Intimate Surrender. RaeAnne Thayne
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entire future for a roll in the sack. He had a feeling he would be lucky if his name was still on the door of the CEO’s office at Logan. Hell, he’d be lucky if they even let him keep the name he’d been given as a six-year-old.
He never forgot how much he owed Terrence and Leslie Logan, how very blessed he had been to be adopted into their family two years after their own son had been kidnapped. If they hadn’t rescued him from the Children’s Connection orphanage, he hated thinking where he might have ended up. On the streets like his mother, probably, or in prison.
He owed them everything. His heart, his blood, his soul. When they read that damn tabloid article, he could just picture the disappointment in Terrence’s eyes, the hurt in Leslie’s. The knot in his stomach kinked a little tighter.
No. He had worked too hard for too long proving to his parents he was capable of running the Fortune 500 company they had built from the ground up. He refused to let a Crosby ruin everything, especially not this particular Crosby.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid, Peter?” she said now. “I never touched your desk.”
Against his will, he had a vivid memory of her naked and flushed the second or third time they made love, her luscious skin glowing with perspiration and the soft little noises of arousal she made as he took her against the nearest surface, which at the time just happened to be the top of his antique walnut desk.
Throughout that incredible night of passion, there had scarcely been a corner of his loft they’d missed in their hunger for each other.
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He knew the instant her own memory clicked in. A rosy blush spilled over her cheeks and she dropped her gaze.
“Well, besides that time,” she mumbled, looking so charmingly disconcerted he wondered how she could possibly be so deceitful.
“I’ve tried to think about what I might have had lying around about our NPIR project but I’m coming up empty. Why don’t you refresh my memory? What did you find?”
“Nothing! I wasn’t thinking about NPIRs or anything else computer related. I didn’t go anywhere near your stupid desk, except that time with…you.”
“Yet the note you left was written on my own personal stationery, which I just happen to keep in the top drawer of that stupid desk.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then she drew a deep breath. When she spoke, her voice sounded weary. “What do you want, Peter? Why follow me out here to the middle of nowhere? You could have yelled at me over the phone.”
He refused to let himself be sidetracked by how fragile she suddenly looked. “I want some answers. What did you learn about our project?”
“I didn’t learn anything! I told you that. I never even gave work a thought that night. If you’ll remember, you didn’t give me time to think about much of anything but you.”
They stared at each other for a moment and he remembered again the wild passion they had shared. Or at least he thought they’d shared it. Had it all been feigned on her part? All those long kisses, her sighs and moans, the way she acted as if she couldn’t seem to get enough of him?
That was the part that he was finding most difficult to accept, he finally admitted to himself. He had been enthralled with her, completely entranced. He had wanted her with a fierce hunger unlike anything he’d ever known before.
While she had been as cold-blooded and calculating as an asp.
“Did your brother tell you to sleep with me?” he asked.
With a swift intake of breath, she stared at him, her brown eyes huge in her pale face. In any other woman, he might have almost believed she looked hurt. But he obviously couldn’t trust anything his instincts told him about Katherine Crosby.
“That’s insulting to Trent and to me. I shouldn’t even justify it with a response but I will tell you that he knows nothing about this, about the two of us and that night. If he did, he would be livid.”
Peter slapped the folded tabloid at her. “Hate to be the one to break it to you, sweetheart, but there’s not a person in Portland who doesn’t know by now.”
She gazed at the paper for a moment, nibbling her lip again. “Okay so everyone might know we kissed. As for the rest of it, no one else has to know anything about that. We were both carried away by the champagne and the night and the whole thing. Matters never should have gone so far. We should both just forget it ever happened.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” she murmured.
At her words, another wave of anger washed over him. The intensity of it had him jumping to his feet and stalking to the fireplace. He hated that she could just dismiss the night they had spent together. Forget it ever happened. Right. As if he could just forget the most erotic night of his life.
He turned back to her. “A smart man never forgets his mistakes. And, sweetheart, this was one hell of a mistake.”
“For both of us.”
“The difference is, you knew exactly what you were doing—and who you were doing it with.”
“That’s right. I set out to seduce you from the moment I walked into that ballroom. It was a brilliant strategy, wouldn’t you say? All I had to do was convince you to take me home with you, make love all night until you fell asleep, then comb through your office on the chance—slim to none though it was—that I might find some tiny snippet of information in your loft about your super-router that we could use at Crosby Systems. Right. You caught me. That’s me, Katie Crosby, corporate spy. Trent sends his little sister out to sleep with all his business rivals.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past the Crosbys.”
Something flashed in her dark eyes, something that looked like anger and hurt and maybe even a little sorrow. “Okay, that’s enough,” she snapped. “I would like you to leave now. I’m sure you don’t want to spend another moment in the belly of the beast.”
She rose as if to show him out but as soon as she stood, what little color remaining on her face drained out like wine spilling from a tipped glass and she swayed. Peter reached out instinctively to keep her from toppling over, then helped her back onto the couch.
“What’s wrong? Are you ill?”
Her chin lifted. “What do you care?”
“I don’t,” he snapped. “Maybe I just happen to be fond of these particular boots and don’t want you yakking all over them.”
She glared at him. “Your precious boots are safe. I’m not going to yak, as you so charmingly put it. I stood up a little too soon but I’m perfectly fine now.”
He only had to take one look at her to know she was lying, but then why should that surprise him? The woman wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped up and bit her in the behind. With hollow eyes, her skin three shades past white and her mouth pinched like a shriveled apple left in the bottom of the bushel, she sat there and expected him to believe everything was fine.
“I didn’t see signs of anybody else when I arrived. Who else is out here with you?”
She paused as if she didn’t want to answer him, then she finally shrugged. “Usually the ranch foreman and his wife live in quarters at the rear of the house, but they’re away for a few days.”
“You’re alone?”
“Not if you count two dogs, six barn cats, a dozen horses and two hundred head of cattle.”
He studied her pale features again, suddenly chagrined at himself for bursting in on her, guns blazing. She might be a lying Crosby but she didn’t look well at all.
Crosby or not, he didn’t like the idea of her being out here alone. A thousand things could happen to an ill woman on her own at an