Page 34 of Royally Knocked Up
He laid her gently on the mattress. She’d wondered what it would be like. Would he toss her down and pounce on her, laughing? She had imagined it that way, when she’d allowed herself to fantasize. Surely that was the kind of man he would be. He wouldn’t take any of this very seriously.
But she had been wrong.
He lay down beside her.
For several long moments, he didn’t say anything.
There was no frantic ripping-off of clothes. There was no eager rush, as she had imagined there would be when they finally let this happen.
He just lay there, looking at her.
After a long, exquisite, drawn-out moment, during which Hailey wondered if she was even breathing, he touched her lower lip — gently, as if it was a berry that he was testing to see whether or not it was ripe.
She felt her lungs expand.
“Has anyone ever told you,” he asked — conversationally, as if he was asking her about the weather — “how beautiful you are?
Of course they had. It was a line that had been used on her a dozen times. How many times had she heard it?
And yet, it had never sounded the way it did right now, coming from him.
This time, she believed it.
“Don’t try to sweet-talk me,” she managed, but in fact she hoped that he would never stop. As much as she had longed to be here with him in this exact situation, she thought she wouldn’t mind if this was as far as things went between the two of them. For him to lie here with her, looking at her as if she was a priceless work of art and telling her that he thought she was beautiful — that was all she needed. That was enough magic to last her for the rest of her life, she thought.
He had her believing that right up to the moment when he bent to kiss her again — and then Hailey knew wholeheartedly that words could never be enough. That nothing he said would ever satisfy the hunger within her.
She fisted her hands in his shirt so that he wouldn’t be able to pull away from her this time, thinking of what it had felt like to make out with boys when she was a teenager. It was the fact that she was doing something forbidden that had made it allso alluring back then, not the boys themselves. She had been breaking the rules.
She was breaking the rules now. But the difference, the key difference, was that this time she was breaking them with one of the sexiest and most emotionally and intellectually stimulating people she had ever known.
He rose up to his knees and took off his shirt, and in the darkness she could make out the angular planes of his body. It was shadowy enough that she couldn’t get a good, detailed look at him.
She didn’t need to.
She caught his wrist in her hand and pulled him close again, reveling in the feeling of his body, warm against hers, and began to explore him with her hands. The tips of her fingers skated across his skin, getting to know every inch of him.
This first time might be their last time, she knew, and she was determined to make the most of every single moment of it just in case she never found herself here again.
CHAPTER 14
HAILEY
“There’s a letter for you at the reception desk,” Isla said.
“Hmm?” Hailey asked idly as she straightened a tablecloth.
“A letter,” Isla repeated. “At the reception desk. Honestly, Hailey, you’ve been a million miles away for the past few weeks. Are you ill? What’s the matter with you?”
Hailey wasn’t ill. She knew exactly what was the matter with her, and it wasn’t something she could speak to Isla about. It wasn’t something she could speak to anybody about.
That night with Enzo in his room had not been the last, as she had thought it might be. Instead, the two of them had spent almost every night together since then.
They had continued to keep their relationship secretive. Enzo had insisted that if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d been sent here by his father, he would have been happy to go public. “But if he finds out about you, he’ll find some way of ruining it,” he’d said. “He’ll insist that there’s something inappropriate aboutwhat we’re doing, and he’ll move me, or he’ll fire you, and it just won’t be good for either one of us.”
Hailey had nodded. “I understand,” she’d said, and he had smiled at her with such warm gratitude that it had set the old guilt squirming in the pit of her stomach.
She wasn’t going along with his desire not to be open about their — whatever they had, was it a relationship? — because she was sympathetic to the fact that he didn’t want to let his father know what was going on. She was going along with it becauseshedidn’t want to let his father know what was going on. Because he was absolutely right that she would be fired over it — but not from the job he thought.
