This was not a fantasy. This was real. Her career was at stake. Maybe even modern feminism.
She twisted the cap off the miniature liquor bottle.
Although it was kind of unfair to put the whole burden of modern feminism on her shoulders.
She poured the scotch into a crystal cut glass and held another bottle out his way. “Want one?”
“No. Alcohol destroys brain cells.”
“No problem there. I think you could use a few less.” She dropped his mini-bottle back in the drawer, closed it, and took a healthy first sip of her scotch. Actually, kind of a gulp. “I have to be honest here. I know the rich are different and everything, and eccentric is one thing, I mean I was starting to like you—”
“You were?”
“But now that you’ve crossed the line, I’m not sure how this is going to work.”
“What?”
“This. Us.”
“I thought you said we couldn’t have sex together.”
“Working! Working together, I mean.”
“Oh. Whatever.”
His casual dismissal annoyed her. “And I kind of resent it. This is my first day. Don’t they have HR training or something at this company?”
“Mmmm.”
He was looking at her with those really cute blue eyes and, goddamit, this was all reminding her that she’d had quite a dry spell herself. The plane took a little jolt, turbulence or something again, and she grabbed for the side of one of the seats, her drink spilling onto the aisle. He popped up to steady her, surprisingly gallant. With his big hands resting on the slight swell of her hips, his breath warm at her temple, she felt a twinge in the pit of her stomach. More minor than a thrill. Far from being turned on. But still it was there.
She raised her gaze, and he dropped his hands to pick up the spilled drink and set it on the counter.
The plane steady again, she helped herself to a fresh bottle. After all, she’d barely started on the last. Since they were heading east, the light outside the window was growing fainter by the second. Or maybe the storm was catching up with them.
He sat back down and so did she across the aisle from him again. He picked up his magazine, and she tended to her scotch, relishing the smoky taste of a very good brand.
After a few minutes, she said, “I’m sorry but I still feel like I need to clear the air here. Are you always this blunt in coming on to women or is it just me again?”
He put down his magazine. “I heard you about no sex. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”
“Well, me, too.”
“I just haven’t had it in a while, and you reminded me of that. Okay? Simple enough. Just drop it.”
She finished off the almost-second scotch, and the buzz it gave her made her less likely to try to treat this whole situation as just another bizarre thing bosses were apt to want you to do. Like working all night proofreading impossibly convoluted merger agreements for deals that probably weren’t going to close the next day anyway. Or writing endless memos on legal strategies that anybody with a brain in their head could see were stupid from the get-go.
Like that.
“I see,” she said. “So, since you’re not getting any, or not much anyway, being with me made you think maybe you could fit some in during the flight, is that it?”
“Well, kind of. But that was probably a trick question, right?”
“See, you’re not as clueless as you seem.” She resisted the impulse to get up for another scotch and said sullenly, “Anyway, don’t you have a girlfriend or something? God, you’re rich enough.”
“There’s a necessary correlation?”
“Please! You might actually not know what sexual harassment is— And I’m still not sold on that.”
He shrugged.
“But you can’t possibly be naive enough not to know that rich guys can get whoever they want.”
“I’m not naive. I just work a lot,” he pointed out.
“To the exclusion of everything else probably.”
“Most people don’t,” he hesitated, “interest me.”
“Oh, I forgot. Because you’re a genius, right?”
“I don’t like labels.”
“Look, I didn’t get my Ph.D. at twenty-five and make a killing in an IPO or anything, but I’m not stupid here.”
“Are you talking about the shirt? It was the only thing I could put on that was clean.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“So do you think it’s easy to get into Harvard and graduate cum laude?”
“For some people, probably not.”
She stopped short and lost the battle on the scotch front, getting up to get another one after all and pouring two of the mini-bottles into the glass for good measure and some ice. All right, three doses of the liquid courage.
“I must say, though, it would be impossible for me to go to law school. If I had to read legalese all day, I’d go nuts.”
When she sat down, she muttered, “You’re already there. And you can fire me for that, by the way.”
“Why?”
“It’s disrespect. Calling you nuts.”
“I told you, they don’t let me fire anyone. They don’t let me give interviews, either.”
“Now, that one makes sense.”
He did that head cocking thing again. “Have you had sex before?”
“Me? Of course I have! What kind of a question is that?”
“You just seem extremely shocked by the suggestion we have it.”
“It’s the context.”
“I see.”
She shouldn’t say it. She really shouldn’t. She took another drink of the scotch, which got smoother with every swallow. But hell, he’d been blunt enough with her. Her turn.
“I do like your looks, though. I was thinking that just before you opened your mouth and blew everything all to hell by asking to fuck me.”
“Yes, I see now that was a mistake.”
“I’m glad I managed to get that through to you.”
“You were very clear.”
