no way she could be in close quarters with him, not on the heels of their earlier encounter when he’d barely breathed on her and still managed to get her hot and bothered. At least by the door, she had a shot at retaining the upper hand. “No, thanks. I’m okay.”
“You can’t keep standing. That tactic only works if you inflict it on someone other than the person who taught it to you,” he said mildly.
The fact that he saw through her only made it worse.
“Really, Gage,” she snapped. “Fyra’s executives are waiting in a boardroom for the CEO to arrive. Cut the crap. Why are you here?”
His expression didn’t change. “The rumors about your formula are true, right?”
She crossed her arms over the squiggle in her stomach. “Depends on what you’ve heard.”
“Revolutionary is the word being thrown around,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve heard the formula works with your natural stem cells to regenerate skin, thus healing scars and eliminating wrinkles. Nanotech at its finest.”
She kept her expression schooled, but only just. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
Her lungs hitched as she fought to draw a breath without alerting Gage to her distress. The leak was worse than they’d assumed. When Trinity had stormed into Cass’s office yesterday to show Cass the offending blurb in an online trade magazine, she’d read the scant few lines mentioning Fyra’s yet-to-be released product with horror. But it could have been so much worse, they’d assured each other. The trade magazine had few details, especially about the nanotechnology, and they’d hoped that had been the extent of the information that had traveled beyond their walls.
Apparently not.
It was a disaster. Full-blown, made even worse by Gage’s arrival on the scene.
Gage watched her carefully, his sharp gaze missing nothing. “But if my intel is correct, a formula like that might be worth about a hundred million or so. Which I’m prepared to pay.”
Oh, no, he had not just dropped that sum on her. She shut her eyes for a blink. Money like that was serious business, and as the CEO, she had to take his offer to the others for due consideration.
But she knew her friends. They’d agree with her that the formula was priceless. “I told you, the formula isn’t for sale.”
He stood suddenly and advanced on her, clearly over the power play she’d instigated by standing by the door. The closer he got, the harder her pulse pounded, but she blinked coolly as if lethally sexy men faced her down on a daily basis.
“It’s smart business to consider all opportunities,” he said as he leaned against the doorjamb not two feet from her. “If you sell, you don’t have to worry about little things like FDA approval and production costs and false-claim lawsuits. You just roll around in your millions and leave the hard work to someone else.”
The scent of clean forest and man wafted in her direction.
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” she stated firmly as she fought to keep from stepping back, out of the line of his masculine fire. It was a battle of wills, and if she fled, he’d figure out how much he truly affected her.
The man was a shaman, mystical and charismatic. One glance, and she’d follow him into his world of hedonistic pleasure. Or at least that had been true in college. She’d learned a few tricks of her own since then, along with developing a shield around her fragile interior.
His gaze held her captive as he reached out and tucked a chunk of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering far longer than they should have.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked softly, his expression morphing into something almost...warm.
You. She swallowed. Where had that come from? Gage didn’t scare her. What scared her was how easily she forgot to control her emotions around him.
This cat-and-mouse game had veered into dangerous territory.
“Taxes,” she muttered inanely and ignored the way her pulse raced.
When was the last time she’d been touched? Months and months. She’d developed a reputation among single men in Dallas as a man-eater and unfortunately, that just made her even more popular as men vied for her attention so they could claim victory. Mostly she just shut them down because the whole scene exhausted her.
And she couldn’t lose sight of the fact that the reason she chewed up men and spit them out was staring her in the face. He was very dangerous indeed if she’d forgotten for a second the destruction he’d caused.
And that’s when it hit her. She was handling Gage all wrong.
This wasn’t college and Gage wasn’t her mentor. They were equals. And he was on her turf. That meant she called the shots.
If he wanted to play, she’d play.
* * *
Once Gage had tucked the errant lock of hair behind her ear, he’d run out of legitimate excuses to have his hands on her. Which didn’t keep him from silently running through a litany of illegitimate excuses.
“Gage,” she murmured throatily and the base of his spine heated. “The formula’s not for sale. I have a board meeting. Seems like we’re done here...unless you’ve got a better offer?”
Her eyelids lowered to half-mast and she didn’t move, but the sensual vibe emanating from her reached out and wrapped around him, drawing him in. Those cutaway panels at her waist would fit his palms perfectly and with any luck, the mesh inserts would allow him to feel her while fully clothed. The thought sent a rush of blood through his veins and the majority of it ended up in a good, solid erection that got very uncomfortable, very fast.
“I just might have something in mind,” he said, his vocal chords scraping the low end of the register. God, she’d even affected his voice.
Down boy. Remind her why the formula is for sale...but only to you.
Yeah, he needed to get back on track, pronto, and stop letting her get into his head. He dropped his hand but leaned into her space to see about turning those tables on her. “You’re doing amazing things here, Cass. I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished.’
Wariness sprang into her gaze as she processed his abrupt subject change. “Thank you. I’m proud of what the girls and I have built.”
He crossed his arms before an errant finger could trail down the line of her throat. Because his lower half wasn’t getting the message that the goal here was to get her hot and flustered. Not the other way around. “Remember that project I helped you with for Dr. Beck’s class?”
That was before they’d started sleeping together. He didn’t recall being so magnetically attracted to Cass back then. Sure he’d wanted to get her naked. But at twenty-four, he’d generally wanted women naked. These days, his taste was a bit more refined, but no woman he’d dated over the years had gotten him this hooked, this fast.
Of course, he never looked up his old girlfriends. Maybe any former lover would affect him the same. But he couldn’t imagine that would be true.
Her
