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He stumbled to the nearest open window and breathed deeply of the cooler air flooding over his bare skin. He had to get it together. They had a meeting in less than half an hour.
Somehow, he got dressed and met up with Nichelle in the hallway outside their shared rooms. Wearing her business clothes like a suit of armor, she acted as if nothing had happened. They made it to the meeting with Favreau on time and worked together to convince the idiot to spend his money with them, then they left for the hotel.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t awkward. They talked business in the taxi on the way to the meeting and back. Then, at the hotel, they went their separate ways. There was no more talk of them exploring the city together. Nichelle went for a walk, and Wolfe left for the hotel bar and a double whiskey.
He’d been to Paris before, each time on business. It was just another city for him, with none of the magic that most of the women in his family thought it held. The Eiffel Tower was nice. The brie was pretty good. That was it. Still, he’d been looking forward to sharing the city with Nichelle and learning more about it. But his erection had perked up and ruined any chance of that.
At the bar, he quickly knocked back his first glass of whiskey. The second glass went down even easier than the first, and after the third he was feeling relaxed, easygoing. He reached for his phone and dialed a familiar number. It only rang twice before his best friend picked up. It was still morning, just after nine, in New York.
“Hey,” Garrison greeted him. “I thought you were in France this week.”
“You thought rightly, my friend.” He kept his voice low, aware of the French dislike of audible public conversation. Even though it was barely three in the afternoon, the hotel bar was far from empty. “I’m calling you from a very French hotel right now.”
“Everything going well there?”
Wolfe grunted. “Yeah. Well enough. We got the client we came here for at least.”
“You don’t sound that pleased about it.” Faint noises came through the phone, a low voice from nearby.
“The guy is a prick but— Wait, am I interrupting something? If you and Reyna are still getting your honeymoon on—” Wolfe named his best friend’s new wife, a woman he’d met a handful of times, the most recent being at their wedding where he was best man.
“Then I wouldn’t have answered the phone,” Garrison cut him off.
Wolfe smiled, swirling the whiskey in his glass. “I would’ve been disappointed in you if you had. The grapevine says wives don’t take kindly to that sort of thing.”
“For once, the grapevine might just be on to something.” Garrison paused. “You doing good?” A hint of worry crept through the phone. “You seem a little agitated.”
Was he agitated? Wolfe shifted in his chair and tilted his head back to stare at the ornate ceiling with the pale cherubs and half-naked goddesses, the European idea of public art. He swept his tongue across his front teeth, tasting the question he was about to ask. “When did you know you wanted Reyna?”
A huff came through the phone, Garrison’s version of a laugh. His friend was restrained to a fault. When they were younger, and hell, he couldn’t lie, he did it now, Wolfe often made a game of trying to make Garrison literally laugh out loud. A full guffaw was as rare for his friend as oilfields in Florida.
“What’s going on with you? Did you meet a woman over there?”
“Stop deflecting. I’m serious. When did you know you wanted to take her to bed?”
Garrison breathed a sigh into the phone. “The day I met her.”
“Really?”
“Of course. You feel the same way about nearly every woman you end up dating.” If that’s what he wanted to call it. The unsaid words made both men laugh. One more than the other, obviously.
Garrison’s laughter trailed off. “If you haven’t met anybody over there, what’s going on? Did you accidentally drink the water?”
“I’m in France, not Nicaragua, Garrison.” Wolfe avoided the more important question.
“You never know what those French people are up to. First it’s snails, then before you know it, you’ll be stuck in one of their miniature bathrooms with something explosive like Bonaparte’s Revenge.”
Wolfe almost choked on his whiskey. “Right.”
A waiter, crisp in a white shirt, black slacks and a long apron, served the high table next to his. The table full of business people, most of them Canadian by the sound of it, clinked their glasses in a toast punctuated with a round of celebratory laughter once the waiter left.
“So what’s got you thinking and drinking at three o’clock in the afternoon?”
Wolfe didn’t bother denying he was at a bar. “Does a man need an excuse to enjoy his favorite whiskey?”
“Not every man needs an excuse, but you do.”
