Nothing But The Best

Or not quite everything else, because she could feel his hands moving up her sides, tracing the dip in her waist, the line of her ribs. The featherlight strokes gave promise of what was to come when he was touching her, instead. He broke the kiss.

And she waited.

When his hands rose to her zipper, he drew it down slowly, touching only the fabric, not her. Cilla shuddered as the cool air touched the narrow stripe of exposed flesh. She knew when he’d dropped it low enough to realize that she had no bra on; she heard his helpless exhalation.

And with a sound of impatience she turned to him.

3

HIS HANDS SLID the dress off her shoulders. Cilla gave an absent shrug, releasing the fabric to pool around her feet even as she reached out for his waistband. After a day of temptation, a night of promise, here in the wee, wee hours it was finally happening. She unfastened his trousers and let them drop away.

When she stepped forward to press her body against his, the heat and hard muscle and smooth skin nearly made her swoon. Pleasure saturated her, the feel of his hands running down her back, molding her to him, the insistent pressure of his hard cock against her belly. She wanted him on her and in her, she wanted him—

Cilla broke their kiss and pressed her head to his chest with a groan.

“What?”

“Do you happen to have any condoms with you?” she asked, a little desperately.

His hands froze. “Shit.”

“Exactly.”

After a moment, he began exploring her again. “It’s not the end of the earth, you know,” he murmured, running a line of kisses over her shoulder as he slid one hand up to her breast. “There are other things we can do. We have the technology.”

Cilla laughed. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Not that I’m not flattered that you think so highly of my hard-on.”

Cilla looked down to see it bobbing and jerking. “Looks like it thinks highly of me, too.”

RAND HAD SPENT the better part of the card game trying to ignore the tight coil of tension in his belly, trying to ignore the brush of skin and fabric as his cock lengthened under his clothes. Now, the pressure of her fingers, the motion of the thin skin over the hard column of flesh had his breath hissing in. It was too soon. He wanted to savor the feel of her taut, sleek body, listen to her pleasure, and then, only then, find his own release.

He reached down and stilled her hand, then pulled her to him. She tasted just as she sounded, tangy and sweet, with a complexity that made him linger over her mouth even as he sought his own pleasure by finding her breast. The slight curve of it against his palm gave him a pulse of arousal. He squeezed the hard nipple until she moaned.

And the sound only made him harder. Rand reached for the lamp.

She caught at his hand. “What are you doing?”

“I figured you’d want the lights off.”

“Why?”

“The women I’ve been with like it dark.”

Cilla smiled wickedly. “I’d say you’ve been hanging around with the wrong crowd,” she said, drawing him to the bed.

“Doors open?” This time, surprise crept into his voice.

Cilla laughed and fell back against the mattress. “If they’re up at 3:00 a.m. and have sharp enough eyes to see all the way up here, more power to them.”

In fact, she thought, it was a bit of a turn-on to think about someone watching them together, watching him kneel by the bedside and part her knees so that he could lick his way up her thighs. How was it that she registered the warm, tempting touch inches away from where it was actually happening, inches away in that hidden cleft where she was already slick with wanting?

The first contact was just a tease, a quick brush of soft heat that made her jolt and left her craving more. The second lasted longer, sliding through her sensitive folds to find her for an instant. By then, though, his hands were on her breasts, rubbing the nipples to send quicksilver bolts of wanting through her. She pressed her body against him, needing his touch, needing more, needing it all.

And suddenly his mouth was on her, tearing a shocked cry from her throat.

Cilla’s fingers clutched at the coverlet, then Rand’s shoulders as her hips moved against him. He wouldn’t be rushed, though. He took her close but backed away, leaving her wanting before taking her up again, driving her mindless. Spiraling tension gripped her, making her a slave to the wet heat of his tongue until he gave her that crucial extra second and the good, hard orgasm broke through her.

She didn’t know how long it lasted, the helpless quaking, the incoherent cries, the washes of pleasure that came at her again and again. She couldn’t say how long it took her to recover enough to talk. Finally, she lay still, aftershocks still jolting her body at intervals.

