The Spanish Tycoon's Temptress Page 0,9
was very close and would probably be there but she must have been lax in her diligence at protecting her work at some point. That lack of attention to protecting her work left her experiments open to tampering. So stupid as to let others mess up her experiments. She knew better! Competition in the laboratory was fierce and there were many scientists who were not above hurting someone else’s work to get theirs to the finish line first.
The knock on her apartment door came much more quickly than she realized. She looked around at the mess of her apartment, the charts that had spilled down from the printer, the books scattered and stacked in random places surrounding her furniture, some stacks even acting as tables for abandoned cups of coffee or other drinks. It was a mess! She jumped up from her dining room table where her laptop and printer were located, quickly trying to gather things so that it didn’t look so chaotic.
But when the knock came again, she knew she had to answer it. With all the papers in her arms, she hurried to the door and pulled it open, her breath catching in her throat when she took in the magnificent man standing there.
No, not magnificent, she corrected herself. He was just another handsome, inconsiderate jerk who thought he was above the rest of the world. A man who didn’t need to follow the rules of common courtesy. She hated him so no matter how handsome he looked, she was not going to stare.
She pulled her eyes away and turned around, dumping the papers onto her tiny kitchen table, ignoring the reports that slid back down onto the floor. “You didn’t have to pick me up,” she said as she sifted through the papers. “I could have met you somewhere.”
Gaston walked into the apartment and looked around. It was just as messy as it had been last week but it seemed worse with more lights on.
He couldn’t stand the chaos, possibly because it was yet another indicator that she was hurting about something. Was it another man? Had she just broken up with someone and this is the result? He remembered her being meticulous and organized, so he lifted his eyes to watch her instead. When he took in her dress, he felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. The dress wrapped around her slender frame, making her breasts look even larger, fuller. On any other woman, that dress would look ridiculous but on Elana, she looked….ethereal. And sensuous.
Damn! His hands wanted to cup those breasts, to find out if her nipples were as sensitive as they used to be. She’d gone up in flames when he’d touched her all those years ago. She’d been a little kitten, always purring whenever he came close, her smile lighting up his day.
There was sadness in her eyes now and he wondered who had put that there. She was cautious, wary. And she refused to look at him. She was doing something with the papers on her table, sorting them somehow. But really, all he wanted right now was for her to look up at him so he could see her eyes.
She’d worn makeup tonight. And her hair was a soft halo, falling in a silken wave down over her shoulders. She really was an astonishingly lovely woman. It was also surprising that she lived in such a rundown apartment building. Her father had money, not as much as he used to thanks to Gaston’s attempts to pressure the man into giving him back the damn book. But her father wasn’t poor. Surely he could spare some of his precious money to take better care of his daughter. She might be an unfaithful, lying, deceitful woman, but she didn’t deserve to live like this.
His whole body tensed when she bent lower. He could see her breasts more clearly and she was wearing a sexy, black lace bra. Was she doing this on purpose? Was she trying to torment him? He swung his eyes away, only to have them come right back to those full, ripe breasts. Had the other men in her life taken advantage of those lovely swells? Had they known the same kind of fulfillment with just the soft escape of her breath when he touched her?
“Are you almost ready to go?” he growled out, then felt like an ass because her eyes looked up at him with a hurt, wounded expression. He wanted to