He was too damned old to get aroused from a dead-end kiss. His only hope was that Holly hadn’t noticed. He gripped her upper arms, lifted his head and put a few inches between them.
“Good night.” His voice sounded strained and no wonder. His lungs weren’t working.
“’Night.” She licked her lips and raised her lids to reveal slightly dazed eyes.
Instead of releasing Holly and stepping away the way his brain ordered him to do, Eric found his arms encircling her, pulling her closer. He kissed her again and again. He couldn’t help himself. Even as he consumed her mouth, his conscience shouted, “What are you doing?”
Her arms twined around his neck, pressing her soft breasts against his chest. His fingers glided upward from her waist. He had to feel her weight in his hand, to cup her fullness. Had to.
The sound of a car starting and crunching down the gravel driveway barely registered, but the barking dogs hurling themselves at the other side of the front door managed to infiltrate the haze clouding his mind. His hand stopped inches short of its target. He lifted his head and swore.
Holly stiffened, jerked her hands from around his neck and pushed against his chest. She looked past his shoulder. “Octavia’s gone. I, um, think that probably convinced her.”
She licked her lips again and need clawed at him, but Eric released her and stepped away.
What in the hell had just happened?
Whatever it was couldn’t happen again.
He, more than anyone, knew that strong emotional attachments made a man weak. If he ever needed a reminder, all he had to do was look at his henpecked father.
He backed away from temptation and left as quickly as he could and still maintain his dignity. Two miles down the road, he realized he still had Holly’s check in his pocket, but he couldn’t risk turning the ’Vette around. Until tonight, no woman had ever rattled him enough to make him forget that money and the power attached to it made the world go round.
Who’d have thunk it?
Holly leaned against the inside of the door and sank to the floor. Monet and Seurat crawled all over her, jostling for attention. She absently scratched them while willing her pulse to slow.
If anybody had told her uptight Eric Alden’s kisses held more sexual promise than the pages of the Kama Sutra, she’d have laughed. And darn it, she could not turn the page to see what the next chapter revealed.
How unfair that when she finally met a guy who could singe the toes out of her panty hose, he was the one man she couldn’t have. Not only had she tried and failed to fit into Eric’s world, she’d promised Juliana after the auction that there was nothing sexual about buying her brother’s date package.
Those melt-her-mascara kisses had made a liar out of her. Her body still hummed and her lips wouldn’t stop tingling, no matter how hard she bit them. If he’d been anybody but Eric, she would have invited him in for more than a nightcap, thereby breaking her born-again virgin vow. But she’d promised herself she wouldn’t settle for anything less than happily ever after next time. If such a thing existed. And she had her doubts. Waiting for a prince—a prince who didn’t need fixing or financial assistance—to love her and all her foibles hadn’t worked thus far. Better to do without a man altogether than be disappointed yet again.
Holly shoved to her feet and dodged the dogs all the way to her kitchen. She’d have to do a better job of keeping her distance from Eric Alden. She sifted through the pile of magazines and junk mail that had piled up on the counter while she was finishing her current project until she found the bachelor auction brochure. She read over the eleven enchanted evenings promised in Eric’s date package to refresh her memory and groaned. “Talk about monotonousness. Jeez.”
As long as he didn’t kiss her again, then his offering of meals at stuffy see-and-be-seen restaurants where even the wait staff had condescending attitudes would make ignoring the chemistry between them easy. Each date would be a reminder of the world she’d left behind—the world that had turned on her when she’d dared to sully her hands at manual labor.
Juliana and Andrea were the only friends who’d stuck by Holly when she’d said to hell with being miserable doing what was expected of her, quit her job at the Caliber Club and moved to her grandparents’ farm. Being happy was more important than being accepted.
Eric thrived in society with all its restrictions, expectations and conventions, but Holly was a debutante dropout who’d suffocated until she’d escaped. He was a banker who lived by the bottom line, and she was a bleeding heart who’d given away more than she could afford, a situation illustrated by her current predicament. One she needed to address ASAP.
Despite the smoldering kisses, she and Eric couldn’t be a more mismatched pair—a fact she’d better not forget if he ever hit her with another one of those break-her-celibacy-vow kisses.
Three
Holly tried to ignore the coffee klatch going on behind her as she double-checked the measurements of the living room window she’d been hired to replace.
If she hadn’t left the Caliber Club behind, she could have been one of this group. But instead of designer duds and jewelry that cost more than her Jeep, she wore chain store jeans, simple gold stud earrings and a Timex. As usual, she didn’t fit in.
But you’re not here to fit in. You’re here to work at a job you adore.
“What made you bid on Eric, Holly?”
The metal tape measure retracted so fast it almost cut Holly’s finger. She faced her client, a woman a few years older than herself, and searched for an acceptable answer. The truth wasn’t an option. Finally, she shrugged. “Why not? He’s good-looking.”
“And good in bed,” one of the other women said.
Holly’s gaze zipped to the ultrathin, high cheekboned brunette. The woman scanned her friends’ faces. “Oh, please. I am not the only one of us who shared Eric Alden’s bed before marrying my husband. And Eric was absolutely fabulous between the sheets, wasn’t he?”
Three of the six heads nodded. Holly struggled to keep her jaw from dropping. These women had slept with Eric? Holly blew a floppy hank of hair off her forehead and turned back to the window to hide her consternation. Why was she surprised about the affairs? The upper class was its own school of predatory fish, inbreeding and feeding off one another. That was one of the many reasons she’d chosen to get out.
And Eric was…well, sexy in a take-charge kind of way.
“But why did you buy him, Holly? Handsome or not, he’s hardly your type,” her hostess pressed. Charlise Harcourt had been one of Holly’s students for the past eighteen months, so she’d met Lyle, the mistake who’d run off with Holly’s money.
Think fast. Why did women want wealthy alpha males? “Um…to be treated like Cinderella?”
The women nodded like bobble head dolls, and Holly struggled to conceal her disgust. As far as she was concerned, Cinderella and all her fairy-tale-princess cousins needed to get off their duffs and learn to solve their own problems rather than wait around for a guy to swoop in and do the job.
“Eric can certainly be Prince Charming as long as you remember the party ends at midnight. He isn’t the type to commit to any woman who can’t further his career.”
An unspoken, “And that’s not you,” hung in the air.
“That bank is his wife and his mistress, too,” the brunette said. “A mere woman can’t compete.”
“Look at his engagement,” a third woman chimed in. “That was no love match. Eric was willing to marry to cement the bank merger. Too bad Priscilla wasn’t smart enough to hold on to what she had. I’d take a lifetime of great sex and bottomless pockets over love any day. That’s what friends, personal