by C. C. Wood
Landen nodded. “Okay, we’ll get to know each other better.”
As we finished our entree, I learned that Landen was an only child, just like I was. I also learned that he liked to read anything and everything, even the occasional romance novel.
When I shared my obsession with Lt. Joe Kenda with him, he grinned. “You watch Homicide Hunter?” he asked, laughing. “Why am I not surprised?”
I cocked my head to the side and stared at him. “Why do you say that?”
His grin widened. “Because you’re just as tenacious and methodical as he is.”
I decided that his words were a compliment since those were both character traits I admired and smiled. “Why thank you.”
He laughed again, but the waiter chose that moment to return and take our now empty plates. For someone who said he hated to share, Landen not only shared his food with me but picked food off my plate as well. Between the two of us, we devoured the entire meal. So much for my midnight snack. I mean, my lunch tomorrow.
“Would you like some dessert or coffee?” the server asked.
It dawned on me that he’d never given us his name, but before I could ask for it, Landen asked him about the desserts and if they had anything special that wasn’t on the menu.
The waiter’s eyes lit up. “I have just the thing. It is a bit like cheesecake, but very special.”
“What’s it called?” I asked.
He said the name and my eyes widened. There was no way my tongue would fit around that word.
Landen and the waiter both laughed as I tried to repeat it and butchered the pronunciation. The server left and I still didn’t know his name, which bothered me. I liked to know the name of the people who waited on me at restaurants or businesses that I used regularly. I liked calling them by name because I knew from experience that customers often forgot the wait staff were people too.
When he returned, he brought a plate with a huge chunk of what looked like a thin cheesecake and two cups of Greek coffee.
“I sweetened the coffee, just a bit,” he explained. “It is too bitter without it.”
“Sounds delicious,” I murmured. When he took a step to leave, I spoke, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name earlier.”
The older man smiled, his dark eyes twinkling. “I’m Gregory. Enjoy your dessert.”
Landen and I thanked him and each picked up our forks. After the first, blissful bite, I immediately took another. It was like an orgasm in dessert form. One little taste would never be enough.
Immediately, I decided that I didn’t want to share and an evil little plan formed in my greedy brain.
“Oh, hey, look who’s here,” I said brightly, pointing at the door behind Landen.
He turned to glance over his shoulder, which gave me the opening I needed. I grabbed the plate, yanked it over to my side of the table and out of his reach, and forked up another bite as I did.
When he twisted toward me, his mouth open to speak, he saw what I had done and laughed. I paused in my efforts to consume every bit of the dessert at the sound. He’d laughed around me before but not like this. He looked younger, happier, and less intimidating. Almost boyish. It was a good look.
“I take it you like the dessert,” he stated.
I nodded, yet another bite of the decadent concoction making its way past my lips.
Then he reached over and slid the plate towards him. I growled, grabbing the edge once again and trying to hold it in place. “Mine,” I mumbled around the bite in my mouth.
He released the plate and eyed me for a moment, as though he were taking my measure. Then he smiled, but it wasn’t an amused smile. It was teasing and downright wicked. Before I could ask him why he was grinning, I felt his hot, callused fingers against the inside of my left knee.
I nearly choked on the dessert as the tips of said fingers skimmed up my inner thigh, pausing mere millimeters from the edge of my underwear. My leg trembled because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to slam my knees together or let the muscles in my thigh relax so that I was even more open to his touch.
Just as my breath began to back up in my lungs, he traced one finger over the edge of my panties and I gasped, my body growing rigid. If I had been on a first date with anyone else and they touched me like this, I would have decked them.
But Landen was different. We’d already shared an insanely hot kiss and we weren’t complete strangers. At least that’s what I told myself.
Ever so slowly, his hand drifted back down my thigh and I nearly whimpered because I wanted it back where it had been and more.
When his hand finally left my leg, I collapsed back in my chair, my chest moving quickly with my panting breaths. I opened my eyes, surprised to find that I’d closed them in the first place.
Then my eyes met Landen’s heated gaze, just in time to see him lift a forkful of dessert to his lips.
“Oh, no you didn’t,” I muttered.
The devil man had used sex to distract me while he stole my dessert! At least when I’d done it to him, I hadn’t gotten him all riled up first.
Then I grinned and his expression grew wary. I leaned forward, resting one hand on his shoulder as my other hand went beneath the tablecloth. I licked the small dab of cream off his lip just as my hand slid over the top of his thigh and I ran a teasing fingertip over his zipper.
Landen grunted as I shifted my mouth closer to his ear. “Don’t forget, two can play that game.”
Still moving slowly, I leaned away. His eyes followed each gesture I made and the rise and fall of my breasts. He was taking my measure, looking for a weakness, like a predator preparing to pounce.
I’d lost all interest in the dessert and I reached for my water glass, hoping the chilled liquid would cool the inferno threatening to spread throughout my body.
Landen reached out and tugged my chair closer to his, which tangled our legs together beneath the table.
