Challenging Gabriel (Knight Security 2)

Knight Security Series 2

Challenging Gabriel

By

Carole Mortimer

USA Today Bestselling Author

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2016 Carole Mortimer

Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper Designs

Editor: Linda Ingmanson

Formatter: Matthew Mortimer

ISBN: 978-1-910597-32-3 (mobi)

ISBN: 978-1-910597-33-0 (ePub)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved.

DEDICATIONS

Peter

As Always

Prologue

Eight years ago

She’s here.

I don’t know where she is or how I know she’s here. I just do.

I’ve been coming back to this club night after night for three weeks now. Hoping to see her again. To talk with her. To
be
with her.

Finally, she’s back. I can’t see her yet, but I know she’s here somewhere. I can feel her. The air is charged with her presence. My body is charged with the same expectation.

She’s here, somewhere.

I fucking
know
it.

When I breathe in, I even think I catch faint wafts of her perfume. Citrus and spice, and that unique feminine aroma that’s all
her
. As usual, it’s caused my cock to harden in anticipation.

I ignore that ache as I slowly turn and allow my narrowed gaze to scan the booths to one side of the club, searching for that familiar golden hair cascading down the length of her spine. I look at couple after couple. Group after group. But I know at a glance none of them is her.

The dance floor next. My gaze passes over the gyrating bodies, one by one. Searching. Half dreading finding her again, only to see she’s with another man. That had better not be the case. For his sake. Because anyone who gets in the way of my being with her will be dealt with. Eliminated. Quietly. Efficiently.

None of the women on the dance floor are her.

So where the fuck—

My breath leaves my lungs with a noisy whoosh as I see her standing at the other end of the bar. She’s ordering a drink, laughing and talking with the redhead serving behind the bar.

My quarry is a little over five feet tall, with long blonde hair and gray eyes, and skin I know is as smooth as silk to the touch, and tastes of heat and honey. She’s so beautiful, looking at her is like gazing directly at the sun. Blinding. Dazzling. Sucking all the air from my lungs.

My eyes remain narrowed as I step forward, uncaring of who stands in my way as I walk determinedly toward her. No one is unwise enough to check or rebuke me for that single-minded pursuit. Maybe because they know, by the coiled tension that must be rolling off my body, if anyone tries to stop me from reaching her, I’ll walk straight over or through them. Their choice.

I’ve waited three hellish long weeks for her to come back to the club, and she isn’t going to get away from me a second time.

Not ever again, if I have my way.

And I invariably do.

Chapter 1

Present day

She’s here.

He can sense her. Feel her. Breathing in, his senses are flooded with her perfume, citrus and spice, along with that unique feminine aroma that is all her. He can almost
taste
the sweet honey between her legs, the hot and heady musk—

“Your eleven o’clock appointment is here, Gabriel.”

What the fu—!

Gabriel gave a start as he was jolted back into the present by his secretary’s announcement. It took several disorientated seconds for him to even realize he was sitting in the chair behind his desk, in the CEO’s office in the Knight Security building.

One minute he had been leaning back in his chair, staring out the huge picture window at the London skyline as he waited for his next appointment to arrive, and the next he had been transported back into the past. No explanation. No warning. Just there.

God, so completely there.

Every part of him had been saturated with her. Touch. Sight. Smell. Taste.

It had all been so fucking real, his cock was hard and engorged and tenting the front of the tailored trousers of his suit.

Why the fuck was he thinking about her now?

He hadn’t thought about her in years. Hadn’t
allowed
himself to think about her for years. His dreams were another matter, however, and in the early years, he had often woken, saturated in sweat and his own cum, after a particularly graphic dream about her. As the years passed, the memories hadn’t grown dimmer, but his self-control had grown stronger, and he had managed to banish her from his thoughts, from his memory, and eventually from his dreams.

But even in those early years, he had never zoned out the way he had just now. Becoming so immersed in memories of her, he had no awareness of where he was, or what time it was.

What could have triggered the memories today? Why the hell—

“Gabriel?”

He turned his head round so fast, he gave himself whiplash.

Standing in the doorway of his office, slightly to the left of his secretary, was another woman.

A woman who smelled of citrus and spice, and a feminine aroma that was uniquely her.

Angel?

The perfume was the same, but otherwise…

The black tailored knee-length dress the woman wore was sophisticated and obviously expensive, her legs long and silky above three-inch-heel shoes. Her figure was a bit on the thin side, even though she had curves in all the right places. The blonde hair was trimmed to shoulder length, and styled professionally in wispy layers. Gray, long-lashed eyes looked at him coolly, almost dispassionately.

Without recognition?

If that was so, then that lack of recognition didn’t quite tally with her familiarity in addressing him by his first name a few seconds ago.

