by L A Pepper
“Of course I hated you, I had to hate you, or I’d just want you all the time, with no hope of ever getting you.”
“Oh, you had hope, all right.”
“Then come get me,” she said, her voice barely a growl. She sat up and tugged me towards her on the bed by the waistband of my pants.
Wasting no time, I stripped them off and for good measure, I stripped hers off, too along with her underwear with one tug. She was there, laughing on the bed again as I crawled over her near naked body.
“This is going to be fun,” I said amazed at my own surprise. When had I come to enjoy her so much? How did we go from bickering constantly to this easy laughter?
“Yeah, it is.” She ran her hands across my ribs and around to my back, driving me nuts.
“This has got to go,” I said snapping her bra strap.
“Your wish is my command,” she said and reached behind her back to flick the snap. I pulled it off greedily.
“I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“I never thought I’d say it, and yet here we are.” Her laughter faded away and her face grew serious, her eyes darkened to midnight. “What do you want, Nick? Anything you want.”
Her eyes were so large and deep. She smelled like apple blossoms and heat. Her skin was silk under my hands, so soft, so perfect, so warm, and mine. “You,” I said, a whisper. “Just you.”
I lowered my head to kiss her plush lips, held her against me, and she clung to me, wouldn’t let me go. But I didn’t want to go anywhere. Just here, just with her. I trailed my lips down her neck, as her fingers tangled in my hair.
“You’ve got me,” she said, the emotion in her voice rolling over me. “I’m yours.”
I kissed her breasts, full and round and she arched her back, wanting more, so I gave her more. With my tongue and lips and teeth I plucked at her and she wriggled underneath me like an untamed thing. She was helpless beneath me. I kissed her again, and she grasped at me, pressed up into me. I skated my hands down her body to where she was slick and wet for me and she moaned into my mouth, a vibration, that filled me as deep as something could go. “Is this what you want?” I asked her, and she had no words for me.
She nodded frantically and clutched at my back. Her nails cut into my skin and the pinch of pain made the pleasure greater. I held her to me and played on her senses, breaking our kiss so that I could watch the ecstasy on her face as she rose and rose and rose, until she had left her clever words behind. Her constantly whirring mind had been silenced, she left that ever present drive behind on the wrinkled cotton sheets twisting underneath her passion. So sweet. So hot. So hungry.
“Please…” she whimpered.
And I was pleased. Oh so pleased. She wrapped her legs around me as I slid into her, feeling like I was coming home.
Chapter Twelve: The Way The World Worked
We’d spent the night together, in Nick’s bed, staying up far too late, drunk on each other’s touch, making love again and again, then sleeping late because he said he was the boss. What was the use of being the boss if you couldn’t come in late every once in a while. And when we woke up luxuriously late, he grinned at me like the dangerous man he was and we made love again, because I couldn’t get enough of him. We finally climbed out of bed, got ready for work, and headed in. I looked across the jeep at him as he drove us into work, and he winked at me.
It was impossible to hold the happy laughter back, and he reached across the console and took my hand. He brought it up to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “God, I like you, apple blossom,” he said, and I smiled at him.
The light changed, and he turned his attention back to the road, as I listened to the words singing in my soul.
I love you.
I looked away, out the window. The thrill of recognition that I loved him was followed almost immediately by the terror. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
That’s not what this was. We had been clear about this from the very beginning, it was fake. Nothing but fake.
A fake engagement for the betterment of my career and his personal life, right? Just an act, nothing but an act. Clearly there had been an element of sexual attraction but that shouldn’t have— we should not have— I should not have...
... Oh no...
Fallen in love with Nick Meryton.
This was a disaster. I shot a look at Nick. He was still driving, but holding onto my hand, either way. I couldn’t let him know there was anything wrong. I couldn’t let him know that I had broken our agreement. This was not fake. This was not just for the show. And sleeping with him had been a mistake. A huge mistake, because all it did was show me that the feelings I had been hiding for Nick were real.
They had been real all along.
How could I have been so stupid? So naïve. He had been entirely right about me from the get go. I was naïve, and I didn’t understand the way the world worked.
And I had been right all along, too. I couldn’t play the game. I never could. I hadn’t been playing I had just been pretending.
So I would continue to pretend. I wouldn’t let him know.
Nick pulled into his spot at work and kissed my hand again. I wanted to snap at him to stop it but I could see the paparazzi right outside the car, waiting for the photo.
“You ready to play the game, apple blossom?” he asked, his grin as he looked at me different this time around, stripped of that playboy veneer, the prettyboy act. My heart flipped in my chest like the traitor it was.
Did he notice that the smile I gave him was false? Could he tell that I was putting on an act for him. Playing the game, which was no longer the old game. There were an entirely new rules. My head spun. I didn’t know how I was going to do this— pretend that I was in love with Nick Meryton and engaged to him to the whole world while pretending to Nick that I wasn’t in love and just playing a game.
