‘When I decide to take you, Aspen, rest assured you’ll be in the mood.’
Then he kissed her. Long and deep and hard.
* * *
Aspen held the back of her hand against her throbbing mouth as Cruz marched out through the main door to the lift.
And good riddance, she wanted to call out to his arrogant back. Except she didn’t. She felt too shattered. Lack of sleep last night, the roller coaster of a day today. It all crashed in on her.
Not wanting to wait around in case he suddenly reappeared, she fled to the bedroom, hoping sleep would transport her back to East Hampton. Literally.
Only it wasn’t her room she was in, and she quickly snatched her things together and headed to one of the spare bedrooms.
Ha—she would show him who wasn’t ‘in the mood’.
She let out a low groan as those words he had flung at her came rushing back. The embarrassing thing was she couldn’t have been more in the mood if he had lit scented candles and told her he loved her.
And he had seemed to be totally in the mood.
When she found herself trying to analyse the exact moment it had all gone wrong she pulled herself up. That was a one-way street to anxiety and sleeplessness and she wouldn’t go there again. Not for any man.
* * *
By the time Cruz let himself back into the penthouse his frame of mind had not improved. He’d gone down to the stables—something he’d always done when he felt troubled—but it hadn’t made him feel any better.
In fact it had made him feel worse, because now that Aspen had walked back into his life—or rather he had walked back into hers—he couldn’t get her out of his head.
Worse, he couldn’t get the game he was playing with her out of his head. He’d had a lot of time to think about things since he’d picked her up, and although he’d like to be able to say that it had started out as an underhand way of getting what he wanted the truth was it hadn’t even been that logical. He’d taken one look at her and wanted her. Then he’d made the mistake of touching her. Kissing her. He’d never felt so out of control. Something he hadn’t anticipated at all.
He’d convinced himself that he could sleep with her for one night and send her home.
So much for that.
The reality was that right now he wanted her in his bed—and not because he was paying her a pit full of money but because she wanted to be there. And didn’t that make his head spin? The last time he’d wanted something from a Carmichael he’d been kicked in the teeth, and he was about as likely to let that happen again as the sun rising in the west.
He thought about her comment about his family treating him like a king. He’d been so caught up in his own sense of betrayal and, yes, his anger at missing out on knowing them that he hadn’t considered his own involvement in continuing that state of affairs. Now he saw it through Aspen’s eyes and it made him want to cringe. Yes, he held himself back. But distance made things easier to manage.
But she had understood that as well, hadn’t she? ‘That’s a lot for a child to have heaped on his shoulders. You must have really struggled.’
Yes, it had been a lot. Particularly when Charles Carmichael had been such an exacting and forbidding taskmaster. Maybe others understood what he had gone through but no one had dared say it to his face.
And her suggestion that he could scowl a little less...?
He scowled now. Maybe he should just go and find her, have sex with her and be done with her. But something about that snagged in his unconscious. Something wasn’t right about her hot and cold responses but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
‘I can’t believe it. I’ve ruined it.’
Why would she have said that? If anything he’d ruined it by stopping. But she hadn’t questioned that, had she? She’d had a look on her face that was one of resigned acceptance and moved on.
And hard on the heels of that thought was her comment about her marriage to Anderson being a disaster. He’d wanted to push her on that but had decided not to. Now he wished he had. There was something about the lack of defiance in her eyes when she had mentioned her ex that bothered him. Almost as if she’d been terribly hurt by the whole thing.
He frowned. The truth was he shouldn’t give a damn about Aspen Carmichael, or her feelings, or her comments, and he didn’t know why he did.
Throwing off his tangled thoughts, he tentatively pushed open his bedroom door and stopped short when he found the room empty. His wardrobe door lay open and a stream of feminine clothing crossed his room like a trail of breadcrumbs where she had obviously dropped them as she’d carried her things out.