The Spanish Tycoon's Temptress (11 page)

As soon as that thought struck her, the reality of the situation broke through her passion drugged mind.  She’d just allowed…no, begged Gaston to touch her, to kiss her and she had been a full participant in the activity.  How could she be so weak?  Why hadn’t she stood by her principals and ordered him out of her apartment?  S
he was embarrassed that she hadn’t stopped him herself and she now felt weak and ridiculous.  “I don’t care what you want,” she said and pushed off of the counter, shaking with the impact of what they’d just done.  “I want you out of here,” she said firmly, turning her back to him as she grabbed her sweater and pulled it back over her head. 

When she felt his hands on her shoulders, she stiffened and tried to pull away but he tightened his grip on her shoulders, keeping her there, so close to him that she
could feel his heat against her back. 

“We’re going to make love, Elana.  You need to stop fighting this.  We can’t do that anymore, but I want all of you,” he stated.  “We’re not doing a repeat of seven years ago.”

She spun around, ready to confront him, but he just saluted her before he grabbed his jacket and a moment later, he was gone.  She looked around her apartment, feeling as if her world had just been spun around by a tornado.  And it had nothing to do with the way she had books and papers stacked up everywhere.  It had everything to do with the way Gaston always made her feel when she was in his presence for more than a few minutes.  The man was diabolical, she thought with anger rising up.

She looked at her apartment
once again and was actually embarrassed by what she saw.  This was not her, she thought with anger and resentment at what she’d allowed herself to become.  Gaston had been correct earlier in the evening when he’d said that she was organized and careful.  And this room was chaos!  She had no organization, no control in her life.  Maybe that’s why Gaston could simply walk into her apartment and touch her once and she would melt like butter in his hands. 

In the back of her mind, she knew that her
conscience was transferring her focus to the mess in her apartment so she didn’t have to deal with the scene with Gaston.  The mess in her apartment was easy to deal with so she looked for a starting point.  Gaston on the other had was impossible to deal with.  She didn’t understand him, couldn’t wrap her mind around what he wanted anymore.  There had been a time when she thought she knew him better than anyone.  But he was a stranger now.  A stranger that came into her life and tossed things around so that she was so confused she didn’t know what was happening.  And that scared her. 

With determination, she
started attacking the papers that were littered everywhere.  She hated this!  Bending down, she picked up a stack of papers that were just shoved into a file folder.  As she sifted through all of them, she realized that they didn’t even match the file folder name.  Now that her dining room table was cleared off, she took the papers and started sorting them, making piles of the various research she’d done over the past several years.  There was even a pile for things that were irrelevant.  Good grief, when had she started accumulating junk mail? 

For the next six hours, she sorted, sifted, piled and compiled the papers all over her
apartment.   At one point, she even rushed out to the all-night drug store and found a shredder, more manila folders and storage bins.  By the time she finally called a halt in the early hours of the morning, she felt cleansed!  Her apartment looked amazing!  There were still books everywhere, but the papers had made the whole place look messy.  The stacks of books definitely didn’t help, but with the ragged papers all sorted and filed away in the large storage bins or shredded and bagged up in a recycle bin, the place looked almost neat. 

She curled up on her sofa, enjoying the newness of her environment.  She didn’t realize when she’d fallen asleep, but
her ringing cell phone wasn’t something she was going to ignore any longer.  As soon as she moved to answer the phone, she knew that she hadn’t made it to her bed.  The sofa was comfortable, but it definitely wasn’t a piece of furniture that one wanted to sleep on forever. 

With a crick in her neck and some not so subtle pains in her back, she searched for her cell phone.  The number on the small screen was the same as last night and she remembered how Gaston had come over simply because he hadn’t been able to find her.

“Hello?” she answered, pushing her hair out of her eyes. 

“Where the hell ar
e you?” Gaston demanded.  No greeting, no good morning or apology for last night.  Just the newest demand and in that arrogant tone that always irritated her. 

“I would love to tell you that I’m sitting on a sandy beach with a mohito in my hand, but you probably know exactly where I am.”  She let out a deep yawn, filling her lungs with much needed oxygen. 

“And you couldn’t have picked up the phone to let me know that you weren’t coming into the lab today?”

“What are you talking about?” she mumbled, padding her way into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.  Once again, she looked around and noticed how nice everything looked now that she’d cleaned up so much of the chaos. 

Gaston’s sigh came through the phone and Elana pictured him running a frustrated hand through his thick, black hair.  “I’m talking about the fact that it’s already eleven o’clock in the morning and you haven’t bothered to show up!”

Elana looked at the clock over her stove and gasped. 
“Oh no!  I’m so sorry Gaston!  I’ll get to the lab immediately,” she said, rushing about and pulling off her clothes so she could take a quick shower.

She heard him sigh
again a moment before he called out her name.  “Elana, just stay home today.  You’ve been working three times the hours of everyone else and you need the break.  I’m sorry to have woken you if you were finally getting some sleep.  Just take the day off and rest.”

She looked down at the phone, wondering what was going on.  “I don’t need to rest, Gaston.  I can be at the lab in less than an hour.”

He chuckled at her insistence, a deep, rumbling sound that made her heartbeat increase.  “No, you can’t, Elana.  Just take the day off.  You have to work tonight with all of these board members so just relax.  Go out and get a manicure or whatever it is you women do to treat yourself and I’ll pick you up at six o’clock.”  He was about to say goodbye when something occurred to him. “Elana, do you have something appropriate for tonight?  Do you have a cocktail dress?”

