An Australian Surrender: Girl on a Diamond Pedestal / Untouched by His Diamonds / A Question Of Marriage
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Because she couldn’t look at Ethan. And she couldn’t think about what he’d just said. It was contrary to everything she’d ever been taught about life. About what was important.
And he was just trying to make her feel better, because who wanted a cranky-looking woman on their arm all night?
A woman, a very young woman in a long red dress, came floating out onto the stage and sat in front of the piano, a string quartet sitting down the stage from her. The first strains of the music started to filter through the room and Noelle closed her eyes. Let them fill her with longing, with an ache that she was afraid would never go away.
“Care to dance?”
She opened her eyes and looked at Ethan, his eyes hot and intent on her. She cleared her throat. “You dance?”
“My mother insisted I learn. And anyway, I found it quite instrumental in picking up women back in the days before my bank balance was quite this healthy. Back in the days when I had to rely on charm and skill to get a date.”
She looked back at the stage, at the performers. She’d always been the one up there. Separate and removed. The mood of the room. A part of the parties, an integral part, but never in them.
“For the press?”
His lips curved up slightly. “Yeah, of course.”
She accepted his offered hand. It was hotter than she’d imagined it would be, his palm a bit rougher. He led her to the dance floor and her heart started tripping on itself. She’d never danced with a man before. She’d never danced. Not even at her own CD-release parties. But she’d even performed at those, even then more the entertainment than the guest of honor. And dancing wasn’t essential to piano, which meant it was a skill she’d never acquired.
“I don’t really know how to dance,” she said, when they stopped at the edge of the dance floor and he pulled her gently into his arms.
“But I do. And you can let me lead.” He laced his fingers through hers and wrapped his other arm around her waist. “Put your hand on my shoulder,” he said, his voice soft, enticing.
She obeyed the instruction and immediately had to fight the urge to slide her hand, palm flat, down to his hard-muscled chest. She knew it was muscular because her breasts were crushed against it, her heart raging, and she was certain he could feel it.
She looked back up at the stage as Ethan moved back. She felt it all flow through her, the music and his movements, and her feet seemed to obey the prompting from Ethan’s body. Everything just seemed to work.
“So tell me, why don’t you know how to dance?”
“No time,” she said, her words short and breathless, not from the exertion of dancing, but from being in such close proximity to a man. To this man.
“Ah, right. The drills.”
“Yeah, the drills. They took up—take up—a lot of time.”
“I see.”
“A person can’t be great at everything. You can be great at one thing, if you work at it. If you want it badly enough.” She repeated the words of her former piano teacher, slightly shocked at how quickly the words rolled off her tongue, even after all this time.
“I don’t accept that,” he said, pressing his hand more firmly against her lower back, moving the lower part of her body closer to his. It made her tingle, made her uncomfortable … aware of her breasts. It was the strangest thing. Not completely unpleasant.
“Doesn’t matter whether you accept it, it’s true. It takes hours and hours of dedicated practice to claim proficiency at anything. It takes true commitment.”
“Hmm, commitment I’m not so good with.”
Her pulse pounded harder. He flexed his fingers and the slight motion against her back made a shock of sensation skitter through her veins, lighting up every last part of her body, from her head to her toes and every inch in between.
“Are you sure? Because you asked me to marry you only twenty-four hours after meeting me.”
“Commitment with a catch I can deal with. Commitment with a defined end date, I actually think that’s quite perfect. But then, that’s why I don’t make commitments. Because I know I wouldn’t want to keep them.”
“Well, then your proficiency must be in something other than relationships.”
He smirked. “I have a major in business with a pretty accomplished minor in bedroom skills. And I only claim a minor because you insist a person can’t have a double major in life.”
She felt her face get hot, her blood pounding in her temples. She didn’t know how he could say things like that so casually, like it didn’t mean anything. As if it didn’t throw his mind straight into the bedroom with all kinds of sweaty, half-formed visions.