I was not meant for this kind of sophisticated plot. I was a country girl after all. I wanted to go back to my words on the page and thoughts lined up all nice and neat. My investigations and analyses. Writing stories was so much easier than living them. And even harder was when the stories stopped being stories and started being lies.
Rachel shook her head at our late arrival and the comments didn’t stop from my coworkers, about love birds and ‘wasn’t it nice to be engaged to the boss,’ and it didn’t matter that the teasing was light heartedly, it still made my heart crack.
I was in so much trouble.
I tried. I tried all day. I tried not to yearn for a sight of Nick as he went about his work day. I tried to make our regular lunch date just the same as it always was, fake romance for the audience and just friends, partners, for us, but he knew. My smile was brittle, my conversation was stilted.
“Are you okay, Chloe?” he whispered over our lunch. “You seem… tense.” He reached across the table and took my hand, his thumb stroking my knuckles in a way that reminded me of last night. By the way his amber eyes darkened and his smile turned up at the corner, it reminded him of it, too.
I squinted a smile at him. Fake. “Yeah. Don’t worry. It’s just an adjustment.”
“Hey, apple blossom, don’t worry. Nothing has to change. It’s all the same as it was before, Okay? Last night was unrelated.”
“Of course,” I reassured him. And he turned back to his food, which must have meant that I was a better faker than I thought it was. Because there was nothing okay about any of this. I was in love with Nick Meryton and he thought we still had a business arrangement.
* * *
I walked into Rachel’s office and closed the door behind me.
She smiled at me from behind the desk. “Chloe, how can I help you?”
I did not smile back. “I quit.”
Rachel’s face stilled, and she dropped her head to look over her glasses at me.
“I—I’m homesick. I need to leave New York City and go back to the mountains where I belong.”
She took her glasses off completely. �
��What did he do?”
“He did nothing.” It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. “I just can’t work here anymore.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I refuse your resignation. I won’t let you quit. I will have words with Nick and I’ll straighten this all out. He won’t bother you again, I assure you. You are my hire, not his, and I told him this already. I warned him that if he did anything to you, I would be on your side and he would be the one who would have to go on an extended work trip. I told him all this because I cannot control his personal life though I wish I could. I can control his work life, and I am in charge of who works at this magazine, not him. You do not quit.”
A lump rose in my throat. “It is not his fault, Rachel. It’s mine. I broke our rules.”
Rachel’s eyebrows drew down low. “What do you mean you broke your rules?”
I swallowed to keep the tears down. “We had rules when we entered into this agreement--”
“Agreement. There’s that word again.”
“Agreement.” I repeated it. She should know. “And I broke them. I fell in love with him.”
She stared. She cocked her head, and then stared at me. “I distinctly remember him saying that this agreement, this engagement, happened BECAUSE you fell in love.”
I chuckled. Or was it a sob? “The engagement was fake.”
She kept staring. Head cocked. Her hands flexed on the desktop as if she wanted to strangle somebody. “And how did you enter into a fake engagement agreement?”
She did not sound surprised.
“It was an accident at first. We were just bickering at the gala, you know, like how we do— how we used to do— and then his brother jumped on something I said--”
“His BROTHER? This was all about his brother?” She raised her eyes up to the ceiling. “I am going to kill Nick.”
“No. Don’t. Don’t blame him. I agreed. He said he’d give me that section in the magazine. I agreed.”
“I was giving you that section anyway, Chloe. And he knew it. We were just waiting until you had enough experience under your belt. Chloe… Chloe. Don’t you know never to get involved in a conflict between Nick and his brother. You know the kind of relationship they have.”
“I didn’t know it was his brother. I just thought it was some guy named David who wanted to flirt with me!”
“Chloe! You did the expose. You know his issues with his brother. You wrote about them!”
“I didn’t know! I wasn’t thinking! I was just having a good time, living my life. Work-life balance, like you told me to!” I wiped a tear away. “David is a very common name.”
“And I suppose he saw his brother trying to hit on you and got all possessive. Because he said you were his.”
Thinking back, yes that was what had happened. Now that I knew him better, that was exactly what had happened. I nodded.
“That man! He will never stop his womanizing.”
“Don’t blame him. I knew what I was getting into.” I laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “I wrote the expose. I knew what he was like. I agreed to this sham, anyway.”
“It wasn’t a sham, Chloe. It was a tactic to get you into bed.”
Her words stabbed through me. “It worked.” She had been so stupid. “So now you see why I have to quit. I can’t work under him anymore. I can’t be in love with him. I can’t pursue this anymore and I can’t play these games.”
“He said he would protect you. That he wouldn’t punish you when it ended.”
I gasped at the thought of him discussing their relationship ending with Rachel, as a business matter. He had discussed it with her. “This isn’t about that. This is about how I need to not be around him. Whether he wants to keep putting on this act or not. I can’t. I can’t imagine being here, and wanting to be with him, and not. Or worse, having him move on to some other woman while I watched him be with her?” The tears I had been fighting started to flow.
