She tensed, pale jaw tightening, emotion flickering over her face, shadowing her eyes.
For a moment she looked fierce and proud and rather bruised.
A fighter without arms.
A warrior taken captive.
Joan of Arc at the stake.
He felt the strangest knotting in his chest. It was an emotion he hadn’t felt before, and it was hot, sharp, uncomfortable. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to feel it. She worked for him, not the other way around. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but it’s over. I’ve chased you from Palm Beach to South Beach but I’m not chasing anymore. Nor am I negotiating. It’s my way, Hannah, or this is where it ends, and you can begin looking for a new job tomorrow.”
He saw her chest rise and fall as she took a swift breath, but she didn’t speak. Instead she held the air bottled in her lungs as she stared at him, a defiant light burning in her intensely blue eyes.
How could he have ever thought Hannah so calm and controlled? Because there was nothing calm or controlled about her now. No, nothing calm in those mysterious lavender-blue eyes at all. She was all emotion, hot, brilliant emotion that crackled in her and through her as though she were made of electricity itself.
Who was this woman? Did he even know her?
He frowned, his brow furrowing with frustration as his gaze swept over her from head to toe. At work she was always so buttoned-up around him, so perfectly proper, but then, she hadn’t dressed for him tonight, she’d dressed for Alejandro, her lover.
The thought of her with Ibanez made his chest tighten again, as something in him cracked, shifted free, escaping from his infamous control to spread through him, hot, hard, possessive. For reasons he didn’t fully comprehend, he couldn’t stand the idea of Ibanez with her, touching her.
She was too good for Ibanez. She deserved so much better.
His gaze rested on her, and it was impossible to look away. Her satin dress was a perfect foil for her creamy skin and the rich chestnut hair that tumbled down her back. The low square neckline accentuated her long neck and exquisite features. He’d known that Hannah was attractive, but he’d never realized she was beautiful.
Incandescent.
Which didn’t make sense. None of this really made sense because Hannah wasn’t the sort of woman to glow. She was solidly stable, grounded, focused on work to the exclusion of all else. She rarely wore makeup and knew nothing about fashion, and yet tonight she appeared so delicate and luminous that he was tempted to brush his fingertips across her cheek to see what she wore to make her appear radiant.
The tip of her tongue appeared to wet her soft, full lower lip. His groin hardened as her pink tongue slid across and then touched the bow-shaped upper lip. For a moment he envied the lip and then he suppressed that carnal thought, too, but his body had a mind of its own and blood rushed to his shaft, heating and hardening him, making him throb.
“You’re threatening to fire me, Sheikh Al-Koury?” Her incredulous tone provoked him almost as much as that provocative tongue slipping across her lips.
“You should know by now I never threaten, nor do I engage my employees in meaningless conversation. If I’m speaking to you it’s because I’m conveying something important, something you need to know.” He was hanging on to his temper by a thread. “And you should know that I’ve reached the end of my patience with you—”
“Not to be rude, Sheikh Al-Koury,” she interrupted, before making a soft groaning sound. “But how far away is the airport? I think I’m going to be sick.”
For Emmeline, the rest of the short drive to the executive airport passed in a blur of motion and misery. She remembered little but the limo pulling between large gates and then onto empty tarmac next to an impressively long white jet.
She was rushed up the stairs, aided by a flight attendant, and then escorted into a bedroom and through a door to a small bathroom.
The flight attendant flipped on the bathroom lights and then closed the door behind her, leaving Emmeline alone.
Thank God for small mercies.
Perspiration beading her brow, Emmeline crouched before the toilet. Her hands trembled on the pristine white porcelain as she leaned forward, her stomach emptying violently into the toilet bowl.
The acid that burned her throat was nothing compared to the acid eating away in her heart. This was all her fault … she had no one else to blame. She’d been weak and foolish and insecure. She’d reached out to the wrong man in a moment of need, and to make matters worse, she’d approached Hannah, dragging her into this.
Remorse filled her. Remorse and regret. Why wasn’t she stronger? Why was she so needy? But then, when hadn’t she craved love?