He dropped his head back with a slow sigh. “I didn’t used to be this predictable.”
Background sounds came from Garrison’s end of the call, the creak of leather, the tap of glass on wood as if he was having an appropriate drink of his own, probably coffee, at his desk. He didn’t say anything, just waited for Wolfe to break the silence.
Wolfe stroked the whiskey glass with his thumb. “You know what I’ve always thought about Nichelle, right?”
“That she’s too important to sleep with. Yes, I remember.”
“Well, today I might have had a slight change of heart.”
“She’s not that important to you anymore?” That was Garrison’s idea of funny.
“Keep it up, Kevin Hart.” He gripped his nearly empty whiskey glass. “Today, things got a little messy.”
“You slept with her?”
“You’re just making all the wrong guesses right now.”
“I know you want to sleep with her,” Garrison said. “I’m simply making the logical leap here. So, if I know you, something happened that made her more appealing than usual, and you’re fighting your typical pleasure-seeking impulses.”
“Something like that. I want her, you know I do. But now she knows, too.”
“What, she saw you staring at her shoes again?” Garrison knew that Wolfe had a thing for women in high heels. Especially Nichelle in high heels.
Years before, when Wolfe had the idea to bring Nichelle over to Kingston Consulting, he’d set up an appointment to meet with her. They communicated by phone and email for weeks before he saw her in person, all grown up, for the first time in nearly two years. She stepped into the restaurant where they’d agreed to meet for their business lunch, breath-stealing in black and white, an outfit that made her look like a fifties pinup model but that he later found out she thought of as business attire, some version of a uniform. The dress caught his eye first, but as his eyes went lower, he damned near swallowed his tongue. Her shoes, electric blue stilettos, fit her feet as if they were custom made, creating an elegant silhouette of the already beautiful contours of her feet.
His heart thudded loudly in time to her footsteps as she walked through the restaurant, attracting the stares of nearly everyone she passed. Nichelle looked as if she’d stepped straight out of his fantasies, deep burgundy lips, hourglass figure and shoes he immediately imagined her wearing in bed. His bed. He reined in his thoughts before they could go any further and had even managed, he hoped, to get through the meeting with his mind strictly on the business proposition he wanted to make her. Although it was hard, he kept his eyes firmly on her face for the entire two hours.
Yeah, Garrison knew all about that and had laughed at him, another one of his rare belly laughs, when Wolfe told him about the meeting a few days later.
“She definitely caught me looking,” Wolfe said. “But this time, she was looking, too.”
Garrison hummed a response that was all doubt. “Are you sure you weren’t having another one of those dreams again?”
Wolfe dropped his head back against the seat and groaned. “Oh, come on...”
He finished up the call the same time he finished his whiskey, urging Garrison to go back to whatever he had been doing while he tried to do a better job of not lusting after his business partner.
But nighttime came and tore all his resolutions to shreds.
A dream brought him right back to that moment in the room: Nichelle in the doorway with the phone in her hand. Her slender but curvaceous body in jeans and a high-collared white blouse that would have been virginal except for the fact that it was completely see through. In real life, he remembered that she had worn a black bra beneath the blouse and that it was more than the wisp of material it was in the dream. But reality and dream blurred, then the dream became what he wanted.
In the dream, her eyes flickered over him, warming his body, pumping blood rapidly through him, filling him with hard intention. But instead of leaving, she closed the door between their rooms and came closer. Wolfe began to shake. He dropped the underwear from his hand and watched her walk to him. The sinuous dance of her body across the carpeted space between them; the twitch of her hips beneath the thick fabric of the jeans; her slightly parted lips as she stared at his body, then finally, finally at his face.
She may have said something, the dream Nichelle. Or it may have been Wolfe’s desire to see those lips part, to hear her call his name. He turned and she touched his chest, tracing the line down the center of his body, down his belly that tightened hard from the light stroke of her fingers. Those fingers skated lower as she met his eyes and held them. His throat was too tight for him to swallow, his lungs incapable of holding or circulating enough air. She touched his intimate flesh.
