A Secret Seduction: A Secret Until Now / A Sinful Seduction / Secrets of a Shy Socialite. Elizabeth Lane
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eyes widened.
He had found himself grinning, amused by her total lack of artifice, then watched in fascination as a visible wave of heat travelled up the long graceful curve of her neck, adding an extra tinge of colour to her smooth cheeks. He could not remember ever encountering a woman who wore her emotions so close to the surface. Yet despite the blush, the glowing, gorgeous young creature had held his gaze steadily.
‘I think you saved my life.’
He’d given the faintest of shrugs. ‘Do you make a habit of throwing yourself under moving vehicles?’
She’d then been staring as hard at him as he was at her. ‘It was a first for me.’
When not breathless, the throaty, sexy quality of her voice had intensified.
He’d felt her trembling. Post-trauma or was she feeling the same clutch of lust he was...?
There’d been more than a hint of provocative challenge in her attitude as she’d lifted her chin and asked, ‘Can I... Let me buy you a coffee, to thank you...? It seems the least I can do, unless you’re...?’
‘Coffee would be good,’ he’d heard himself say.
She had expelled a tiny sigh and beamed up at him in undisguised delight, and when he’d kept a guiding hand on one of her elbows she hadn’t pulled away. He’d felt her shiver and that time he’d known why.
Alex pushed away the memory; as always it was inextricably and painfully linked in his mind with guilt. On one level he recognised the guilt was irrational. He had no longer been married at that point, hadn’t cheated, he’d been free to have sex with a total stranger.
Even when Emma had been alive he could have taken a mistress with her blessing. Alex was not easily shocked but on the first occasion she had brought the subject up he had been—deeply. He’d known she’d had something on her mind and had coaxed her to tell him what was bothering her but he hadn’t been prepared for the incendiary suggestion she had made.
‘You’re a man, you have needs that I can’t...and you’ve been so patient with me, never said that I should have told you about the MS. I wanted to, but it might have been years before it came back or even never.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had known,’ he had told her, hoping it was true. Even wondering had felt like a betrayal.
‘I know that, Alex, but the fact remains you didn’t have the choice. I didn’t give you the choice. So if you need to, you know...date other women, that’s all right with me. I don’t have to know, I don’t want to know, so long as you stay with me while I’m— I hate hospitals so much, Alex...’
And there it was, the real fear, that he would send her to some anonymous nursing home. It had cut him to the core to know his wife had been willing to endure infidelities for the security and promise of staying in the home that she had enjoyed furnishing in those first months of marriage. She had enjoyed a lot of things before the disease that had finally killed her resurfaced.
A short year later she had been confined to a wheelchair and eaten up with guilt because she hadn’t told him before they’d got married. The constant apologising had been hard to hear and sometimes had made him angry with her. Guilt piled on top of more guilt. It had been a vicious circle.
‘This is your home, Emma, our home.’ Her hand had felt so small under his, the bones fragile as he’d squeezed. ‘There will be no hospitals and no other women, I swear.’
And he had kept his word to the letter if not the spirit. He might have been legally free but in his mind, in his heart, Alex had still been married when he had spent the night with Angelina. Though not once during that night had he thought of Emma. How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? The next morning he hadn’t been able to get out of there quickly enough.
If he had encountered the stunning Angel when Emma had still been alive would he have found it so easy to keep his promise? The question wouldn’t go away and he would never know the answer, but he was pretty sure that if he had it wouldn’t have given him any comfort.
Alex liked to think he was able to forgive weakness in others, but he set higher standards for himself. Though he’d got out of there as fast as he could the morning after, memories of the night before had haunted him. Well, he was about to lay that ghost—literally if things turned out as he intended—to rest.
‘Only the star is missing.’ His inability to prevent his eyes going to the doorway sent a surge of irritation through Alex. ‘Does the lady like to make an entrance?’
Beside him Nico responded defensively to the disdain in his uncle’s voice. ‘She’s really nice.’
The balding executive whom he had directed his sardonic comment to nodded in agreement with his nephew’s assessment. ‘She certainly doesn’t stand on ceremony and the last thing you can accuse her of is being a diva.’ He laughed at some private joke and took a sip of the orange juice he was nursing. ‘And if she wanted people to notice her she wouldn’t need any stunts. With Angel in the room no one else exists.’ He drew a line in the air and pronounced with utter confidence, ‘End of story.’
Alex recalled Angelina, or Angel as it seemed he must learn to call her, in his room, an anonymous hotel room. For him that night, no one else had existed. He clenched his teeth in an effort to eject the image of her sitting on the bed gloriously naked and utterly unselfconscious, acting as if they had just shared more than lust, acting as if there would be a tomorrow.
Dragging himself into the present, he wondered if the executive’s admiration was purely professional. Was the man sleeping with the model? He knew little of the world they occupied but he supposed it would hardly be a revelation if they were.
‘Rudie says Angel simply doesn’t have a bad angle. The camera loves her,’ Nico, the new president of her fan club, informed him.
‘And Rudie is?’
‘Our lighting man, one of the best.’
The guy was probably in love with her too, Alex thought sourly.
* * *
Oh, God, she was the last to arrive. Angel fought the impulse to step back into the shadows, then smiled to herself at the irony that she made her living posing for a camera, having her image stared at by the public, though she genuinely hated being the centre of attention.
She didn’t retreat but paused in the doorway, her eyes sweeping the room, the light breeze pulling the silky fluttering fabric of her dress against long legs until Ross spotted her. The photographer grinned, giving a thumbs-up sign, in the process slopping what she knew would be tonic water down his front. People assumed he had a drink problem, and he let them think that. He had once confided to Angel that he simply didn’t like the taste of alcohol, but being thought an ex-alcoholic made him seem more interesting.
Angel’s spontaneous burst of throaty laughter alerted the others to her presence and she was immediately involved in a lot of luvvie air kissing.
Well, she’d been right about one thing: she was underdressed. The men, with the exception of Ross, were wearing suits and ties and the women cocktail dresses.
‘Worth the wait,’ he heard someone say and Alex could not disagree.
The late arrival’s appearance had sent a rush of scalding heat through his body. Six years ago she had been stunning, possessing a natural grace and sleek sensuality that had been all the more powerful for appearing totally unstudied. She still possessed all those attributes but now she held herself with the confidence that came when a woman knew the power she wielded with her beauty, when she enjoyed it.
Every man in the room was enjoying it.
Alex’s enjoyment was tempered by this knowledge and the discomfort that could be traced to the testosterone-fuelled ache in his groin. The intervening years slipped away as his blue eyes made a slow sweep upwards from her bare feet, and the pink-painted toenails—presumably the sandals dangling