neck arching as she felt Gabriel’s hand push her blouse up, his fingers lightly caressing the bareness of her spine, her abdomen, before his hand cupped beneath the bared fullness of her breast.
The soft pad of his thumb was a light, sweeping torture across her aroused nipple, his lips a hot caress against Bryn’s throat as pleasure coursed hotly through her body, heating, dampening between her thighs, as he captured her aching nipple between thumb and finger, squeezing lightly.
His ragged breath burned against her throat as his other hand moved to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, allowing his questing lips to move lower, his tongue a sweeping, hungry caress against the tops of her breasts before dipping lower as he sucked her aching, straining nipple into the moist heat of his mouth.
Bryn’s head fell back against the headrest behind her, her fingers becoming entwined in the dark thickness of Gabriel’s hair as she held him against her, the intense pleasure of the dual assault of Gabriel’s lips and fingers against her breasts almost too much to bear.
Almost.
The pleasure was just too good, too exquisite, as it built higher, and then higher still, as Gabriel continued to draw deeply on her nipple, his tongue a moist and rasping caress against that burgeoning heat, rising higher, deeper, until she felt as if she would explode into a million pieces that could surely never be completely put back together again.
Never.
‘Gabriel, you have to stop!’
Gabriel was so aroused by the taste of Bryn and the desire that had raged so deeply, so out of control between them, that it took him several moments to realise that her hands were now pushing against his chest, her face turned away from him as she struggled to free herself from his arms.
He backed off the instant he realised what she was doing; he had never forced himself on a woman in his life before and he certainly wasn’t about to start now. He desired Bryn too much to ever want to do anything that she didn’t want, ache for, as much as he did.
Gabriel’s breathing sounded harsh in the confines of the car. ‘Hell, I totally forgot where we were.’ He gave a wince as he realised they were still sitting in his car parked outside the building where Bryn lived, and that although the side windows of the car were darkened glass, the windscreen certainly wasn’t. ‘I’m sorry, Bryn.’ He ran an agitated hand restlessly through the dark thickness of his hair.
She avoided so much as looking at him as she straightened and refastened her blouse with hands that shook slightly, her face pale in the moonlight.
‘Bryn?’
‘Not now, Gabriel. In fact, not ever!’ she insisted shakily. ‘I have to go.’ She turned to look out of the side window. ‘I— Thank you for dinner. I enjoyed Antonio’s.’
‘Just not what followed?’ Gabriel murmured knowingly.
Bryn gave a pained grimace. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree it wasn’t the most sensible thing either of us has ever done—’
‘Bryn, will you, for the love of God, look at me?’ he rasped his frustration with the situation. ‘Talk to me, damn it!’
She turned slowly, eyes huge and shadowed, her cheeks as pale as ivory in the moonlight. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘Don’t you?’
She looked away from the intensity of his gaze. ‘How about, this should never have happened?’ She gave a shake of her head. ‘We both know that already.’
‘Do we?’
‘Yes.’ Bryn looked at him searchingly. ‘Unless— Is this standard procedure? Did you think, expect, that I would be so grateful to be included in the exhibition at Archangel I would—?’ She broke off abruptly as she obviously saw, and recognised, the tightening of Gabriel’s jaw and the anger now glittering in the darkness of his eyes.
‘I’m getting a little tired of that accusation, Bryn.’ He spoke softly, dangerously so. ‘And no, kissing me isn’t the price you’re expected to pay for inclusion in the exhibition!’
She winced. ‘I didn’t exactly say that—’
‘You didn’t exactly have to!’ Gabriel bit out harshly, wondering if he had ever been this angry in his life before. ‘What the hell sort of man do you think I am? Don’t answer that,’ he immediately amended. He already knew what sort of man Bryn thought he was.
Gabriel had thought, believed, that after a rocky start they had managed to spend a relaxed evening together, that Bryn was starting to see beyond what happened in the past—starting to see him beyond that—and instead she now thought him capable of using his position as one of the owners of the gallery to— What an idiot, what a fool he was, to think that Bryn could ever see him as anything more than the man who had helped to put her father in prison....
‘You’re right, Bryn. You should go inside now,’ he growled coldly. ‘Before you think of something else to say to insult me.’
Bryn hesitated, continuing to look at Gabriel searchingly, unable to read anything from his suddenly closed expression. ‘It wasn’t my intention to insult you—’
‘Then heaven help me if you ever do mean it,’ he muttered disgustedly.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘I was— I just— Our going out to dinner earlier, what happened just now, it was a mistake.’
‘Mine or yours?’
‘For both of us,’ she insisted firmly. ‘And I think it would be better, for the sake of the exhibition, if it didn’t happen again. If we keep things on a purely business footing between the two of us from now on,’ she added.
‘As opposed to?’
‘Anything less than a business footing,’ she maintained determinedly.
Gabriel gave a grim smile. ‘Do you really think that’s possible after what just happened?’
Bryn wasn’t sure a business footing had ever been a possibility between herself and Gabriel—and she was utterly convinced of it after her response to him just now. Gabriel had only needed to kiss her, to touch her, to caress her and she had forgotten everything but him and the moment. Nothing else had mattered at that moment. Nothing.
And it had to. It must. Because she wasn’t about to allow herself to suffer the heartache of falling in love with Gabriel D’Angelo.
Not again.
Gabriel took in the stubborn lifting of Bryn’s chin, the determined glitter in her eyes, and knew that she meant it when she said she wanted the two of them to go back to having a business relationship only.
If not for the reason she stated.
He was thirty-three years old, had been sexually active for almost seventeen of those years, and he was experienced enough to know when a woman desired him. And, whether she liked it or not, Bryn had been looking at him all evening as if she desired him as much as he desired her, and what had happened just now had been a direct result of that mutual desire. Bryn might wish it weren’t so, might believe it was insanity on her part to be attracted to Gabriel while still carrying the pain of the past, but none of that changed the fact that she did want him.
Whether or not she actually liked him was something else entirely.
And that mattered to Gabriel.
Because he not only desired Bryn, he liked her. He had liked her five years ago too, even before he had seen her unshakeable loyalty to her father, and the quiet strength she had offered her mother as the two of them had sat together in the courtroom day after day.
Just as he admired Bryn’s determination since meeting her again, her tenacity to succeed so intense that she had even been willing to become involved with the Archangel Gallery, to meet with at least one of the detested D’Angelo brothers, in order to achieve the success she so desired.