Whether this woman was Angel or merely a woman who looked very much like her, Gabriel felt at a complete disadvantage at being caught daydreaming in his office in the middle of the morning, when he was expecting clients. Even when he wasn’t expecting clients. Jesus, Knight Security was his place of work. A serious place, where he carried out serious business. Lives depended on him keeping his shit together. Which meant he didn’t allow himself to go off into fucking daydreams and getting hard-ons thinking about a woman he hadn’t set eyes on in eight years.

“I’m your eleven o’clock appointment.” The woman spoke evenly in that voice that was Angel’s and yet somehow not. This woman’s voice was cold, controlled, whereas Angel’s had always been infused with life. Or screaming his name as she came.

He eyed her guardedly. “You are?”

A cool dip of her head. “I have some…business I need to discuss with you.” She gave his secretary a pointed glance.

Gabriel checked the screen of his laptop. “You’re
Mrs.
Sinclair?”

Her mouth tightened. “I am, yes.”

He glanced down at her slender left hand, noting the ring finger was adorned with a thin gold wedding band. Which explained why he hadn’t made the connection between her and his next appointment. If this was
his
Angel, then her surname had been Jones eight years ago. Angela Jones.

Angel.

His
Angel.

Until she wasn’t.

The woman standing in front of him wasn’t
his
Angel either. This woman was composed, sophisticated, every inch the well-dressed, impeccably coiffured wife of a very rich man. A man who expected his beautiful wife to always look perfect and behave with gracious self-confidence. The ideal hostess to his business associates, the trophy wife on his arm whenever they went out together.

Gabriel’s Angel had been just twenty years old, alone in the world after her mother had died when she was fourteen and her father a year before he met her. She was using the money they had left her to put herself through university.

The night Gabriel met her, she had been wearing an only-just-decent skirt and a fitted tube top, her almost waist-length hair a cascade of blonde waves. He almost groaned aloud as he remembered how warm and sweet-smelling those curls had been when they moved in a caress across his naked thighs as she bent over to take his cock into her mouth.

His gaze fixed on the fullness of the coral-painted lips of the woman who had introduced herself as Mrs. Sinclair. Were they the same lips that had once wrapped themselves about his cock and pleasured him? He couldn’t say for sure.

Gabriel gave a frustrated shake of his head. “I’m afraid Knight Security isn’t taking on new clients at the moment.” Even if it transpired this woman wasn’t Angel, he didn’t want to work with her.
For
her. This woman brought back far too many memories he would much rather forget.

That he needed to forget, if he wanted to function properly. He might have tried not to think of her for years, but his brief time with Angel had become the yardstick by which he measured all other women. They always came up wanting.

She turned to Josey. “Is that true?”

His secretary looked uncomfortable. “I… Well—”

“Obviously not.” The woman sighed. “If you will excuse us?” She smiled politely at Josey. “I believe Gabriel is about to spout a load of bullshit, and it’s probably for the best if you don’t stay around to witness my reaction to it.”

Josey gave a surprised bark of laugher, which she quickly brought under control as Gabriel glared at her. “I’ll be right outside in my office if you need me.” She hurried from the room and closed the door behind her.

A blonde brow arched over mocking gray eyes. “Are you going to need her, Gabriel?”

Fuck, this woman certainly treated him like Angel had. He had been thirty years old eight years ago, a soldier, a trained warrior, but Angel had never been in the least frightened or in awe of him. As so many others had been, and still were.

Gabriel might have tried to convince himself—hoped—this wasn’t Angel, but he knew, in his heart of hearts, it was her. She might look different, act different,
but the reaction of his cock didn’t lie. That part of him had known Angel was somewhere near long before Gabriel’s other senses had. There might have been an office wall between them, but he had no doubt her perfume must have wafted through that barrier, and the slightest hint of that perfume had transported him back eight years in time. To Angel. To the hunter and the hunted.

“Are you?” she challenged.

Fuck, he had to stop staring at her as if she were an apparition, and start behaving like Gabriel Knight, CEO of Knight Security. One of, possibly
the
most, prestigious security companies in the world. As Gabriel Knight, head of that company, was known to be one of the scariest bastards in that same world.

He might have a more sophisticated appearance too, in his tailored suits, and silk shirts and ties. But underneath those civilized trappings he was still the same man who would walk straight over, or through, anyone who tried to get in the way of what he wanted.

As he had once wanted Angel to the point of obsession.

“Doubtful,” he drawled.

“That’s what I thought.” Mrs. Sinclair nodded. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?”

“No point,” he bit out. “I’ve already told you, we aren’t taking on new clients right now.”

Temper flickered briefly in her eyes before it was quickly brought under control. “Knight Security isn’t, or you, personally?”

“I don’t take clients
personally
.”

Surprise widened her eyes. “No?”

His mouth thinned with derision. “I’m strictly a sitting-behind-a-desk man nowadays. I tell other people where to go and what needs doing when they get there.”

“That’s new.”