Camilla drank her liquor and looked at him, lovely still, but her pale blue eyes a little glassy. Her tidy bun was somehow messier now, too, and the blond wisps around her face made her look more attractive, not less. She started to play with the damn strand of pearls around her neck again. She was purposely trying to drive him crazy now. He was convinced.
“I could never sleep with my boss,” she said in what must have been the twentieth variation on that same theme since he had brought the subject up. “It’s so retro and really wrong. I mean, who does that?”
He didn’t know what the retro referred to, but he supposed the whole practice hadn’t been as frowned upon in the past as it apparently was now. Again, a pity. But as to the wrong, well, she had been abundantly clear on that score.
And he had stopped thinking about it. Absolutely. Almost.
“We’re not in some episode of Mad Men, are we?” she demanded.
“I don’t think so.”
“Although I would sleep with that Don Draper, I don’t care who he was. Any girl would. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
He didn’t know who Don Draper was, but he was jealous.
“And that’s not a mixed message, by the way. It’s nuanced.”
The word came out slightly slurred, but in a cute way.
“I mean, we’re allowed to fantasize, right?”
She took the words right out of his mouth, although he had caught on by now that he wasn’t supposed to say them. He was fantasizing about her right at this very second. How the glossy pearls she was playing with would look against her bare cleavage with no blouse impeding the full effect.
When she took her suit jacket off suddenly and tossed it onto the seat next to her, he got an even better view of those breasts.
“Thirty-four D,” she volunteered wryly at his undoubtedly focused stare. The piece of information went straight to his crotch.
He was pretty sure her
disclosure of bra size was squarely in the list of things they weren’t supposed to talk about—sexual body part measurements—but he certainly didn’t mind the internal inconsistency in her line of thinking now. And no way was he going to point it out to her.
“If this was my fantasy,” she said off-handedly, “do you know what I’d do?”
“No.”
She set the empty glass on the seat next to her, nestling it in her suit jacket.
“I’d climb on your lap and kiss you.”
Chapter Three
He said nothing and she scoffed.
“And if you were a normal guy, you would’ve responded to me saying that by you saying ‘go ahead.’ Egging me on kind of. Get it?”
“No. But go ahead. I like this role-playing a lot more than the kind we were doing in the limo.”
Her tight smile only opened up after a second or so, as if she was trying to stifle it and wasn’t able to.
“You are pretty cute. But if this is some kind of lame move you use with women, I’m going to be really mad. Like Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot, where he puts on that Cary Grant accent and pretends he can’t get it up so Marilyn Monroe will fall all over him trying to ‘cure’ him.”
“I never said I couldn’t get it up.”
She leaned over the aisle with a wicked smile and placed her hand on his knee, causing him to suck in his breath trying to hold off a groan. “I’d say you’re proving that right now.”
He glanced down to his trousers where his cock was standing to attention, following the conversation avidly. “Is it possible to get back to talking about you climbing onto my lap?”
“Possible. Not probable. I’d need a few more scotches for that.”
He frowned.
“What?” she demanded, taking her hand off his knee. “Don’t tell me you’re going to quibble about that! Listen, your best bet is for me to get so plastered I don’t even remember who you are. Then maybe you’ll score.”
That scenario didn’t appeal to him.
“What is that look for? You’re okay with pressuring an employee into sex, but not with getting her drunk to do it? How does that make sense?”
“I wasn’t pressuring you. I only asked.”
“Which since you’re my boss constitutes undue pressure under the law.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. Now I do.”
“But drunk girls give you pause. Why is that?”
“Alcohol not only kills brain cells, it can impair judgment.”
“Why don’t you look into heavy debt loads impairing judgment, too? That’s why I’m still a lawyer.”
“How long have you been a lawyer?”
“Five years. Which is four years and three hundred and sixty-four days too long.”
“I see.”
“I didn’t mind being sworn into the bar and taken out to lunch on my first day of practicing, but it’s all been downhill since then.”
He laughed, which surprised him. He didn’t do too much of that usually, too intent on keeping his eye on his career, on building his company, and too little time for much else.
“And for the record,” she added, “I haven’t been laid in almost that whole time if you can believe it. Or at least the last two-thirds.”
“Why not?”
“Too busy. Too tense. Too I don’t know what. Did your mom really use a sperm bank to conceive you?”
Not sure he liked the abrupt change in subject—he’d rather try to steer her back to the subject of getting laid—he went along anyway. “Yes. She did.”
He didn’t know why everyone always seemed so interested in the sperm bank aspect of his parentage. He had said it during his first interview with the New York Times for some reason, he couldn’t remember why, and the suit who was handling the reporter had scowled at him at the time and made annoying hand signals that involved fingers going in a horizontal line across his neck. It was very distracting. Of course that was before the PR department stopped allowing any interviews with him altogether, which was fine with him. But people still brought it up to him from time to time. “Apparently, my mother’s criteria were very specific.”
“Only genius sperm?”
“I don’t think so. She wasn’t very intellectual.”