Rand rose to lay on the bed beside her, propping his head up on his hand.

“You know, I kind of like this strip poker,” he said, running the flat of his hand over her belly.

“Give me a minute.” Cilla’s voice was ragged. “You’ll like it even more once I can move.”

“I’ve got time.”

The sound of the fountains in the atrium drifted in through the open French doors. Time was irrelevant. Eventually, Cilla rose to press him flat on his back.

Rand’s cock was still hard. He could feel the throb of the blood rushing through it. Anticipation, he thought. It was almost as good as the reality of sex, the expectation bubbling in his blood, the nerve endings sensitized so that even the drift of air stirred by the ceiling fan had his erection twitching against his belly. And then he felt the warmth of her breath, the nuzzle of her lips. A sigh escaped him.

She didn’t tease, though, seeming to understand how close he already was. Instead, the electric heat of her tongue stroked up the underside of his cock and pure lust slammed through him. When she slid him into the warm wetness of her mouth, he groaned. He fought desperately to stay in the moment, to not let the rhythmic strokes take him past the point of inevitability.

He wanted to prolong it, and when he went, he wanted to take her with him.

“Why don’t you swing around here so that we can both enjoy ourselves,” he managed to say, grinding his teeth as she stopped her ministrations.

“You mean…”

He reached down to help her move into place, running his hands along her long, lovely thighs as she slid his cock back into her mouth.

How much sensation could one person absorb, Cilla wondered as she felt Rand’s tongue trace maddening patterns over her clit even as she savored his erection. The next best thing to having it inside her was the immediacy of having it against her lips, of hearing his groan when she changed her motion, added her hand. But even as she brought him closer to coming, he was doing the same for her, each slippery stroke making the heat and tension rise within her, sometimes making her stop just to moan out her pleasure. In between, she savored him, drawing him closer and closer to that point at which the world ceased to be about anything but sensation.

And then it wasn’t anything but sensation, her own surging pleasure and the shuddering soon after in his body as he released and let himself follow.

IT WAS THE SOUNDS from the atrium, coming in through the open French doors, that woke her the first time. Cilla crossed over to close the doors and shut the blinds against the pitiless day.

“What time is it?” Rand rasped.

She squinted at the digital clock. “Nine.” Only three hours after they’d finally gone to sleep. It was easy to slide back into oblivion.

When she woke again, it was closer to one, and real life was beginning to gather at the edges of her mind. The Danforth cocktail reception was less than five hours away and she needed to get her game face on. Board members, managers, lawyers…she might know them all, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have to make a good impression.

Showing up looking freshly boffed was probably out of the question.

The hot water in the shower beating on her cleared her mind and left her with that wonderful sense of well-being that followed a night of truly great sex. Or a few hours of it, anyway. She’d found herself a clever, talented lover, indeed, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror as she dried off.

Cilla wrapped herself in a towel and walked into the room to find the blinds open and Rand sitting out on the balcony in just his pants, the newspaper open on his lap.

He smiled at her. “Good morning.”

She spent a moment or two just staring at him. Such a beautiful, beautiful man. “Good morning.”

“You do nice things for a towel,” he said, and rose to cross to her.

Cilla lost long minutes to his kiss, and then the feel of his hands when the towel dropped. It would be so easy to slide back into bed and let him take her away.

Easy but not smart. She took a deep breath and moved back from him, plucking her towel from the floor. “As much as I would love to dive back in with you, my hooky’s over. Time to go back to the real world.”

Disappointment flickered over his face. “I was hoping for a rematch.”

“No can do. Sorry.”

He sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Being a grown-up sucks.” Every fiber hummed and waited as she hoped to hear some word of the future. For God’s sake, they hadn’t even properly had sex. They couldn’t let it drop here. Edgy with nerves, she crossed to the closet and pulled out some underwear.

Rand grabbed his shirt from the floor and put it on. “So where do you live?”

She slid into a denim miniskirt and a Mark Jacobs T-shirt. “L.A. And you?”

