Mistresses: After Hours With The Boss: Her Little White Lie / Their Most Forbidden Fling / An Inescapable Temptation

“It shouldn’t have happened,” he bit out. It was inexcusable. The loss of control. The desperation he’d felt. To use her as a salve for his wounds. To let go of everything completely.

“I see,” she said. She bent down and started collecting her clothes, her movements jerky, awkward. She seemed angry, upset.

“You think it was a good idea?” he asked, frustration pounding his temples, arousal pounding in his groin.

“What? Oh … it’s just …” She stood up. “Whatever.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “It was a kiss. It’s not like it was anything serious. No big deal. Lips. Tongue. Not a big … I’m gonna go now.” She sidestepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Dante wrenched his belt off and threw it on the ground, stalking into his bathroom and turning the shower on cold. He dropped his pants and underwear and stepped beneath the spray. He let the icy water roll over him, making him shiver, his body shaking from the inside out. It wasn’t about cooling the heat in his body. He was paying penance for losing his control.

It would not happen again.

Paige leaned against her bedroom door, her heart sill pounding heavily, her lips still burning. Just a kiss? No big deal? She was getting good at lying.

She’d never been kissed like that, by a man like him, in her life.

And of course, the first words out of his mouth had been that it was a mistake. Of course it had been. How could it be anything else? A man like him would not want to kiss a woman like her. Not really.

Sometimes she felt like she was changing. Finding out who she was apart from the labels she’d been given at home, back in high school. Tonight, she felt like she’d reverted. Back to the painfully awkward girl she’d been.

The one she still was beneath the makeup and sequins.

She changed into her pajamas as quickly as possible and tried to ignore just how conscious she was of the fabric sliding against her skin. Of how sensitive she felt. He’d lit her skin on fire, made her feel like she was burning from the inside out.

The memory of the kiss, of how it had made her feel, took the edge off her humiliation. He’d made her want to do something stupid, like run her fingers over that finely muscled chest. To feel him, firm flesh, heat and a hint of chest hair, beneath her palms.

He’d made her want more than that. Her entire body heated at the thought of exactly what he’d made her want.

And he thought it was a mistake. Had he even wanted her? Even a little? Or had he just been horny and wanting sex? And she was in his house instead of one of the women he’d selected.

He wouldn’t have stopped with one of them. Wouldn’t have called it a mistake.

She opened her door and padded down the hall, cracking open the door to Ana’s room. She pushed Dante, and the arousal, the need, the hurt he’d inflicted on her, out of her body. A sense of calm washed over her as soon as she entered her daughter’s room. She didn’t need blood relation, or a government document to feel like Ana was hers. She was, in every sense of the word, no question.

She walked over to the crib and leaned up against the rail, not minding that the wood was digging into her ribs. She bent down and ran her hand over Ana’s fuzzy head, down her stomach. Ana sighed and wiggled beneath Paige’s hand, making a little smacking sound with her mouth.

So much perfection. So much love. So much responsibility. Paige had never succeeded at anything in her life. And she had to succeed at this.

No matter how hot the kisses, Dante Romani was just a means to an end. She couldn’t let him distract her.

And that meant no more kissing. Unless they had to. For the press or for social services.

Suddenly she felt very tired. Like a weight had come to rest on her shoulders. It was harder than she’d imagined it would be. And she couldn’t pretend that she didn’t care. Couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t pressure pushing in from all sides. Couldn’t pretend that losing would mean nothing.

Not when it would mean everything.

“I’ll do my very best, sweetie,” she whispered, an ache in her throat, a tear rolling down her face. She just hoped that for once, her best would be good enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ucee2d68b-dd06-5d8e-abc6-862a58eb0486)

PAIGE managed to avoid Dante for the next few days. As best as she could avoid someone when she lived with him and drove to work in the same car with him every morning.

She was definitely much more careful when trying to sneak into his room for clothes. Not because she was afraid of him, but because she was afraid of herself.

She’d liked the kiss too much and she was in serious danger of longing after the man. She didn’t do the longing thing. It ended in disappointment. And sometimes humiliation. Whether it was test scores or boys, that had been her experience. Longing just made the impossible hurt more.

There was no time for longing. She had to focus on Ana, not her suddenly perky hormones.

She growled into her empty office and bent down, rummaging through the box of glass, glitter-covered ornaments and gathered a few of them in her arms, taking them over to the work space she had cleared for herself in the back of the room.

The sunlight streamed in, bright and perfect for Paige to get an idea of just how everything would glitter in the windows of Colson’s department stores at Christmastime. The Christmas designs took up so much of her year, because every year there was the pressure to do bigger, better, more intricate. She loved it.

They moved her wooden frame, the same size and shape of a standard Colson’s window, so that it was right in the path of the sun and she started hanging the ornaments from the top with fishing line.

They caught the light, and they glinted. But it wasn’t enough. She needed flash. She needed something no one would walk by and ignore.

She dug through her big box of sparkle, as she’d dubbed it, and produced a canister of silver glitter, one of gold and some deep purple gems. She set to it.

The finished product was much better. They caught fire when the sun hit, and beneath the display lights they would be fantastic.

She brushed her hands on her black skinny jeans and grimaced when she noticed the trail of glitter she’d put down her thighs.

“You’ve been working hard.”

She turned at the sound of Dante’s voice and ignored the fact that her heart had slammed into her chest and then started pounding hard and fast.

“Eh, you know the old joke. Hardly working and all that,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she was so quick to dismiss her work, and yet, she always did. Making light of it seemed to be her default setting. She was only just noticing it, and she didn’t like it.

“Doesn’t look that way to me,” he said, crossing the threshold and moving to her work area. “I like it.”

“There will be more. The mannequins, of course. Plus, about fifty more of these hanging at different heights. Snow. A Christmas tree. This is just for one of the side-street windows. But the main window display is going to be pretty amazing. I’m excited.”

“I can tell.”

“I put a lot of work into it,” she said, for herself more than for him. “And I work really hard.”

“Of course you do, Paige, or you would hardly still be on my payroll. This will be our third Christmas with you at the helm, and everyone has said how much higher the quality has been on the displays since then.”

“Well … thank you.”

“Tell me about the main window.”

“It’s going to be called Visions of Sugarplums. It will be a bunch of Christmas fantasies. And I think I want to have them like they’re sort of springing from a dream. So some mist and icicles and lights. Very whimsical and beautiful.”

“And all the same at each location?”

“I think each one should be slightly different,” she said. “At least the big destination stores in Paris, New York, Berlin, et cetera. So that each one is an attraction.”

“Do you have the budget for it?”