A Convenient Arrangement (6 page)

“Hey!”

“Shhh.” Leo pressed one upright finger to his lips and slowly took his hand from Gwen’s mouth.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Leo was so close…oh my goodness, too close. Almost as close as he had been last night, except this time he had his clothes on. She wished that he didn’t.

“Who the hell do you think you are, Jason Bourne?” Gwen shook her head. This was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Leo had her pressed up against the wall in Anthony’s dark den.

Hello. Leo’s rock-hard sex pressed against her hip. She could handle this. Absolutely. She channeled her inner badass, willing her expression to radiate “I really don’t have time for you, so get over yourself.” Damn, the oranges again…and soap…and man…why did he have to smell as sexy as he looked? Who smelled this good? Her body betrayed her, her nipples pebbling beneath her bra, almost like her cells remembered all the pleasure from last night. Tingles shot between her legs. Even as angry as she was, Leo completely turned her on. The pressure of his cock against her hip told her he was turned on too.

Huh. That tidbit of information could be useful. Very very useful.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Leo hissed.

“Attending my best friend’s family’s New Year’s Day party, and you?”

“You said you weren’t coming.”

“And you said the same.” She shifted her body to nudge her hip a little more firmly against Leo’s hard cock.

“Ah…I…”

“What was that?” Gwen asked, fluttering her eyelashes.

Leo leaned back, moving his hips away from hers. “When you…ah…decided you weren’t coming”—his gaze drifted from her eyes and down her neck to land on the v-neck of her sweater, which revealed a hint of creamy cleavage.

“Yes?”

His eyes darted back up to hers. “Right, right, when you said you weren’t coming today, I knew one of us needed to be here, otherwise everyone would think we were together.”

His sweet breath caressed her face, his lips intoxicatingly close to hers. His lush… No, no, no…hard-ass woman. She had to focus.

“That’s exactly why I’m here. You texted that you weren’t coming, so I did. I mean, if I’d known you were going to be here, Leo, I most definitely wouldn’t have come. I don’t want to make things awkward for
you
.” She leaned forward slightly, completely aware of how her décolletage popped from the top of her sweater. If he was going to be an ass, then let him, but she absolutely was going to make him pay for the privilege.

His eyes narrowed in confusion. “Difficult for
me
?”

Gwen nodded and smiled and gave him her best doe-eyed stare. “Yes, you. I don’t want me being here to be awkward for you.”

His mouth dropped open. Speechless? She had rendered Leo speechless. Score one for the party planner! She was much better at this nonchalance thing than she’d thought.

“Uh…”

“Look, Leo, I mean, it’s me. This is completely my fault. Like I said this morning, you are an amazing guy, but right now I’m completely into my career and I know you are too.” She widened her gaze. Damn, she was laying it on thick, but she had to get out of this room with some pride. Her body, though, couldn’t care less about her pride. All she really wanted to do was close the tiny distance between them, press her lips to his, rip off his clothes, and roll around on the rug like horny wildebeests.

“Right…your career. My career.” He nodded, his gaze distant. She couldn’t quite tell from his look if he was contemplating tomorrow’s hostile takeover at work or her words. “I’m starting to feel like maybe the lady doth protest too much.”

“Shakespeare? You’re going to quote
Taming of the Shrew
to me?”

“
Hamlet
”—he lifted his brow and the corner of his mouth—“but who’s keeping track?”

She’d like to kiss that smirk from his face. Gwen leaned back, but Leo tightened his grip around her waist.

His soft, sculpted, kissable lips were a millimeter from Gwen’s. That mouth had pleased her last night, made her moan his name. Her belly tightened and her breathing grew heavy. His breath tangled with hers…jeez, how bad did kung pao scallops smell after a few hours? Of course, she’d brushed her teeth buuuut…

“I know neither of us want a relationship, but maybe this thing between us doesn’t have to be a relationship.”

Gwen swallowed. “Are you asking me for a—”

His lips claimed Gwen’s. Her brain buzzed and did the fuzzy white snow thing that happened when the cable was on the fritz or had been turned off because you couldn’t pay your bill…until this year she’d spent a lot of time with her cable turned off.

Leo’s tongue stroked the seam of her mouth. My God, what the man could do with his tongue. One arm, still circling her waist, pulled her close, but his free hand trailed sneaky fingers up her arm to clasp her neck, then slid back down to the decadent décolletage she’d teased him with.

