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All Chapters of Just One Night With Him: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10
33 Chapters
Chapter One
WHAT the hell are you doing, Elena? Just what kind of game are you playing now?’ Roth demanded angrily as he removed her hands, releasing her fingers from his shirt where she had unconsciously curled them in her attempt to get him to listen to what she wanted to say, to understand that she was no longer a child, that she was now completely and totally a woman...a woman who loved and wanted him.‘Roth, this isn’t a game,’ she protested, her eyes starting to fill with anguished tears as he thrust her away. ‘I want—’‘Oh, I know exactly what you want, Elena,’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘You want me to take you to bed. But right now what I feel more like doing—’ He broke off, said something she couldn’t quite catch under his breath and then turned to look at her so that the light fell sharply across his face, outlining the aristocratic arrogance of his profile.‘Your stepbrother is one of my closest friends and my employer and—’‘This doesn’t have anything to do with Penn’ Elena protest
Read moreChapter Two
"Roth, wh-what is it...what’s wrong?’ she stammered.‘What’s wrong? Oh, for God’s sake...’ she heard him mutter. ‘The fact that you even need to ask that kind of question shows,you even need to ask that kind of question shows just how... You’re a child still, Elena... Six months from now...’She bit down hard on her bottom lip when she saw the irritation in his eyes as he ran his hand through his thick dark copper hair.‘I’m sorry... I should never have done that...’ he told her tersely.Elena felt her eyes fill with vulnerable tears.‘You kissed me,’ she protested shakily. ‘You wanted me...’‘No, Elena,’ she heard Roth telling her grittily. ‘What I wanted...’ he told her bluntly, ‘was not you, but what you offered. I’m a man, and when a woman comes on to me, offering me sex...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘You’re a child still, Elena.’‘I bet if we were in bed together you wouldn’t be saying that,’ Elena challenged him boldly, adding recklessly, ‘I’m not a child at all, Roth, and
Read moreChapter Three
"The old man had this thing about stately homes, I guess I kinda feel the same.He owned a fair handful of the things himself, so he kinda had a taste for them, if you know what I mean. There was the plantation down in Carolina and then a couple of châteaux in France and a palazzo in Venice, so it just kinda happened naturally that he should have this idea of using his millions to preserve and protect big houses, and now the Trust has a whole skew of them all over the world, and more wanting to have the Trust bankroll them every day.’Elena, with her own admittedly second-hand experience of her stepbrother’s problems in running and financing his own large family estate in England, had quite naturally been very interested in what Lloyd had had to say, but it had still surprised her a few days later to receive not just a telephone call from him but the offer of a job as his personal assistant.Elena wasn’t sixteen any longer, nor was she the naive and perhaps overprotected girl she had
Read moreChapter Four
‘But Elena, this place is a gem, a perfect example of English neoclassicism,’ she could hear Michael protesting as he studied her stubborn expression. ‘I promise you, you’ll love it. I’ve had Tara book you onto the day after tomorrow’s Concorde flight for London. I thought you’d be pleased. You were only complaining way back in the spring how much you wanted to spend more time with your stepbrother and his wife and their son...‘This house... Did I tell you, by the way, that the guy who inherited it just‘This house... Did I tell you, by the way, that the guy who inherited it just happens to know your stepbrother and that’s how he’d got to hear about us? It seems that he was telling your stepbrother about the problems he was experiencing, having unexpectedly inherited this place, and Alex suggested that he should get in touch with me... I wasn’t too sure at first. After all, we’ve already got that pretty little Georgian place down near Brighton, but, well, I kinda felt I owed it to Lu
Read moreChapter Five
‘You don’t approve, do you?’ Michael demanded, shaking his head ruefully.‘Just wait until you see it, though, Elena. You’ll love it. It’s a perfect example of...’‘We’re already very close to the limit of this year’s budget,’ She warned him sternly, ‘and—’‘So what? We’ll just have to increase this year’s funding,’ he told her with typical laid-back geniality.‘michael,’ Elena protested, ‘you’re talking about an increase of heaven alone knows how many million dollars... The Trust...’‘I am the Trust,’ Michael reminded her gently, and Elena had to acknowledge that he spoke the truth. Even so, she gave him an ironic look to which he responded by informing her loftily, ‘I’m just doing what I know the old man would have wanted me to do...’‘By buying a decaying neoclassical pile in the middle of Derbyshire?’ She asked him dryly.And she was still shaking her head as he told her winningly, ‘You’ll love it, Elena..I promise you!’Cravenly Elena was tempted to tell him that she was far too