Then he leaned in, put his mouth against my ear, and whispered, “Game on.”
Chapter Six
“Game on, my ass,” I muttered beneath my breath as I crammed two more folders into their proper spots in the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer shut.
I reached out and grabbed another stack of folders that Chris had been through yesterday and opened another drawer on the filing cabinet.
It had been a little over a week since I’d last seen or heard from Landen Weber. Exactly ten days.
For all his talk of wanting to get to know me and hating to share, he sure didn’t seem to give a shit.
I huffed out another breath and went about replacing the files. Just as I suspected, even though I’d handled a lot of things while Chris was gone on his honeymoon, work had still piled up. So much so that we were scrambling to finish everything in the ten-hour days we’d been pulling since his return to the office on Monday. I hadn’t even had time to meet Grier for our twice-weekly walks after work.
It was now Thursday and Chris was determined that we wouldn’t work over the weekend. He wanted to spend that time with his new wife and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to miss out on hot monkey sex either.
And, yes, I knew they were still going at it like crazy because Lucy was an oversharer. I’d asked her repeatedly not to tell me about her sexcapades with my boss, but she refused, stating that I’d been her friend before I was his employee and it was “hoes before bros.” Whatever that meant.
In my case, there was no hot monkey sex in my immediate future. Those hopes had been dashed a week ago when I realized that Landen wasn’t going to call me. Our first date had gone so much better than I thought it would, though he’d only given me one more of those barely-there lip touches before putting me into my car ten days ago.
Then nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
No texts, no calls, not even a motherfucking email. After all his talk, Landen had walked.
At first I’d been hurt, but now I’d moved on to pissed. I might not look like a supermodel, but I wasn’t h
ard on the eyes. I was reasonably intelligent and, dammit, I was fucking funny.
I could have called him. I could have made the next move. I knew that. But the problem was that I was tired of having to do that. Every time I was truly interested in a man, I would make an effort. If I didn’t hear from him after a few days, I would text. If he didn’t respond then I moved on. But many times, they would reply and we would end up trading texts or voicemails for a few weeks before things would fizzle out. I’d decided a few months ago that I would no longer do that. If a man enjoyed my company then he could let me know. If I messaged him and he didn’t reply within a day or two, I wrote him off. I wasn’t going to waste any more time on someone who couldn’t be bothered to reply to a text.
I deserved better than the treatment Landen was giving me. If he’d decided he didn’t want to get to know me better as he claimed, he should have had the balls to tell me. At this point I’d even take an impersonal email that said, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
Never mind. I deserved better than that too.
I deserved to be chased. To be pursued. I deserved a man who couldn’t wait to talk to me, who liked spending time with me, even if we were just sitting on the couch in our pajamas and watching crappy television.
I deserved someone that wanted me enough to make an effort for me.
And it was painfully clear that Landen Weber wasn’t going to be that man. Which just proved my initial assessment that anything romantic between us wouldn’t work despite our off-the-charts chemistry.
Meh, who needed fucking chemistry? I didn’t. I hadn’t used any of my basic chemistry knowledge since high school when Maura Charles and I built homemade stink bombs that had ended up exploding inside her car on the way to school rather than in the girls’ locker room as planned.
I sighed. That’s how much he affected me. I was remembering things better left forgotten because even thinking about those stink bombs made the specter of that smell return.
“Why don’t you go take a break, Chelsea?”
I jumped and shrieked at the sound of Chris’ voice behind me in the storage room. Whirling around with a hand over my pounding heart, I leaned back against the filing cabinet and stared at him.
“You scared the crap out of me!”
He lifted both hands and the corners of his mouth twitched. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I pushed myself off the filing cabinet and straightened my shirt. “Now, what were you saying?”
“Why don’t you go take a break?” he repeated. “You’ve been here since six-thirty. Go grab a coffee and walk around for a bit or something.”
I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I had no idea what that expression meant but my mother used to say it all the time and the older I got, the more I found myself repeating things that usually came out of her mouth. Maybe I should get a t-shirt that said, Sorry, when I open my mouth, my mother comes out. I knew my dad would get a kick out of it even if Mom didn’t.
“All right. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I stated, skirting past him.
“Take twenty or thirty.”
I frowned at him but shrugged. “Okay then.”
I grabbed my purse and cell phone out of my desk and headed out of the office, so I didn’t see Chris watching me, shaking his head and rubbing his temples.
Once I was in the lobby of the building, I made a beeline for the little coffee shop near the atrium. When all my friends used to work in the building, we would meet for lunch there at least once a week. Now that Lucy was gone and Yancy worked from home two days per week, we didn’t do it as often.
I bought a latte and settled down at a table in the atrium. I scrolled through a news app as I drank. After the week I’d had, it was nice to just sit down and relax for a few minutes.
“Is this seat taken?”
I glanced up from my phone, the coffee cup still pressed to my lips and saw a man hovering over the chair across from mine. He was smiling at me, revealing dimples in his cheeks.
A quick look around revealed that the tables surrounding mine were empty but I still shook my head and lowered the cup to reply, “No, it’s not taken.”
