A Seductive Proposal (15 page)

Out of nowhere, panic ripped through him. His chest seized. That perplexing pain returned. He had to separate from her now but he didn’t want her to know what he was feeling.

He whispered his need for the bathroom, then lifted off of her. He even kissed her neck. He took his time crossing the room though he felt like breaking into a sprint.

Once inside, he closed the door then got in the shower fast. All that heavy equipment he’d felt earlier seemed to be moving once more inside his chest cavity, digging out the earth. He put his head under the stream of water and let it hit the back of his neck.

Goddammit. What the hell was going on?

* * * * * * * * *

Carly lay in bed. She needed a new word for
sated
. Her muscles had turned to pudding. She’d melded with the sheets and the mattress. She couldn’t move.

She loved having sex with Quint. In her entire life she’d only been with three other men and the first two, during her teen years, could hardly qualify as men. And Jeff? Well, he’d been satisfactory. She’d known pleasure when they made love but nothing like this.

Everything about Quint was new ground for her. Even the way he kissed. She could hardy describe it. Maybe
orchestrated
was the right word, yet nothing about how he worked her lips or her body felt cliché. He had skill but skill alone couldn’t make her feel like this.
Quint
made her feel this way; his hands, his lips, his solid, heavy cock that took charge of her. Maybe that was the difference, that he took charge of her, of her body, of bringing her to climax over and over.

She stretched. She could stay in this room forever.

She glanced at the clock. Already eight.

Yikes. She was usually at work by now.

She hopped from bed and at the same moment heard the fax machine going off in the living-room-turned-command-center.

She had to call Tina. Where was her purse?

She slid into her jeans, her bra and her shirt. She laughed at the sight of her thong all torn up on the floor. If this kept up, she was going to have to purchase some new lingerie.

She crossed into the adjacent room, found her purse and retrieved her phone.

Her cell was dead.

She moved to the desk where Quint’s multi-line phone sat beside the fax machine. She picked up the handset and punched a button to open a line. She had just started to hit the numbers when her gaze landed on the fax to her right.

Her named jumped out at her.

Heat struck her face first then a tremor of agitated nerves slid over her torso.

Why was her name on a fax?

From a company called
Falcon Investigations
?

She hung up the phone and withdrew what turned out to be ten pages of material from the machine’s tray.

She saw all sorts of information about herself on the document, financial information first and foremost including a credit report. The money she had in her two savings accounts, her personal checking account and her business account followed to the penny. The worth of her home was listed, an estimated worth of her business, of her winery, even of her Acura. Pages of documentation added to the weight of the report.

The paragraph concerning her childhood flashed in front of her eyes like a glaring Las Vegas marquee. Orphaned and on her own since eighteen. Father an alcoholic, died of a heart attack. Mother a smoker, died of lung cancer two years prior to her father’s death. No siblings. Worked her way through NAU driving Jeeps for the Sedona Pink Jeep Tour Company. Blah, blah, blah.

Quint had had her investigated.

The shower still ran.

That man,
that stranger, liked long showers.

She picked up the fax and carried it into the bedroom. She settled it on his pillow. She slid into her shoes and grabbed her socks. She returned to his desk, picked up her purse then left.

A few minutes later, when she walked into her own bedroom, she stripped once more and threw her clothes into the hamper. This time she got into the shower and scrubbed her whole body over and over. She washed her hair three times.

She didn’t know what to think or what to do. She was mad and hurt, then hurt and mad. Her mind whirled in circles about Quint, about what kind of person he was that he would have hired a PI to look into her life. She felt like a fool. She thought about Jeff, his self-absorption and drive. Right now he and Quint were a matched set of heavyweight pricks. Yeah, she really knew how to pick ‘em.

She thought she would go crazy with distress and frustration. She really needed help sorting this out. Well, Tina had encouraged her to
get back in the game
. Now her friend was going to have to listen to just how lousy the game had become.