Read moreChapter Six
That relief had turned to something very different, though, when he had received a fax from Michael advising him that his assistant, Ms Elena Bennett, would be flying over to Britain to act as his representative over the repair and renovation of the property. He could, of course, have simply chosen to turn his back, walk away, and leave someone else to liaise with Elena, but Roth wasn’t like that. If he had a job to do he preferred to see it through for himself, no matter how unwanted or potentially problematic that task might be.Potentially problematic! A bitter half-smile curled his mouth. There was nothing potential about the problems that Elena was likely to cause him... Nothing potential at all.He had heard scraps of news about her over the years, of course, mainly from lucas and Lia. Elena had completed her degree course and majored summacum laude... She was living in New York and looking for a job... She had got a job... Elena was working in Venice... In Rome... In Prague...
Read moreChapter Seven
FIVE miles or so before her ultimate destination Elena pulled the car she had hired at the airport over to the side of the road and switched off the engine—not because she was unsure of where she was going, not even because she wanted to absorb the beauty of the Derbyshire countryside around her, magnificent though it was as it basked warmly in the mid-afternoon sunshine, devoid of any sign of human occupation apart from her own.No, the reason she had stopped was that she had been tellingly aware for the last few miles not just of the slight dampness of her hands on the steering wheel but, even more betrayingly, of the increasing turmoil of her thoughts and the nervous butterflies churning her stomach.When she finally met...confronted...Roth, she wanted to be calm and in control of both herself and the situation. She was not, she reminded herself sternly, meeting him as an idealistic teenager who had fallen so disastrously and desperately in love with him, but as a woman, a woman wh
Read moreChapter Eight
Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Elena acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.*Roth had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger elena, and her apparent total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before making his way downstairs.They met on the paved portico. Roth opened the massive front door just as elena mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm
Read moreChapter Nine
‘Roth!’Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow invitingly sensual little thread of sound, gasping his name in a slow-drawn-out moan that was more invitation than protest?But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively, But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she had given; Roth was already acting on what he had obviously interpreted her ‘protest’ to mean, his hands lifting from her waist to her arms, her shoulders, as he drew her closer, his mouth fastening on hers as he kissed her, not as an old acquaintance or a friend of her brother’s, Elena recognised, her senses reeling, but in all the ways she had dreamed of him kissing her all those years ago, as a man kissed a woman.Despairingly she struggled valiantly to resist but it was useless. Her own foolish senses were doing far more to aid Roth than to support her, turning traitor and welcoming his sensual assault of her mouth with the eagerness of parched land gree
Read moreChapter Ten
She was under no illusions about why he had kissed her like that... It was his way of reminding her not just of the past, but also of his superiority...of telling her that, whilst she might be the one who was in charge of the project they were going to be working on together, he still had the power to control her...to control her and to hurt her.Elena turned swiftly on her heel, not waiting for him to see the emotions she knew were clouding her eyes. knew were clouding her eyes.‘The lake needs dredging,’ she commented crisply as she shuttered her eyes and stared out towards the large ornamental lake several hundred yards away from the house.It was the wrong thing to say. She could hear the mocking amusement in Roth's voice as he drawled, ‘Well, yes, it does, but let’s hope this time you don’t end up head-first in the mud. We’ll have to hose you down out here if you do.There’s no way Mrs Lucia is going to let you into the Rectory smelling of stagnant lake water and covered in mud
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