on his.
No, he could continue to play with his bunnies and maybe in time, and halfway across the continent, she could find a man who she could love and who could love her.
‘We can renegotiate your contract, talk about your hours, find out how to make this work for both of us—’
And didn’t that say it all? He was talking about work and she was thinking about them, their relationship. They weren’t on the same page—hell, they weren’t even reading the same book!
‘I have to go,’ she quietly replied. ‘It’s time.’
James immediately pulled away from her and when his eyes slammed into her grey ones Riley had to fight the urge to take a step back. He had his don’t-mess-with-me CEO look on, his expression inscrutable, his eyes stony and deliberately veiled.
‘If that’s the way you want to do this. Tomorrow is Saturday so I’m working from my apartment. Be there at eight and I’ll give you a rundown of what I expect from you over the next couple of weeks before and after Christmas.’
And, on that cryptic statement, he headed towards her door, snatching up his jacket as he walked into her tiny hall. Then her front door slammed and Riley sank to her haunches and rested her arms on her bent knees.
Well, okay, then. James was obviously not going to make this easy for her.
Then again, nothing between them had ever been easy so why had she thought this would be?
HEADING HOME FROM the gym the next morning, James jogged up the flights of stairs to his penthouse home. He wished he had time for a swim in his lap pool, which was in his conservatory on the top floor of his very exclusive apartment block overlooking Central Park. The pool had been his pet project and he loved the idea that it formed the ceiling of his apartment’s hallway. He had a recurring daydream about watching his lover swim naked in the pool from below, but since he never brought a woman back to his place it remained only a fantasy. And since there was only one woman he fantasised about lately, he could easily imagine Riley, who was a strong swimmer, naked above him, her shapely body easing through the water, her breasts swaying and her perfectly waxed pubic strip …
James scrubbed a hand over his face as he stepped through the door into the hall of his expansive home. He had to get a grip and, after such a strenuous gym session trying to excise Riley from his mind, a shower.
James stepped into his open-plan living area and abruptly stopped when he saw Riley sitting at the kitchen counter. His heart stuttered. She’d pulled that long fall of deep red hair into a ponytail that hung halfway down her back and her Saturday face held the lightest of make-up, freckles he rarely saw splattering across her nose and cheeks. She was engrossed in the morning paper, a cup of coffee at her elbow.
Seeing her sitting there felt so damned right …
Except that it wasn’t. He’d tried the relationship thing. It had led to the engagement thing. That hadn’t worked out too well. When he’d found out his fiancée had lied to him and stolen his money, he’d decided never to put himself in the position of being at the mercy of any woman ever again.
Especially one who had kicked him into touch once before. Lesson learnt and all that.
‘How did you get in here?’ he demanded, conscious that he looked hot, sweaty and, possibly, unhinged.
Riley didn’t bother looking up. ‘Your lift code is 9562. Morgan told me.’
‘Of course she did.’ James sighed. She was so pretty. Small, tight, perfect. He only had to look at her and he wanted to nail her, every single time. He’d be meeting with investors and the image of her would pop into his head and he’d stop breathing. And he’d go stone-hard.
‘I need to shower—are you going to be here when I get back?’
Riley very deliberately looked at her watch. ‘Maybe. It’s Saturday morning and I have things to do.’
Why did everything have to be a battle?
‘Stay there,’ he ordered before walking down the passage, through his bedroom and to the shower.
Slapping his hands against the glass of his huge power shower, he dropped his head and closed his eyes as hot water pummelled his tired muscles. He had a woman in his apartment for the first time in for … well, for ever—liaisons, okay, one-night stands, always took place where he could leave—and she was already giving him grief.
Situation very normal, then. It didn’t escape his notice that the two women he’d let all the way into his life, his heart, his home had both wreaked havoc. Riley—he’d laid his heart at her feet and she’d stomped on it in her haste to go backpacking around south-east Asia—granted, she’d only been nineteen, but still—and Liz, who, after he’d proposed, changed from the sweet girl he’d fallen in love with into a money-grabbing monster.
Not only had Liz burned through his credit cards, she’d also refused to sign a pre-nup and had transferred money out of the credit card he’d given her into her personal bank account. When he’d confronted her, she’d explained that she was not going to leave their marriage with nothing.
They were still months off tying the knot and she was already contemplating divorce? That had been a big ‘maybe this won’t work out’ moment for James. She went to the press; he went to his lawyers and it had been such a spectacular, messy, humiliating failure.
He’d been raised to succeed and failure was never an option. That his failure of an engagement had been so public, a very ugly airing of their dirty laundry, still had the ability to coat his throat with acid.
It still stung that he’d been so comprehensively fooled … And because James had a talent for factual analysis, unbiased by prejudice and emotion—one of the reasons he was the youngest mining magnate in the world and the CEO of Moreau International at the age of thirty-four—he now had issues with that fuzzy concept called love. Since he’d failed so spectacularly at it, once privately, once very publicly, somewhere along the line he’d decided that it was best to be avoided.
He couldn’t analyse it, didn’t understand it so he’d rather steer clear of it. But, if he believed that sex had nothing to do with love, why couldn’t he go out and find some?
Until he had the time and inclination to work through that dilemma he’d remain horny, dammit.
Dammit.
James rushed through the rest of his shower, deciding not to shave. He pulled on a pair of comfortable jeans and the closest T-shirt he could grab from his walk-in closet, an old grey one with the words Instant Human, just add coffee in faded letters on the front, and left his bedroom.
‘You live in a hospital, Moreau,’ Riley said, her attention still on the paper. She had yet to look at him and her flat voice and snippy attitude amused him. So she wasn’t happy with his order to be here … Well, tough. He wasn’t happy about her leaving.
He looked around his home and shrugged. ‘It’s not so bad.’
It was a penthouse in the most exclusive apartment building in NYC, with superb views, lots of space and incredible facilities.
‘It’s very white and hardly has any furniture. There’s minimalistic
