Читать книгу Bedded By The Boss - Jennifer Lewis, Yvonne Lindsay - Страница 11

Three

“Seventy-six bottles of beer on the wall, seventy-six bottles of beer…” Her voice was cracking, her throat clenched with terror.

“You’ve survived, Sara, open your eyes.” Elan’s words penetrated her shattered consciousness.

“Oh, God.” Her whole body was rigid. Her eyelids squeezed tight as she struggled to shut out reality.

“We’re above the clouds now. There’s no danger.” His low voice rose over the mellow drone of the jet engines.

Gingerly she opened her eyes, and the bright light gleaming through the row of tiny oval windows threatened to blind her. Silhouetted against it was Elan’s face, features creased with concern.

She realized she was clutching both his hands in a death grip. But she couldn’t let go. Desire had nothing to do with it. She clung to him out of sheer terror.

“See, it’s not so bad. The plane cruises along. You can’t even see the ground from up here.”

“Oh, God.” The thought of the ground miles and miles below made her stomach drop.

“Are you going to be ill?”

Oh, God, please don’t let me throw up. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

“I’m sorry I’m such a …” Wimp? Wuss? Weak woman?

“Don’t apologize, Sara. Many people are afraid of flying.” He gave her hands a quick reassuring squeeze.

She took a deep breath, and another. They were airborne. Oh, God.

“You’ve never flown before?” His look of tender concern caused a swell of emotion to rise to her throat. She swallowed hard.

“No.”

“I thought Americans flew everywhere.”

“Some do, I guess. Not me.” She still couldn’t believe they were above the clouds. At the thought a fresh surge of horror seized her gut. She saw her anxiety reflected in Elan’s pained expression.

He wrenched one of his big hands free from her rigor-mortis clench. As Sara shuddered with—fear?—he unbuckled his seat belt in one swift motion and slid his arm around her shoulder.

The warmth of his sturdy arm encircling her shivering torso soothed her as she leaned into it. She took a deep breath. Maybe she could survive this after all.

“Your family didn’t fly abroad on vacation?”

She let out a snort of laughter. A nervous explosion. “No, we rarely left the city limits. My family’s finances were strictly hand to mouth.”

“They were poor?”

“Very.”

“Oh.” His lips pursed as he appeared to consider the information. Would it make him think less of her? Surely not. It was hardly her fault. Though she didn’t plan to be poor again if she could help it.

“But you’re from Wisconsin, aren’t you? How did you come to Nevada?”

“By road.”

“On your bicycle?” His eyebrows shot up.

She laughed again. The release of laughter and the comfort of his reassuring embrace steadied her nerves.

“No, I drove a car. An old clunker. It died as soon as I got here. That’s why I ride a bike now.”

He smiled. “I’m relieved to hear it. But you’ll buy another car, no?”

“Eventually.”

As soon as I pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. She didn’t really want him to know about that. Her personal burdens were nobody’s business.

“The color is returning to your cheeks.” He spoke softly. The deep, mellow tone of his voice was intimate, assuring. She gradually became conscious of the way their bodies were entwined. Elan still leaned into her airplane seat, his strength wrapped around her.

His broad chest pushed into her shoulder. The firm surface of his pectorals rubbed against her, heating her through the thin fabric of their clothes. The vibrations from the jet’s engine hummed through them both, causing little shock waves of sensation to surge through her, heating and arousing her from head to toe.

The color returned to her cheeks in a blaze of glory.

She tore her eyes from him. As her fear ebbed it was being replaced by an entirely different sensation.

Lust.

His hand rested on her waist just below her right breast. A curl of heat rose in her belly as she became aware of the pad of each long, dexterous finger pushing gently against her skin, warming her through her blouse. Her breast stirred beneath her shirt. Her nipple hardened, craving his touch.

And she was conscious of the scent of him—earthy, musky, with an exotic note of fragrance that wound itself through the air around her.

Elan.

Secret fantasies were coming to life. Dreams stalking the daylight. Her most humiliating craven longing fulfilled in the touch of this man.

Her boss.

As her body tingled with the sensation of sheer physical excitement, her mind struggled with the knowledge that his embrace was purely a gesture of compassion. If he knew what was going on in her body, in her mind, he’d recoil in horror.

But she couldn’t help wanting to prolong the illicit pleasure, the dangerous high of being held in the arms of the man whose allure was the torment of her days and the solace of her lonely nights.

