“Please send Mr. Masters in. Oh, and Karlie, feel free to take your lunch now.” The last thing she wanted was for her assistant to wonder what was or was not going on in her office.
“Mr. Masters? His name is not Mr. Masters,” Karlie whispered.
Desiree raised a brow, confused. “Then who is it?”
“Mr. LeBlanc. Aimery LeBlanc. The French race car driver that’s always in the news,” Karlie whispered even lower.
Desiree frowned. What in the world was Aimery doing here? She hadn’t heard from him in more than two years. The night their affair had ended hadn’t been pretty. “Please send Mr. LeBlanc in, Karlie.”
She got up from her desk and moments later, Aimery walked in, smiling.
Smiling? He was a good-looking man, she would have to give him that much. And there was no telling how much he had paid for that designer suit. But that was all he had—good looks and no substance. As Camille would say, he was all show and no go. All icing with no cake.
She smiled back, deciding she could act just as fake as he was. “Aimery, what a surprise.” She refused to go so far as to say it was a pleasant surprise, because it wasn’t. “What are you doing here?”
She offered him a chair when it looked as if he was coming toward her desk. To do what? Certainly not to offer her a peck on the cheek. She didn’t even want a courtesy kiss on the hand fromhim. They hadn’t ended things with a lasting friendship in mind. When he slid into the chair, she realized that truly, there was nothing sexy about the way he moved. At least, not compared to Cobra.
Even though she knew it wasn’t fair, she couldn’t help comparing the two men. And Aimery was lacking in so many ways. Although both he and Cobra were handsome men and sharp dressers, that was where the similarities ended. She no longer found him attractive in the least, and whatever sexual chemistry they had before was long gone. Whereas the chemistry between her and Cobra was off the charts.
However, she already knew the main difference between the men lay in how they conducted themselves in the bedroom. Aimery was a selfish bastard, and though she hadn’t slept with Cobra yet, she already knew it would be something she’d never forget.
When she took her seat behind her desk, she tightened her thighs together when she remembered the way Cobra had so easily brought her to a climax. She’d been thinking of that a lot lately, almost every single day. The memory often made her feel hot and needy, and lately, she’d been thinking of ways to return the favor. She couldn’t help thinking Cobra would likely approve of some of the ideas she had come up with.
“I’m in America doing several late-night talk shows to promote my next big race. But that’s not the reason I’m here, right now. This weekend, I discovered in conversing with someone that you’d kept something from me when we were together,ma chérie,” Aimery said, intruding into her salacious thoughts.
She was about to tell him he could take his words of endearment and shove them somewhere, but resisted. She wasn’t his anything—definitely not his darling or sweetheart.
Still, she was curious about his motives for being here. Why would her name have come up in any of his conversations, and just what did he think she had kept from him? “What is it that you think I didn’t tell you, Aimery?” she asked, leaning back in her chair.
“That you were Richard Sharpe’s granddaughter. I had the honor of dining in the home of Geoff Timberlake Saturday night, and I noticed a group of pictures sitting on one of the tables. He’d taken them at a wedding of a business associate last month. One of those photos was of Geoff standing beside a man he pointed out as a close friend. Of course, I recognized him as Richard Sharpe. Then I recognized you standing beside him. I assumed you were his trophy date, but Geoff informed me that you were his granddaughter who had recently moved back home from Paris.”
She nodded. Geoff Timberlake was an old friend of her grandfather’s, and she recalled when the photo had been taken at Colton’s wedding.
“And?” she asked, since he had yet to say why it was any of his business.
“And imagine my surprise. Your relationship to Richard Sharpe would have been good to know about when we were a couple.”
She lifted a brow.Seriously? “And it would have benefited you how?” she asked.
He chuckled. “You want a list? At the top, Richard Sharpe could have become one of my major sponsors on the circuit. Hell, I would have even overlooked your, ahh…sexual inadequacies had I known.”
Her sexual inadequacies? She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was about to tell him what he could do with his inadequate body part when a deep, male voice said, “You must have Desiree mixed up with someone else. I know fora fact there’s not an inadequate bone in her body. Sexual or otherwise.”
Desiree glanced beyond Aimery and saw Cobra standing in the doorway. Did he not believe in knocking? Still, she was glad to see him. Judging from the look on his face, he was furious, and like the snake he was named for, he seemed poised to strike. Dangerous but sexy. A thrill ran through her as she stood. “Cobra?”
“Desiree,” he said, coming into her office and closing the door behind him. Crossing the room, he brushed a kiss across her lips, deliberately exposing the degree of familiarity between them.
Even the chaste kiss was swoon-worthy. When she recovered her composure, she went to introduce the two men. “Cobra, this is Aimery, and -”
“And he was just leaving,” Cobra boldly interrupted.
She glanced at Cobra, saw the intense rage in the depths of his eyes, and could even feel anger seeping out of him—anger on her behalf. She couldn’t help feeling a quiet satisfaction that he’d defended her against Aimery’s comment. Unlike her ex, Cobra was all show and a lot of go. He wouldn’t hesitate to prove it by knocking the hell out of Aimery. Hadn’t her grandfather once told her that Cobra was a man who could hold his own?
Deciding to avoid any type of confrontation between the two men, she said, “Yes, Aimery was leaving.”
Aimery’s stare moved angrily from Desiree to Cobra, and then back to Desiree again. “I came to take you to lunch, Desiree, for old times’ sake.”
“Yeah, that won’t be happening,” Cobra said stiffly.