Quint stood by the side of the bed and read the PI report over several times. He had to because his mind wouldn’t focus long enough to make sense of what he was looking at.

So, Carly had seen the report. She’d understood what he’d done and she’d run away.

He sighed.

He should have been glad she was gone. Hadn’t he spent twenty minutes in the shower avoiding her, not knowing what the hell to do with an entire host of desires that had to do with keeping her close…forever?

He had thought this would be simple: Get Carly back in bed, find her weakness, get her winery.

He rubbed his chest and dropped the report on the bed.

He bet she was mad, word-blistering furious.

He turned and planted his ass on the rumpled sheets. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. Her scent rose up around him like a cloud. If she was still here, he’d be on top of her right now.

What the hell was wrong with him? He had to get a grip. He had to put these bizarre sensations in perspective.

Profanities slipped past his lips.

He felt out-of-control and that pissed him off.

Again he forced himself to read the report, the report Carly had read, all about herself, the one he had ordered to have run on her. Her finances were in superb condition. She was more than solvent and zeroed her credit card balance every month. Her credit limit was at forty thousand and her credit score was in the high seven hundreds. Her net worth made him nod in approval. Unfortunately, if she’d had some serious debt, he could have used that against her in his bid for her winery.

Overall, he was pleased. Except for the discovery of the fax, and that he still didn’t have the information he needed to help him get Carly’s winery, the seduction couldn’t be going better.

* * * * * * * * *

“Oh, come on, Carly,” Tina cried. “Of course he had you investigated. Why are you so shocked? This is Quint Barron, multi-multi-millionaire, working his way to a billion. He probably had the cleaning lady who wipes out his toilets investigated.”

Tina lounged in one of the brown leather club chairs in front of Carly’s desk, a leg slung over the arm of the chair. She slid a spoon into a Yoplait banana-and-strawberry yogurt.

Carly leaned her backside against her desk, her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms folded across her chest. “The thing that irks me the most right now is that this doesn’t seem to bother you at all. Why is that?”

Tina licked the spoon clean. “Because I’m not sleeping with him. If my husband, before we were married, had ever pulled a stunt like that I would have strung him up by his left nut.”

Carly winced at the visual but still she laughed. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

Tina shifted her attention away from her yogurt and met Carly’s gaze. “The thing is, you’re in bed with this man, in more ways than one and it’s clear from everything you’ve said that once the Napa weekend is over, he’s out of here. Why get your panties in a wad? Besides, I think payback might be a lot more fun than all this angst. Why don’t you have
him
investigated? Serve him with his own sauce?”

Carly’s gaze drifted as it so often did toward the plate glass window and the tall Mogollon Rim beyond.

She could do that. She could hire a PI and have a report worked up on Quint. That would be a tremendous amount of power to have over him, too, to know all about his finances, his businesses, his homes, even about his childhood.

But how would that serve her?

Maybe give her some release from all this anger, but not much else.

The bottom line? She just couldn’t do it. Hiring a PI to dig up personal information about Quint felt too much like a violation. Maybe he used such reports as SOP in his world, but in her world she would much rather keep things simpler and more real. Either he shared all that data with her, of his own free will, or it just wasn’t worth knowing on any level.

Now that she was much calmer, she faced Tina again. Her office manager worked at scraping every last bit of yogurt from the container, going at an angle all around the inside as she twirled the base in her hand. Carly smiled. She liked having Tina as a friend.

“So, you gonna hire a PI?”

Carly shook her head. “No. Just not my style. I realize he’s given me reason to and in that sense it would be
fair,
but what would I gain?”

“I didn’t think you’d go for it.”

Carly laughed.

Tina looked at her once more and smiled. “So what happens next?”

“I suppose if Quint wants me back in his bed, he’s going to have to work damn hard to get me there again. I’m thinking he can’t do it.”

Tina snorted her disbelief. “That man could move a mountain with his bare toe.”

“Tina Clark, you are no help at all.”