Yes, she dreamed about him—waking dreams, as well as sleeping dreams. Fantasies, the shame-laced release of all the pent-up emotion bottled inside her at the end of a long day spent in close proximity to him.

But never as close as this.

On impulse she looked at him and her heart seized as she read the expression in his narrowed eyes.

I want you.

His irises were nearly black, indistinguishable from his pupils, fathomless depths, wells that drew from a dark, secretive soul. But at that moment she knew exactly what was on his mind.

Just as he knew exactly what was on hers.

In a sudden flurry of activity they disentangled themselves. She cleared her throat and smoothed the front of her blouse. He snatched up his Wall Street Journal and arranged it in his lap with a good deal of rustling.

He fiddled with his tie. Ran his fingers through his hair. Unhooked his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves. He shuffled his paper, appearing to scan the columns with keen interest.

Avoiding her glance.

Sara leaned stiffly back into her seat. She had no idea where her briefcase was. In the paralytic terror that had accompanied her onto the aircraft she’d been aware of nothing but an urge to run screaming back down the ramp to the safety of terra firma.

Oddly, though, she wasn’t afraid anymore.

Fear seemed a paltry emotion after the intense, primal madness that seized and shook her as Elan held her.

She cleared her throat. “Um, I can’t seem to remember where I put my briefcase.”

He gave her a quick look of alarm and pointed to where it lay at her feet.

“Thank you.” She rifled inside it, bending forward and letting her hair hang down to conceal her crimson face. She pulled out a report she wanted to proofread and made a big show of finding her place and uncapping her pen.

She sneaked a glance at him. His expression was stony as he read his paper. He snapped the big pages open and scrutinized the tiny print with focused intensity. She attempted to concentrate on the dense scientific text in front of her, but her mind couldn’t make sense of the words.

“I’m sorry.” The words formed on her lips of their own accord.

I’m sorry I can’t stop wanting you in just the way you despise.

“For what?” He didn’t look up from his paper.

“For being a gibbering idiot. I had no idea I was going to react like that. I guess I’m officially a white-knuckle flier.” She bit her lip. It was humiliating to see how little control she’d displayed in the face of fear.

“It’s no matter,” he said brusquely, without glancing up from the text. He snapped open another page, appeared to study it for a moment, then looked up. “There’s no shame in showing fear of flying through the clouds.”

His stony features softened as he looked at her. Sara swallowed hard as a strange surge of emotion threatened to overflow its boundaries. Fear, embarrassment and forbidden lust all roiled inside her, her poor nerve-racked body a fragile vessel for so much unfamiliar torment.

Poor Sara! He could see how greatly she suffered. She’d not betrayed even a moment of hesitation, had not mentioned her lack of flying experience until her fears overcame her as they boarded the aircraft.

Her obvious terror filled him with a powerful protective instinct that shook him to the core. He wanted nothing more than to put his arms around her and comfort her.

And the protective urge frightened him far more than any of the transient sexual thoughts that bedeviled him in her presence.

He’d left his home and his cruel father behind to build his own life, free of ties and obligations he had no use for. He needed no one and no one needed him—until he saw the fear that racked her delicate body and brought tears to her pale jade eyes. He couldn’t sit and watch her suffer. And holding her was a pleasure beyond imagining. At his touch she softened and relaxed. Her shivering eased and her flesh warmed. She leaned into his embrace, welcomed his touch. Welcomed him.

Desire had seized him. Desire to offer her far more than comfort, to take far more than the satisfaction of soothing her fears.

He wanted to experience the sweet agony of her soft body pressed against his. To sink his fingertips into her lush curves. To fill her with the joy that swept through him each time she flashed her lovely smile in his direction.

And she was his for the taking. He could see that.

That knowledge alone should extinguish his desire.

“I bet you were a kid the first time you flew in a plane.” Her voice startled him out of his tortured contemplation and forced him to refocus on the paper he’d been pretending to read.

“Yes, age eleven.” He didn’t dare look up. Those wide eyes cast a spell on him that right now he had no power to resist.

“Were you taking a vacation with your parents?”

A vacation? Did the concept even exist in his country? “No.”

“Well?” Her lips twitched in a half smile as she waited for him to expand. Soft, delicate lips, thin and mobile.

That begged his mouth to close over them.

He struggled to wrench his mind back to her question about his first plane ride. And the memory it conjured dampened his feelings of pleasure.

