with him?
He was letting this woman lead him around by the balls, and she didn’t even know it.
Or maybe she did.
* * *
Chelsea checked her makeup in the mirror of the ladies’ toilet and took a deep breath. And another, because parties like this—and exchanges like the one she’d had with Alex Diaz—brought her to the brink of an anxiety attack. Not that she’d ever show it. Ten years on and she’d learned not just to live with it, but to hide it.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, willed the color to return to her cheeks, her heartbeat to slow and her palms to stop tingling. You’re better than this, Chelsea. Stronger. Will it away.
A breath. Another. She continued to stare at her reflection, her face composed, her eyes hard. And finally, finally, the color returned and the tingling went away and she breathed deeply, her heart rate normal.
There. See?
Taking one last breath to steady herself, she turned from the mirror and left the ladies’ room.
Twenty minutes more and she’d call it a night. The thought brought an almost painful wave of relief. Her exchange with Alex Diaz had made her feel particularly edgy, everything just a little too close to the surface even though she knew, intellectually at least, that it was all still well hidden away.
Thank God.
Even Michael didn’t know how hard these occasions could be for her. When you had a high-profile career in television, you could hardly admit that socializing sometimes made you almost cripplingly anxious. That people scared you.
People like Alex Diaz.
She’d continued to feel his eyes on her as she’d moved around the room, and while his attention hadn’t scared her precisely, it had made her wary. Wary and aware, because even from fifty feet away he had the power to affect her. Make her ache. And that was too much power for one man to have.
She turned away from the mirror and headed back out to the party, stopping suddenly when a familiar bulk blocked the narrow hallway.
Paul Bates, AMI’s leading news anchorman and a complete ass. A drunken ass, judging from the fumes Chelsea could smell from ten feet away, and the way he lurched toward her. She took another deep breath and started to move past him.
He grabbed her arm, fingers digging in, nails snagging onto the slippery fabric of her dress. “Where you going, beautiful?” he slurred, and the whisky fumes now hit her full on the face. Chelsea didn’t move, didn’t pull her arm away. She knew better than that; men like Paul Bates liked a little resistance. Or even a lot.
“Back to the party, Paul,” she answered calmly. “But I’d suggest you remove your hand from my arm unless you want to be slapped with a sexual harassment suit.”
“Oh, come on, Chelsea.” She could get drunk off his breath alone, Chelsea thought dispassionately. “You could be a little friendlier to me, you know,” he continued, his voice turning both insistent and wheedling. “I could help you the way Agnello does.”
As if. She’d seen Paul eyeing her at the studio before, had ignored a few thinly veiled insults, some offensive innuendo, but he’d never actually come on to her before. He’d never touched her.
“Oh, I’m sure you could, Paul,” Chelsea murmured, tossing in a throaty chuckle for good measure. He made a clumsy grab for her hand and started drawing it to his crotch. Chelsea let him, felt his rather unimpressive hard-on. And smiling sweetly, she squeezed his balls hard enough for him to choke.
With a gasped curse he released her hand.
Chelsea moved past him, stopping abruptly when she saw another figure blocking her exit.
Alex Diaz.
He was gazing at her with narrowed eyes, his mouth twisted into something like a smile.
“And here I was about to charge to your rescue,” he murmured.
“Watch out you’re not next,” Chelsea fired back, keeping her voice flirtatious, and she heard him laugh softly.
“I’d better move out of the way, then.”
He moved to the side and Chelsea slipped past him, her breasts brushing his chest. Her breath hitched and she tilted her head up, gave him a slow smile. “Although maybe you’d enjoy it,” she murmured, and he gazed back, his face expressionless now.
“Maybe I would.”
She felt her heart lurch inside her. Why was she doing this? Alex Diaz was dangerous, and exactly the wrong kind of man for her.
And that was exactly why she was doing it. Because playing with fire proved you were strong and smart enough not to get burned—or at least not to mind a few singed fingers.
Still smiling, she dropped her hand and let her fingers brush against the front of his trousers. He didn’t so much as twitch, but she could still feel his arousal and answering desire arrowed through her. She leaned forward so her earrings grazed his jaw, and he still didn’t move. “I don’t need rescuing, Diaz,” she murmured into his ear.
Alex turned slightly so his lips brushed her cheek, less than an inch from her mouth. Everything in Chelsea clenched hard. “You sure as hell don’t, Miss Maxwell,” he murmured back and before she lost it completely she stepped away and walked back into the ballroom.
She felt his gaze on her back all the way to the elevators.
Alex watched Chelsea Maxwell walk away and shook his head slowly. The woman was incredible, and he wasn’t sure he meant that in a good way.
Although maybe he did. A certain part of his anatomy certainly did, because when she’d brushed against him with her fingers he’d had to resist the urge to grab her by the arms and push her against the wall, kiss her until they both were senseless. And more.
Which didn’t make him all that different from Bates, who was still bent over and wheezing from Chelsea’s smiling squeeze of his balls.
The woman was no victim. No Sarah, used and abused by men with power, and the thought gave him a strange, savage satisfaction because that was the kind of woman he needed.
But first he had to get her to agree.
His gaze narrowed as he saw her heading for the elevator. Was she leaving the party already? For a moment he considered following her, but then decided against it. He’d laid the groundwork tonight; he needed to think about the best way to handle Chelsea Maxwell before he spoke with her again. And he also needed to get a handle on the obvious attraction he felt for her. He didn’t like feeling out of control, especially not when it came to sex. Men started making stupid decisions when they let themselves be led by their dicks.
And Alex had no intention of letting that happen. If he slept with Chelsea, it would be on his terms, because it served a purpose.
Even if he suspected it would be incredibly enjoyable.
The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside, head held high, her chin tilted at an almost defiant angle. She looked haughty and magnificent, the ultimate ice queen—and then Alex noticed one hand clenched in the folds of her gown. That little, telling action surprised him, and he wondered just what it revealed. Was she angry with the drunken idiot who had come onto her? She’d seemed no more than coldly amused when Bates had stumbled up to her.
From behind him Alex heard Paul Bates mutter a wheezy curse.
“What a bitch,” he mumbled and Alex glanced at him in derision.
“You’re just saying that because she got you in the balls.”
“Like I said—”
“And you deserved