“Alex—”
“Go.” She pushed into the ladies’ room, the door swinging shut behind her. Her legs trembled; bile pulsed at the base of her throat. She had never even spoken flirtatiously with someone else’s man since Jordan. Never even looked at a man unless she had irrefutable evidence he was single and not harboring secrets. But she had just kissed Gabe in a crowded restaurant in front of his date. Deliberately kissed him.
She sank down on the leather bench, rested her forearms on her thighs and pulled in deep breaths. The night Cassandra Lane had walked in on her and Jordan in bed in his apartment flashed through her head like the recurring nightmare it was. The one that had never gone away. Jordan laughingly insisting on getting out of bed to get them more wine, the sound of a strange woman’s voice in the hallway, then the appearance of Jordan’s redheaded wife in the bedroom, her face dissolving at what met her there.
Alex had been so disorientated, so confused as to what was happening she hadn’t been able to move. A wife? Jordan had a wife? He was supposed to be divorced.
After that, everything had been a blur. Cassandra had lost her mind. Jordan had had to physically remove her from the room while Alex recovered her brain and dragged on her clothes.
Her six-month affair with the man she was in love with had ended the next day with a flower delivery to her office and a thank-you note.
Well, she wished it had ended there. But it hadn’t. As much as she’d wanted to bury her head in the sand and nurse her wounded heart, damage control had to be done. A thirty-million-dollar divorce settlement—in which her firm was inextricably involved because of her—was in play. A five-million-dollar-a-year account her agency depended on hung in the balance. It had been a disaster. Alex was problem child number one yet again, after a youth filled with that label.
She lifted her head as a woman came in and stared curiously at her. Sat up straight and ran her fingers through her hair. Only her boss’s contacts and efforts had prevented the story from being dragged through the tabloids. Kept her career and reputation intact. And yet here she was displaying the same type of reckless behavior.
She was the woman least likely to ever become a De Campo, with a past that could bring the family tumbling down faster than a deck of cards. So why was she making a total and complete fool of herself over him?
It didn’t matter what was between her and Gabe. This had been wrong. Very wrong.
She collected herself and walked back into the restaurant. Susan eyed her paper-white face, asked her if she wanted to talk, then hustled her out to the car when she said no.
This was why she didn’t allow emotion to rule, she told herself in the car as Susan drove her back to the vineyard. Because this was how she messed up people’s lives. How she’d messed up a great deal of her own.
Whatever was happening with Gabe—how she was allowing herself to feel things for him—it had to stop. He was dangerous, lethal to her because of it. She had to end it before she messed up this opportunity she’d been given to keep herself in business. To keep her life on track.
* * *
At first, Samantha Parker refused to let Gabe drive her home. Her bag clutched to her chest, she stood outside the restaurant and blasted him with at least five minutes of insults in a combination of English and Italian before she took a breath. Too bad most of the world’s great operas had been written in Italian, he thought ruefully as he endured the barrage, because Samantha had a very good handle on his native language.
She eventually agreed to let him drive her home when he explained that getting a cab to the city would be both difficult at this time of the night and cost a small fortune. The silence in the car was deafening and he deserved it in every way. No apology seemed to help. How could it? He wasn’t about to tell her the truth, that he’d wanted the woman he’d been kissing back there for what seemed like an eternity, and nothing he did got her out of his head. He could tell her he regretted it, because he did. He’d never acted that way with a woman in his life. But when Samantha had put her hands on her hips outside the restaurant and asked what Alex meant to him, he’d been devoid of an answer. Maybe because he didn’t have one.
So he’d said nothing. That had gone over well.
Now, walking up the front steps to Samantha’s expensive Presidio Heights home, he flinched as she walked in and slammed the door in his face. Bene. He deserved that. But Cristo, he had never navigated waters as murky as these. What was he doing? He’d told himself to forget about Alex and focus on Samantha, yet every time Alex had laughed at something that hulk of a bartender had said, he’d wanted to smash his fist through the guy’s face.
He strode back down to his car and got in, bracing his forearms on the steering wheel. He had the scary feeling the only way forward for him and Alex was to face their attraction for each other. Get it out of their systems. And maybe that was the path they’d always been on. It’s just that neither of them had cared to admit it.
The fact that it was a bloody inconvenient time didn’t seem to matter. Neither did his rule. Avoidance was definitely not working.
He revved the engine and pulled away from the sidewalk, the car’s throaty snarl matching his inner one. His orderly life was in chaos. Ever since Alex Anderson, mistress of mayhem, had landed in the Bay Area, he’d gone from being the logical, sensible De Campo, the one Antonio and Riccardo called in to smooth things over with ruffled clients, to being a complete wild card at a time when he should be, needed to be concentrating on the most important launch of his life.
It was complete insanity. And it needed to end. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The nagging doubt that Alex was like an iceberg—with way more beneath the surface than he could see, and likely far more than he bargained for—wasn’t enough to stop him.
A wise man would stay away. Resist temptation. But he couldn’t seem to help himself.
* * *
Alex felt Gabe’s presence before she saw him. Feet dangling in the pool that was the jewel and center point of the De Campo gardens, moonlight slanting over her shoulder, she felt the air pick up in intensity—a charge went through it. She swiveled around and took in his open-legged stance, his hands in his pockets, the slight frown that marred his brow.
Confrontational.
“I take it your date didn’t end as planned.” She almost laughed after she said it, because that was the understatement of the evening, except nothing about this was funny.
He stepped out of one shoe, then the other and came to sit beside her. Close enough to disturb everything about her. Far enough that they were just two people talking.
“She’s furious.” He slid his feet into the water. “I don’t blame her.”
“Neither do I.” She watched the moonlight dance across the surface of the oval-shaped pool rather than look at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Probably the same thing I was thinking in my office,” he said dryly. “We knew from the beginning we had a problem, Lex.”
“We could forget it happened?”
“I don’t think that’s an option anymore.”
Her heart stuttered. She jump-started it with a determined pull of air. “We’re a week away from the most important event of both of our lives. I’d say it’s a mighty fine option.”
He braced a hand on the pool ledge and swiveled to face her. “What happened tonight is not an option. What happened in my office is not an option.”
She turned to look at him then, wishing immediately she hadn’t, because he was so handsome in his jeans and rolled-up sleeves, his hard, strong profile silhouetted against the moonlight. “We have a business agreement,” she said curtly. “I need this to be about business. I cannot lose this job.”
He sighed. “That ground rule is gone. I was a fool to think we could ignore what’s between us and so were you.”
No, they weren’t! She inched another centimeter away from those rock-hard thighs. “I think it’s better to try and keep this under control.”
“You think tonight was under control?”
“We have to do better.”
His breath hissed through his teeth. “I’ve wanted you since the first insult you threw at me at Riccardo and Lilly’s engagement party, Lex. This is not going to get better—it’s going to send both of us over the edge.”
Her heart tripped over itself. “Gabe—”
He waved a hand at her. “It’s more destructive for us not to face this than to try and ignore it.”
She pulled in a breath. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
His gaze was steady on her face. “One night to get it out of our systems.”
A buzzing sound filled her head. “You’re suggesting we have a one-night stand?”
He rolled to his feet. “Either that or we shut this thing down for good. Your call.”
She tried to say something, anything, but she had no words.
“Think about it. You know where to find me.”
She watched as he walked around the pool edge toward the house. The smooth, glassy surface of the water, so tranquil minutes before, shifted into a murky, shark-infested pool of black. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t wanted Gabe—consciously or unconsciously. But tonight, in kissing him, she had taken a step down the rocky road toward the self-destruction she was so adept at. It was a slippery slope to losing everything she’d worked for.