Chapter Three #2
Taz lifted his mouth and pulled her head down, and their lips met in a kiss that was as soft as it was sexy.
She placed her fingers on his jaw, surprised at the softness of the stubble on his jaw and cheek.
It tickled her lips as he explored her mouth, his tongue pressing the seam of her lips, demanding entrance.
She shouldn’t—he was her boss, for God’s sake!
He paid her salary. She shouldn’t even be here, in this hospital room, with him.
But her body, more specifically her mouth, failed to decode her brain’s frantic messages.
Her lips parted, partly from shock, partly from need, and he slipped inside her mouth, setting off a chain reaction of baby fireworks on her skin.
His tongue tangled with hers, and she heard his rumble of appreciation and felt his hand tightening on her head.
Her blood heated, her eyes closed, and she never wanted him to stop.
This was, bar none, the best kiss of her life…
His soft grumble, deep in his throat released the last string holding her control together, and the fingers of her hand speared into his hair, and her other hand pulled his soft T-shirt up his stomach to find warm male skin.
All she wanted to do was to straddle him, rock herself against his hard length.
Why was she reacting like this? Who was she? Why did he make her feel so reckless?
And breathless.
His hand ran up and down her back, over her hip, up her ribcage. It wasn’t nearly enough. Nothing but being naked and having him inside her would be enough. Millie didn’t recognise herself: She never responded like this, was never needy and…wanton.
Men never made her feel wild and out of control. Taz, through some dark magic, did.
And boy, did he know how to use his lips. Was he as good at making love as he was at kissing? Of course he would be: He’d had lots of practice with a steady stream of women. But knowing what type of woman he usually went for—slim, sophisticated, famous—why was he kissing her?
Except that he wasn’t. Kissing her. Not anymore.
His lips weren’t moving, and his hand fell from her head to his side.
Millie pulled back. His eyes slammed into hers, and she thought she caught shock in his, echoed by his bobbing Adam’s apple.
She straightened, and Taz rested his head on his pillow and pushed his hand through his messy hair.
If he was anyone but Taz De Rossi, she would suspect he was a little off balance and that he’d been caught off guard by the heat of their kiss.
But that wasn’t feasible. He closed his eyes, and his thick lashes lay against his pale skin.
The lines of pain were deeper now, and he pressed his lips together.
‘Are your pain meds wearing off?’ she asked. She had to say something, the silence between them excruciating.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, his voice a little rough.
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation: He’d had a high-speed crash and an operation.
But Millie wasn’t buying it. She was starting to read his body language, and his tight lips and the muscle jumping in his jaw suggested something was bubbling under the surface.
She was tempted to push but decided not to.
Did she want to know? Could she handle it if she did?
It was late and so much had happened, there was no need to toss an accelerant on a runaway fire.
Maybe their kiss was simply an unusual end to an unusual day. She shouldn’t read anything into it. He might not even remember it in the morning. And if he did, he would probably, hopefully, write it off as a spur-of-the-moment thing.
God, she hoped so. Millie left his room, shut the door behind her, plopped down in the nearest chair in the hallway and rested her forehead on her fist.
A normal Sunday night back in London meant a curry in front of the TV, maybe folding some laundry, vacuuming her flat if she felt energetic. But here she was sitting in a hospital in Shanghai, newly promoted to a job she didn’t think she could do, reliving a kiss with her boss.
Who was she?
And that was the issue, wasn’t it? That was why she was here.
Because she didn’t want to be who she was, but didn’t know who she wanted to be.
Or who she could be. She needed a new version of herself, a Millie 2.
0, but had no idea what that person looked like or what she believed. About the world or herself.
When she was younger, she’d been intimidated by the sophisticated and wealthy world of F1 racing, by the sophisticated girls Ben dated, the circles he socialised in, and the wealth and the luxury surrounding him.
Both her and Ben’s parents glittered and glowed, and they’d easily slid into Ben’s world and navigated it with ease.
Unlike the rest of her family, she didn’t like the spotlight.
Her parents had only ever planned on having one child.
Another child would’ve demanded more—time, money and input—than they were prepared to offer, but they’d been vastly disappointed in the child they got.
They’d told her, quite often, that they felt cheated she wasn’t confident, charming or talented enough to share their limelight, to be loved.
It had been the same for Ben until his racing career took off and he started building a reputation at De Rossi Racing.
His friendship with Alex De Rossi hadn’t hurt and had boosted his profile further.
His parents and hers had welcomed him back into the family like the prodigal son.