Rachel came around from her desk and sat next to me on the sofa. She put an arm around my shoulders. “Nope. Nuh uh. This is what we’re going to do. I’m sending you on assignment.”
“Where to? Kuala Lumpur?” It was laughable. I was the hometown girl. I didn’t get to go to exotic locations.
She shook her head. “No. Domestic. We’re sending you to the Adirondack Mountains.”
“What? You’re sending me home?”
She nodded. “Yes. We’re sending you to a domestic travel destination, where you will write a piece, in your beautiful prose, about the glories and wonders of this location.”
“But it’s not a luxury destination.”
“Luxury is in the eye of the beholder… or rather, the person marketing the story to the beholder. You are going to write up every luxury in the great natural beauty that is your mountains. And that will be your assignment. You are NOT quitting. I want you for my magazine.”
“Nick’s magazine.”
“He’s just the pretty face, Chloe. It’s my magazine, and he knows it. And you’re my protege, not his. This fake engagement story can fade away like it should. He should never have asked you to betray your principles like that.”
“He didn’t ask me to do anything I didn’t agree to, Rachel. Like you said, I needed to learn how to play the game.”
“Not with your heart, Chloe. Your heart was never part of the game.”
“It’s my fault.”
“It certainly is not. He took advantage of your vulnerabilities, because you are not like him. You are real, and you are sincere. And he liked that.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Okay, I believe you. But you’ll take a few weeks away from here, and get back to work, and get away from Nick, and I bet you’ll see it all differently when you come back. You’ll have your feet under you again. All you need is some perspective on the force of nature that is Nick Meryton.”
Rachel took care of it all. She said she’d inform Nick. All I had to do was pack up and head home.
I felt like a coward, but my heart was too shaky to stand and fight. So I ran. I ran all the way home.
Chapter Thirteen: Gone
It was the end of the day and I was dying to be done with it and grab Chloe and go home. I worked very hard to avoid thinking about her all day. I tried not thinking about the way she tasted or how she felt moving on top of me, and yet, no matter where I went or what I did, I smelled her apple blossom shampoo. I wasn’t sure if I had gotten some of it on me, or if it was just how strong a presence she had in my mind.
All I knew that I was ready to get out of here and go home with her. And kiss her for real and take her back to bed.
“Are you listening to me, Nick?”
I blinked. Rachel was staring at me. “To be honest, not really.” I shrugged. Our daily touchstone meeting was not holding my attention.
She did that thing where she glared at me over the top of her glasses, like she was my disapproving mother. She was only two years older than me. She was not my mother, so I glared back at her.
“Are you thinking about your fiance?”
I leaned back and crossed my arms. “So what if I am?”
She leaned forward. “Then maybe you’ll listen to this. She’s my employee, and if I find your relationship is interfering with her work, I can do something about it.”
“I said it wouldn’t.”
“It already has. Her work is slipping.”
“It is not. Take that back.”
“What are we, playing in the school yard like eight-year-olds?”
“No we’re running a magazine. My magazine. And she is an excellent writer.”
“I want her on her own projects, not yours,” Rachel snapped, her brown eyes flashing. She was mad. Something wasn’t right. “I sent her on assignment.”
A beat passed. I blinked at her. “You sent my fiance on an assignment and didn’t ask me?”
She pressed her lips into a tight line. “I sent my writer o
n an assignment that I needed for a story. I wanted her there in time for the ski season.”
Chloe was not here.
She’d been sent away.
I sat in shock, knowing that Chloe was gone. I couldn’t go to her cubicle and find her. I couldn’t take her home in the jeep. She wouldn’t sit next to me on the couch and watch that dumb ocean documentary. I couldn’t kiss her.
Rachel was scrutinizing me. “You said your relationship with her wouldn’t harm her career or get in the way of the magazine.”
“It hasn’t.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
The look she sent my way was accusatory and knowing. It cut right through me. “You know.”
“Yes. I know that the engagement was fake all along. So really, you shouldn’t have a problem with her going on assignment, since it’s not real in the first place and just an arrangement you had for your convenience. It’s not as if you really loved her. It’s not as if you really were engaged to her.”
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m protective. She’s my protege, and you don’t get to play games with her.”
“We weren’t playing any games we didn’t both agree to. Consenting adults, Rachel.”
She sent me a disappointed look. She definitely knew I’d slept with Chloe and it wasn’t just a fake engagement act. She’d known me a long time.
“Then you can continue your games when she comes back. No harm, no foul.”
“How long will she be gone for?”
“Indefinitely. Until her story is done.”
I sat there speechless. Indefinitely? “Why didn’t she tell me before she left?”
“You were in a meeting, Nick. You’re a busy man. I told her I’d take care of it. And since this engagement is just a business arrangement anyway, then there really was no need for an intimate discussion, was there?”
I shook my head. Chastened. Or something. There was a block of ice sitting in my chest. “I assume this meeting is done then?” She nodded. “Then I’ll be getting back to work.” I left without another word.