“I travel a lot, but L.A. is sort of my base.” He buttoned his shirt and turned to her. “Can I call you next time I’m in town?”

She beamed—she couldn’t help it. “I’d like that.”

He scooped her against him. “I’d like that, too.”

THE USUAL FACES, Cilla thought that evening, as she walked into the Danforth cocktail reception. The usual conversations. Danforth had reserved a private atrium room at the resort for the welcome dinner. Standing in little groups by the floor-to-ceiling windows were the five board members, most of the division heads for Forth’s, the department managers for Danforth and the financial cadre. It was maybe fifteen or sixteen people all told, the brain trust of the Danforth empire.

Given that she wasn’t in the direct management chain, she probably ought to have been pleased to be involved.

She wasn’t.

What she was was frustrated that she’d had to work twice as hard and twice as long as any normal employee to make headway in the company. Only when she’d sent in her résumé under a false name and received an immediate callback on a management position had she been able to get her father to take her seriously.

He’d spent much of his lifetime dismissing his wife.

He wasn’t going to dismiss Cilla.

She watched him now as he stood by the windows talking with the CFO, the head of legal and a board member. Sam Danforth wasn’t particularly tall, but something about the way he held himself commanded attention. She could see herself in the cleft of his chin and the green of his eyes, the eyes she often felt didn’t really see the grown-up her. And until he saw her and respected her, no one in his chain of command was really going to do so.

She could tolerate that for the time being. Cilla was nothing if not patient. She’d gotten the education, she’d gotten the experience. She’d grown up learning strategy from her father. Now all she needed was the opportunity to prove what she could do.

With the skill of long practice, she stepped into the room and began circulating, a chat here, a joke there. Having a drink to hold on to kept her hands busy, though she’d learned from her father long ago to stick with club soda and lime at business receptions. “You’ve got to keep your wits about you,” he maintained. “You never know what might come up and you want that edge.”

Her father turned now and waved her over. She’d known the men he was talking with since she’d been in braces.

“Here she is, our secret weapon,” her father said.

“How go the fashion wars?” asked Danforth’s CFO Bernard Fox, portly but still dapper in a beautifully cut Armani suit.

“A Hun dressed in Versace is still a Hun,” Cilla said lightly.

“Good point. I hear Sam here wants us to come up with a strategy for thirty percent growth over the next three years,” said Burt Ruxton, longtime board member. “Since you’re the first timer at the meeting, we’ll let you come up with it.”

“Are you still holding a grudge over that time I dropped your satellite phone in the swimming pool, Uncle Burt?”

“Not at all. Although if profits go up thirty percent, you might finally get around to replacing it.”

Cilla’s father looked over her shoulder and brightened. “Ah. Here’s someone I want you to meet. About time you showed up,” he said more loudly.

“Checking my e-mail,” said a voice behind her.

A very familiar voice.

And Cilla turned and found herself nose to nose with Rand Mitchell.

“Rand, this is my daughter, Cilla. Cilla, this is Rand Mitchell. He’s doing some business development for us in Europe.”

She’d always thought jaws dropping was a figure of speech, at least until her own did. Surprise? Shock, more accurately. And she couldn’t help it. She laughed.

A corner of Rand’s mouth tugged up into a rueful smile in response.

“What’s the joke?” her father demanded, looking between them. “Do you two know each other?”

“Sort of,” she managed, working to tuck away her amusement. “I had a flat on the highway coming in and Rand was my good Samaritan.” He stood now in a gorgeous suit, looking polished, professional and entirely good enough to eat.

That probably wasn’t such a good idea anymore, she thought. Getting her body to agree, of course, was going to be the challenge.

“Well.” Sam Danforth clapped Rand on the shoulder. “Nice to see that you’re looking after Danforth’s important assets. Rand is our man in Europe,” he said to the rest of the group and introduced Rand around. “Thanks to him, we’re finally making a name for ourselves over there.”

“I bet you’re making a name here, too,” Cilla said.

SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, Rand was fairly sure, had written a “Top Ten Business Don’ts” list, and at the top of that list had to be sleeping with the boss’s daughter. Stupid, brainless, dense. Normally, he’d be kicking himself up one side of the room and down the other.