“I left my home in Oman for the first time to fly to boarding school in England.”

That day he’d left everything he knew, everyone he held dear, to find himself alone and afraid in a strange, cold country where no one understood his speech and customs. It had been a journey from which he would never truly return.

“Were you frightened?”

“Yes. Though perhaps not as you might imagine. I enjoyed the flight. Young boys take pleasure in the power of big machines.” He forced what he hoped looked like a natural smile.

“Why did your parents send you away to school?”

Why indeed? Not so he could receive an excellent education, though that had been a result. Not so he could become familiar with the ways of western culture, though in time he had.

So his father could punish his mother. Rip her favorite child from her arms and banish him to a far land. Simply to show her that he could.

Anger still burned in his gut at the memory of his mother weeping as his father’s aides dragged her screaming son away from her for the last time. Elan never saw her again. Her health was already frail—a neurological ailment—and after he was sent away her decline was swift, her death sudden.

And he could never forgive his father for taking her life as surely as if he’d slashed a knife at her throat.

He realized Sara was waiting for an answer to her question. “They thought it would turn me into a man.”

That, too, was true. His father had reviled his close relationship with his mother. Abhorred how when he was little he’d liked to crawl into her bed to seek comfort from his nightmares, how he followed her on her daily rounds, laughing with her and the women, enjoying her gentle humor and loving caresses.

No son of mine will hide himself in the skirts of a woman! His father’s words still rang in his ears.

“Leaving home so young must have been hard.” Sara’s voice trembled a little as she said the words softly. He realized she must be responding to emotion on his face. A twinge of embarrassment warred with an urge to tell her more.

“Yes. I spoke little English. I’d rarely been to the nearest city, let alone out of the country. I’d spent every day in the bosom of my family, and suddenly I was torn from all I’d ever known. Strange people, strange language, strange food and the English weather…”

Words poured from his tongue unbidden as Sara’s kind eyes watched him. “I missed the bright sun of my home almost as much as I missed my family.”

“I’ve heard the weather in England is a bit grim.” She smiled tentatively.

“My horses were as surprised as I was. They couldn’t understand why the sun had vanished and water kept falling from the skies. They at least enjoyed lush green grass.”

“You took horses with you to boarding school?” Her eyes twinkled with curiosity and interest that only fired Elan’s impulse to share memories he’d kept locked away for so long.

“Yes. I brought my two favorite stallions with me. The school insisted on gelding them. They said stallions couldn’t run with the other horses.”

The painful memory of his close companions being deprived of their manhood stung him. It seemed so symbolic at the time. The three of them together were humbled aliens in a strange land, stripped of their former power and position and all they knew. But together they’d found a way to survive. They’d learned a new language, figured out the rules and learned to play by them.

That long, hard exile from his country and from everyone he’d ever loved had made him into the man he was today.

“Aren’t stallions supposed to be dangerous?” The innocent awe in Sara’s eyes lifted the gloom descending on him.

“They must be handled with care. But a man who’s ridden a stallion can never truly be satisfied with any other horse. To harness the feral power of the herd leader and to move with him as one is an experience like no other.”

A delicate flush spread up across Sara’s chin and cheeks. At first he was surprised, then he realized his words must have triggered a rather different image than the one he intended.

Perhaps she imagined how it would feel to ride him.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Sara’s blush darkened a shade further.

To be sure, the image intrigued him, too.

The thought of her slim thighs squeezing him, her long, delicate fingers wound into his hair, her hips moving against him, urging him on—

Elan quickly rearranged his paper to cover his lap. His breathing was in danger of becoming audible and he struggled to focus his mind on something that would douse his desire.

Sara’s lips parted as she wrenched her eyes from his face and rifled through her briefcase. Her skin flushed crimson right down to her blouse. Fair skin could be a terrible disadvantage. Her thoughts were literally written all over her face.

But he couldn’t help wondering what other parts of her body might redden in response to his presence. Nipples blushing like ripe berries. The delicate flower of her sex a pink rose inviting him to taste its nectar, beckoning him to bury his face in its soft petals—

He cleared his throat loudly and rustled his newspaper. “Pardon me. Something in my throat.” Mercifully his dark skin did not betray the sudden flush of heat surging though his body.