She’d watched her share of late-night cable when she’d been alone in her hotel room, so she knew what kinds of things he was talking about. And it was making her feel weak and shaky all over.
“What about you? What’s your view on commitment?”
“I majored in piano,” she said, forcing a smile. “Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“Yeah, I got that. I see what you were doing there.”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said. But he wasn’t doing it in a cruel way. He was teasing her. She wasn’t sure if anyone had ever really teased her like that. If anyone had engaged her in conversation quite like this. Intimate. Sharing. Strange.
“A little bit.”
He turned away from her and she couldn’t help noticing how striking his face was in profile. Strong nose and square jaw. He was almost too perfect to be real. He was like a man chiseled from rock, only infused with breath and warmth. And a glint in his eye that spoke of sin and pleasure.
“Over there,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “That’s Anita Blaire, she’s the lead writer for the society pages.”
Noelle turned her head slightly and saw a woman craning her neck to get a look at them.
Ethan released his hold on her hand and placed his palm on her hip, sliding it around slowly until both of his hands were rested on the indent in her spine, just above her bottom. He moved his thumb slightly, slowly, his touch edging near intimate territory.
She stiffened, her heart pounding so hard she was afraid she was going to pass out. She swallowed, barely able to finish the job thanks to her suddenly dry throat.
“Relax,” he whispered. “Lean into me.”
She did her best to relax but her muscles were locked up, tense. Not with fear, but with anticipation. She didn’t know what he might do next. Where he would touch her. It made her hot and shivery all over. Like having a fever, one that burned from deep inside her core.
“How’s this?” she asked, her voice a little bit thin, shaky.
“Better,” he whispered, his lips brushing her temple, the slightly intimate caress making her stomach tighten with raw, sexual need. It was different like this. In the arms of a real man, instead of just the hazy fantasy of a dream lover’s caress. Her ideas of desire were all viewed through a Vaseline-smeared lens in her mind’s eye. But this wasn’t obscured or blurred, it was sharp and clear. Almost painful in its intensity.
And he hadn’t even kissed her.
Would he? Eventually. He would have to eventually because he would have to do the kiss-the-bride thing at the wedding. And now her palms were sweaty. She tightened her grip on his shoulders.
He angled his head and his lips skimmed the line of her jaw. She blew out a shocked breath and dug her fingernails into his shoulders, just to get that extra hold, because she felt as if she might melt into a puddle of Noelle at his feet. Wouldn’t that be a good picture for the society pages?
He pressed his lips more firmly to her skin, just beneath her ear. She shuddered when he brushed the tip of his tongue over the tender skin. She’d never even known to fantasize about such a simple, sensual thing. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have known the effect it would have on her.
“You taste like vanilla,” he said, his voice soft and husky, his breath touching her neck, making goosebumps spread over her.
She pulled her head back so she could look at him, at his dark eyes, so intent on hers. Was he going to kiss her now? Like, really kiss her?
He looked away from her, back in the direction of Anita. “I think we’ve caught her attention,” he said.
The shroud of arousal that had cocooned them just a moment before broke and Noelle became conscious again of the noise in the room. The buzz of conversation, the music, the fact that there were other people there, in the ballroom, in the world.
“Oh,” she cleared her throat, “yes.”
“Ready to go and be social?”
No. She was ready to go and crawl under a rock and hide for ten years, thank you very much, because she’d made an idiot of herself over the brief brush of his lips on her skin. The worst thing was, she was still wishing he’d done more.
“Of course,” she said, her voice brittle.
“Come on then, sweetheart, let’s spread the good news of our new-found love.”
CHAPTER FIVE
TOTAL bliss. She was warm. And comfy. Happy even. Cocooned in the thousand-thread-count sheets in a luxury hotel. And room service was on its way up with coffee.
Noelle snuggled down deeper into the bedding and sighed. For a few moments her mind was blank, and then last night came rushing through it. Not just her mind, her body. She could feel him again, his large, warm hands on her hips, his lips against her jaw.