Oddly, he wasn’t. The whole thing was too absurd to be taken seriously. After all, what were the chances?

As a committed fast-tracker, he supposed he had to wonder what impact his adventure with Danni—or Cilla, it now appeared—might have on his future. Then again, he’d never planned to stay at Danforth longer than the obligatory year, maybe less, if something appealing came calling.

“So you’re our man in Milan,” said Cilla.

“Cilla’s the couture buyer for Danforth’s and does some of the bridge-line buying for Forth’s,” her father put in. “We’ll have to get her involved with the European branches. Maybe you two can find some time to hunker down over that while we’re here.”

“We’ll be sure to do that,” Rand said blandly, wondering just what Papa Danforth would say about the kind of hunkering they’d been doing already.

Cilla kept a poker face. Of course, it didn’t do to think about poker at this point. Or getting her naked and having his hands on all that warm skin, or the way her body shuddered when he—

“So you’re the dot-com whiz.” Ruxton eyed him speculatively.

If “whiz” defined a man who’d made the better part of three million in an IPO and pissed three quarters of it away in a venture capital firm, maybe. Instead of raking in the bucks from the bonanza of IPOs launched by the legions of bright young things he’d funded, Rand had watched his investments die or go into hibernation, waiting for the market to return before considering an IPO. Until they went public, he couldn’t get his money back. Maybe one day, but it wouldn’t be any time soon.

Rand smiled briefly. “It was a wild ride while it lasted.”

Cilla tilted her head at him. “Would you do it again?”

He considered her question, well aware that his audience was far bigger than just her. “The experience didn’t make me afraid of taking chances—I think your biggest returns always come from thinking outside the box, and risk is always part of that. I learned a lot about moderation and hedging my bets, though. I’m probably better at gauging a situation than I was,” he added.

A response suitable for a job interview, Rand thought in satisfaction, which, in a way, this was. He’d spent the four months since he’d come on board at Danforth getting the Milan venture rolling. No one knew him, aside from looking at the reports on his project. Never hurt to impress the board, he figured.

Granted, the Danforth job didn’t represent the degree of challenge he was accustomed to, and the company was sure as hell a lot more conservative. Then again, by the time they’d come calling, he’d been unemployed for a year, waiting for the right opportunity to arise. A year, at his level, you could justify; more than that made you look like a problem candidate to future employers. So even though he hadn’t needed the money he’d said yes, reasoning that the European expansion was marginally interesting to him. Besides, any job that entailed being in stores that dressed beautiful women couldn’t be all bad.

“So you’re comfortable being back in the bricks-and-mortar world?” Fox watched him closely.

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here,” Rand said with perfect truth. He wasn’t one of those idealists who thought everything about the world was going to go Internet, he was just a businessman who’d recognized potential when he saw it.

The cocktail hour wore on and he shook hands and made appropriately incisive or off-the-cuff remarks, depending on how he judged the situation. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cilla head out of the room. He circulated long enough to be discreet, then followed.

The foyer was lit with the warm light of sunset reflecting in through the wall of windows. Cilla stood near them, Mt. San Jacinto providing her backdrop.

“Danni? As in Danforth?”

“It was the best I could come up with.” She turned and looked at him apologetically. “It’s like Paris Hilton, people recognize the name, and I didn’t want to be recognized.”

“We swapped numbers this morning.” And it left him feeling shut out.

“I would have said something once I knew you better,” she told him. “It’s just hard. There are the stores and there’s all this money and I just wanted this morning to be about us…” She trailed off. “Does that make sense?”

Slowly, he nodded. He might not like it, but he could understand it. “So it never occurred to you that the guy you met in the hotel bar could be here for the Danforth meeting?”

“Did it occur to you in my case?” she countered.

He shrugged. “I knew Danforth had a daughter, but I thought you stayed out of management,” he told her.

“And I thought I knew all of our people who were going to be here. Sergio Venetti is running the Milan store. I’ve met him.”

