The Gideon Affair Read online

  Paige was one of those women who didn’t give a flying fart what others thought, a trait she’d inherited from her grandmother. She was comfortable in her skin—quite glad, in fact, that she’d always been a bit of a tomboy. Despite a lackluster romantic history, she was unashamed of being naked when the situation called for bare skin.

  When she’d exposed her breasts to his gaze, she stood proudly, chest out, shoulders back, and waited for his reaction. In no way was she bummed out when it came.

  “Paige Turner,” he drawled with a sly grin. “You have the most delectable nipples I’ve ever seen …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she interrupted with an answering smile. “And you’ve seen a lot. I know.”

  He wagged his eyebrows at her, made a comical face, and flicked his tongue out for emphasis.

  “What can I say? I was a breastfed baby, after all.”

  “I’ll be sure to thank your mom next time I talk to her.”

  Instead of laughing at her jest, he gave her a comically stern looking frown and grumbled, “Stop stalling, woman.”

  She froze. Stalling?

  Nodding, he used his head to indicate the only article of clothing she still wore.

  “Panties. Off.”

  She hesitated, bit her lip, and then morphed into turbo mode, whipping the plain cotton off in a single motion. Before she’d tossed her panties next to her other clothes, he took them from her hands and buried his nose in the wad of cotton.

  When his eyes lifted to hers, she looked away, embarrassed. No way was he going to miss the scent of her arousal.

  “Oh, fuck no, babe. Look at me. Now.”

  Usually confident, it wasn’t exactly comfortable to be standing there naked while the man of her dreams inhaled proof of her unwavering desire. For him. Only for him.

  “Eyes on me.”

  Still, she hesitated.

  “I gave you a command,” he murmured in a voice that did not invite any comeback.

  A command. Uh-oh. What the hell had she gotten herself into?

  Paige swung her eyes to his, but instead of seeing triumph in his expression, she found something else. Besides the excitement, she saw understanding and maybe a touch of amusement.

  Why, he knew that how quickly her body surrendered to his passion would embarrass her! Wow. She’d never felt more … female. Or more sexual and maybe, just maybe, for the first time, those two things were one and the same.

  With a smug expression he knew damn well would get a reaction from her on general principle alone, he held up her discarded undies and gave them a little twirl around his finger. She gave him a scorching look that only made him laugh.

  “Rule number one, Miss Turner. Your eyes belong to me. That means glasses off when I say, and you never try to hide from something by looking away.”

  What was she supposed to say to that? No? Sorry? Screw you?

  “Edward …”

  “Nah, nah, nah,” he stated firmly. “I’m not finished.”

  Was she in some weird alternate reality? What was happening here? Good lord, she was butt-ass naked while he was fully dressed and on his knees. Not only that, but he was also laying out some rules that ordinarily would have made her laugh in his face. Instead, she stood there meekly as if any of this was normal.

  Pfft. Normal! There was no more normal.

  “I want you to stand there and not be shy about letting me see your beautiful body.”

  Her cheeks felt like they were warming up.

  He crossed his arms again and laid on the stern Alpha thing kinda thick.

  “And so you don’t misunderstand … your pleasure is priority one. Don’t hide it from me because you’re embarrassed. I want you to be swollen with desire and dripping wet before we touch. Consider that rule number two.”

  She had a hard time breathing for a second. Why were all his words and actions so perfect?

  His eyes were hard with desire. A desire she felt drawn to—as if she was made for satisfying his lust. The notion shook her quite a bit. This was serious stuff going on.

  “Rule number three—and probably the most important.”

  Paige couldn’t help the reflexive squeeze her thighs did at the sultry sound of his voice. Let the dripping commence.

  Again, he didn’t react or say anything close to what she had expected. Right then and there, she broke free from the conditioned responses that her previous relationships had helped to create. Edward was his own man and nothing about him even remotely resembled what she’d known before.

