Broken Resolutions: A Rule Worth Breaking / The Man She Can't Forget / Billionaire Boss, M.D.

‘Sure. You’re the boss.’

Clearly unhappy, Rick didn’t say another word. But he still found a smile for Caitlin as he passed her. Then he left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. She shivered. She suddenly didn’t feel at all easy about finding herself alone with Jake.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ The charismatic manager strolled across to another ponderous Victorian sideboard and, opening a door, extracted a bottle of Bourbon along with two glasses.

‘No. Not for me, thanks.’

When Caitlin declined his offer without further ado he poured himself a conservative amount of alcohol into a shot glass and advanced slowly towards her. Not for a second did he take his glance off her. His blue eyes glinted dangerously, just like a shaft of sunlight catching the burnished blade of a sword. She couldn’t help tensing. The charming man in the Armani tux who had taken her to the Burlesque had apparently disappeared.

Tipping back his glass, Jake swallowed down the drink before saying, ‘So…care to tell me why you’ve come to see me tonight, Caitlin? It certainly isn’t to make small talk, is it? What’s on your mind? In my experience there’s only one reason a woman comes to a man’s hotel room late at night.’

As if to illustrate what he meant, he flicked his intense gaze over her as if he’d like to strip every stitch from her body and devour her, and then take his slow, sweet time doing it all over again.

Caitlin tried desperately to calm the rioting sensations he was stirring inside her.

‘Well, that’s not the reason I came to see you, Jake…as hard as that might be for your ego to take. My visit is a purely practical one.’

‘Is it?’ His expression doubtful, he put his glass down on a nearby side table and turned back to give her a deliberately lazy smile. ‘You break my heart, Caitlin Ryan…but I think you know that, don’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

Her mind was in a complete spin, and if she hadn’t backed herself up against the door just then there was a distinct danger that she might simply have crumpled to the floor. Her legs were trembling so hard they hardly seemed to have the strength to keep her upright.

‘What you do to me with those slow, hot looks of yours is nothing less than criminal.’

His voice a low, grating rasp, Jake yanked her away from the door and pulled her roughly into his arms.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#u43d3e29c-96b1-53b5-a622-ceff093f1dd3)

CRIMINAL… CAITLIN COULD HAVE used the same adjective to describe Jake’s kiss. The way he took her mouth was near savage, and it almost knocked her off of her feet. This was no inept fumbling, no tentative exploration, but a devastating passionate assault on the senses.

With a hungry groan that seemed to emanate from the depths of his soul, he swept his tongue over the warm recesses of her surprised mouth as one firm hand possessively anchored itself in the long thick strands of her hair to render the contact between them even more intimate.

As his tongue thrust deeper, harder, mimicking the ultimate sexual coupling between a man and a woman, Caitlin swallowed her breath, tasting him, her senses intoxicated by the dark sultry flavours of bourbon and avaricious heat. She gripped onto the sensuous silk of his shirt with all the strength and tenacity of someone hanging from a precipice by their fingertips…as if she dangled into empty space and could fall at any moment.

But from the instant Jake had captured her mouth there had been no thought to deny him. Not when everything in her clamoured wildly for more of the same. Only a frigid woman could not want what Jake was giving her right now, and Caitlin was anything but that. She was a living, breathing, loving human being, and it was too long since she’d been held and desired—too long since she’d been loved like a woman longed to be loved by a man.

Oh God…how did I survive without this? she thought.

All she knew was that her legs suddenly didn’t have a hope of holding her up for very much longer. Not when the equivalent of a hundred volts of pure unadulterated pleasure was pulsating through her as though she were plugged in to her own personal ecstasy machine.

Almost mindlessly driving her hips against Jake’s, she heard herself moaning urgent little sounds of want and need—sounds that were as alien to her as this wild, savage joy that was pouring through her veins. Sean had never taken her anywhere near close to the kind of heights Jake was taking her to now. Never before had passion come at her like a wild, untamed river, bursting its banks, sweeping everything that stood in its way to exciting unchartered shores that left her dazed and trembling.

Hungrily she acquiesced as he alternately nipped and grazed at her mouth, every now and then her tongue meeting and dancing with his, her breasts burning into the hard granite wall of his chest. She was certain of one thing and one thing only…that she never wanted this sweet, irresistible agony to end.

Unbelievably, Jake turned up the heat. Now their invisible passion dial hovered somewhere between boiling and the point of no return. As he rocked his hips deep into hers the solid ridge of his button fly was testimony to his driving, hungry need, and when he suddenly broke contact to look down at her Caitlin glanced back at him in surprise.

It was a shock to witness the depth and strength of desire contained in that blistering gaze. His pupils were almost totally black, ringed with just the slimmest band of devastating blue. From his lips his breath issued hard and fast, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his ridged brow.

‘I don’t want our first time to be up against a door. You’ve got to tell me what you want, baby.’

As he finished speaking he reached behind him and shot the bolt, enveloping her in a dizzying cloak of heat and his disturbing, sensuous male essence.

