Expose Me

* * *

Alex watched Chelsea, her back straight, her hips swaying slightly as she preceded him into the restaurant. Every exchange they’d had was loaded with innuendo, heavy with intent. But he had her. He could tell he had her; she was curious as well as ambitious and hungry. She would do what he said, and sex would be a sweet way to seal the deal. To celebrate it. He’d seen the desire in her eyes, the hunger, even though she would never admit it.

He’d make her admit it. He’d bring her to her knees, sobbing out his name, begging for his touch. The thought made him smile.

It also made him hard.

Shifting to ease his discomfort, he followed Chelsea into the restaurant.

“So tell me about yourself,” he said once they were seated, menus open before them and linen napkins placed in their laps. “I don’t know anything about you except the bullet points of your résumé.”

Her eyes narrowed like a cat’s, and he could see her debating the merit of a snappy comeback. Finally she shrugged and took a sip of water. “There’s not much more to know beyond that. I’ve pretty much lived for my career.”

“As have I, but that doesn’t mean you could compress my personality into a single sheet of paper. What do you like to do in your spare time?”

She looked surprised, as if no one had ever asked her such a thing before. “Hobbies?” she said, leaning back in her seat. “I work out. A lot.”

“I could have guessed that.”

“Oh?”

“You’re a control freak.”

She cocked her head. “Takes one to know one.”

“Absolutely.”

He felt the clash of their wills as if a metallic clang had reverberated through the room. It was going to be so good to take her to bed, he thought. And then leave her there.

“I foresee a problem,” she said, glancing down at her menu so her long, chocolate-coloured lashes feathered her cheeks.

Alex leaned back in his seat. “Which is?”

“We can’t both be in control.”

“Definitely not.” He felt heat unfurl in his belly as he saw her eyes flare. Knew what they were both thinking of. Knew then, with an absolutely solid certainty, how this evening was going to end.

The air between them seemed to snap and crackle with electric tension. Alex could almost hear the sizzle.

Time to bring it down a notch. He wanted to make it through dinner, at least. “In any case, I don’t believe you. Everyone’s got a hobby.”

“All right then, what’s yours?”

“Scuba diving.”

“That’s not something you can do everyday.”

“No. Holidays only.”

“So what do you do to relax on a daily basis?”

“Besides the obvious?”

Her mouth curved. “I’m not talking about basic needs.”

“I also swim,” he said, and her mouth curved wider, drawing Alex’s attention to it. It was delicious, full and lush. He wanted to feel it against his own.

“Doesn’t that count as working out?”

“So does fulfilling my, ah, basic needs.”

She laughed softly, the sound no more than a breath. “So you must be very fit.”

“You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

“Is that a promise?”

“More just a statement of fact.”

Her smile widened, revealing a dimple in one cheek. “Does it relax you?” she asked and for a second he thought she was talking about sex. Then he remembered what they’d been at least pretending to talk about. Swimming.

“I’ve learned to let it relax me.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“I didn’t learn to swim until I was in high school.” Alex paused; suddenly he could almost smell the chlorine and sweat of Walkerton Prep’s pool. Could feel the hard shove on his back.

“Alex.” He glanced up, blinking, and saw Chelsea giving him a teasing smile. “Whatever you’re thinking about, it feels like a bit of a buzz kill.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Maybe, but it motivated me to learn how to swim.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting, and he continued. “I got a scholarship to Walkerton Prep. You know it?”

“The boarding school in Connecticut? Who doesn’t? It seems like everyone with money is trying to get their kid in there.”

“Exactly. I fulfilled their diversity quotient, I guess. Half-Dominican kid from the Bronx.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, and her voice had turned thoughtful, her head tilted to one side as she gazed at him.

“Which part? Dominican or the Bronx?”

Her mouth curved again in a small smile; she really did have the most amazing lips. “Both, I guess. But you were telling me how you learned to swim.”

“We had to take swimming at Walkerton. The first day one of the kids in my class pushed me into the deep end of the pool, when the coach was in his office.” Alex swallowed; he could still remember the feel of the water closing over his head, filling his mouth and nose as he choked and flailed and a dozen preppy boys watched him dispassionately.

“Did he know you couldn’t swim?”

“Oh, yeah.” He’d had the naïve idiocy to share that little nugget of information before he’d been pushed. He shook his head, managed a wry smile even as surprise rippled through him that he was telling this to Chelsea Maxwell. He didn’t talk about his years at Walkerton Prep to anyone. He didn’t like to remember the lonely boy he’d been, desperate to fit in, to matter. He would have sold his soul then, just to belong. Thank God Jaiven had snapped him out of it with a right hook to his eye. Thank God he’d learned to be harder, tougher, and to stamp all over spoiled, entitled kids like that. “Fortunately the coach returned before I deep-sixed it. But I think those kids would have let me drown.”