  The serious but very sexy man-in-control tone softened. He rose up on his knees and reached for her, bringing Paige close as his face moved within inches of her breasts.

  “You’re in complete control, babe. Nothing happens without your consent.” He said this as both hands slid slowly over her butt until he gripped the backs of her thighs, and she could feel his warm breath teasing her already peaked nipples.

  “Understand?”

  She sure as hell did understand. Dipping a shoulder, she sent a puckered nipple straight into his mouth. She rubbed it on his lips until he grunted his approval and lightly kissed the very tip, following up with a hearty lick that almost buckled her knees.

  Edward’s soft chuckle echoed in her head and throughout her nerve endings. “Now that’s what I’m talking about, babe.”

  On a deep sigh, he opened wide and sucked the offered breast into his mouth, suckling harder and harder until Paige cried out and grabbed his head, tangling her fingers in his hair. She wanted him to devour her. The rhythmic tugging of his sucking mouth started an ache in her womb that was so strong it had her shaking with need.

  A deep, guttural moan rumbled up from her chest and …

  A sound, distant at first but louder with each passing second, cut through the air. Chimes or something musical like that. The louder it got, though, the less pleasing the sound. Soon, the chimes turned into a honk.

  Her eyes flew open. Two seconds passed and then she shot up straight and looked around. Reaching for her phone, she swiped the screen to turn the alarm off, grunted, and then threw the stupid thing onto the floor not giving a shit if it broke.

  Served the damn thing right if it did. Was no less than what the irritating technology deserved for having interrupted such a delicious dream.

  Well, this was certainly not what he’d expected of the strange meeting Mickey and he just sat through. Not what he expected at all.

  They were in a huge SUV, speeding along by L.A. standards having gone a whopping two miles between the dead stops that ground the local traffic to a slower than slow crawl. Maybe, and he did mean maybe, they’d get back to Beverly Hills sometime today.

  Luckily, Mickey relied on a car service to handle the hellacious driving drudgery; which was a good thing because the silence coming from the backseat spoke volumes. Anytime Mickey was at a loss for words, it was probably best to leave the practicalities to others.

  The trip earlier out to the hills of Pasadena that ended at a luxury estate with a magnificent view of the L.A. skyline had been uneventful and tense. Neither of them knew what the fuck was going on or what they were walking into, and it hadn’t helped Edward’s mood that he couldn’t drag Paige along as a buffer.

  Not one to be either impressed or intimidated by flat-out ostentation, especially not that of the real estate kind, he’d felt a bit of annoyance at the lush, vibrant lawn that greeted them. A green lawn. In the midst of a crippling drought, this fucking guy had a goddamn green lawn. Part of him wanted to whip it out and take a leak, maybe sign his name in pee on the man’s tone-deaf landscaping. They hadn’t even met and already Edward thought he was a shithead. His eye roll at Mickey as they approached the front door said it all.

  Once inside the main house of the seriously over-the-top estate, they walked at least a quarter mile just to get to the study where they were met by a stone-faced Perry Waterman—one of the richest sons of bitches in the country. Catching a glimpse of an obvious lawyer monkey hov
ering in the background made Edward’s hackles go up.

  What followed was by far the strangest ninety minutes of all time.

  Holy crap just kept repeating in his head.

  Mickey took out his phone and started texting. Edward wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen anyone’s fingers move quite so fast. Maybe Paige’s but she had long, thin, expressive fingers while the crazy Russian at his side was more of a bulldog type. His pudgy digits wailing on the phone’s keyboard was something worth watching.

  Minutes ticked by and the intense stabbing motion continued.

  The guy texted like he talked…in one long, never-ending stream of consciousness. Edward chuckled. Mickey Fingers was about to become a new expression in his vocabulary. One he couldn’t wait to share with Paige.

  Smoothing his tie for no apparent reason, he fingered the blue silk that Paige insisted complemented his eyes.

