Her heart seemed to lift somewhere up into the stratosphere. She kissed him with all the pent-up frustration and misery from the past week and decided she might never let him go. But she wanted to hear him say it again first. “You need to clearly articulate what you said before,” she murmured, pulling back and drinking her fill of him. “Say it again.”
“That I love you?” A slow smile curved his lips. “I love you, Lex. And I promise if you give me your heart, I will protect it.”
Oh. She felt herself slither into a pile of boneless mush.
“And your body,” he murmured, heat filling his gaze as he pressed his palm to her back and brought her closer. “Definitely your body. We are spectacularly hot in bed together, cara, and mine has been very, very cold this past week.”
“I think we should go fix that right now,” she murmured, his hard, sexy body turning hers to liquid.
“Did you leave a bathing suit in your stuff upstairs?”
She blinked. Nodded.
“Go put it on.”
“Does that mean I’m staying?” she asked archly.
His gaze softened. “How about forever?”
Oh. He did the sappy, romantic thing so well. “I was thinking,” she ventured carefully, “that maybe I could have a bicoastal office.”
His gaze glittered. “How about we discuss that in the hot tub?”
She slanted a look at him. “If that’s where we’re going, we’re not discussing living arrangements. I have experienced your technique.”
A smile curved his lips. “Go.”
She tripped on her way up the stairs, she was so eager to get there with her boot-camp-sore body, but nothing could wipe the smile off her face—it might be there permanently. Pulling on her bikini with eager fingers, she joined Gabe on the terrace. He was wearing those drool-inducing low-slung navy trunks that drove her to distraction.
“Come,” he said, holding his hand out. But he didn’t take her to the hot tub, choosing the path to the winery instead. Alex dug in her heels when he started down into the cellar.
“Forget about that. She’s down there.”
He made her go anyway, the stone floors echoing under their feet. Alex clung tightly to his hand all the way into the tasting room, where he retrieved a bottle and two glasses. No footsteps. And there were none on the way out.
“I think you were imagining it,” Gabe murmured as they walked down the hill toward the house. “Or maybe one last party put her at peace.”
Alex could only hope.
She lowered herself into the hot tub, moaning her thanks to the god of the jets for his ability to soothe her aching body.
Gabe eyed her. “Is that just to turn me on, or are you sore?”
She gave him a baleful look. “I went to boot camp every morning at six this week to work off my excess anger.”
He slid into the water, Alex’s hands aching to touch every hard, muscular inch of him. “I have a surprise for you.”
“I like surprises...”
He handed her the bottle. It was beautiful—a tall, elegantly shaped cylinder—but it was the name on the front of the label that made her breath catch in her throat. The Angel’s Share.
“The very first bottle,” Gabe murmured.
“It’s stunning.” She turned her gaze on him. “Excited?”
“Immeasurably so.”
The lust in his gaze made her pulse sprint. “Turn the bottle around,” he instructed. “Look at the bottom near the Made in Napa line.”
She tore her gaze from him and scanned the fine print. There, at the bottom in an elegant scroll, were two words. For Alex.
Her heart went into free fall.
“You’d better love me,” he said huskily, “or I’m going to have to stare at five million bottles of that, and it isn’t going to be pretty.”
They managed one sip of the thoroughly brilliant wine before Alex was in his arms, her legs curled around him, and this time, this time there was no unfulfilled fantasy. This time she got all of him and with him the knowledge that sometimes in life you did get everything you wanted. It just might not happen the way you thought it would.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from A BARGAIN WITH THE ENEMY by Carole Mortimer.
PROLOGUE
‘DON’T WORRY, MIK, he’ll be here.’
‘Take your damned feet off the desk,’ Michael snapped in reply to his brother’s reassurance, not even glancing up from the papers he was currently reading in the study at Archangel’s Rest, the secluded Berkshire home of the D’Angelo family. ‘And I’m not worried.’
‘Like hell you’re not!’ Rafe drawled lazily, making no effort to swing his black-booted feet down from where they rested on the front of his older brother’s desk.