Tina just laughed and licked her spoon one last time.

Now that Carly had calmed down and reorganized her thoughts, she was grateful she’d seen the report. She’d received a harsh dose of reality about Quint’s essential character, something she badly needed to keep at the forefront of her mind. However amazing her time with him in bed had been, she needed to remember that with Quint, this was just sex. She would be a fool to believe it was anything more than that.

“I just think it would be best if we had a more platonic relationship.”

Carly didn’t meet Quint’s gaze. Three days had passed since she’d discovered the fax and she’d worked hard at fending him off. He’d sent her flowers every day, which she had taken to the widows’ board-and-care home without two seconds’ thought.

Right now, she pretended to be engrossed by the itinerary spread out on the shelf below the plate glass window in her office.

He came up behind her and separated the hair on her nape. He kissed her neck and though Carly’s knees buckled, she shied away from him then turned to face him. “That’s not exactly platonic
, Mr
. Barron.”

He backed up to half-sit on the corner of her desk, his arms crossed over his chest. He smiled, his expression almost teasing as he shrugged. “It wasn’t personal. I have everyone investigated.”

“But you don’t
sleep
with everyone. I think that’s the difference. And if I hadn’t been sleeping with you I don’t think it would have mattered much.”

“Either way, it matters to me. You think I haven’t found instances of fraud by having someone investigated?”

At that, she flipped the edge of the remaining page she held gripped in her hand. “I don’t think you expected to find fraud. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I know why you set a PI on my trail.”

“Oh. Why’s that?” He narrowed his gaze. He did that a lot. He also swung his foot. She had the feeling he was enjoying himself a little too much at her expense.

“You had me investigated because you were looking for something to use against me. Do you deny it?”

He shook his head. “Not a bit. This is business. You have something I want. Simple.”

She felt a small geyser go off in her head, streaking straight up and pummeling the inside of her skull. How could he sit there with that stupid half-smile on his lips? Oh, that’s right, he owned the world. He could do whatever he wanted.

She turned back to the itinerary pages and picked them up in succession, last ones first. “You didn’t find anything you could use, did you?”

“Nope.” She heard him sigh. “I can see you’re upset but I still think you’re taking this way too personally. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re just about perfect on paper.”

At that, Carly tensed. So, she was almost perfect on paper. For some reason that bugged her. “Whatever,” she said. Maybe a little juvenile, but yeah…
whatever
.

Strong arms enveloped her from behind. She gasped and felt her cheeks grow warm, a sensation that had nothing to do with embarrassment. “Let me back in, Carly. We’re good together. You know we are. And we’re running out of time. We have only have two weeks now until my guests arrive.”

The door was closed. Tina had gone home an hour ago and night had fallen on the canyon country. She shouldn’t be here alone with Quint.

“You’ll have to forgive me some time,” he murmured, his lips against her neck right next to her ear.

Carly closed her eyes and shivered. She was vulnerable to him but this had to stop. On impulse, she made up a story. “You know, after I found that fax, I decided to hire a PI of my own. I’m waiting for the report. Should come any day now.”

His hands stilled on her arms. His body grew stiff. “You did what?”

She whirled on him. “Hey,” she said, faking a smile. “It’s just business. Nothing personal.”

“But you had no reason to.” He backed away.

“Well, how do I know you can pay for all this furniture you’ve ordered or even the leasing fee?”

“I can pay.” His blue eyes hardened to ice chips.

She stood facing him. She tapped her foot. “Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”

He glared at her. “Your reasons were punitive. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

“You play by an interesting but quite self-serving set of rules, Mr. Barron. You put me in the wrong because of motivation but the results would still be the same, a real sense of violation at having someone root around in your life behind your back. But you don’t need to worry. I lied. I didn’t hire anyone. I thought about it though, I was that mad. However, on the basis of simple decency I decided against doing it. You’d been inside my body. Somehow it just didn’t seem right.”