  Paige. His thoughts, no matter how scrambled they got, always seemed to circle around to her eventually. Maybe he should text her. Let her know they weren’t kidnapped or sold off as sex slaves—something she insisted was a possibility anytime he went off on his own.

  A smile lit him up remembering how he’d messed with her one time when they were out of the country on location. Thinking it would be hilariously funny to send her a ransom note—one he’d secretly worked on for days by cutting letters out of newspapers and magazines—he sent her on a wild goose chase through a crowded marketplace. Marsh even played along by contacting her and saying he’d also gotten a note.

  She’d almost killed him on the spot once he let her off the hook and ended the charade. But absolutely the best part of the memory was how quickly her anger had turned to amusement then eventually to fall down laughing. The girl was one of a kind.

  A couple of grunts from Mickey brought Edward back from his mind trip. It didn’t require a surveillance report to clue him in that the day’s weirdness was in no way over.

  “I hate cherry pie.”

  The peculiar statement immediately earned a footnote in the Out-Of-Left-Field Hall of Fame.

  “Say again?” he politely asked.

  Stuffing the phone into the pocket of a tailored vest, his agent turned. The expression on his face was unusually sphinxlike.

  That can’t be good.

  “Cherry pie. Hate the stuff. Tastes like cough medicine.”

  “Oookay … duly noted.”

  “Gave her the upper hand and now she’s gonna make me eat that crap because I hate it.”

  Taking a stab in the dark, he asked, “Shirley?”

  The agent snorted like a bull and chuckled. “Shit, no! My wife is a goddamn saint.”

  Jesus. This was getting out of hand. Typically bombastic and about as verbose as a person could be, navigating through the man’s curious mood was not easy. Who the hell was he talking about and what the fuck with the cherry pie?

  “Who are you and what have you done with Mickey Klein?”

  The guy huffed and shook his head. “I know, right?”

  “Hey,” Edward said with a half a grin, “if it helps any, tapioca pudding makes me gag. Just seeing it. Blech!”

  “Yeah, well … we have a meeting with Moira Kennedy.”

  Edward froze. Ho-ly fuck. Moira Kennedy. Damage control expert to the stars. Things were even more fucked up than he imagined if Mickey was calling in the big guns.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do …”

  She was wearing a path in the carpet with her relentless back and forth pacing. Not that she cared. The guys had been off the radar for hours and Paige was at the end of her rope, so who cared about a little rug damage at this point?

  After hobbling home on her banged up knee yesterday, she’d been less-than-happy to discover that she was being frozen out of whatever had Mickey and Edward by the throat.

  They were both nice about it, but some serious shit had to have gone down after her visit to the gym. Without any explanation, both men rather sternly told her to take care of her injury and not to worry—that they had everything under control.

  Pfft. Who the hell were they kidding? She knew damn well that Perry Waterman yanking Mickey Klein's chain was a huge deal. She’d worried and fretted all night about the ramifications of the unusual powwow.

  Probably explained why she’d tossed and turned all through another restless night. She was worried about Edward. Worried about what the nasty minded media would make of the reignited scandal.

  He’d made a lame attempt to cajole her out of worrying when he’d called her right before the late-night shows came on. Halfway through a pint of Chunky Monkey when the phone rang, Paige had gone on a roll. She’d demanded he keep her in the loop while he made light of the secret meeting on the next day’s agenda and cracked jokes about her clumsy crash and burn off a moving treadmill.

  A monumental hissy fit had been gathering steam inside her when he changed the subject and threw her a curveball.

  “Missed you today.”

  “Yeah, well …” she spit out. “That’s what you get for keeping your assistant in the dark.”

  She heard his sigh and stopped.

  “I wasn’t referring to my assistant.”

  The rest of the conversation didn’t matter. Not really. Not after his quiet admission that he’d missed her. Her. Not the employee.

  Which would then totally explain the very sexy dream that had chased her throughout the restless night.

  Eek. Just thinking about it …

  She shivered slightly then rubbed her hands briskly up and down each arm.

