And your girlfriends?” The question burst out of her mouth before Priya even knew she was thinking it. She could feel the heat creeping up her cheeks. “Forget I said that. None of my business.”
“Are you sure?” he asked in a soft, silky voice that sent a prickle of heat all along her skin.
Priya nodded, though she wasn’t sure whom she was trying to convince. There was that demand in his eyes again. As if compelling her to ask him. As if he knew. “Of course I’m sure, Christian. Your love life is none of my business.”
For the rest of the day, Priya wondered at how it was the strangest thing a woman could say to the man who’d just asked her to marry him.
CHAPTER TWO
Eight and a half years later
PRIYAMIKKELSENPAIDthe cab driver with a swipe of her phone and stepped out into the pouring rain. She could feel his gaze on her back, wondering if she was a little cuckoo, walking out into a downpour with nothing but a cashmere wrap for protection. He might even wonder if she was deranged since she was marching up to one of the wealthiest estates in the Pacific Northwest looking like a woman on the edge.
She didn’t care. Tonight, she was not a mother who had to put on a smiling face for her seven-year-old son.
She wasn’t a granddaughter-in-law who had to bandy words with an eighty-nine-year-old man who doted on her son and put all his faith in Priya.
She wasn’t a daughter who had to reassure an overanxious, overprotective mother who’d drown her in suffocating love if she didn’t look perfectly happy at all times.
She wasn’t the CEO of a major tech company battling with the vulture cousin of her dead husband and a board of directors who constantly tried to question her leadership.
She was simply Priya. The woman who was so lonely that the stench of it clung to her very pores. A thirty-one-year-old woman having a ridiculously juvenile tantrum even her small son would laugh at.
The smooth whir of the electronically manned gates after it scanned her thumbprint reassured the concerned cabbie that he wasn’t dealing with a possible criminal.
Priya started up the incline, her four-inch stilettos making her thighs burn with each step. The raindrops soaking through the dress and the steep pathway forced her energy and thoughts into putting one step after the other.
If Mama was to see her now... Priya let out a bark of laughter.
She’d wonder if her calm, coolheaded daughter had gone completely bonkers. Then she’d watch over Priya day and night, drag her to a therapist and then a matchmaker. Not that going to a therapist was wrong.
It was just that no therapist in the world could solve Priya’s problem.
Sharing her loneliness and its source with her mother would be nice. But Mama wouldn’t simply listen to her vent.
No, the moment she heard Priya mention her unhappiness, she’d arrange a solution. Without exaggerating the matter, Priya knew she’d be married to within an inch of her life in no more than two months. Mama’s will was something one should never provoke or invoke—a lesson she and her dad had learned a long time ago.
But Priya didn’t want a husband. She didn’t want a relationship and all the misery and heartache it could involve. She didn’t want a man to dictate her life any more than she wanted Mama to.
She wanted flirting and long, heated glances. She wanted kisses and caresses and yes, sex, she admitted to herself, wiping rain from her lashes. But not the impersonal, hushed-up encounter she’d been propositioned with this evening. Definitely not the man who’d turned ugly within a minute of her retreat. She wanted to feel like a woman instead of a mother and a daughter and a great-granddaughter-in-law and the CEO who held the reins of so many people’s livelihoods in her hand.
No, she wanted a long night of seduction and intimacy and warm, sleek male skin at her fingers and broad shoulders and hard thighs enveloping her.
Basically she wanted one man.
Laughing blue eyes and dark blond hair and a roguish grin. The face in her mind’s eye shouldn’t have surprised her. But it did. He’d been an astonishingly good-looking man. But more than that, Christian had had a presence. A magnetism that drew people to him. An energy and verve for life that had equally amazed her and terrified her.
It shouldn’t be a complete shock then that her mind conjured up Christian again and again. Even though he’d largely avoided her when they were married, she’d surprised herself by discovering how much she’d enjoyed being his wife. Until suddenly she wasn’t anymore.