“That’s awful.” Chelsea was quiet for a moment, her expression serious and yet somehow closed. “But I believe it,” she added, and there was too much understanding in that statement, too much experience. He almost asked her about it, and then decided not to.

If he thought sex might complicate things, some kind of emotional connection would screw it up completely. He didn’t go there. Ever.

“Well, like I said, it motivated me. I learned how to swim and I ended up on the varsity diving team. I ended up being captain my senior year, which infuriated the guys who tried to drown me. Sweet revenge.”

“I bet.”

“In college I learned how to scuba dive, and now I spend a lot of time in the water.”

“Do you like it?” she asked, and he saw a gleam of shrewdness in her eyes that jolted him. No one had asked him that before.

“Do you think I’d do it if I didn’t?” he asked back, and she tilted her head as her gaze swept over him.

“You’re a control freak, right? Absolutely. Anything to feel in control.”

He laughed and held up his hands in mock defeat, even though her insight made him feel a little more exposed than he’d have preferred. “Well, you’re right, Miss Maxwell. I still hate the water. But I do it.”

She nodded slowly. “I understand that.”

Her tone was heartfelt, and again he wondered. Wanted to know what she hated and still did. Her show? He knew she was hungry to prove herself professionally but did she actually dislike going on the pink sofa with those washed-up stars?

Something else he wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t actually want to know this woman. He just wanted to use her.

In more ways than one.

“Shall we order?” he asked and she nodded again. After the waiter had come and gone he decided to steer the conversation onto safer ground. Keep it innocuous, at least for the moment.

“So you’re from Alabama, right?” And just like that she tensed right up, her expression closing like a fan. Interesting. Strange, but interesting.

She took a sip of water and then slowly, carefully put the glass back on the table. “Yes,” she said, and even that seemed like more information than she was comfortable imparting.

“You’ve lost your accent.”

Her face was utterly blank as she gazed at him. “Yes.”

Alex leaned back in his chair. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t like to talk about your past?”

“It’s not very interesting.”

“And if I’m interested?”

“Somehow I doubt you actually are. But you can read my bio online.”

“I have.” He’d read the question-and-answer interview with her on her show’s website. He’d started out as a journalist; he did his homework, just like Chelsea. According to her bio, she’d an idyllic childhood in Alabama, all homemade cookies and trips to the state fair, and then she’d joined AMI as an intern when she was twenty-two. There was the inevitable list of awards and charities she supported, and that was it.

Pretty bland, really, and she obviously liked it that way, for she shrugged now, the movement invariably drawing his gaze to her breasts, their round shape outlined in cream cashmere. He wanted to slowly peel that dress off her, and soon. “Then you know all there is to know.”

He raised his eyebrows as well as his gaze. “Which is nothing.”

She just shrugged again, and he felt a sharp spike of curiosity again. Who was this woman?

Better not to wonder. Not to know.

Their appetizers came then and they didn’t talk about anything more alarming than industry gossip and news for the rest of the meal, which suited Alex fine. He was at a good restaurant with a beautiful woman, and he intended to enjoy it for a little while.

And then he intended to enjoy a whole lot more.

* * *

What was it about this man, Chelsea wondered, that made her say things? Feel things? She’d told more about herself to Alex than she had to any other person, except for Michael and her sister Louise. And she barely knew the man. Admittedly, what she’d told wasn’t that much, but she still felt exposed. He could dig into her history now, search Alabama records, and knowing him, he’d find something. He’d find too much.

Her insides iced and she told herself she wouldn’t say another word. She’d keep it professional or physical, one or the other, but no more of this talking.

Damn it, she was not that kind of woman. She didn’t let men get close. She didn’t tell them things. She used them for business or sex and that was it. That was how it had to be.

And she intended on using Alex in one way or another. Hell, maybe both ways. After their charged, innuendo-laced conversation she knew he wanted her. She wanted him.

That, at least, could be simple.

As for business? He’d deliberately not mentioned Treffen for the entire meal, and that suited Chelsea fine. She wasn’t ready for that conversation, didn’t want to be wrong-footed.

But no matter what happened between them, she’d keep it from being intimate. Emotional.