‘I’m really not, Rafe,’ Michael assured mildly.
‘Do you know if—?’
‘I’m sure it can’t have escaped your notice that I’m trying to read!’ Michael sighed his impatience as he glared across the desk. He was dressed formally, as usual, in a pale blue shirt and neatly knotted navy blue silk tie, dark waistcoat and tailored trousers, the jacket to his suit draped over the back of his leather chair.
It had always been something of a family joke that their mother had chosen to name her three sons Michael, Raphael and Gabriel to go with the surname D’Angelo, and the three brothers had certainly taken their fair share of teasing about it when they were at boarding school. Not so much now they were all in their thirties, and the three of them had been able to utilise their names by making the three Archangel auction houses and galleries in London, New York and Paris the most prestigious privately owned galleries in the world.
Their grandfather, Carlo D’Angelo, had managed to bring his wealth with him when he fled Italy and settled in England almost seventy years ago before marrying an English girl, and producing a son, Giorgio: Michael, Raphael and Gabriel’s father.
Like his father before him, Giorgio had been an astute businessman, opening the first Archangel auction house and gallery in London thirty years ago, and adding to the D’Angelo wealth. When Giorgio retired ten years ago and he and his wife Ellen settled permanently in their Florida home, their three sons had turned that comfortable wealth into a veritable fortune by opening up similar Archangel galleries in New York and Paris, resulting in them now all being millionaires many times over.
‘And don’t call me Mik,’ Michael instructed harshly as he continued to read from the file in front of him. ‘You know how much I hate it.’
Of course Rafe knew that, and he considered it part of his job description as a younger brother to annoy the hell out of his older sibling!
Not that he had as many opportunities to do that nowadays with the three brothers usually at a different gallery at any one time. But they always made a point of meeting up for Christmas and each of their birthdays, and today was Michael’s thirty-fifth birthday. Rafe was a year younger and Gabriel, the ‘baby’ of the family, another year younger at thirty-three.
‘I last spoke to Gabriel a week or so ago.’ Rafe made a face.
‘Why the grimace?’ Michael quirked a dark brow.
‘No reason in particular—we all know that Gabe’s been in a bad mood for the past five years. I never understood the attraction myself.’ He shrugged. ‘She looked a mousy little thing to me, with just those big—’
‘Rafe!’ Michael cautioned in a growl.
‘—grey eyes to recommend her,’ Rafe completed dryly.
Michael’s mouth thinned. ‘I spoke to Gabriel two days ago.’
‘And?’ Rafe prompted impatiently when it became obvious his older brother was doing his usual clam impersonation.
Michael shrugged. ‘And he said he would arrive here in time for dinner this evening.’
‘Why the hell couldn’t you have just told me that earlier?’
Rafe swung his booted feet impatiently down onto the carpeted floor before rising restlessly to his feet. He ran an irritated hand through the short thickness of his sable-dark hair as he paced the room, tall and leanly muscled in a fitted black T-shirt and faded denims. ‘That would have been too easy, I suppose.’ He paused his pacing to glower at his older brother.
‘No doubt.’ Michael gave the ghost of a smile, eyes dark and unreadable, also as usual.
The three brothers had similar colouring, height and build; all a couple inches over six feet tall, with the same sable-black hair. Michael kept his hair short, his eyes so dark a brown they gleamed black and unfathomable.
Rafe’s hair was long enough to curl down onto his shoulders, his eyes so pale a brown they glowed a deep gold.
‘Well?’ he rasped impatiently as Michael added nothing to his earlier statement.
‘Well, what?’ His brother arched an arrogant brow as he relaxed back in his leather chair.
‘How was he?’
Michael shrugged. ‘As you said, as bad tempered as ever.’
Rafe grimaced. ‘You two are the pot and the kettle!’
‘I’m not bad tempered, Rafe, I just don’t choose to suffer fools gladly.’
He raised dark brows. ‘I trust I wasn’t included in that sweeping statement...?’
‘Hardly.’ Michael relaxed slightly. ‘And I prefer to think of all three of us as perhaps being just a little...intense.’