Page 66 of Dangerous Temptation
Yet they still communicated best without words. The sex was hot, intimate and addictive. The more he touched her, the less Elena believed the stories about him.
Or his guilt.
She was trying not to let her personal feelings cloud the facts, but it was hard to understand how he could have fallen in with his grandfather. Her father could be charming, but Alex was smart.
Too smart to be lured into their scheme.
Yet he was driven unlike anyone she’d ever known. Hungry for power and control. Money could buy both.
It was late one night when she sat in bed with her shoulders propped against the headboard and her new laptop balanced upon her bent knees. Her fingers moved over the keyboard as she browsed the Internet. Night had fallen and the wind outside was howling. She’d stopped working long ago. She wasn’t searching for economic models or trends. She had a more personal topic on her mind.
One Alex Wolfe, with an ‘e’.
Her teeth worried her lower lip as she looked at old articles from Page Six of theNew York Post. Ax, as they liked to call him, hadn’t lived up to the social awkwardness of most software geeks before his incarceration. In fact, he’d looked a little too comfortable on the social scene.
Her jaw tightened as she looked at a picture of him with a leggy blonde. She read the caption underneath. Barbie was an actress who’d been in two consecutive blockbusters but had planned on going artsy. Too bad that hadn’t worked out.
Jabbing the back button, Elena chose a different link.
And found him with a vivacious redhead. Her heart squeezed.
Both of the people in the photograph were stunning. Impeccably groomed and confident. Used to the upper-crust world in which they lived.
Stomach turning, she backed out of that site, too.
She wasn’t competing with these women. That wasn’t the way things were between her and Alex. She wasnotjealous.
Her gaze fell on a newer article written on the day he’d left prison. Everything inside her went quiet. In the shot, the sun was glinting off his sunglasses as he walked to the awaiting car. The building at his back looked dull and rigid. With his tailored suit and spiky hair, he appeared arrogant and unapologetic, yet she saw the muscle clenched in his jaw – the one that said he was holding everything in tightly.
Darn it.
She pulled back her hand, which had unconsciously reached out to trace that tell-tale sign. She shouldn’t know him that well. They weren’t having a relationship.
In her mind, that was being disloyal to everyone she knew … everything she was fighting for …
In her body and her soul, though, she knew she couldn’t fight the truth much longer. She didn’t sleep with just anybody.
‘Do you need Leonard to get you some more raspberry body lotion?’ Alex called.
‘I can just use …’
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ he said as he came out of the bathroom.
He switched off the light and the only illumination left in the room came from the bedside table.
Oh, yes, Elena thought as she watched him through her eyelashes. They might not be a couple, but they had a routine.
She watched as he closed the bedroom door. He only did that when she was with him. Her gaze ran over his back from his wide shoulders to his narrowed waist. He wore black silk pyjama bottoms and nothing else.
Tonight, she wore one of the nighties he’d bought for her. The pale-yellow one.
His gaze was soft as he walked to the bed. ‘That laptop still working OK for you?’
She hurried to switch pages on her browser.
‘I love it. It’s so fast.’ The mattress dipped as he took his place in bed beside her. ‘Thank you again.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He kissed her temple, and his lips moved down to the shell of her ear as he reached out to confiscate her machine. ‘But no computers in bed.’