Her mouth dropped open.“I can’t believe that. Who was your sperm donor then? Albert Einstein?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“When was the last time you had sex?” she asked, which he definitely took as the conversation going back in the right direction.
“I couldn’t pinpoint the time for certain, but more recent than you I’m pretty sure.”
“You’re probably not very good in bed,” she said, almost to herself, and then added, to him, “How could you be? Being how you are, I mean. Clueless. Probably slam-bam-thank you-ma’am. No offense.”
“None taken.”
Though he was kind of annoyed at how casually she was discussing this now. He could barely breathe with wanting her, and his cock was aching to show her how he was in bed while she was still fiddling with the fucking necklace.
“I tell you what,” he said. “Let’s role-play and you can see for yourself.”
At first Mr. Genius-Inventor clearly did not have the slightest idea how to flirt. She kept giving him softballs, and instead of responding with “why don’t you see” or “you be the judge,” he kept answering her straight-faced.
But the role-playing line was pretty good. It shot a bolt of excitement through her right down to between her legs. The intensity of his glittering blue eyes didn’t help, one curly black lock falling over his forehead. She wanted to either kiss his eyes closed or lose herself in them. Anything. If she just waited, she was going to die or explode. Or maybe even do something really, really stupid that she wouldn’t be able to blame on the scotch later because she wasn’t that drunk.
“Maybe we could start with one kiss,” she barely breathed. “Do you like to kiss?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice gravelly. “I’ve been thinking about kissing you all day as a matter of fact. Wondering what you’d taste like.”
They leaned closer to each other over the aisle, and he linked his fingers in her string of pearls and tugged.
God.
His lips closed over hers slowly, carefully, his palm cupping her neck, the slight pressure just enough. One light kiss and then a second until she leaned farther in and opened her lips to him. He held her still for a long, thorough kiss, his lips firm against hers, his tongue delving in, tangling with her own in little thrusts she felt between her legs. He tasted minty and delicious.
She tried to steady herself, reaching out while they kissed, and landed a handful of his silky hair, grasping it, rocked by the sensations flooding through her. He shuddered and broke away with a groan, his blue eyes so dark they were almost black now, and her hands dropped to her lap, feeling suddenly empty.
“How was that?” he asked softly.
She cleared her throat. “Good. Pretty good. Nice actually.”
“I can do better.” He cupped her head again, sifting his fingers through her hair, loosening the bun even more, tingles shooting through her at the subtle massage. “Let’s try again.”
His mouth was rougher this time, and his five o’clock shadow lightly scraped her cheek. He kissed like he really had been thinking of it all day. Long greedy swipes of his tongue that made her hips arch in her seat even while she twisted to the side and strained to get closer, her own tongue exploring the warm wet depths of his mouth. When he pulled away a second time, her heart was beating fast against her chest, her breath uneven and her cheeks hot from more than just the razor burn. For a moment, she forgot who he was and who she was and wanted nothing so much as to climb right over the aisle and close the distance between their bodies.
He leaned back. “Better?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“To really make any further progress, Camilla, you need to come over
to this side of the plane.”
She swallowed hard and started to get up, veering toward the liquid courage. “Let me get another scotch.”
He grabbed her hand to stop her. Even that slight touch felt good. His thumb circled her palm in a mesmerizing motion as she stood in the aisle. “No more scotch if we’re going to play this game.”
She looked down at him. His jacket was still on, and needless to say, so were his pants, but a quick glance at his lap showed the heft of him straining toward her. His hair was mussed from her fingers, his breathing shallow and his dilated pupils partially shaded by those long black lashes. He was as excited as she was.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not supposed to play this game with you.”
“I got that. But sometimes you have to break the rules, don’t you?”
His voice was even lower than it usually was, and she leaned down slightly to hear him over the noise of the plane. His mouth was only an inch or so from her breasts, the nipples erect, straining through the silk, and she willed him to press his lips against the thin material. Just the thought of it sent her pulses racing. Instead, he reached behind her and unclasped her pearls before taking them in one hand and running the beads along the length of her neck, a soft sensuous feeling.
She didn’t break the rules. Not usually.
He brought her palm to his lips, pressed a light kiss on it, and dropped the pearls in her hand, then closed it with his own. “If we’re going to stop, you’d do me an immense favor if you’d put these away.”
She could stop. She could still stop.
She lowered her hand, astounded by her audacity, and lightly skimmed the pearls against his hard cock, feeling the heat right through his pants. He groaned and closed his eyes for a second, and she unconsciously arched her hips, imagining him inside her, deep and hard.
She turned her hand slowly, the pearls spilling out, and his cock jerked and seemed to swell even further, like a living thing begging to be freed. One side of his mouth came up, dimple in full evidence, and he clasped her wrist, holding it slightly away. “I’m dying here, Camilla.”
A girl could break the rules once in a while, couldn’t she?
“Show me,” she whispered.
Tempting the New Boss Page 5