Was her refusal to join Ben at his races, to step into his glamorous and sophisticated world, motivated by her anger and resentment that he was successful and popular and therefore acceptable and valuable to his parents and hers?
Maybe? Her insecure behaviour aside, Ben always reminded her that she was strong, lovely and smart and could hold her head up wherever she went, with whoever she met. He was the only one who saw her doing and being more…
Weirdly, in some strange and expected way, Taz promoting her and then kissing her made her feel the same way. That maybe she could do hard or unexpected things, handle more responsibility and…
And that she was more attractive than she believed herself to be. That she mattered.
No, she was being naive and making unfounded assumptions.
The world didn’t work that way. Her promotion was likely to be rescinded in the morning when Taz had some time to review his impulsive decision.
He’d only kissed her because he’d been half-asleep and was a little woozy from the anaesthetic.
It meant nothing: He’d been acting on instinct.
‘Is everything all right?’
Millie jumped at the sound of a nurse’s voice, and jerked her head up, her hand on her heart. ‘Sorry, you frightened me.’
‘You look tired.’
Millie was emotionally and physically exhausted. It had been a day.
‘Maybe you should go now.’
Millie nodded, picked up her bag, slung it crossways across her chest and looked at Taz’s closed door. She thought she should say something, ask the nurse to keep an eye on him, but that was stupid and unnecessary. She was his employee, not his girlfriend.
She needed to remember that. She had things to do, and falling for her attractive boss wasn’t on the agenda.
Taz heard the door snick shut and lifted his good arm and placed it across his eyes. Spikes of pain ran up his other arm and into his shoulder, and all he wanted was the oblivion of drug-induced sleep. Or Millie’s lips back on his.
While he’d kissed her, he’d forgotten everything in his life, totally lost in her heat and her mouth.
The agony of his injury faded, humiliation lessened, and his anxiety about the championship dissipated.
He’d been utterly, wholly into her: her light, feminine perfume, the softness of her hair, her glorious mouth.
His harsh F-bomb shattered the silence of his private room. Maybe the drugs and anaesthetic had affected him more than he realised. Because women, especially a woman like Millie—a little unsure, not-so-sophisticated, very real—didn’t make him feel like this. Off-kilter. Out of control.
He liked being alone. He’d embraced self-sufficiency because it was easier to stand by himself than to be disappointed and abandoned, to be shunned as he had by his own father and brother. They had been a team, and he’d been squeezed out.
He’d had a choice: to curl up into a ball, to fade away or to make them notice him.
He’d chosen the latter. When he was sixteen, he’d begged his father to send him to the right racing academies, and his persistence eventually paid off.
Luckily, he was talented, and when his father didn’t give him a position on the De Rossi F3 racing team, he was quickly snapped up by another team.
It didn’t take him long before he’d made his way to F1, joined another racing team, and when the press questioned why he wasn’t on the family team, his father smoothly replied that he didn’t believe in nepotism.
Taz had to earn his spot on the De Rossi team.
It couldn’t have been further from the truth.
His father hadn’t wanted him on the team full stop.
That had only fuelled the fire of his ambition.
While driving for a rival team, he became a top driver, a contender and Alex’s rival.
Then Ben was killed at Imola, and his father, hampered by his words about only employing the best, reluctantly offered Taz a place next to Alex.
He nearly refused, but the De Rossi team was the pinnacle of racing.
And like his father, he never settled for second best.
Nothing about their family dynamics changed, and he kept his distance, never reacting to his father’s and brother’s gaslighting, understanding that they needed to find a chink in his armour to exploit. He became…stoic. Unimpressed. Unemotional.
Appearing impassive and detached became a habit, and eventually, after years of training, he became the way he acted.
Until tonight when he kissed Millie. Maybe it had started on Thursday when he realised she could see past his cold facade to the storm brewing under his layer of ice. Or maybe it started weeks ago when he’d first looked into her purple-blue eyes and felt himself tumbling.
Bottom line, he’d boxed himself into a corner.
He didn’t like the way she made him feel, and his first impulse, and the easiest option, was to be shot of her.
But if he demoted her back to being his press liaison officer, he’d still have to work with her, which defeated the objective.
And he didn’t have any cause to fire her.
Either action would make him look like indecisive.
Besides, firing Millie a day after promoting her would also be grossly unfair.
He’d raised her expectations by telling her she was promoted, and ripping the opportunity away would be a cheap shot.
Or was he grabbing onto any excuse to keep her around?
He shoved the idea away, uncomfortable with its many implications.
He’d promoted her: He would stick by his decision and make it work.
And pray that in the morning, everything would be back under control.