Bad move on her part. Because now he was using her décolletage the way one might grasp the back of a cat’s neck to paralyze it. As his fingertips gently stroked over the top of her breasts she couldn’t move, heck, she could barely breathe. My God, what could she do? Nothing, nothing but stand here with this insanely sexy man kissing her and try to pretend he had no impact on her at all. His tongue thrust deeper as the hand that had been around her waist slid down and cupped her ass. Oh my, and her ass, it was as though her ass remembered last night, because her hips rolled forward and pressed against his hard cock. Flash of bare skin and hot kisses and his thick shaft sliding into her flooded her mind.

Her hot breasts felt constricted in her bra, and her hips rocked forward and back. Leo’s hand left her breast to move to her jawline. He gently, ever so slowly, pulled back from their kiss.

Was it over? Goodness no, don’t let it be over. She couldn’t open her eyes, not yet.

“Maybe we don’t have a relationship here,” Leo whispered, his lips still so close to hers that his breath tickled them. “Maybe what we have could be called, well, a…convenient arrangement.”

“A convenient arrangement?” Gwen’s eyes fluttered open. While her body wanted to say hell to the yeah, her mind thought a convenient arrangement with Leo sounded like a very bad idea.

“We both acknowledge that we have a mutual attraction for each other.” His hand squeezed her ass and pressed her even tighter to his hard, oh my, very hard cock. “Don’t we?”

She licked her lips and inhaled. “Perhaps.” Her trembling breath made the word sound much less nonchalant than she’d hoped.

Leo’s wicked smile accented the glimmer in his eyes as he leaned back a bit to observe her expression. “Perhaps? Okay,
perhaps
there’s an attraction.” It wasn’t much of an admission for him to make, Gwen thought. No matter what, he couldn’t hide the erection that pressed against her. Hiding that was like trying to put King Kong in a two-car garage. Nope. No hiding that giant. He leaned forward and kissed her neck.

Her knees wobbled and he tightened his arm around her.

“We both acknowledge that neither of us want a relationship,” he whispered in that sinful voice. “Yes?” Gwen’s heart beat hard against her ribs. She did want a relationship…but it was far too late to say so. She’d played the “you can’t hurt me because I don’t care card” earlier today. She couldn’t go back now. To admit that her I-am-woman-hear-me-roar act had been just that, only an act, would mean feeling horribly uncomfortable whenever she ran into Leo, which seemed to be, right now, every day. So basically for the rest of her life.

“Exactly.” Gwen lifted her chin to look steadily at Leo. “No time, no need, no desire for a relationship. Not that it’s you, Leo. I mean you’re definitely a man with obvious talents.” Gwen gave him the kind of flirtatious-but-detached smile she imagined a practiced vixen would bestow. “But I simply can’t get sidetracked right now. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

“Really?” Leo said. “You’re
completely
uninterested? Because last night”—he leaned forward again, his lips so close—“Gwen, you seemed more than a little—”

“Last night was a mistake.” Gwen placed a hand flat on his chest and pushed to create a little breathing room between them. My God, the man’s pecs were made of steel. The desire to dig her fingers into his sweater, yank him forward, and suction her lips to his nearly overwhelmed her. Yowza. Instead, she took a deep breath and pushed even harder against the wall of nearly perfect flesh in front of her. “We both agreed that we wouldn’t talk about it.”

“A mistake only because we didn’t have clarity around the situation.” Leo tilted his head and leaned closer. “Now that we have clarity, I can see that we could, in fact, reach an agreement that could be mutually beneficial.” He shifted his pelvis firmly against hers. King Kong rubbed her kitty.

“Mutually—” A gasp passed over her lips. Electrical pulses tingled through her lady parts and made forming words impossible. She cleared her throat. “Mutually beneficial?”

“You don’t want a relationship, I don’t want a relationship. But this—” Again he ground himself gently against her. My God, if she didn’t have on clothes they’d be doing the vertical mambo. “But you do feel this, right?”

Oh good God, did she feel it. She felt it right between her thighs, pressed against her sensitive lady bits. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Jeez, could she feel more? Her body tightened, her breathing shortened, and—

“Yeah, you feel it too.”