He was rock-hard, straining painfully against the zipper of his pants. He regretted removing his jacket, but if he rose to retrieve it from the seats on the other side of the aircraft, his situation would be very evident. Only the Wall Street Journal prevented his lust from being clearly visible to its instigator.

Why on earth did this woman have such an appalling effect on him? He felt like a man who’d wandered lost in the desert for months without water then stumbled across a glittering oasis. He gasped with hunger and thirst that had nothing to do with food and drink.

He’d not been celibate for the past decade. Women flung themselves at him on a regular basis, and sometimes he took what they offered. They had their needs, he had his. The enjoyment was mutual, the parting inevitable. Some of them sought a rich beau to pamper them, some of them an exotic lover to walk on the wild side with.

He could give them what they wanted without giving up anything of himself.

None of them saw the man inside. The simple man humbled by the poverty of his spirit. The lonely soul who had learned at the hands of his father that love and affection were crimes to be met with harsh and lasting punishment.

He was no longer capable of love and the knowledge did not even pain him anymore.

Well. That little train of thought had taken care of his erection nicely.

He flipped the page of his newspaper and sneaked a sidelong glance at Sara.

She’d fallen asleep?

Good.

He felt genuine relief for her. It would be far better for her to sleep quietly through their return to earth. The jolt of the landing would be a rude enough awakening.

Some of the client sites they visited had runways that tested the skill of the most experienced pilots. The site they were traveling to was remote, a new field, the runway probably still dusted with freshly turned soil. Even he sometimes became alarmed at the sight of rocky, uneven terrain rising up to meet the plane at high speed.

Quietly, he laid his newspaper aside. He didn’t want its crinkling to rouse her from her peaceful slumber.

And she did look peaceful. Her delicate lashes rested against her cheeks. She did not wear mascara and her lashes were a soft, dark gold color, like the soil of his homeland.

Her cheeks were still flushed with pink, and her lips parted, moist, as if she’d just licked them.

And maybe she had.

What dreams danced in her head that caused her face to shimmer with a secret smile? A smile that didn’t play upon her lips or sparkle in her closed eyes, but that lit her features with an inner radiance and made them glow with enchantment.

He didn’t feel anything so mundane as lust for her at this moment. Her loveliness was a balm to his spirit.

And he respected her business acumen. She displayed an astonishing knack for putting clients at ease, for explaining complicated concepts without blinding business people with science, the way he tended to. He knew he often came off as pompous and standoffish. He wondered if she saw him that way. Probably. And she was probably right.

On their relatively short acquaintance he could see that Sara was a remarkable woman in many ways. A woman who deserved to be treated with respect. And as a mark of his respect he would not take advantage of her attraction to him.

Or his attraction to her.

He was a grown man. He could control his base instincts, rein them in the way he reined in the potentially dangerous power of the stallions he rode. She was a valuable employee. And he would do well to remember that when his primal urges threatened to get the better of him.

“Oh, God!” Jolted awake by a loud bang and a sudden jarring sensation, Sara couldn’t remember where she was. “Did we crash?”

“No.” Elan’s eyes were on her as she opened her own. “We’ve landed. We’re on the ground.”

The plane shook and rattled, jarring Sara’s rigid body as the wheels shuddered along the crude runway.

“Did I fall asleep?” Stupid question. Of course she had. Though how on earth that had happened she couldn’t imagine. A response to sensory overload, perhaps? “Don’t answer that.”

Elan didn’t look as if he had any intention of answering. Casual chitchat wasn’t his style. An odd memory of singing with him crept into her consciousness. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.” Must have been a dream. Weird. And in her dream the singing was his idea. Weirder.

In a rush it all came back to her. Her humiliating display of terror as they’d boarded the aircraft. The way she’d practically hyperventilated as they taxied along the runway. How she’d clung to him as if he were a life raft in the open ocean.

She braced against her seat as the plane ground to an abrupt halt.

“Thank you.”

She didn’t know what else to say.

He merely nodded, folded his newspaper, and placed it in his briefcase.

Noise from the drilling rigs assaulted her ears as their driver parked the Jeep. She strained to hear Elan as he jumped out and beckoned her to follow. He strode toward the drilling site, enthusiasm evident in his energetic movements.

The heady aroma of crude oil filled the air. A phalanx of beam pumps stretched into the distance, rocking in a steady rhythm, pulling the oil from its age-old hiding place beneath the barren soil.

