Her stomach clenched at the fury streaking across his face. “There’s no need to shout,” she murmured. “And they can’t wait, Gabe. You need them if you want this launch to be a success.”
“What do you think, Alex? That I’m working twenty-hour days because I don’t?” He took a step closer to her, then another, until two hundred pounds of pure male aggression was staring her in the face. Her heart started to pound furiously in her chest. She tumbled back in time to another room, to another big male bearing down on her, laying his hands on her, and her breath came quick and hard. This is Gabe, she told herself, sucking in a breath, not him.
Breathe.
Gabe scowled. “I want you to stop disobeying my orders and start doing what I say, because you are treading very, very close to the line.”
That snapped her out of it. “What line?” she demanded.
“The creative differences line. The one where I fire you.”
“Fire me?” She let out a bark of laughter, releasing the tension inside of her. “I only wish you would fire me, you’re such a pain in the ass.”
His hands clenched at his sides. “I am not having a good day, Alex. Rein it in.”
“No.” She stuck her chin out. “You are killing us, Gabe. You need to start letting us make decisions.”
“Like adding people to the guest list I haven’t approved?”
She frowned. “Your PR agency missed some key influencers.”
“You added my ex-girlfriend and her husband.”
“Oh.” Her fingers flew to her mouth. “Who is that?”
“Darya Theriault.”
She thought hard. “Right. Yes, well, she and Peter are a Bay Area power couple. Don’t you think you can swallow your pride for one night and do what’s right for the event?”
“No, I cannot,” he yelled at her. “She is not coming to this event.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. This was getting just a little out of control. “Okay, maybe I should have checked with you on that. I should have checked with you on that. But it isn’t my fault you fired the last agency and left us with zero time. It isn’t my fault you can’t prioritize what’s important and it isn’t my fault you are a serial perfectionist.”
He gave her a dangerous look. “A serial perfectionist?”
She opened her eyes, looked up into his furious face. “You have me chasing down Ligurian anchovies. How stupid is that? Ligurian anchovies, Gabe.”
“It is a treasured cultural food for Italians,” he bit out.
She waved a hand at him. “It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. However, I would be inclined to pander to your little whims if you would just give me my goddamned approvals before we all go down in a big, fiery flash.”
“You are driving me crazy,” he rasped, taking another step forward until she was backed up against the desk. “You have been deliberately antagonizing me. You don’t like someone to control you, so you decided to bury me in paper. I ask you to do something, you do the opposite. And when all of these things don’t work, you go your own renegade way and do exactly what you like.”
“I do not do the opposite of what you say.”
His gaze flashed. “I asked you to wait in the living room and found you in the kitchen.”
She stared at him. “Do you know how ridiculous you sound? It’s control freak gone crazy.” She shook her head. “Is this how you are in bed, Gabe, because I’m gobsmacked that so many women in this day and age would go for it.”
“You’d be surprised,” he grated. “Maybe that’s why you were strutting around in that outfit last night? Because you still can’t admit you’d like to try it on for size?”
She winced at the innuendo. At the hard heat of his body that had her trapped against the desk. “This is not professional.”
“This hasn’t been professional since day one.”
“Still—” Her pulse went into overdrive as he reached up and slid his hand into her hair. “Gabe—”
“Shut the hell up, Alex.”
He brought his mouth down on hers in a hard, punishing kiss that held more than its fair share of anger. She should have stopped it, should have immediately pushed him away, but unfortunately intense sexual frustration made her highly susceptible to the command behind it. To the insistence she open her mouth and let him in. She did and he made a sound in the back of his throat and explored her with an erotic thoroughness that made her hot all over. Desperate for more.
The desk was hard against her back. She moved against him and he picked her up and set her on it. Braced his hands on either side of her and took her mouth in another heated exploration that sent her pulse soaring.
“Gabe,” she murmured, hoping to inject some sanity into the situation. He dragged his mouth down the line of her neck to the raging pulse at the base of it. “I think we should—”
His hands moved to the top button of her shirt. The second. His mouth at her most sensitive place between shoulder and neck, teeth scraping across her skin, made her shiver with want. Somehow she couldn’t make herself move or get the rest of the words out. He pushed her shirt aside, his gaze hot on her. “Dio. You are so beautiful.”
Alex forgot her name then, squeezing her eyes shut as he ran his thumbs over the hard tips of her breasts. Shaped the weight of them in his hands. It felt good, so exquisitely good to finally have them on her that she let out a low moan.
He moved his mouth back up to her lips, set them ablaze with another scorching kiss and slid his hands around to the back clasp of her bra.
She stiffened. He was her client. She could not have sex with him on his desk.
“Gabe—” She pushed a hand against his chest. His fingers stilled on the clasp. “We—we can’t do this.”
He pulled back and looked at her, the hazy desire in his eyes sending another wave of heat through her. Strength, she needed strength...
“We— I—” she stumbled, “whatever is happening here, we need to figure it out and not...do this.”
His mouth tightened. His hands fell away from her. “Fix your shirt.”
She moved trembling hands to the buttons. “Gabe—”
“Fix your shirt.”
She did the buttons up with unsteady fingers that didn’t seem to want to work. Tucked her shirt back into her skirt. Gabe shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the window. “You’re right,” he muttered harshly. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
Only for a million different reasons. She offered up the most convenient excuse. “We’re both stressed.”
“Yes,” he agreed, sarcasm lacing his tone. “Let’s go with that.”
She pushed off the desk. He turned around, his face grim and forbidding.
“I’ll have the catering menu to you within the hour. What else do you have?”
“It’s all in here.” She pushed the folder across the desk. “The menu and the interview schedule are the priorities.”
“Bene.”
“Gabe—”
“Leave it alone, Alex. That was an act of insanity on both our parts. Enough said.”
She swallowed hard, tried not to be intimidated by the coldness coming off him like an arctic current. “I know how much this means to you. Let me do my job and I will not let you fail.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then his dark lashes came down to veil his gaze. “No more executive decisions, Alex. Or two days, two hours before the event, I will fire you. I promise you that.”
She nodded. And got the hell out of there before she did something else that was incredibly stupid.
CHAPTER SIX
GABE SPENT THE next week reviewing every person who’d ever been involved in the development of The Devil’s Peak with Pedro, from those who’d supervised the pruning of the vines to get the tannins just right, to those in the lab who were intimately familiar with the finished product, hoping to find something, anything that would point to a leak.
They racked their brains but could find no one with the right combination of access, motivation or strange behavior of late to warrant looking into. Thomas’ background checks didn’t turn up anything. It was distressing, to be sure, that a Devil’s Peak imitator supposedly existed, but Gabe wasn’t prepared to go on a witch hunt and alienate his employees on the basis of rumor. He didn’t even know how close the wine was to his. Which meant he hadn’t told Riccardo or Antonio about it and didn’t plan to until he had more to work with.
He sat back in his chair and looked over at Pedro, the sixty-two-year-old, third-generation winemaker who’d taught him everything he knew about blending. “We need to get our hands on Lane’s wine. You have any friends in the valley who can help?”
Pedro shrugged. “No one wants to cross him. But I can try.”
“Grazie.” Jordan Lane was the undisputed king of wine in California. No one wanted to touch him, because they’d be blackballed within a minute of doing so.
Pedro sharpened his gaze on him. “Have you thought about moving our special project up? Going with that instead for the fall campaign?”
“It’s not ready.”
Pedro shook his head. “You’re not ready. The wine is.”