“Do you mind if I join you?”
His question was light but I appreciated that he didn’t just assume he could sit down and start talking to me. I placed my phone face down on the table and returned his smile. “Please do.”
He placed his laptop bag on the chair to my left and sat across from me. Holding out a hand to me, he said, “I’m Phillip.”
I took his hand and shook it, noting that his warm palm felt nice against mine even if it didn’t make my entire arm tingle the way that it did when a certain man touched me. Then I locked those thoughts away. Landen had his chance and he blew it. I wouldn’t waste any more time thinking about him. The man in front of me was good looking in a clean-cut, all-American sort of way. His hair was sandy brown instead of dark chestnut and his eyes were light blue rather than dark, but he was handsome nonetheless.
“Hi, Phillip. I’m Chelsea. Do you work in the building?”
“I just started a job on the tenth floor a couple of weeks ago.”
“So you’re an attorney?” I asked, bringing the cup to my lips.
He grinned at me. “Yes. How did you know?”
“A friend of mine works on the tenth floor. You may know her, Tanya Blake.” I caught myself. “Sorry, Hawke. I forgot that she changed her name when she got married.”
Phillip’s eyes widened. “You’re friends with Tanya?”
I laughed at his expression. “Yes. I know she’s tough but she’s a good person. You’ll see.”
He made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat and I suppressed the urge to chuckle. When Tanya was at work, she wasn’t to be fucked with. I’m pretty sure they called her a ballbuster around the office, but they also respected her. She got the job done. It also meant that she probably intimidated Phillip, which made my urge to laugh fade. If he couldn’t handle Tanya, I doubted he could handle me.
Too many times to count, men saw my curly blonde hair, short stature, and big blue eyes and immediately thought that I was as sweet as I looked. Then, once they’d recognized that I wasn’t some reticent, retiring little thing, I rarely heard from them again.
I looked exactly like my mother but I was as bold and brash as my father. I liked who I was too much to try and change my personality to please other people. True, my blunt tongue and tendency toward sarcastic remarks made it difficult to make friends, but the ones I had were the best. I’d take quality over quantity any day, and that included the men I dated.
Phillip and I chatted for a bit and I learned that he was single and he’d moved to Dallas from Virginia because he’d been offered a position at the firm where Tanya worked.
Then he asked, “So what do you do?”
“I’m Chris Barden’s executive assistant,” I answered.
He appeared surprised. “Chris Barden? Wow, that must be a demanding job.”
I shrugged one shoulder, knowing he’d probably heard talk about Chris from other people in the building. Anyone who ran a company in Dallas knew who Chris was and also knew he had exacting standards when it came to his employees. “It is but I love it.” I peeked at my phone and saw that I’d been here for nearly twenty-five minutes. “Speaking of work, I probably need to get back.”
When I rose from my chair, Phillip mirrored me. “Look, I really enjoyed talking to you and I’d love to do it again sometime.”
I blinked at him and realized where he was leading. I also thought it was kind of cute that an articulate attorney had difficulty asking me out on a date.
“I enjoyed talking to you too, Phillip,” I replied.
He stepped closer. “Are you free for drinks tomorrow after work?”
Again, he asked me a question instead of demanding that I go out with him, which I liked. I nodded. “We could meet in the lobby at five-thirty. I know a place that has great Ha
ppy Hour cocktails and serves tapas.”
He grinned and the way his light blue eyes sparkled drew my attention. They were pretty but not as striking as the indigo blue eyes I’d stared into over a week ago. I cut that train of thought off ruthlessly. I’d wallowed for ten days and now a handsome, nice, and successful man was asking me out on a date. I intended to go and have some fun. So what if his hand hadn’t given me tingles earlier? Maybe those would come with time.
“That sounds perfect,” he replied. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a business card case. Quickly, he pulled out a card and flipped it over. Then he removed a pen from his laptop bag and scribbled something on the back. “Here’s my cell number, just in case you need it.”
I took the card and returned his smile. “It was nice to meet you, Phillip. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
“Bye, Chelsea,” he said.
As I walked toward the elevators, my coffee cup in hand, I tucked his card into my phone case. When I entered the elevator and turned around, I saw him standing where I’d left him, watching me. Then he winked and I grinned.
No, he might not give me the tingles but he was definitely a charmer.
Chapter Seven
I’d just shut down my computer the next afternoon when Chris appeared in the doorway to his office.
“Are you headed out?” he asked.
I lifted the garment bag in my hand. “I just need to change for my date. Do you need me to do something?”
He glanced at his watch and waved his right hand. “No, don’t worry about it. It’s after five. I’ll get the files I need.”
I laid the bag over my chair and rushed around my desk. “No, no, I’ll do it.”
The last time he’d gone through the filing cabinets on this own, I’d spent three days fixing it.
Chris smirked at me. “Don’t trust me in the storage room?”
I lifted a brow at him. “I don’t want to spend the first half of next week putting things back in their place.”