Except it already felt emotional. Already she felt a hard tug of sympathy for that boy perched on the edge of the pool, flailing in the water. God knew she understood how that felt. Everyone enjoying watching you fail. Smiling as you were humiliated, laughing when you were hurt.

No, she had to stop thinking like that. Wanting to know more about this man, cracking open the window of her soul to let him in just a little.

Sex would cure her, she thought. Sex made things simple. A bodily function, a basic transaction, and when it was over she invariably moved on to someone else. She’d never slept with the same man twice, not in ten years.

Sex would get him out of her system.

She smiled at him, pushed away her coffee cup and barely-touched dessert plate. She’d chosen fruit sorbet, the lowest calorie item on the menu, but she’d only eaten a mouthful. Television was unforgiving on a figure. Now she smiled, arched her eyebrows in obvious expectation. No innuendo in her voice, just simple fact. “Ready to go?”

Alex gazed back at her, gold flaring in the depths of his brown eyes. He slid a black credit card that she recognized as an exclusive, invitation-only card from his wallet and dropped it carelessly onto the table. “Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”

They left the restaurant, Alex’s hand low and sure on her back. He had already texted the driver and the limo was waiting by the curb.

He guided her inside, his thigh nudging hers as he slid next to her on the spacious leather seat. She suppressed the urge to lay her hand on that hard muscle, slide her palm upward...

Her hand jerked of its own accord and she pulled it back into her lap. Would his skin be hot or cool? Smooth or rough? Her hand jerked again.

Belatedly she realized they were heading downtown. She turned to Alex. “Where are we going?”

“My apartment.”

“What?” She shut her mouth with a snap. “Aren’t you Mr. Manners. I don’t recall you asking me to go home with you, Alex.”

“I didn’t.”

She stared at him; he looked so unruffled she would have thought he was bored, save for the magnetic gleam in his eyes. She felt a tangle of emotions: fascination, frustration, even a little fear.

And she was more excited, more aroused, than she’d been in a long, long time.

Which showed how screwed up she really was.

She folded her arms across her chest. “Do you think the caveman tactic is attractive?”

“No, I simply prefer to cut to the chase. You knew we’d be sleeping together from the moment you agreed to dinner, Chelsea.”

“A foregone conclusion, was it?” Her voice, thankfully, came out dry.

“We’re attracted to each other. We both view sex as—what did you call it? A basic need?”

“So?”

“So of course we’d sleep together.” He shrugged, as if the matter were of no consequence. “It is a foregone conclusion.”

“You’re very romantic,” she said, and her voice had taken on an edge. “Lay on the violins and roses, why don’t you?”

“I thought you’d appreciate my plain speaking.”

And normally she would, because that was how she always approached sex. She just didn’t like him approaching it that way. She was the one who told men how it was going to play out, and then she kicked them out the door when she was done.

She never went home with them. She never let them call the shots. She was always in control, always on top. Literally. And she usually didn’t even take off all of her clothes.

At least not her shirt.

The limo slowed and she saw they were already downtown, somewhere in Tribeca, near the Hudson River. And as amazed and aroused as she was by his sheer arrogance, she knew she wasn’t going to go into his apartment.

She wasn’t that stupid.

“Sorry, Diaz,” she said, “but I have my rules. I’m not going home with you.”

His gaze locked with hers, and his expression didn’t change. “Fine,” he answered. “Who said we needed a bed?”

A thrill ran through her, jolting her to her core. Why, she wondered distantly, was that sexy? Was it just because he was so incredibly good-looking, that she ignored his arrogance?

But no, it was his absolute assurance that made her weak with want. Thrilled and excited her. And considering her past experience, that made her one sick puppy.

Still she didn’t move. Didn’t speak. And neither did he. The chauffeur waited in the driver’s seat, separated by a soundproof, tinted window. Chelsea had no illusions that the man would know what they were up to. Maybe he’d done this before. Waited for Alex to finish his business.

Her palms went damp and she resisted the urge to wipe them against the side of her dress. Alex’s expression didn’t so much as flicker as he said in a low, sure voice, “Come here, Chelsea.”

Of course she shouldn’t move. Shouldn’t obey that absurd command. No way. Absolutely not. In fact, she should tell him just what he could do with his ridiculous, arrogant attitude. Shove it up his—

And yet she felt herself move, as if her body had a will of its own. She slid across the seat, her dress and coat whispering against the leather, her gaze glued to his. She couldn’t have looked away if she’d tried, which she didn’t. She could hear her own breath, almost a pant, loud in the utter silence of the car. So revealing, and yet she was unable to stop herself.

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