She panted. He groaned. They didn’t move. They lay there, spent, exhausted, their breaths harsh in the silent office, sated beyond words in a heap on his desk, turning work and the business of pleasure obsolete that Friday evening.
When at last he separated from her, he brushed his fingertips along her face. “So beautiful,” he murmured, then bent his head to her neck, layering kisses all the way to her ear. She shivered from his tender touch. “I love being with you.”
She tensed at the words, but then relaxed into his embrace. Try as she might to hold back, to resist, she loved being with him too. He asked her for her body, but the more he took of it, the more it was a package deal.
Which meant she was speeding straight into heartbreak. Only she didn’t have the will to press the brakes.
She should find it. She really ought to find it. But it was nowhere nearby as he gently scooped her up from his desk, held her in his arms, and kissed her face.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fit
Work was out of the question, it seemed.
After straightening up his desk, he knotted his tie, and handed Michelle her jacket.
“I’m famished. Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked as he held the coat for her.
“Yes, and I’ll just carry my jacket,” she said. She didn’t need it for the weather; she’d worn it for the costume. “I only had it on for the effect.”
“I’d say it worked. So long as the intended effect was a spectacular orgasm. For both of us,” he added.
She shot him a smile. “Yes.”
He placed his hand on her back and led her out of the office, now bathed in the twilight glow of a building coasting into evening. Most of his employees had left for the day, and he waved quick goodbyes to the few remaining, hunched over laptops in their cubicles.
Perhaps she should have been embarrassed to be seen leaving with the CEO, knowing what they’d just done in his office. She wasn’t, though. Maybe because she believed him when he’d said his office was soundproofed, or maybe because she was still glowing from that earth-shattering orgasm he’d delivered. Honestly, she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a news report that one of the planet’s tectonic plates had shifted. It had been that powerful a climax. Unbidden, she shuddered, the sweet, memory washing over her.
“Chinese? Thai? Indian?” he asked as they walked past the gleaming white reception desk with the letter J embossed in silver on the wall behind it. Joy Delivered was the Louis Vuitton of sex toys.
An image of a Thai fusion restaurant on the Upper East Side flashed in front of her eyes. She’d been researching cool new eateries, so she mentioned the name, and some of the dishes on the menu. “I’ve been wanting to try it. Tonight seems a perfect opportunity,” she said, and he dusted her lips with a kiss saying yes.
“Do you want to walk there? It’s not too far away.”
“I’d love to.”
When they reached the lobby, he laced his fingers through hers, and squeezed. A private little gesture. A silent moment. Sending a message just to her that he liked holding her hand in public. Tingles skipped through her bloodstream, so happily and so quickly that she barely noticed a familiar face a few shops down, watching her from the fruit stands outside a bodega.
When it registered why the dark hair and thick glasses felt so familiar—like the man who’d bumped into her then held her elbow too long—he was gone. Worry shot through her bloodstream, but she quickly tamped it down. This was Manhattan, an endless island of people and faces. It was the land of the unknown, but when you live in close quarters with millions, the city has a way of fooling you. Tricking you into believing you know everyone.
Even so, she peered into the doorway of the bodega as they walked past, but the view inside only confirmed her theory. New York was jam-packed with people. He was nobody she knew, just like last time.
“You okay?”
She smiled. “Totally. I just thought I saw someone who looked familiar. This guy with glasses.” She returned to far more pleasant topics. Their hands together. “I never would have pegged you as a guy who likes to hold hands in public.”
“Why? Do I seem like an asshole who doesn’t want to have his hands all over his woman?”
She laughed, but thrilled inside—against her better judgment—at the use of his. She wasn’t his woman. She had no plans on being his woman. But she was his woman for another fourteen days. Happily.
“I just would never have thought you were that type of guy.”
“You didn’t think I wanted to have you in my lap, either. But yet I did,” he said, stopping to bring their clasped hands to his mouth for a quick kiss as they passed a florist, the front of the shop teeming with flowers in bright orange and yellows—late summer shades. “How else am I surprising you?”
How else?
In so many ways. He was not what she would have expected from the first night, or from what she suspected people saw on the surface—his gorgeous chiseled good looks, his sharp well-dressed style, his cool blue eyes, both warm and distant at the same damn time.
He had more contradictions than she’d ever have suspected, and she was someone who trafficked in contradictions. Who was accustomed to them. Who had come to expect them. But Jack was tender and sweet when he could have been removed; he was removed when he could have been calloused; he was self-protective when he could have been cruel.
“Well?” he asked, prompting her as they darted past a group of teenage girls hanging onto each other and their phones outside a yogurt shop. The girls clearly weren’t going to move. And Jack clearly wanted her opinion. “How am I different than what you expected?”