“Nicki...”
He groaned her name while her hands clasped him, caressed the tip of him with her thumb. A flash of mischief crossed her face.
She sank to her knees in front of him. Her breath stroked him, then her mouth, then her tongue. Her fingernails dug painfully into his thighs, a counterpoint to the humid heaven of her mouth. She hummed her delight around him, and Wolfe exploded with pleasure. He woke up gasping, his belly wet with evidence of his release.
* * *
Nichelle was furious at herself. One look at Wolfe’s naked body, and she had reacted just like every other empty-headed woman who’d ever seen him, damned near leaping across the room on top of him. Women literally came on to him every day. To get laid, all he had to do was point a finger or nod his head.
And because of this, Wolfe dismissed those women as if they were nothing. He shared a night or three of physical gratification with them, sure. But at the end of it all, they were forgettable, and he could and often did replace them every few weeks. Nichelle didn’t want to be like that. Ever.
After the meeting with Favreau, she left to wander the city alone. Instead of going back to change into more suitable walking clothes, she attacked the city in her business blouse and skirt matched with her favorite sunshine-yellow heels.
The heels weren’t the most comfortable to walk in, but they forced her to move slowly and take in all the city had to offer. She strolled through the Louvre’s courtyard to the Pont des Arts, one of the bridges festooned with locks from people who thought they were in love. The wooden slats of the bridge felt precarious under her high heels, even more so when she looked down and saw the water of the Seine wavering beneath the dark wood.
She wondered if all those couples who’d put their locks on the bridge were still in love and still together. A few feet away, an Asian couple, the woman in a lacy wedding dress, the man in a white tuxedo, posed for a professional photographer. Did they think their love would endure if they took wedding photos framed in the locks of other people’s love?
“I bet they won’t last a year.”
Nichelle nearly jumped out of her skin at the intimate voice near her ear. She turned. It was a Frenchman, or one who looked stereotypically French in close-fitting designer jeans, a T-shirt and a light scarf draped around his neck. His eyes were gray, and his mouth was framed by a sexy, well-trimmed beard.
“I won’t take that bet,” she said in response to his earlier comment. “They might end up lasting longer than we live.”
“True,” he said, but hardly looked repentant. “And maybe every fool who latched a lock to this bridge will end up dying happily next to the one they came here with.”
“You’re awfully cynical for someone who lives in the city of love.”
“It’s the City of Light, thankfully. The other name is just a dreadful rumor.” He flashed her a smile and crowded close to her against the railing. She could smell his cologne, something musky, mixed with his body heat and clean sweat.
Nichelle knew what he was doing. He was handsome, and she was single. She didn’t have a lover waiting for her at home and didn’t need anyone’s permission to enjoy someone of the opposite sex. But even though the strange Frenchman seemed nothing like Wolfe—he wasn’t as handsome, and his smell was almost too sweet—Nichelle looked into the teasing flicker of his gray eyes and only thought of the man she’d left behind at the hotel. The man who had stood tall, wrapped in light and kissed by shadow, his virile nakedness stirring a hot ache in the center of her. Nichelle stepped back from the stranger. Her spine connected with the railing of the bridge.
“You’re right,” she said. “Who needs love?”
His pale eyes sparkled down at her. “Definitely not me.” His gaze dropped to her mouth before connecting with her own. “Would you like to have a drink with me?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
He moved back a step, a gentleman. The sparkle in his eyes did not dim in the least. “You’ve broken my jaded heart today, mademoiselle.”
“But I’m sure you’ll be better by tomorrow at the latest,” she said with a soft laugh.
The stranger brushed her arm with warm fingers. “I hope whoever you’re pining for will adore you as much as you deserve.” Then he took another step back, still smiling. He winked at her then nodded in parting, deliberately stepping between the photographer and his subjects on the bridge.
Only after he disappeared did his words register. Pining? Hardly. But without prompting, images of Wolfe from the afternoon came back to her in brilliant color. His body, readying itself for sex, the firm muscles under light. His face, frozen in concentration as he stared at her. No, she was definitely not pining.
