the advice to himself. Did the man ever get an early night in his business? Caitlin somehow doubted it.
‘If I’ve come at a bad time—’ she started, suddenly embarrassed. Had any of his other artists ever sought him out the night before a debut concert to seek his reassurance she wondered? Would her sudden attack of nerves disturb him and make him doubt his decision to hire her as Marcie’s replacement?
He must have intuited that she was on the point of changing her mind about talking to him because he said suddenly, ‘Stay right where you are.’
The words were uttered like a command from on high and Caitlin immediately froze. Rick sighed and moved away as Jake took a couple of leisurely strides towards her. As he drew near she saw that his hard, lean jaw was dark with late-night shadow and his slightly cool stare put her on her guard. That less than friendly glance hardly invited a frank admission about her doubts and feelings concerning the gig tomorrow, she thought anxiously.
‘I thought you might come to see me tonight,’ he drawled.
‘Did you?’ Caitlin heard the strength in her voice desert her.
‘Yes, I did’ He turned round to find Rick. ‘Give us a few minutes, will you? Come to think of it, we’ll probably need a little longer than that. Go and have a drink with Tina.’
Looking doubtful, his colleague shrugged. ‘I’d really like to oblige, Jake, but whether Miss Cold-as-Ice down there will even serve me is another matter. We’ve had a bit of a falling out.’
‘You brought it on yourself, Rick. Sort it out.’
‘Sure. You’re the boss.’
Clearly unhappy, Rick didn’t say another word. But he still found a smile for Caitlin as he passed her. Then he left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. She shivered. She suddenly didn’t feel at all easy about finding herself alone with Jake.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ The charismatic manager strolled across to another ponderous Victorian sideboard and, opening a door, extracted a bottle of Bourbon along with two glasses.
‘No. Not for me, thanks.’
When Caitlin declined his offer without further ado he poured himself a conservative amount of alcohol into a shot glass and advanced slowly towards her. Not for a second did he take his glance off her. His blue eyes glinted dangerously, just like a shaft of sunlight catching the burnished blade of a sword. She couldn’t help tensing. The charming man in the Armani tux who had taken her to the Burlesque had apparently disappeared.
Tipping back his glass, Jake swallowed down the drink before saying, ‘So…care to tell me why you’ve come to see me tonight, Caitlin? It certainly isn’t to make small talk, is it? What’s on your mind? In my experience there’s only one reason a woman comes to a man’s hotel room late at night.’
As if to illustrate what he meant, he flicked his intense gaze over her as if he’d like to strip every stitch from her body and devour her, and then take his slow, sweet time doing it all over again.
Caitlin tried desperately to calm the rioting sensations he was stirring inside her.
‘Well, that’s not the reason I came to see you, Jake…as hard as that might be for your ego to take. My visit is a purely practical one.’
‘Is it?’ His expression doubtful, he put his glass down on a nearby side table and turned back to give her a deliberately lazy smile. ‘You break my heart, Caitlin Ryan…but I think you know that, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
Her mind was in a complete spin, and if she hadn’t backed herself up against the door just then there was a distinct danger that she might simply have crumpled to the floor. Her legs were trembling so hard they hardly seemed to have the strength to keep her upright.
‘What you do to me with those slow, hot looks of yours is nothing less than criminal.’
His voice a low, grating rasp, Jake yanked her away from the door and pulled her roughly into his arms.
CRIMINAL… CAITLIN COULD HAVE used the same adjective to describe Jake’s kiss. The way he took her mouth was near savage, and it almost knocked her off of her feet. This was no inept fumbling, no tentative exploration, but a devastating passionate assault on the senses.
With a hungry groan that seemed to emanate from the depths of his soul, he swept his tongue over the warm recesses of her surprised mouth as one firm hand possessively anchored itself in the long thick strands of her hair to render the contact between them even more intimate.
As his tongue thrust deeper, harder, mimicking the ultimate sexual coupling between a man and a woman, Caitlin swallowed her breath, tasting him, her senses intoxicated by the dark sultry flavours of bourbon and avaricious heat. She gripped onto the sensuous silk of his shirt with all the strength and tenacity of someone hanging from a precipice by their fingertips…as if she dangled into empty space and could fall at any moment.
But from the instant Jake had captured her mouth there had been no thought to deny him. Not when everything in her clamoured wildly for more of the same. Only a frigid woman could not want what Jake was giving her right now, and Caitlin was anything but that. She was a living, breathing, loving human being, and it was too long since she’d been held and desired—too long since she’d been loved like a woman longed to be loved by a man.
Oh God…how did I survive without this? she thought.
All she knew was that her legs suddenly didn’t have a hope of holding her up for very much longer. Not when the equivalent of a hundred volts of pure unadulterated pleasure was pulsating through her as though she were plugged in to her own personal ecstasy machine.
Almost mindlessly driving her hips against Jake’s, she heard herself moaning urgent little sounds of want and need—sounds that were as alien to her as this wild, savage joy that was pouring through her veins. Sean had never taken her anywhere near close to the kind of heights Jake was taking her to now. Never before had passion come at her like a wild, untamed river, bursting its banks, sweeping everything that stood in its way to exciting unchartered shores that left her dazed and trembling.
Hungrily she acquiesced as he alternately nipped and grazed at her mouth, every now and then her tongue meeting and dancing with his, her breasts burning into the hard granite wall of his chest. She was certain of one thing and one thing only…that she never wanted this sweet, irresistible agony to end.
Unbelievably, Jake turned up the heat. Now their invisible passion dial hovered somewhere between boiling and the point of no return. As he rocked his hips deep into hers the solid ridge of his button fly was testimony to his driving, hungry need, and when he suddenly broke contact to look down at her Caitlin glanced back at him in surprise.
It was a shock to witness the depth and strength of desire contained in that blistering gaze. His pupils were almost totally black, ringed with just the slimmest band of devastating blue. From his lips his breath issued hard and fast, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his ridged brow.
‘I don’t want our first time to be up against a door. You’ve got to tell me what you
