Private 02 - Private Paradise

hadn't just spilled his guts all over the place.
    A week later, there wasn't so much as a crack in Carla's cool facade.
    While he, Sam thought as he pounded out a mile on the treadmill in the resort's gym, had come to the conclusion that working with Carla was torture. Absolute, fucking torture. And damned if he could find a way out.
    When they interacted, Carla was all cool politeness and courtesy, treating Sam like he was nothing more than some distant acquaintance, someone she wouldn't have even remembered had he not reappeared in her life.
    While Sam was resorting to this, he thought as he started another punishing circuit of the resort's state of the art gym: a six minute mile on the treadmill, followed by fifty each pull ups, sit ups, pushups, and squat thrusts. Over and over every single morning because this was the only way he could deal with the simmering ache of frustrated desire that dogged him every second of every day he spent with Carla. So close, so unreachable.
    Every time he sat across her desk from her as they discussed particular strategies for their high profile guests, he had to fight not to reach out and grab her, lay her across the wide wooden surface. Make her remember everything they were to each other and all the ways he knew how to make her scream with pleasure.
    Every time he watched a male guest run his eyes appreciatively over Carla's toned, curvy body, Sam had to fight not to put the guy in a headlock. It was getting so bad, Sam actually considered doing it just so she'd have a legitimate excuse to fire him.
    While she was apparently able to dismiss what had happened between them like it had never occurred, Sam was going batshit crazy, living in an agony of frustrated desire. He'd always thought people who claimed you never got over your first love were crazy. But now...
    Whoa. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Just because you're still dying to fuck Carla DeLuca at age thirty-two doesn't mean you feel the same way you did when you were twenty-one. As if you could really call that love anyway...
    Not that Sam knew much about it either way, and now he shied away at the thought that what he'd felt for Carla back then was far and away more than he'd felt for any other woman before her or since.
    He shook off the thought. He cared for her, true. And he wanted her. So much he was afraid he would spontaneously combust if he didn't get relief from something other than his right hand in the very near future.
    Which was why he was here, at the resort's state of the art workout facility at the ungodly hour of six a.m., as he'd been every morning for the past five, pushing himself to the brink of exhaustion to take the slightest edge off the grinding need coursing through his body every second of every goddamn day.
    At this early hour it was deserted, as even the most fitness conscious guests wouldn't start wandering in for yoga or Pilates until after nine when regular classes began. Good thing, because the way he'd been grunting and sweating his way through his workouts this week any observer would be likely to think he was about to have a coronary.
    He pushed himself through his fifth set of sit ups and stayed seated on the mat, picked up his bottle and squirted water into his mouth. His breath came so fast and loud he didn't hear the door to the fitness center open.
    “ Oh, you're here.”
    He didn't even need to turn and look to see who it was. The charge of electricity that traveled down his spine to zap him in the balls was enough. Still, Sam pushed himself to his feet and turned to greet her.
    Carla hesitated in the doorway as he drank in the sight of her. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, her hair pulled into a tight pony tail. Knee length black pants stretched tight over her tight, toned thighs and mouthwateringly firm ass, and a bright orange lycra tank top clung to the lush curves of her breasts and the flat plane of her stomach, leaving her tanned, well defined arms bare.
    She glanced at the watch strapped to her slim wrist. “You're usually gone by now.”
    So, she was keeping tabs on his gym time. To make sure she didn't run into him? Interesting.
    Sam grabbed a towel from the stack near the cardio equipment and used it to wipe his face and neck. “I usually am, but I felt like going a little longer this morning.”
    Needed to, was more like it, especially after the dream he'd had in the small hours of the morning, a variation on the same one he'd had every night since he'd