An Inconvenient Obsession (5 page)

“I don’t hate it,” she said, reaching for it just a second too late and missing.

“No?” Ethan smiled, tipping the picture toward the yellow lamplight. In it, a ten-year-old Cate, gap-toothed and spindly legged, clutched her first jumping ribbon to her scrawny chest while her proud father beamed from behind her shoulders. “You always told me you did.”

She tried to snatch it from him, but he lifted it above her reach, realizing as he did so that she was still the perfect height. The perfect size. “It’s a good one of Father,” she said after another unsuccessful swipe. Giving up, she turned to spin the combination lock on the cash box while averting her gaze. “So I keep it.”

“It’s a good one of you, too,” he told her. He gently returned the frame back to its position next to the ink blotter and traced a fingertip over her shiny ten-year-old braids. He remembered that summer, when Cate had given Ethan her cherished ribbon, telling him he was her first place best friend. He’d ached to kiss her, his heart squeezing in his adolescent chest. But he’d known she was off-limits even then. The help didn’t kiss the boss’s daughter. Ever. “I liked the kid in that picture.”

“Meaning you don’t like me now.”

“I didn’t say that.” Though it was true. Looking back, he realized she’d been toying with him all along, wrapping him around her spoiled little finger so he’d accommodate her every whim. And he had. He’d done everything she asked and more, anything to please her. Anything to make her smile.

“You didn’t have to say it,” she said. “I heard it all the same.”

“Are you about done, Cate?” Not wanting to sink any further into inconvenient memories, he turned to face her with his arms crossed over his chest. This place felt old. Stuffy. It brought all his youthful insecurities to light, inciting feelings he hadn’t entertained for years.

As if he weren’t good enough. Still.

“Give me another minute.”

He rolled his shoulders, relaxed his jaw and strode toward the wall of black windows, staring sightlessly past his own reflection in the black glass. He had nothing to worry about.
He
was the one with the power now. He was the one who’d win. Hell, given time, he could see the entire Carrington building
razed if he wanted, and there was nothing Cate or her father could do about it.

Irritated with himself, he turned away from the window and stared at Cate’s bent head. He clasped his hands behind his back and imagined the excuses Cate would try to invoke once she’d put the money away. Would she feign fatigue? Would she look at him with those limpid green eyes and beg for respite? And would he still have to fight the urge to please her? To pull her close and vow to give her anything she wanted, anything at all, while the heat rose between them?

No. Damn it all. He wasn’t here to bend to her will, to feel sorry for her, to soften. He was here to seduce her while remaining remote and aloof. He was here to show her he didn’t care. That her opinion meant nothing. Nothing.

Cate’s breath caught in her throat as Ethan watched her from the shadows of her father’s office. His presence, coupled with his brooding, smoldering eyes, seemed to consume all the air, to lend an impossible heat to the nervous energy that had plagued her all night.

An unexpected hunger swept through her, making her mouth go dry and her fingers itch to touch his bronzed skin. She recognized the flood of desire from her youth, the wild, drunken excitement that had kept her up nights and made sleep impossible. “I’m almost done,” she said, and cleared her throat. “I just need to transfer everything to the safe.”

She bent down, opened the bottom right panel of the desk, then worked the combination until the safe clicked open. Stalling for time, she removed the cash and checks from the box and proceeded to sort them by denomination and donor in neat lines atop her father’s desk blotter. She could feel Ethan’s eyes on her as she bent to place each pile into its own spot along the safe’s interior edge. Her thoughts raced and
her fingers began to tremble as she reached the last pile and realized Ethan could be put off no longer.

He returned to the desk and placed a hand on its corner, his thighs perilously close to her bent head. She reared upright and he took advantage of her retreat to nudge the desk closed with his knee. The safe clicked shut with the finality of a death knell and he moved to lean against her last excuse for delay.

Trapped between his big body and her father’s chair, Cate felt her options for escape dwindle to nothing.

He peered down at her, an odd flicker deepening the blue of his eyes. “You’re done, Cate.”

