my home. We’ll stay outside,’ she ordered. Not that she really believed in all that stuff, but if he came across her doorway she knew that she would strip him naked and do him on her couch, her yellow wingback chair, on her wooden floor …
She was nuts. Horny and nuts. A dangerous combination.
‘Inside, Riley.’
‘Not going to happen.’ Riley shook her head a couple of times and folded her arms.
James hauled in a breath, looked at the ceiling and sighed. ‘Okay, let’s do it the hard way then.’
Using his superior strength against her, he looped an arm around her waist and picked her up and walked her into the apartment as easily as if he were carrying a sack of potatoes. Dammit! He was seriously starting to annoy her with this carrying her around kick he was on.
‘Stop lugging me around!’
‘Stop being a brat.’ James dumped Riley on her purple-and-white-checked couch and loomed over her, his hands back on his hips. ‘Why did you tell my family that you were resigning when we hadn’t finished discussing it?’
Discussing it? Really? That was stretching the truth …
Riley blew her fringe out of her eyes and silently cursed James’s mum. Just after she’d told the Moreaus and Noah that she was leaving, Hannah had excused herself to go to the bathroom, AKA rat on Riley. She loved her second mum but right now she could strangle her.
‘I don’t need to discuss it; you’re the one who is harping on about it!’ Riley retorted, scuttling past him to head for her kitchen. ‘I’m going to make coffee; do you want one?’
‘I’ll have some of that whisky you keep on hand for Noah,’ James replied, following her across the room. Leaning a shoulder into the wall, he took the glass of whisky Riley handed him. She could feel his eyes on her back while she fiddled with the coffee machine.
‘What did you tell my parents, Riley?’
‘That I needed a change, to do something different.’
‘Is that the truth?’
‘It’s as good as any,’ Riley retorted. She hadn’t told them that she missed Morgan’s companionship now that she was engaged and in love. That without her, and without having any contact with him, her life was duller, lonelier, that she felt distant and separated from this family who she no longer felt a part of.
That she felt compelled to move the heck on.
‘So, not the full truth. Riley, we’ve always been honest with each other; you’re the one person in my life who has always been unflinchingly truthful.’
‘Stop badgering me, James. I’m just trying to … redesign my life.’
‘What are you talking about? You don’t need a new life!’
Did he actually hear the words that came out of his mouth? Riley wondered. And how dare he say that when all he could give her was a one-night stand three times?
‘I won’t understand if you don’t explain your crazy impulse to me!’ James snapped and she heard the frustration in his voice. Riley opened her mouth to speak and abruptly closed it again. What could she say to him? Would he even understand any of what she wanted to say?
Will you listen, James—really listen? If I say that I have always adored you but I can’t be in the same city as you and not talk to you? That I am so damn scared I’ll fall in love with you, even though I know that a part of me loves you anyway? That walking away from this half-life is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life? That I am terrified to go but even more scared to stay?
Riley sighed, pushed the coffee cup away and took the easy option, swallowing the words she’d been thinking. ‘Just let me go, James.’
James shook his stubborn head. ‘No. You’re staying until the end of the year and I’d keep you longer but you’ll probably have me arrested on kidnapping charges.’
‘Damn right I will.’
James ignored her. ‘I expect you to be at work every day until then.’
‘What am I going to do?’ Riley wailed. ‘My staff are all on holiday and it’s a deadly quiet time—’ James tossed back his whisky and smiled his bad-ass CEO smile. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll find something to keep you occupied and out of trouble.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Riley narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I suppose that if I don’t agree you’ll set those sharks in Legal on me for breaching my contract?’
‘Damn right I will,’ James repeated her earlier phrase.
Riley looked from her kitchen window, where the occasional drop of icy drizzle hit the windowpane, as she tried to ignore the whoosh in her stomach, the thump of her accelerated heartbeat. They were old companions—something she was so accustomed to feeling whenever James was in the same room as her. How could she be so annoyed with him yet still want to rip his clothes off? Her glance flicked over him—dark grey suit trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his wrists, red tie pulled down from his open collar. His warm blond hair held furrows that suggested that he had spent the day shoving his fingers through it and there were blue shadows under his eyes, suggesting stress and no sleep.
Situation normal, then.
James returned her stare and Riley watched as his green eyes turned hard and cold. ‘Are you leaving because of a man?’
Yes, you, you jerk-nugget!
‘What?’
‘Have you met someone new—are you following him somewhere, acting impulsively again?’
Riley tipped her head and she couldn’t help her self-satisfied smile. ‘Are you jealous?’
James slowly stood up, walked around the counter and placed his hands on either side of her hips, effectively caging her in. ‘Answer the question, Riley.’
To hell with that. ‘Maybe.’
James dropped his mouth to hers, his lips brushing hers in a kiss that immediately dissolved her body and sent a wet warmth straight to that pulsing spot between her legs.
‘Wrong answer,’ he said against her lips before sucking her lower lip between his. He knew she loved it when he did that, the sod! She kept her arms folded across her chest in an effort to keep them from looping around his neck and climbing up and over him. With James she went from irritated to turned-on in ten seconds flat.
‘Get rid of him,’ James ordered, his lips touching her jaw, moving up to feather kisses along the high arch of her cheekbone, her temple.
That’s what I’m trying to do, she mentally wailed. But when you kiss me like this it’s impossible!
‘This is crazy, Ri. We can work this out,’ James quietly said, resting his chin on top of her head.
No, they couldn’t. History had taught them that. She wasn’t enough—exciting