Gwen’s eyelids flipped open. Yes, yes she did feel him, and the electric pleasure that went with his touch, but she certainly didn’t want to. Okay, she wanted to, but she didn’t want the train wreck of what his “mutually beneficial” convenient arrangement would mean, or the inevitable heartbreak to follow. Because while she was ready to play nonchalant tough girl when she saw Leo in public at Travati events and parties and functions, she definitely couldn’t play nonchalant tough girl if she was sleeping with him on the side, like the insatiably horny bunny she actually was where he was concerned.

“Nope, I don’t think so.” Gwen said. She pulled her hips back, loosening Leo’s grasp on her ass and King Kong’s pressure on her kitty. “Too risky. I mean yes, of course I do feel this attraction that we share, Leo.” She threw him a kind of patronizing but noncommittal smile, as if their attraction to each other was an ordinary thing. Such a lie. “But I really don’t want to skulk about and hide this from my friends and your family. You know if any of them discovered that we were in a ‘convenient arrangement,’ they’d never leave us alone. Ever. For the rest of our lives. They’d assume—erroneously, of course—that we were meant for each other. Imagine Aubrey. She’d be unmerciful.  It would just lead to the very type of attention we’d be trying to avoid.”

“Seems like an excellent reason to say no to my offer.”

She smiled.
Ding, a winner!
She’d played this entire scenario perfectly even while her hips had attempted to betray her.

“Except for one thing.”

Her heart skipped a beat and her eyebrow raised. “And that is?”

“This.”

His arms gripped her like an anaconda around a gazelle as his lips descended on hers. Her nipples stiffened beneath the lace of her bra. Her mouth opened to his greedy, demanding, nearly overpowering kiss. Her knees trembled and he tightened his hold. She pressed closer, wanting to rip off his clothes, to let King Kong have his way with any piece of her body that he wanted.

She couldn’t think. Stars exploded behind her eyes like giant fireworks and heat pulsed through her body. How did he do that? Just a kiss, his kiss was like an earthquake, a hurricane, and a tsunami all rolled into one. She’d ceded control of her muscles and her mind; all she wanted was for Leo to carry her to the loveseat and strip her naked. Never mind the living room filled with his family. Nope. None of that mattered a whit, because Leo Travati was a sex god, a complete and utter sex god. Just like last night, when the man kissed her and she’d surrendered, even after all her strong words today, Leo could have his way with her, have her every which way, in fact.

He slowly pulled his lips from hers. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t even open her eyes. Her heart raced much too fast for anything but concentrated breathing.  “You agree we have a conundrum.”

Who could say the word conundrum—no, who could
think
the word conundrum—after a kiss of such earth-shattering proportions?

“Hmm.” Deep breath. She needed to recover her cool, unimpressed exterior somehow. Gwen tapped her fingertip to her lips and opened her eyes. “While I do see your point—your kisses are nice”
Yeah, like David Beckham’s ass looks just okay
. “—I really don’t see this working.” She shook her head slowly, as if breaking the news to a potential intern that they hadn’t gotten the job. “No, this won’t work for me. I’m sure you understand, don’t you?”

She slid out from between Leo and the wall, away from this gorgeous hunk of man that she wanted to eat with a spoon, and closed her eyes. My God, one more kiss like that and she’d be stripping off her clothes for him. She needed to escape this room. Too much heat. Plus, the memories of last night were about to sink her. Her neck was flushed and soon she’d need to fan herself or pass out for lack of oxygen.

She smoothed her hand down the front of her sweater and tugged the edges near her waist. Then she straightened her black crepe skirt. Yes, out. She needed to get out.

Leo grasped her arm. She looked over at him and her breath hitched in her chest. Could he tell how badly she wanted to fall into those eyes, to moan his name as she’d done over and over last night?

He cocked his eyebrow, and with a smug, self-assured smile said, “I think you’re making a mistake.”

Yes. Yes, a big mistake. Every bit of her lady parts wanted to let Leo sleep with her for the next week, month, six months, however long he’d have her…but what then? He’d tire of her, as he always tired of the models and actresses and heiresses, even an astrophysicist. And then she’d be exactly where she was now, only awkward and embarrassed in front of his family and her friends, because inevitably someone, Shelly or Nina or Aubrey, would discover what was going on between them. She really wasn’t that great a liar, especially to women who knew her so well.