Cate stared up at him, the lamplight creating a nimbus around his head while his gaze bored into hers. She felt a tide of heat coming over her body, suffusing her skin with a tingling desire to explore the hard lines of his face. His chest. His everything. The surface of her stomach and thighs felt as if he’d breathed his hot, teasing breath over her without touching her even once. “No,” she whispered.

“Yes.” Ethan extended his hand and she flinched backward. Her withdrawal bumped the backs of her knees against the chair, and she wavered unsteadily, her balance as unsettled as her emotions.

Sardonic amusement tugged at his mouth as his hand darted forward, steadying her as she abruptly sat. She felt his tensile fingers grip her forearm just above the bones of her wrist. She didn’t fight him, remaining pliable and biddable within his grasp, despite the maelstrom of her thoughts. Her pulse thundered beneath his thumb and she felt the brush of his pant legs against her knees. Though they remained separated by multiple layers of silk and wool, she felt swollen. Hot and aroused and scared.

“Ethan,” she said desperately, easing her wrist from his grasp. “It’s late. Practically morning.”

“So?”

“So it’s too late to drive all the way out to Long Island.”

That crooked smile of his flattened and authoritative command flashed in his eyes. He obviously wasn’t accustomed to being waylaid, and she felt his immutable will gather like the waves before a storm. “You honestly think that tactic will work with me?”

“It should,” she blurted. “I don’t know why you want to take care of it tonight, anyway. We can have our lawyers deal with all the paperwork tomorrow.”

“I never delegate personal transactions to my staff.”

Cate swallowed, daring to meet his eyes. “Signing papers is personal?”

His blue gaze intensified. “For the island? Yes. As I said before, the memories I have of the place are quite … charming.”

A casual observer wouldn’t have detected the subtext in his words, so smooth was his delivery. But she wasn’t a casual observer, and they both knew it.
Charming?
she thought, her emotions a crazy blend of anguish and tortured amusement. The memories she had were anything
but
charming. They haunted her, had consumed her, had been the only thread of hope that had kept her fighting to live. To walk.

How many pain-filled days and wretched nights had those memories been her only solace? She knotted her hands in her lap. “It’s been abandoned for years, you know,” she told him, braving his censure as she maintained eye contact. “I can’t vouch for its upkeep.”

“But surely you remember that the wildness of it was my favorite part,” he said in a low voice filled with promise. With danger. His long, narrow feet inched toward hers as he relaxed back against the edge of her father’s desk and crossed his arms over his wide chest. She felt the heat radiating off of him. Too close. “The ripe, sultry scents. The tropical heat that made me lazy and uninhibited and … reckless.”

Cate heard his memories in the words, the memories of them, together. The way they’d raced each other along the water’s edge, splashing and shrieking and falling together as the waves crashed over their bodies. The way he’d trickled dry, hot sand onto her bare stomach. The way he’d painted the edges of her bikini, first with the bright flamingo lily, then with the tentative tips of his callused fingers. “Yes, well,” she said at last, forcing a smile despite her nervous swallow. “It sounds like you and your father will be happy there, then.”

“Happy,” he repeated, his face inscrutable, but his eyes still claiming hers.

Gingerly, Cate withdrew from his heat, pressing her shoulders against the back of the chair. “Yes. You deserve happiness, and I’ve always hoped you’d found it.”

“You,” he said, the seductive note in his voice flattening to terseness, “wish me to be happy.”

“Of course I do!” she insisted, thinking of their earlier friendship, the easy way they’d loved each other. She’d been happy then. They both had been, and she still grieved the aching loss of that effortless joy. “Despite everything else, you must know that I’ve never wanted anything but your happiness and success.” She’d given up everything,
everything,
so that he could have a future.

He stared at her in silence, unmoving except for the flexing of his jaw. “Happiness is overrated,” he finally said.

“You can’t mean that,” she whispered. She’d sacrificed too much, lost too much, and she wouldn’t survive if she believed it had all been for nothing. “You can’t be that bitter.”

“But success?” he interrupted, reclaiming his sardonic edge of humor. “Success supplies everything a man like me could ever want.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Though, to be honest, I’m not sure it’s what you had in mind.”

“It’s not.”