She flung her arm over her eyes and growled into the empty room. She didn’t want to be dealing with this at the moment. And definitely not with him. She had to keep it in the realm of business transaction or it was just … wrong.
There was a heavy knock on the door and she tugged the covers up to her throat. “Come in.”
“Morning.” He brought coffee, but he wasn’t room service. Ethan strode in, looking amazing and not at all like they’d stayed at a party until the early hours of the morning.
He was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt that was open at the collar. She could see just a hint of dark chest hair when he moved and the shirt gaped a bit … and she was staring. And it was probably obvious. She looked out the window.
“So you aren’t … I was expecting room service.”
“I intercepted them. Said I wanted to wish my darling Noelle a good morning in a way only I could.”
She felt her face get hot. “You do have a flair for drama.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t say that. But I do want this to work. And in order for that to happen, everyone around me has to believe that you’ve done a real number on me.”
“Do they?” She couldn’t really imagine doing a number on a man. Not when his presence made her feel hot and sort of uncomfortable. But not in a bad way, really. Actually, it was the most pleasant discomfort she’d ever felt before.
“So, what’s on the agenda for today?” He looked surprised by her question. “What?” She shrugged. “I’m sort of … working for you now. Kind of my job to be at your beck and call.”
His facial expression shifted, a subtle change, his lips parting slightly, a dark and dangerous light illuminating his brown eyes. The intensity of his focus only made that discomfort spread through her a little more, from her tightened stomach and pounding heart down to her limbs, to the apex of her thighs.
“Now that is a very interesting and tempting thought, Noelle.”
Noelle felt heat creep from her breasts up her throat and into her face. She knew she was pink everywhere. She was usually so pale, her skin always gave her away.
Because she knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing she was thinking. Her mind was back on last night, on what it had felt like to be in his arms. And now here she was, in bed, and it all seemed easy … as if everything might be simpler if she just scooted over and made room for him next to her.
She gulped a too-hot mouthful of coffee and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The briefness of her nightie was now the least of her worries.
“Not what I meant, Ethan.”
“I don’t have designs on your womanly virtue,” he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm. “Promise. Much too complicated at this stage in the game.”
“Agreed,” she said, ignoring the heat in her cheeks. Womanly virtue. Good grief. If only that wasn’t so close to the truth—not that she counted it as a virtue. More like a somewhat telling commentary on just how thoroughly her life had been managed from moment one.
No boyfriends. Not even a hint of teenage rebellion. She’d been too busy. And she’d believed so strongly in everything her mother had asked of her, had wanted to repay her for the years of travel and lessons by doing well.
By doing what she’d been asked, or rather ordered, to do. And now she was paying for it, since she didn’t know the first thing about real life. She knew about glitz and glamour, but not how to make the money to achieve it for herself. She knew about air kisses and fake praise, but not about real relationships. Real kisses. Ethan had come the closest.
She shivered at the memory.
“Come to work with me?”
“Um … sure.” It wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind, but then, she wasn’t really certain what she’d had in mind. “I’m not going to be spending every waking minute with you, am I?”
“I don’t know, what would you do if you were head over heels in love? In love enough to get engaged only a couple of weeks after meeting someone?”
She laughed as she edged over to the bathroom, conscious of her semi-dressed state. “I have no idea.”
“I don’t either, but I imagine that we very much would spend every waking, and non-waking, moment together.”
His eyes, so hot on her, felt like an intimate caress. One that made her burn inside. She crossed her arms over her breasts to disguise her nipples, beaded tight against the filmy fabric with no bra to help hide the effect he was having on her.
“In any case, going to work with you today might be … fun.”
Ethan gritted his teeth and fought hard against the razor-sharp edge of arousal that was digging into him, cutting into his control. She was barely covered up by a silky, bright-blue confection that looked as though it was designed for the sole purpose of driving a man to an early grave. Or at least to the hospital to see a doctor about an erection lasting longer than four hours …
She wasn’t just an easy tumble though. This wasn’t about sex, and it sure wasn’t about using her body. He didn’t need her body. He could have his pick of any woman he wanted. He wasn’t about to let her control him, not about to let himself believe the attraction to her was special in any way beyond what was normal. He’d let it make an idiot of him last night. He’d flirted with her. Nearly kissed her.