Nichelle left the bridge and the crowds to dip onto a side street. Yes, the city was magical in the sun. What she had missed while in college seemed a bit of a tragedy now. If someone like that flirtatious stranger had tried to pick her up back then, she’d have much better memories of Paris.
Maybe you can make some better memories now. With Wolfe.
The thought froze her on the sidewalk, hissed sudden breath into her lungs. Someone bumped into her, a woman who begged Nichelle’s pardon then kept walking and chatting on her cell phone. The sound of her own phone ringing shoved her back into motion. She answered without looking at the display.
“How is Paris treating you?”
She sighed at Nala’s voice. “So far the business aspect is going very well.”
Her friend immediately pounced on what she wasn’t saying. “And the personal?”
Nichelle sucked the inside of her bottom lip. “I just saw Wolfe naked.”
“Oh! I wasn’t expecting that.” Nala sounded positively delighted.
“Me, either.”
Nala’s impatient sigh fluttered through the phone. “So what the hell happened after the naked sighting?”
“Nothing happened. I walked out.”
“But...?”
She drew a trembling breath. “He’s hot, Nala!”
“Welcome to the world of eyes that see.” Nala huffed in amusement and exasperation. “I can’t believe you’re just now realizing that.”
“You know I don’t...didn’t see him like that.” She didn’t want to. She’d be damned if she would allow something as petty as sexual attraction to ruin the effortless business relationship she and Wolfe spent over three years building.
“Are you going to do anything about it?” Nala asked.
“No.” Nichelle shook her head. “Definitely not.”
“Hmm. Okay. Um...” A pregnant silence pressed between them. Nichelle could almost see Nala swelling with curiosity. Despite the gravity of the situation, she smiled.
“Okay. Out with it. I know you’re dying to ask something.”
A breath of relief came at her over the phone. “Oh, thank God!” Nala giggled. “Is he big? Cut? Interested in you?”
Nichelle strolled down the sidewalk, slipping past two women who walked side by side, smoking cigarettes and talking in rapid Spanish. A bicycle bell trilled from nearby as a biker warned a pedestrian who had wandered into the bike lane. She thought about not answering Nala’s questions then decided it wasn’t worth the inevitable aggravation.
“Yes. Yes. And I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean you don’t think so? Did he or did he not get hard for you?”
“Well, he’s a man. Of course he did, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Three boys in hip-hop gear boldly looked her over as they walked toward her. She held the phone against her ear, paying them little attention even as they leered in an obvious way, one of them saying something mildly obscene to his friends. Nichelle walked past them.
Nala chortled. “What happens in Paris, stays in Paris.”
“Nothing is going to happen between us. You know how I feel about this business partnership.”
But it wasn’t just about business. She’d known Wolfe since they were children. From practically across the street, she’d watched him grow from an energetic kid to an awkward teenager and now into a gorgeous adult male. In all that time, she hadn’t felt a flicker of attraction. Why now, after all these years? If she had a type, it was the over-educated man with an extensive vocabulary, articles published in obscure journals and a track record of romantic stability and fidelity. Not this worldly man who didn’t take anything seriously other than his family and work, who had a different woman every other week and didn’t seem inclined to settle down at all.
“I know.” Nala made a soothing noise. “But don’t beat yourself up over this, Nicki. Things happen. Feelings change. It’s just another one of those things.”
She sighed. “Okay.” The dam had already broken. There was no going back. All she had to do was get her unexpected attraction to Wolfe down to a manageable level so she could still effectively do her job. “Thanks for talking me through it.”
“What are best friends for?” Nala paused. “But if you change your mind and decide to get down and dirty with Wolfe, you have to tell me everything. Seriously.”
“Goodbye, Nala.”
She hung up on her friend’s laughter.
Chapter 4
When Nichelle and Wolfe returned to Miami, she tried and eventually succeeded in pretending the charged afternoon in the Paris hotel never happened. And it seemed as if Wolfe had, too. He never mentioned it, never asked to talk about it.
