into the building she was thankful she had a Machiavellian lift.
IT TOOK more than fifteen stupid minutes for the stupid lift to open at Paige’s floor on the night of Gabe’s party. Way too much time in which to wonder if she ought to change her dress. Her hair. Her mind.
She felt edgy. Hyper-aware. As if she could feel even the slightest shift of air dancing across her skin. Because after several days of living out the most hot, illicit, exciting affair of her life under cover of darkness in the privacy of Gabe’s moon-drenched loft, the real world was about to impose on their heretofore perfect little bubble of secret sex.
The lift doors began to close and she slipped inside at the last second, squeezing into a gap amongst a group of bright shiny young things, none of whom she’d ever met. Why would she have? She and Gabe knew hardly anything about one another outside the bedroom.
Which was fine. Perfect really. It kept things super casual.
She wished she’d brought up the party once, at least to get a gauge of what she might be about to walk into. Would she and Gabe treat one another as virtual strangers? As friendly neighbours? Or would they simply avoid one another all night?
This, she thought. This was why she liked things to be simple, straightforward, with all the cards on the table from the very beginning. This nervous tumbling in her stomach was awful. And horribly familiar. Surely it was a symptom that something wasn’t right.
As the lift rose the deep whump whump whump of music pulsed in her bones, lifting the energy throbbing deep within her to screaming point. The lift opened, and the sounds of party chatter and, ironically, Billy Idol singing ‘Hot in the City’ spilled into the lift as the inhabitants tumbled out.
Paige took a deep breath, smoothed a hand over her new dress, ran another over her hair, then with chin tilted she walked into Gabe’s penthouse.
As it turned out, Paige knew plenty of people. Mrs Addable and several other inhabitants of the building huddled by the windows checking out the view. She saw a few girls from uni, and even a couple of guys she’d dated. She felt an odd surge of disappointment. She shook it off. She wasn’t special to Gabe and she didn’t want to be.
She nearly managed to convince herself as much when a quick glance around the jam-packed room revealed a massive red and grey rug now covering the lounge-room floor. A large red urn bursting with a tall spray of stripped willow. And chairs and tables in every place they ought to be. A half second after she got over the surprise of Gabe having decorated she realised every item was from that season’s Ménage à Moi catalogue. The bubbles in her stomach went haywire.
Then the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, as though she was being watched. In a party that size someone somewhere would be smouldering at someone, and it was likely she’d been caught in the crossfire. And yet …
Rolling her shoulders to fend off the scratchy sensation, she turned, eyes searching the crowd until they landed on a pair of familiar dark eyes.
Gabe stood on the far side of the large room, his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows, a near full moon and a million stars twinkling in the inky black sky his backdrop. He was so deliciously handsome, so unsettling, so much. And his eyes were focused entirely on her. Dark eyes of a man who was near addicted to doughnuts, knew more about Doris Day movies than she did, and who remembered where she worked even though she was sure she hadn’t mentioned it since the day they first met.
She liked that he was leaving. Liked that he was discreet. Liked that every time she saw him he could barely keep his hands off her. But the riot of sensation ripping through her in that moment was so beyond mere like she hadn’t a hope of naming it.
She clutched her silver lamé purse in one hand, and the small box she’d brought with her, so hard they left imprints on her palms.
‘Paige!’ Mae’s voice rang sharp in her ear.
Paige blinked, the noise and energy and light and life of the party rushing in on her as if she’d burst from a tunnel. Then the crowd shifted, and Gabe was gone.
Paige turned to find Mae shoving through the crowd and bundling up to her like a ball of energy, Clint lolloping in her wake.
‘How cool is this?’ asked Mae. ‘And my godfather, this apartment! You must be dying to get stuck into it.’
Paige opened her mouth to tell Mae this was Gabe’s version of decorated, until she remembered that according to Mae this was the first time Paige had been there too. She hadn’t meant to keep the thing with Gabe from Mae, but they’d barely seen one another in the past week, and she’d been so busy at work—And it had been so intense, so unlike anything she’d ever done before, she hadn’t wanted the bubble to burst.
She’d fill Mae in on all the juicy details the first moment they had some girly time together, just the two of them. She glanced across at the ever-present Clint and wondered when that might be.
‘Where is that delicious pirate of yours?’ Mae asked. ‘The guy was clearly into you at The Brasserie last week, and he looks like the kind of guy who doesn’t need a flashlight and a map to find your treasure, if ya know what I mean.’
Paige rolled her eyes even while she knew it to be the absolute truth. Gabe Hamilton had found her treasure no problem at all. In fact, her treasure was so attuned to him she was doing her best to ignore the heavy ache in her treasure just thinking about him.
‘Drinks!’ Mae said and Clint looked as if he was reminded again why he wanted to marry her. Then hand in hand they made a beeline for the bar.
Leaving Paige to pretend every fibre of her being wasn’t paying intense heed to their host, wherever he might be.
Gabe ran a finger beneath the V of his sweater for about the hundredth time since a bunch of strangers had piled into his apartment.
He’d be pushing it to say he knew even a tenth of them, and a half of those he’d met in the lift at one point or another that week. The rest were a blur of hair and teeth that Nate had introduced to him, talking each and every one up as though they were the next big thing. He got it, Nate was trying to make him feel at home. Yet the only thing keeping him from making a hasty exit in search of fresh air, no matter how cold, had been brief glimpses of a familiar head of cool-blonde hair.
He’d known the moment Paige had arrived—some shift in the air, some call of the wild to his hormones had him sniffing the air for her scent. And then she’d appeared through the crowd in a white dress that looked as if she’d been poured into it and revealed enough leg to give a less vital man palpitations.
His gaze found her again, this time talking to some guy. Her hair shifting across her back as she talked. When the guy moved in, placing a hand on her upper arm, waving his big watch in her face, something clenched hot and hard deep inside Gabe. Something primal and not pretty.
‘It’s the legs,’ said a voice cutting into his thoughts.
He turned to find a group of men in sharp suits standing beside him, all cradling half-filled glasses, all looking in Paige’s direction.
‘What’s that?’ asked Gabe.