He just hadn’t had sex in so long that his body was trying to convince him she was special. She wasn’t. She was just another blonde. Blondes he’d had. Lots of them.
But her legs. So long and shapely, and her figure, petite and luscious, pert round breasts that called out to him. To touch. To taste. He had a feeling that even if he’d satisfied his libido last week—hell, last night—he’d feel the same way.
Feel some sort of sick craving to possess her in every way. To make sure the deal went through? No, not even he would stoop that low. This wasn’t about her; not about hurting her anyway. It wasn’t even about hurting her mother, not on his part, anyway. It was about showing his father that going through life using people as rungs on the ladder of success and satisfaction didn’t work.
About making sure Damien Grey wouldn’t get rewarded for it.
“Maybe you should go get dressed.”
Her cheeks turned pink, a deep rose that betrayed her embarrassment. That was a novelty, one he wasn’t sure how he felt about. A woman who blushed like that over something so simple, that wasn’t really his thing. And yet for some reason, it made his body harder, more tense, more aroused.
This was a business deal, in a way, and he had to remember that. But he worked with women every day without experiencing this problem. Of course, the women he worked with didn’t come into the boardroom wearing silky lingerie.
He ground his teeth together and tightened his hands into fists, channeling his tension into his screaming tendons. He had to get a grip. On his libido or his body, he didn’t really care, but the attraction to Noelle had to be managed.
“Right.” She slunk off to the bathroom, and he let out a breath he hadn’t been conscious of holding.
The office was safe at least. It would give him a chance to remember why he was doing this. Give his body a chance to calm down. Because he had a goal and he wasn’t about to let an errant attraction distract him from reaching it.
More importantly, he wasn’t about to give in to temptation, to let his body have the control when he despised men who behaved like having testosterone meant they couldn’t be their own masters.
He’d watched his father do it, time and again. Disregarding the feelings of his wife, his children, and for what? For the pursuit of his own selfish pleasure. Casting off every last piece of his honor, his commitments, to chase after a woman who, in the end, wouldn’t even stay with him.
He looked at the closed bathroom door and tried not to imagine Noelle’s nightgown slithering over her curves and pooling onto the floor.
He wasn’t his father. And while she wasn’t her mother, she was the one woman who was patently off limits.
“You do have a nice office.” Noelle leaned back in his office chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her, black tights covering all that tempting, creamy skin, but doing nothing to disguise the shape.
Turned out she was just as sexy when she was fully dressed. Which he’d known after last night, but when he’d invited her to the office he’d imagined she’d put on something more business-casual. He had discovered that ex-performers didn’t have much in the way of business-casual. What she did have was a brief, black dress, black tights and a pair of gold high heels that glowed from fifty paces away.
And all that pale blond hair, hanging loose around her face like a halo … she was just impossible to put in a corner and ignore. And that was problematic on many, many levels.
“Gets the job done anyway,” he said.
“Is there something I can do?” She straightened, crossing her legs at the ankles. It did not help make her look any more demure.
“You can get out of my chair.”
She turned crimson and popped up. “Okay, done. Anything else?”
“You want to work?”
“Well, I’m here.” She shrugged. “It seems like I ought to do something. Won’t people think it’s funny I’m just hanging out?”
“I don’t think anyone thinks it’s funny at all. I think they assume we’re in here not working.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Really. Did you see the paper this morning?”
“No, I didn’t have the chance to grab it.”
“We’re the new hot couple, you know.”
“Can I see?”
He rounded the desk and leaned over, typing in the web address for the newspaper they’d been featured in. “There you are.”
She leaned in next to him, that sweet vanilla scent teasing his senses, making his body harden with tension and arousal.