“I don’t run the stores. I’m business development. All I do is set things up, buy the property, get construction started. Then I turn it over to someone else.”

“That explains a lot,” she said, nodding.

“Anyway, I was a late addition here,” he admitted. “Command performance from the boss.”

“Well, when God calls…”

“Exactly.” He studied her, feeling a little surge of frustration at the fact that she was now off-limits. She wore one of the prim and pretty suits that had been the spring runway rage. Somehow seeing her ladylike and demure clothes just gave him more of an urge to get them off her and uncover the uninhibited lover he’d discovered the night before. “Is this going to be a problem, us working together?” It was definitely going to be for him, unless he got a grip on his imagination.

“Gee, I think it might be, considering the fact that we work in different departments, on separate continents.” Her voice was dry. She grinned at him. “Relax, it’ll be fine. This time next week, you’ll be back in Milan.”

“London,” he corrected.

“Wherever. I think we’re both smart enough to keep a handle on it. No harm, no foul.”

That was overstating the case. It had certainly done harm to him—to his peace of mind, anyway. And yet, as much as he knew how narrowly they’d avoided trouble, he was glad they hadn’t figured out what was going on until after the fact, because the fact had been pretty damned memorable.

Cilla put out her hand. “We cool?”

“We cool.” He shook with her, letting go as quickly as he could. Before he really registered the feel of her skin.

Cilla blew out a breath. “Oh-kay. I’m going to hit the ladies’ room. That way we won’t walk back in together.”

“Worried about your father suspecting something?”

“I’m not, no,” she said frankly. “But it might be best for you if we keep our distance.”

He knew she was a creature of warmth, of humor, of appetites. Now, here was something he hadn’t expected—her concern.

Color stained her cheeks at his pleased stare. “What?”

Rand couldn’t prevent the smile. “Taking care of me?”

“Oh, well, just…paying back the good deed.”

He itched to brush his lips over hers. Off-limits, he reminded himself. “You’ve got a nice soft side, Priscilla,” he murmured.

“Only my grandmother ever called me that,” she muttered uncomfortably.

“You’ve got a nice soft side,” he repeated. “I’m glad I could be your Samaritan.”

4

MORNING CAME far too quickly for Cilla’s taste. Her father was of the lark persuasion and assumed everyone else was happy starting at seven-thirty. Of course, as president, CEO and chief shareholder of Danforth, she supposed he was entitled to think whatever he liked. What she thought, as she found a seat, was that nine o’clock would have been far more popular.

The conference room was furnished in dark wood and jewel-toned linens. No spectacular views here. The focus now was on work. The Danforth groups sat around an open rectangle of tables, a briefing book before each person. Pitchers of water and dishes of candy sat at intervals on the dark green table coverings. To one side, a breakfast buffet groaned with eggs and bacon and fruit, but at this hour Cilla couldn’t even think about it. All she wanted was coffee and consciousness.

Luckily, nothing on the early-morning agenda required any preparation from her, so she was able to merely absorb caffeine until she was marginally awake. Then Rand walked in and sat next to her. Butterflies fluttered around in her stomach even as she gave him a professional smile and nod. No way was she going to risk shaking hands.

She turned to the manager on her other side, chatting casually until her father brought the meeting to order. That should do it, she thought as the various department heads began reporting on the new business ventures, submitting to merciless grillings by her father and the board. Cilla didn’t bother to open her briefing book. She’d studied all the material ahead of time. Be prepared was one of her father’s mottos, and she’d taken it very much to heart.

It was interesting to watch Rand as he found himself on the hot seat, summarizing his work on the Milan store and the European expansion in general. Danforth had sunk a fair chunk of change into the venture, and the responsibility sat squarely on Rand’s shoulders. Still, he seemed to be at ease, even enjoying himself. Of course, through a combination of luck and skill, his news was rosy, which always simplified things.

His suit today was camel colored with a white shirt and a tie of pale gold patterned with gray. “We’re planning the grand opening of the Milan store in two weeks.” Rand looked around the room, focusing on her father. “The returns from the first month are strong. I think we’ve got a winner.”