“Success grants me control, Cate. Power. Influence,” he
said. His eyes, sharp with intent, didn’t match the easy, composed tone of his voice. “It lets me get what I want, whenever I want it.”

Disappointment in his hard, ruthless words tightened her features, made her tongue feel thick within her mouth. “You’re not like that.”

“I’m not?” Though she hadn’t been aware of him shifting closer, there was no denying his sudden, looming nearness. He didn’t touch her, but the solid bulk of his torso, the heat of his stare, burned her with acute intensity.

Within the protesting storm of emotions, a raw physical wanting clenched and fluttered and yearned. She went weak with the hunger to touch him, to pull his head to her breast and soothe the harshness from his brow. She shouldn’t have allowed him to follow her up here, she thought wildly. She should have run from him the moment she’d left the dance floor. “Don’t,” she warned him feebly, her heart filling her throat.

“Don’t what?” he ground out. “Buy the island? Donate money to all those helpless little babies?” His glance traced her eyes, her cheeks and her mouth, warm and close and terrifying. “Make the Carrington auction an unrivaled
success?”

“I …” She couldn’t think with him so close. Couldn’t string one coherent thought together with his big body hovering so intimately over hers.

“You brought this on yourself, Cate,” he told her, his icy blue gaze trapping hers. “The minute you decided to sell the island, you invited me here.”

Cate forced her eyes to stay open, to remain outwardly unaffected by his outrageous words. “I did no such thing,” she protested on a scandalized whisper.

“You’re telling me you didn’t put it up for auction because you wanted me here?”

Fire seeped into her cheeks. “Of course I didn’t!”

“Ah, Catydid,” he breathed, his fingers lifting to graze her cheek. “You always were a terrible liar.”

A wave of wanting flooded her limbs, tugged deep within her stomach. “I don’t want this, Ethan. I swear I don’t.”

“Too bad, sweet, because
I
do,” he said, lifting hooded eyes to hers. “Only this time, I won’t scurry off with my tail between my legs just because you’ve changed your mind about us.”

Flame kissed her skin, tinged with a hint of guilt. “Ethan, I didn’t …” she started, before her denial trailed off into a futile, damning silence.

His smile flashed again, predatory and triumphant. “We have unfinished business.” His voice was low with soft, dangerous menace. “You know it as well as I.”

“No,” she managed, her heart leaping within her throat. “You said it was in the past. Surely you don’t intend to pick up where we left off.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said quietly, his breath skimming her mouth with searing intent. “And you won’t stop me, either, because you want me just as much as I want you.”

“I don’t,” she blurted, needing to call a halt to the dizzying implications of his words. “This is crazy.
You’re
crazy.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Rational thought scattered as Ethan leaned to lift a strand of hair from her cheek. One hand braced against the arm of the chair and his knee pressed against the seam between hers. Cate felt her self-control waver, his closeness stripping her of her resistance. His scent filled her nostrils—the clean smell of his flesh, the hint of mint and cologne mixed with the warm, heady essence she’d never, ever forgotten. Inhaling deeply, the impact of his nearness jolted her on an elemental, cellular level. How could she fight him when he was so close?

Tethered to him by her own longing, she remained immobile as his knee nudged hers apart and his fingers tucked the
hair behind her ear and then trailed down to the side of her neck. Before she realized the precariousness of her position, his hand cupped the back of her skull in a steady, yet gentle grip.

Too soon, she realized she hadn’t even tried to resist him. Too soon, she realized her body had communicated what her mind wanted to keep hidden. Weak with excitement, desire and worry that he’d stop before he’d begun, she could only hang suspended, awaiting his next move.

“Tell me you don’t want this,” he breathed against the sensitive shell of her ear. Hot breath soughed over her jaw, her cheek, her mouth, and she felt her body go taut with need. The fact that she didn’t fight him seemed to intensify the heat climbing between them, inflaming him. “Tell me,” he demanded as drugged anticipation tipped her head back beneath his.

The memories of their shared past, of the agonizing tide of frustrated arousal and longing, consumed her in a torrent of desire, and she no longer cared about the reasons she should push him away. She couldn’t think beyond now, this moment, and the feel of Ethan’s hot mouth capturing hers.