The oil field was a fairly recent discovery and Al Mansur Associates had bid aggressively for the contract to develop it. Sara had jumped at Elan’s suggestion that she come see it.

But now as she stood amid the clamor and bustle of the job site, a twinge of apprehension twisted her gut.

She knew the theories behind supply and demand, soil mechanics, flow ratios. She understood drilling from a technical and economic standpoint. But now she wasn’t sure she wanted to see exactly how the earth was plundered and forced to give up its secrets and riches.

Elan introduced her to the site foreman and they left their papers and briefcases in his office trailer. They donned safety glasses, hard hats and earplugs before he led them across the sandy soil and up a flimsy metal ladder onto a rig about to begin drilling.

The driller in charge gave Sara a stern list of warnings about where she could and couldn’t stand, what to watch out for, the possibilities for injury if a piece of equipment broke or came loose, or the potential for a blowout if they found a shallow pocket of gas beneath the soil. By the time he’d finished, her nerves jangled as if she stood on a massive bomb that might explode at any moment.

She positioned herself as close to the giant drill as she dared. As it revved into action she imagined the dinosaur-like grinding teeth gnawing their way down through the rock below. Elan came and stood beside her, watching her reaction as the platform shook and shuddered with the movements of the machinery.

“This is my favorite part,” he said, shouting over the motors.

“Typical male!” she shouted back.

Elan looked confused for a second then a slow smile spread over his face. He leaned toward her, as if to say something, so she removed her earplug, nerves jumping.

“You have a naughty mind.” His lips brushed against her skin as he spoke and his voice resounded in the hollow of her ear canal, triggering a responsive rhythm that pulsed down through her body. The touch of Elan’s lips on her skin was a sinfully sweet sensation.

Yes, I have a naughty mind. Since she’d come to Al Mansur Associates, her body seemed to have developed a mind of its own that had nothing to do with her intellect.

Elan’s smile stayed plastered across his face. She could only begin to imagine what was going on in his mind as he watched the men guide the drill deeper and deeper into the earth.

When the drilling finally stopped, he placed his hand gently in the curve above her hips to guide her to the downward ladder. The simple and practical caress made her feel languid, sensuous.

“Is it a gusher?” she asked, half-joking, once they were back on solid ground.

“Not yet.” He smiled. “Once they pump out the drilling mud it will be. But you won’t see oil shooting up into the air. We don’t like to waste a single barrel.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon visiting wells in various stages of drilling and pumping. Elan moved about the job site with the ease and confidence of a man used to being in command. Honored that he’d chosen to groom her for a larger role in the company, Sara resolved to live up to his obviously high expectations of her.

Back on his private jet, he settled into the seat beside her. She wondered why he didn’t sit in one of the other seats on the plane. There was no reason for them to sit together since they were the only passengers. Presumably he’d sat beside her on the trip out because she’d been clinging to him like a limpet.

Perhaps he wanted to be close in case she needed reassurance. Did she? Not about the plane. Now that she’d survived her first flight she was relatively relaxed about flying again.

She would like some reassurance that she could work with Elan without wetting his suit with her drool. And that kind of reassurance was not immediately forthcoming. Especially not as he removed his gold cuff links and—once again—rolled his shirtsleeves up over broad, muscled forearms.

Oh, dear. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids. Just don’t look, okay!

“Are you tired?”

“What? Er, yes. I suppose I am a little.” Tired of the way she couldn’t get a grip on her libido. “It was a fascinating day. I really appreciate you bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome. I’ve never brought my assistant out to the field with me before, but I can see your abilities are far above average.”

“Thank you.”

As the jet’s engines roared to life, her gut clenched with sudden apprehension. Without a word he placed his hand over hers. But the warmth of his touch proved anything but soothing.

Fear evaporated as a painful lightning bolt of desire ripped through her, leaving a smoking trail of heat in its path. Her body burned with a dangerous and craven longing to become entangled with this man in a way that was entirely unprofessional.

Elan’s hands were calloused. The rough texture of his palms made her skin prickle with awareness. His fingers were soft yet firm as they wrapped around hers. The unwelcome thought of those broad, masculine hands moving over her tortured flesh sent shock waves of agonizing arousal shivering through her.

Her feelings for him suddenly seemed like the oil pressurized beneath the earth, waiting to rush up and explode into the clear sky unless she kept them very carefully capped and sealed. And every second in Elan’s presence brought her closer to a potentially devastating blowout.