On an early Monday morning, Nichelle sat behind her desk with Wolfe distractingly at the back of her mind. She scanned an email from Teague Simonson at Sterling Solutions. He wanted her to come in for a meeting and see if there was anything at Sterling that would “sate her appetite for bigger and better.” She hit the delete button. The only thing she wanted from Sterling was for them to leave her alone.
Someone rapped on her door.
“Come in.”
Her door opened and Wolfe walked in with Clint, their general counsel. Wolfe closed the door behind him, his eyes resting easily on her, before heading to his usual seat in her office. Nichelle looked away from him after a single flickering glance.
Nichelle moved from behind her desk to lean against the front of it. She crossed her ankles and her arms. Wolfe sat on the small sofa and kicked his feet up on the small hassock. He sipped his hot chocolate Nichelle’s secretary had left for him.
“Tell us the news, Clint,” Nichelle said.
The attorney paused in the process of swiping a finger across the face of his tablet. “Nice shoes, Nichelle.” He blinked down at her lavender Alexander McQueen pumps, a thoughtful look on his face, before going back to his tablet.
“Thank you, Clint.” She smiled at him then glanced at Wolfe. He only sipped from the large mug and gave her a speaking glance, head slightly tilted, body relaxed yet predatory in the Tom Ford suit.
“Tell me something good.” She looked at him but directed her words to Clint.
“I don’t know about good,” the lawyer said. “But I can give you some information you can work with.”
“I’ll take it,” she said.
He nodded. “You know the Quraishi proposal is sound. You did an impeccable job, as always.”
“But...?”
Clint grimaced, looking as if he’d had a bad attack of indigestion. “You might have to let this potential client go.”
Nichelle abruptly straightened. She propped her hands on her hips and planted her feet wide. “Why? This contract could bring in over five point three million dollars to the firm over the next two years alone.”
“I know the numbers, Nichelle.” Clint leveled a pleading look at Wolfe. “But I really think we might have to just give up on this one.”
Wolfe tipped his head toward Nichelle. “Whatever she decides is what we’ll do,” he said to Clint.
Over the years, Wolfe had learned to leave the business of client acquisition to her. He was the money and brawn of their operation while she was the seer and fortune builder. It was because of her that the company was as successful as it was now. Everyone knew it. Although it sometimes took other men in the company a little while to know the power structure, and they usually turned to Wolfe for most decisions, she quickly showed them who held the reins.
Clint sighed. “Quraishi is a devout Muslim and family man. You already know that. He won’t do business with Kingston because its partners—” he jerked a stubby finger at them “—the two of you, are not a married couple.”
“Excuse me?” Nichelle didn’t think she’d heard him right.
“Quraishi would think it’s improper. You’re a heterosexual couple working closely together in business, spending long hours building a company from the ground up. It’s very intimate work. He’s a traditional guy and won’t simply accept that your relationship is platonic. You see how people here at Kingston act. They just think you’ve been incredibly discreet all these years.”
Nichelle didn’t give a damn what anybody thought about her and Wolfe’s relationship. It was none of their business. She clenched her jaw. “How can we change Quraishi’s mind?”
“Aside from getting married to each other, you can’t.”
“Isn’t that a little extreme?” Wolfe’s voice rumbled with annoyance, an echo of what Nichelle was feeling.
“This is not the eighteen hundreds!” she snapped. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I think it’s stupid, but that’s the way he runs his life and his company. There’s no morality clause when you work for him, but I hear that if he ever discovers any infidelity or improper sexual dealings among his employees, they are immediately fired.” Clint dropped his intense stare to tap out something on the tablet. “You can approach him with your proposal anyway. It’s a really good one. But know that once he finds out the two of you are unmarried and working so closely together, you won’t get past his secretary.”
Nichelle crossed her arms, her nails digging into her elbows through the thin silk blouse. She had done her research on Quraishi and reached a similar conclusion. But she’d been hoping that another perspective would prove her wrong. She wanted the Quraishi account. Badly. It was the key to the future she and Wolfe had discussed when he first brought her to Kingston Consulting. She stalked across the room to sink into the couch at Wolfe’s side.
“I want that account, Clint.”