‘Do you want to stay with me tonight? We can go to bed now and finish what we started. I can keep you up all night and give you pleasure like you’ve never dreamed. Is that what you want?’

With deft fingers Jake freed the top three buttons on her coat and jerked the material aside to cup her breast through the thin material of her T-shirt. Her nipple, already rigid and tingling with need, pressed helplessly, wantonly into his palm.

Why did he have to stop and ask what she wanted? Caitlin thought. Why couldn’t he just carry on the way they were going and take what she was so ready to give him?

She was shocked at the desperation of her wild thoughts. What he was doing—his long fingers now circling the nipple of her other breast, alternately nipping and squeezing—was making her womb throb with an almost unholy ache. If he took her right now she’d welcome the possession and count herself blessed. That was how much she wanted him. She was hungry to feel his sex deep inside her, to complete the electrifying bond that had been slowly and devastatingly drawing them together since the very first moment they had met.

But this was crazy—and not just crazy, but completely and utterly reckless. Jake must surely know that? He was the one who’d sternly advised Caitlin against ‘fraternising’ with the band out of hours, and as he was their manager he had to include himself in that warning. The potential pitfalls of turning a working relationship into a personal one could only spell disaster.

And, anyway, it was wrong to assume that Jake even wanted a personal relationship with her. A hot and fast seduction in a hotel room didn’t usually pave the way to something deeper and more meaningful, did it? Was sex all that he wanted from her? If it was, then it was nothing less than an insult—because she was sure he could get that from any woman.

Realising how close she had come to throwing away something precious—namely her self-respect—Caitlin flung Jake’s hand away and straightened her T-shirt. As she did so her heartbeat accelerated so hard she was momentarily dizzy. Seeing the spasm of confusion in his eyes, she sensed tension of another kind radiating from his body.

‘What’s wrong?’ he ground out.

‘I’m not going to sleep with you, Jake.’

‘Sleeping isn’t exactly what I had in mind.’

His words made her flinch. Her body hadn’t stopped aching for him, and her mouth throbbed and burned from his unbelievably passionate kisses, but the idea that he would bed her simply just to ‘scratch an itch’ hurt her deeply. Having already had the soul-destroying experience of being used by a man, she wasn’t about to set herself up to play the same old destructive tape again…

‘All right, then, let me put it this way.’ Impatiently she pushed back a drifting strand of hair from the side of her face to unwaveringly meet his gaze. ‘I’m not going to have sex with you. I won’t jeopardise my relationship with the band and neither will I be used by you because I happen to be “convenient”. And, contrary to what you might believe, I didn’t come here tonight because I had something personal in mind. All I wanted was a little reassurance because I was nervous about the performance tomorrow.’

Jake cursed softly beneath his breath. His disturbing blue eyes raked over her features, pinning her to the spot. It was clear to Caitlin that he was immersed in a deep inner tussle between utilising his common sense and trying to curtail his desire. Like her, he was still reeling from the throes of the incendiary passion they’d ignited. There was a thin film of sweat on his brow and it was evident he was still turned on. With the fulfilment of his desire evidently thwarted, now he was frustrated and angry as well as aroused.

‘Is that what you think? That I’d take advantage and use you just because I wanted sex?’ A muscle flexed warningly in the side of his exquisitely carved cheekbone. ‘If you think that then I seriously underestimated you, Caitlin. You’ve listened to all the less than flattering stories about me, bought them as fact, and condemned me even though I told you the truth about what happened between me and my ex. Don’t you remember that it was my reputation that got dragged through the mud because of the lies she wrote in that blasted article? Not hers?’

Caitlin hardly knew what to say. Was she guilty of judging Jake without trial? Without even giving him the chance to prove his character? After all, it wasn’t just him that had suddenly found himself driven by the libidinous desires of the body. She was in exactly the same position!

Sighing, he agitatedly drove through his fingers through his already mussed hair.

‘Anyway, perhaps you’d better just leave before my “questionable” character contaminates you even more. You’d better get home and get some rest. You know what’s ahead of you tomorrow and I want you to be at your best.’

Her heart almost thudded to a stop. Tomorrow would be a big day…perhaps the most important one of her life so far. It was a shame that she’d spoiled things by coming over to Jake’s and starting something she couldn’t finish.

‘I’m sorry that I—that I…’

‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re going to be just fine, Caitlin. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? All you have to do is concentrate on the songs, the music. Blue Sky is a great band and they’ll be helping you every step of the way. It’s not going to be as hard as you imagine. Trust me. You’ve got a great voice and you’re a stunning-looking girl. In terms of fulfilling the criteria for success in this business, you’ve got it all. You can’t fail.’

If Jake had meant to reassure her he’d done it in a strangely reticent way. Caitlin still felt ill at ease. Plus she could easily sense the anger that simmered beneath his thin veneer of civility.

‘I was going to say that I was sorry for—’ Blushing, she was unable to complete the sentence when he was all but eating her up with his eyes.

‘Turning me on?’