A small smile curved her lips. “They know my name.”
“You sound surprised.”
“No one’s missed me much over the past year. Which I actually consider kind of a blessing. I haven’t really been keen on sharing my downfall with the world.”
“What? That your mother stole your money?”
“That she abandoned me because she knew she’d gotten everything she could out of me. Because my sales—album sales, ticket sales—were dwindling to nothing.”
“So what have you been doing then, this past year?”
She shrugged again, her blue eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind him. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
She looked at him, pale eyes filled with anger now. “Maybe I haven’t done the best I could with my time. But I didn’t really know what to do. I only know how to do one thing.” She looked away. “My mother made sure I only knew one thing. I tried to … I tried to talk to my old booking agent. Tried to see about playing venues I used to play. I called my label and asked them if they wanted to release a greatest hits album. Turns out, they don’t think I have any.” She laughed, a hollow, bitter sound that made his chest ache. “So in that sense, I did something. But I just … I didn’t know what else to do when all of that was shot down.”
“What about playing piano bars and things like that?”
“Ironically, that’s the kind of thing I am a bit too famous for, and I don’t mean that in a snobbish way, I mean … I didn’t want that to show up in tabloids.”
“That’s not really a great excuse, Noelle. You basically just sat there and let everything fall apart.”
“No. No I did not. Everything was wrecked, utterly wrecked by my mother. She smashed everything to pieces—I didn’t let it fall apart. And yes, maybe I could have done something, maybe I should have, but every night I’ve gone to bed hoping … hoping that somehow in the morning it would be fixed. That things would go back to normal. I tried to force it to go back to normal.” She looked at him, blue eyes intent on his, an impact he felt all the way through his body. “Now … now I don’t even want things to go back to normal. But I just … I felt burned out. I was just so tired. This, having a chance to hold onto something, this at least makes me feel like I can fight. Like I have something to fight with.”
His chest felt strange. As if it had gotten smaller, or his heart had gotten larger. He didn’t like it. “You could learn something else.”
Her frame slumped. “I don’t know if I have the energy anymore. To devote myself to mastering something other than music, I mean. I’ve done that. Practicing, improving, every day without stopping since I was a child. It didn’t really get me anywhere, did it?”
He didn’t know why he felt compelled to try and offer her … something. Comfort maybe? He only knew that he did. “Very few people live their lives that way, Noelle. With drills and practice for eight hours a day, in addition to performing and promoting and traveling.”
“Are you telling me you work any less hard?” she asked.
“No, I work a lot. But I choose to. There are plenty of people who go nine to five, five days a week.”
She looked down, her throat working. “What if I can’t do anything else?”
Everything about his carefully laid plan, her being in the office, her being anywhere near him, suddenly felt wrong. Like he was joining in the queue of people who’d used her.
A bit too late to feel that way.
Much too late. And she was walking in with her eyes open.
“Of course you can. Here,” he slapped his palm on the leather back of the chair, “get in the chair.”
She sat back down, her expression confused. Damn, but she made him feel every inch the Big Bad Wolf to her Little Red Riding Hood. He didn’t really like the feeling.
He shoved his conscience to one side. He’d deal with it later. “Do you type?”
She grimaced. “Not really. Not fast.”
“Well, you’re going to learn.” He pulled out a stack of papers he’d set aside for his PA. “I want you to enter this into the computer. These are specs for different building plans. If you enter the numbers in these cells, the computer will do the math for you. You just enter it in.”
“I can do that.”
“Okay, do that. I’m going to go down the hall and make some phone calls, and I’ll be back to check on you.” Distance was definitely necessary.
He walked out of the office and closed the door behind him, his chest still tight. He didn’t know why it mattered, but he wanted to show Noelle that she could do something. Something other than doing drills every day for a career that had crumbled to nothing right in front of her.
More than that, he didn’t like what he saw in her eyes. That look that said she saw herself as a failure. He’d watched his mother go through that. Watched her pin her self-worth on the perception of a fickle public.