  Glancing at her reflection in the big mirror at the far end of the long conference room, she almost laughed. All that naughty talk about being tied up and naked for his pleasure had made Paige permanently horny.

  Not even a steamy shower or the painful shock of the water hitting the rather nasty gash on her knee managed to cool her jets. Needing to be the unflappable professional she was under ordinary circumstances when she went to the closet to choose an outfit, her inner librarian took over.

  Her choice was a silky t-shirt style blouse tucked into a cute skater skirt that looked business-like without seeming stuffy. She ran her fingers on the cool silver balls of the Tiffany necklace Edward had given her then gently tugged on the matching earrings.

  She swept her hair into a tidy chignon and slid on a pair of yummy shoes that were just short of being hooker heels to complete the look.

  A noise in the reception area had her running for the door. Careful not to fling it open and break into a madwoman performance, she cautiously peeked first, holding her breath as she searched the open space.

  Edward and Mickey were standing just outside the elevator in deep conversation.

  Oh, thank god. Back in one piece. Well, at least there was that.

  People were milling about in the office bullpen. From the corner of her eye, Paige saw Mickey’s curious junior assistants looking back and forth between her door peeking, the hot movie star, and the crazy Russian agent.

  Quietly muttering, “Enough of this,” she straightened and strode confidently across the reception area, stepping right into the middle of the men’s conversation. “Gentlemen,” she stated in a no-nonsense tone. “Let’s take this to the conference room, shall we?”

  Putting her hands up, Paige gestured for them to move along as if she was herding puppies. She ignored the surprised expressions and the faint gasps that wafted through the air at her blatant ‘handling’ of the super-agent and his number one client. Clearly, not something that happened every day.

  Mickey’s deep laugh cut through her tension. “Tell me again why you don’t work for me.”

  “Because I won’t put up with your bullshit, Mr. Klein. That’s why.”

  Edward chuckled as he slipped off his suit jacket to the evident delight of an admiring audience of females and quite a few guys, too.

  “It’d take a duel to the death to get her away from me,” he mocked. “That and the fact that you’re too
damn tightfisted to afford her.”

  Good grief. Their audience was enjoying this too much. Careful not to roll her eyes, she tugged on Mickey’s arm and whispered, “Ovaries are bursting and panties melting as we linger. Could you pleeez move it along?”

  Both men simultaneously looked at her. It was like being in the bright lights of an interrogation coming at her from all sides. An odd feeling snaked through her system. Worry and a warning bell invaded her mind.

  Oh, great. Swallowing past a jolt of nerves, she made it clear with her expression that they’d better get moving and take this somewhere private if they hoped to avoid a scene. And she didn’t exactly mean just from the starstruck employees watching with avid interest.

  Paige stiffened. Dammit. Dollars to donuts at least one of the people present was probably speed-dialing TMZ right this moment. Everyone wanted to be part of a juicy scandal, especially when it involved a sex god with an enormous …

  “Now. Conference room,” she bit out sternly and marched away. She didn’t have any other choice—not once she felt a damning blush heat up her neck before moving on to her face. She really did need to watch that video and find out for herself. After all, there was big and then there was … whatever came after that.

  A couple of things hit him the moment Mickey and he came into the long conference room fifteen seconds behind Paige.

  First and foremost was the scent of wintergreen that hung in the air. A half glance in the trash by the door revealed a bunch of green scraps and some silver foil littering the bottom of the can. He figured she’d chewed through almost an entire roll of Breathsavers while waiting for them.

  Right behind that amusing observation was an awareness that hit Edward quite forcefully. The lady was not anywhere near as calm and controlled as she was pretending to be, and anyone with half a grasp of physical nuance and body language could easily see from her posture that she was operating on raw energy.

  Her shoulders were never that stiff, and if she fussed with her skirt one more time, he was going to have to intervene. No way could he take seeing her so…jeez. So, what? Paige and the word undone just didn’t seem like a reasonable fit, but that was the vibe he was picking up.