Dark Alpha (ALPHA 2) by Carole Mortimer

One a beautiful and sought-after model, the other an Oscar-winning actress. Both had accepted dinner invitations from the billionaire Lucien Wynter without even meeting him first.
    His mouth tightened now as he thought of those two disastrous evenings.
    He had only just made it through dinner with the model, her breathy laugh irritating him, her groping him beneath the table in the empty restaurant—something he would once have taken full advantage of—only succeeding in irritating him more. So much so that he had put her in a passing cab the moment they were outside the restaurant.
    The actress—he couldn’t even remember her name now—had been a redhead. Long, straight and glossy red hair to her shoulders, her eyes a sultry blue.
    As far as Lucien was concerned, she had been too tall, and didn’t have curls or rebellious chocolate-brown eyes.
    She was all wrong. Just wrong .
    Lucien’s jaw clenched as he now slammed his fist into the window frame, uncaring of the pain he inflicted as he stared across the London rooftops to the building where he knew Nicky was once again sitting and working behind her desk.
    His building.
    Behind a desk he also owned.
    Nicky was just carrying on with her life as if he didn’t exist. As if the two of them had never met. As if the two of them hadn’t had sex on top of the table where Lucien ate a bagel and drank his coffee every morning.
    He placed his hands wide on the window frame as he breathed deeply, jaw still clenched, eyes glittering.
    He stood like that for five minutes, ten, arms tensed, jaw aching, glaring at the building where he knew Nicky was hard at work.
    Until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
    “Audrey,” he bellowed harshly for his PA. “Audrey, get your—” He broke off as his obviously startled PA appeared in the doorway. He nodded grimly. “You arranged for a letter and check to be sent to a Nicky McKenzie last week; do you have any personal information on her other than her address? A phone number? Email?”
    “I… Both, I think.” Audrey nodded warily.
    “I want them. Now,” Lucien added with grim determination.

    No!
    This could not be happening to her. Not again.
    She just couldn’t keep fighting a man as formidable as Lucien.
    But she had tried. She had tried so hard to do exactly that. And now this.
    Nicky’s fingers tightly gripped the sides of her computer screen as she stared at the email she had just opened without recognizing—realizing—it was from him .
    Those same two words and time that he had written on his business card the day they met, ‘Petruccio’s, 8:00 tonight’.
    Also just like the last time, there was no please, no would you, can you, could you, just a place and time. The same place and time.
    Her cheeks heated with color and she found herself squirming in her chair as the memories of that evening once again came flooding back to her.
    “Everything okay here, Nicky?” Mark Graham, her immediate boss, paused beside her workstation.
    “Fine.” She managed to give Mark a reassuring smile as she eased the tension from her shoulders and forced herself to get back to work.
    Her very first task was to eliminate the email from Lucien without looking at it again.
    She wasn’t going to allow Lucien to do this to her again. To think that he could just snap his elegant fingers and expect she would come running.
    If he really wanted to see her again, after throwing her out of his apartment the last time they were together, then he was going to have to ask this time.
    Even if just the thought of seeing Lucien again, being with him again, was enough to cause Nicky to tremble and shake.
    With desire.
    Arousal.
    With anticipation of the pleasure he could give her so easily...

    “What on earth is wrong with you tonight?” Chrissie studied Nicky closely later that evening as they sat eating dinner in the kitchen of the apartment she shared with Fleur. “You’re cheeks are flushed, eyes feverish, and that’s the second time you’ve