Elana was still confused and she really didn’t want to spend the evening in his company.  And what’s worse, she definitely didn’t want him to come back here tonight to pick her up.  She didn’t want him even
remotely close to her, much less back once again in her private space after what had happened last night in her kitchen.  The man was just too big and too male for her tiny apartment and she was finding that she didn’t have any resistance when he touched her. 

She ran a hand through her hair, wanting to avoid him
coming back into her apartment.  “Gaston, please just let me meet you at the event.  There’s no need to drive all the way over here just to pick me up.”

“Elana, take the day off and relax.  And don’t you dare be anywhere else but at that apartment waiting for me or so help
me, I’ll pick you up and bring you to my place for the next month just so I know where you are.”  He hung up after that and Elana stared at the phone, wondering why he was so angry.  Technically, she didn’t really work for him.  And he was right, she’d been working long hours and most weekends for a long time.  It wasn’t like her to take a day off, but if she wanted to, she wasn’t going to do it simply because he’d told her to!

Although, she had a
schedule that she’d submitted along with her proposal and she was way ahead of that time table.  Her results already were fantastic so as long as she finished on time and on budget, which it was turning out she was actually going to be ahead of schedule and under budget, she really shouldn’t worry about taking a day off.

One thought occurred to her as she laid the cell phone down on the now-clear coffee table in front of her.  H
ow had he discovered that she wasn’t at work?  She stood in the middle of her apartment pondering these questions and it occurred to her that she really wanted to take the day off today.  She wanted to clean up the rest of her apartment so she didn’t lose the momentum that had built up last night.  And since he’d basically ordered her to do just that, she smiled and almost bounced into the kitchen to start the coffee maker as she accepted his order for once.  She’d take the day off, maybe even buy some cheap shelves to store all of her books so she could at least get them off of her apartment floor. 

And when was the last time she’d bothered to vacuum?  Did she even have a
vacuum?  These were all interesting questions that were probably going to negatively impact her savings account.  But after cleaning up the papers last night, she simply couldn’t stop getting things under control. 

She sifted through her old dresses first, pulling on one black sheath dress with sparkly spangles all over the front and back.  When she surveyed her figure in the dress, accepting that it would suffice for the night, if perhaps being a bit on the sexy side, she jumped into the shower,
then pulled her hair into a loose pony tail, grabbed an old pair of jeans and a tee-shirt before heading out the door. 

It was time to regain control of her life.  An hour later, she was lugging the shelves up the stairs to her apartment.  She’d bought t
hree of them, not to mention a relatively expensive vacuum cleaner.  She thought about going cheap on the vacuum, but since she hadn’t used one in her apartment since she’d moved in over two years ago, she knew it would require a great deal of power to get through the grime that had accumulated.  Now that she thought about it, she was more than a little disgusted with the way she’d been living. 

Putting the shelves together was relatively simple. 
After assembly, stacking the books up, all in a very specific order by subject, felt enormously wonderful.  When she was finished, she surveyed her new digs and was surprised at how much extra space she actually had.  She dusted, vacuumed, sorted and cleaned every surface until the whole place shined and smelled clean once again. 

Elana
looked around and felt more than satisfied, wanted to do more, but knew it was past the time when she should be getting back into the shower.  She needed to get ready for the night but as she surveyed her space, she catalogued all the items she’d like to replace.  She wanted new, colorful pillows for her sofa and pretty curtains, things to brighten up the apartment.  The garage sale items she’d been using were still serviceable, but they looked like they’d been owned by about five other people before her.  The color of her carpet was also transformed by the vacuum, making the apartment feel much larger now that the color was brighter, crisper with the dust gone. 

Her sofa wasn’t anything to brag about.  The tan color wasn’t really her style, but it was comfortable and sturdy. 
Nothing a good throw blanket couldn’t fix, she told herself as she jumped back into the shower and scrubbed herself with scented soap and shampoo, trying to get the dust off from her day of cleaning. 

Out of the shower, she dug through her shelves and actually found some scented lotion.  She
smoothed it over her arms and legs, not because she wanted to do anything nice for Gaston though.  It had absolutely nothing to do with the way he used to comment about how good she smelled.  No, the use of the rose scented lotion was for her own benefit. She’d been smelling dust all day long, and even last night so her hands were sore from being dry and her nostrils were filled with the scent of dirt and dust.  She simply wanted to feel and smell something clean now. 

Drying her hair, she considered pulling it up and letting the curls around her neck float freely, but when she saw herself in the mirror, she thought it might look a bit too seductive and left it down.  Then she remembered how much Gaston preferred her hair down around her neck and she pulled it back up, pinning it in various places.  She bit her lip as she surveyed her appearance in the mirror.  Was the dress too short
on her legs?  Or too low cut?  Was her hair too sexy?  She ran to her closet to slip the shoes on, then changed them for a pair of lower heels.  When she looked at her appearance again, the shoes looked dumpy compared to the shimmery dress.  So she slipped the other shoes back on.  She should take off the black stockings, she thought.  But were bare legs any better?

With a groan of disgust, she turned away from the mirror and put on her simple pearl earrings.  The only other jewelry she wore was her watch, ignoring the rest of her jewelry box because she already felt like she was trying too hard. 

The man wouldn’t even be with her, she thought angrily.  She would be expected to mingle around the room, talk to as many people as she could and let them know what her project was about, how the funding would work and how her ideas could benefit their company.  She wouldn’t have time to even discuss the issue with Gaston around because, if things went as they had at previous events like this, he would have his own agenda.  He probably had things he wanted the board members to approve which were completely separate from her issues.  So they would most likely be on opposite ends of the room.  In fact, probably everyone at tonight’s event would be trying to convince everyone else that their priorities were more important.