Wear My Ring. Kate Hardy
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when a quick glance around the jam-packed room revealed a massive red and grey rug now covering the lounge-room floor. A large red urn bursting with a tall spray of stripped willow. And chairs and tables in every place they ought to be. A half second after she got over the surprise of Gabe having decorated she realised every item was from that season’s Ménage à Moi catalogue. The bubbles in her stomach went haywire.
Then the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, as though she was being watched. In a party that size someone somewhere would be smouldering at someone, and it was likely she’d been caught in the crossfire. And yet …
Rolling her shoulders to fend off the scratchy sensation, she turned, eyes searching the crowd until they landed on a pair of familiar dark eyes.
Gabe stood on the far side of the large room, his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows, a near full moon and a million stars twinkling in the inky black sky his backdrop. He was so deliciously handsome, so unsettling, so much. And his eyes were focused entirely on her. Dark eyes of a man who was near addicted to doughnuts, knew more about Doris Day movies than she did, and who remembered where she worked even though she was sure she hadn’t mentioned it since the day they first met.
She liked that he was leaving. Liked that he was discreet. Liked that every time she saw him he could barely keep his hands off her. But the riot of sensation ripping through her in that moment was so beyond mere like she hadn’t a hope of naming it.
She clutched her silver lamé purse in one hand, and the small box she’d brought with her, so hard they left imprints on her palms.
‘Paige!’ Mae’s voice rang sharp in her ear.
Paige blinked, the noise and energy and light and life of the party rushing in on her as if she’d burst from a tunnel. Then the crowd shifted, and Gabe was gone.
Paige turned to find Mae shoving through the crowd and bundling up to her like a ball of energy, Clint lolloping in her wake.
‘How cool is this?’ asked Mae. ‘And my godfather, this apartment! You must be dying to get stuck into it.’
Paige opened her mouth to tell Mae this was Gabe’s version of decorated, until she remembered that according to Mae this was the first time Paige had been there too. She hadn’t meant to keep the thing with Gabe from Mae, but they’d barely seen one another in the past week, and she’d been so busy at work—And it had been so intense, so unlike anything she’d ever done before, she hadn’t wanted the bubble to burst.
She’d fill Mae in on all the juicy details the first moment they had some girly time together, just the two of them. She glanced across at the ever-present Clint and wondered when that might be.
‘Where is that delicious pirate of yours?’ Mae asked. ‘The guy was clearly into you at The Brasserie last week, and he looks like the kind of guy who doesn’t need a flashlight and a map to find your treasure, if ya know what I mean.’
Paige rolled her eyes even while she knew it to be the absolute truth. Gabe Hamilton had found her treasure no problem at all. In fact, her treasure was so attuned to him she was doing her best to ignore the heavy ache in her treasure just thinking about him.
‘Drinks!’ Mae said and Clint looked as if he was reminded again why he wanted to marry her. Then hand in hand they made a beeline for the bar.
Leaving Paige to pretend every fibre of her being wasn’t paying intense heed to their host, wherever he might be.
Gabe ran a finger beneath the V of his sweater for about the hundredth time since a bunch of strangers had piled into his apartment.
He’d be pushing it to say he knew even a tenth of them, and a half of those he’d met in the lift at one point or another that week. The rest were a blur of hair and teeth that Nate had introduced to him, talking each and every one up as though they were the next big thing. He got it, Nate was trying to make him feel at home. Yet the only thing keeping him from making a hasty exit in search of fresh air, no matter how cold, had been brief glimpses of a familiar head of cool-blonde hair.
He’d known the moment Paige had arrived—some shift in the air, some call of the wild to his hormones had him sniffing the air for her scent. And then she’d appeared through the crowd in a white dress that looked as if she’d been poured into it and revealed enough leg to give a less vital man palpitations.
His gaze found her again, this time talking to some guy. Her hair shifting across her back as she talked. When the guy moved in, placing a hand on her upper arm, waving his big watch in her face, something clenched hot and hard deep inside Gabe. Something primal and not pretty.
‘It’s the legs,’ said a voice cutting into his thoughts.
He turned to find a group of men in sharp suits standing beside him, all cradling half-filled glasses, all looking in Paige’s direction.
‘What’s that?’ asked Gabe.
‘They’re like something out of a forties detective movie,’ said another of the men. ‘I’ve spent more time than I dare admit imagining myself as Sam Spade, walking into a smoke-filled room, sunlight pouring through slatted blinds, to find those legs crossed as she sits waiting on my desk.’
‘Hamilton, right?’ asked the third. ‘We’re friends of Nate’s.’
‘Right,’ said Gabe, brushing off the fact that Nate seemed to have more friends he didn’t know than friends he did. There were more pressing matters. ‘You know Paige?’
At the dark tone of his voice three pairs of male eyes turned his way. Turned, and softened. He could all but hear them thinking, Poor mug, thinks he’s in with a chance.
Never in his life had Gabe felt a stronger urge to kiss and tell. I’ve had her up against a wall, on the kitchen bench, crying out my name so loud the whole damn building must have heard. But he lifted his glass and filled his mouth with Scotch before his foot landed there instead.
‘Dated her one time,’ said the first, ‘before she introduced me to my wife.’
‘Cool move,’ said the second with a laugh.
‘Cool creature,’ said the third.
Gabe’s gaze drew back to Paige. He caught her profile as she smiled and waved at someone across the room. Her smile was calm. Understated. He could see why people might think her cool, he’d thought so himself at one point, but now he understood it was a mask, a mode of self-protection. Something tickled the back of his mind, as if he were trying to catch the disparate threads of a dream.
Familiarity, perhaps. Maybe even a recognition of his own natural reserve.
Or déjà vu.
Another cool blonde of his acquaintance came crashing into his mind, right along with the tightness in his gut as he’d first spied that long ago blonde smiling at him from across the room at BonaVenture’s first big party, and the smile that never quite reached her eyes unless they met his.
‘No,’ he said, out loud, turning heads. Grimacing, he downed the last of his Scotch before slamming the glass onto a passing tray.
This wasn’t the same as that. For one thing he’d been young, and cocky, and ruled by his libido. He was older, wiser now and kept that part of him on a short leash. And yet his subconscious wouldn’t let it lie. This thing with Paige was … intense. And it had ignited exceptionally fast. Who could blame him? The woman was so lush and lovely she kept him half hard half the day and all the way all night.
He ground a thumb and forefinger into his eyes, but the memories continued to knock against the inside of his brain.
He’d met Lydia right as BonaVenture had hit the crest of its first wave of success. The business that had been a mere dream a few years before had gone stratospheric right after his gran had died. And it was as though he’d gone to sleep one night himself, and woken up to find the world as he’d always known it was simply no more.
Lydia