All Work and No Play... (In Bed with the Boss 3)

by Julie Cohen

  Jane made a sound in her throat that was part pleasure, part protest. He held the kiss for another moment, because he didn’t want to stop, but also because he wanted to show her he, too, had some control in this situation. Then he parted from her, still holding her, his lips only inches from hers.

  ‘There are people,’ she whispered, though she made no movement to get away from him.

  ‘So we’ll go somewhere private.’

  She stiffened slightly in his arms. ‘I’m not going to have sex with you again, Jonny.’

  And he was an idiot to even think that a kiss was ever going to change anything between them. ‘To talk,’ he said.

  ‘You have a photo shoot now,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care about the photo shoot. We have a lot to discuss.’

  This time she did draw away from him, taking a step back and smoothing down her clothing. ‘I care about the photo shoot. This campaign needs to be a success. And you need the money, Jonny.’

  Well, there was a point, though he’d just as soon not think about it right now.

  ‘All right. I’ll come to your flat tonight.’

  ‘No,’ she replied, too quickly. ‘I’ll meet you for coffee at the café across the road from your hotel at seven o’clock, when we’re both done with work.’

  Coffee. The implications of that were pretty clear: she didn’t want to commit long enough for dinner with him, nor did she want to trust the disinhibiting effect of an after-work drink. And she definitely didn’t want him anywhere near her personal life.

  Even though he’d just kissed her in front of everyone she worked with, and she’d made it public that they’d slept together.

  ‘Seven o’clock,’ he said, nodding curtly, and left her office.

  He ignored the interested looks he gathered on his way out of the building.

  Jane’s insides were doing an imitation of a million drunken butterflies. Her hands were wet and she couldn’t quite catch her breath as she walked the last few steps to the café.

  It was worse than when she’d met Jonny as Jay, before their date.

  She stopped before she reached the door and took a few deep breaths. This was why she had to meet Jonny, and ask him what she was going to ask him. Up until two nights ago, Jonny had been her friend, her safe man, her comfortable buddy.

  She had to stop feeling this way about talking with him, because the alternative was too awful to bear.

  She bit her lip, and the feeling reminded her of his mouth on hers this afternoon. So unexpected and so exciting. And so annoyingly perfect that even now the butterflies spun around her stomach in a tipsy little aroused dance before they settled down to their more serious business of making her feel sick.

  Jane pushed open the door and saw that, just as the last time she’d arranged to meet him, Jonny was early and waiting for her.

  He was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and stylish black-rimmed glasses. He’d washed his hair and now it was free of the products that had mussed it into trendy disarray this afternoon.

  Their eyes met as soon as she walked in. He stood up.

  Her belly butterflies swooned and melted into a big, sticky, lustful puddle.

  And she should just get over these feelings because they were doing no good at all. Jane brushed her clothes down unnecessarily and went to meet Jonny at his table.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. For a moment she thought he was going to make a move to kiss her—on the lips or on the cheek, she couldn’t tell—but then he seemed to think better of it. ‘Skinny latte with chocolate on top?’

  Jane nodded and sat while he went up to the counter to get her a coffee. She couldn’t remember when she’d told him how she liked her coffee, but she wasn’t surprised he knew. It must have come up during one of their casual, fun exchanges of emails or chats online. She knew he liked black filter coffee, from his years in the States working as a software developer. It was part of the tonnes of information they knew about each other—information that was inconsequential, but intimate and friendly.

  Unfortunately, what he looked like had never been part of their late-night chats.

  She couldn’t resist glancing up at the front of the café where he stood ordering her coffee. The female barista was smiling at him very widely, and two women in the queue behind him and another at a table in the corner were ogling him openly behind his back. To say nothing of the guy with the earring bussing tables, who fumbled a latte glass because he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Jonny’s backside.

  How did you drop that fact into casual conversation? ‘Oh, by the way, Jane, I’m gorgeous and all women and even some men want me’?

  Jonny came back with her coffee and a plate of biscuits. ‘Lattes always remind me of the coffee my mum used to give us when we were kids,’ he said. ‘Remember, a spoonful of coffee and all the rest milk? She called it cowboy coffee.’

  She’d forgotten about that until now. ‘She put cocoa on top, too.’

  ‘Your latte must be a comfort thing,’ Jonny said, and sat across from her, taking a drink of his mug of black coffee.

  And she’d never thought about that, either, though it could well be true. She was certainly in need of comfort at the moment.

  ‘If we’d started our conversation like this the other night, we wouldn’t be in all this trouble now,’ she said.

  ‘True. But then again the other night wasn’t about reminiscing.’

  ‘No,’ Jane said, and she couldn’t say much more than that, because the sight of Jonny’s hands and mouth on his coffee mug brought inevitable reminiscences of his hands and his mouth on her.

  ‘Did you find my email telling you who I was?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ It had been buried in her inbox from a couple of days ago, along with all the other emails she hadn’t had time or energy to deal with. It was a typical Jonny email, good-humoured and slightly self-deprecating, and after she’d read it she hadn’t been able to stop herself from reading a few of his other recent emails, sent before he’d come down to London. Reminding her of that easy and freeing friendship they’d shared.

  ‘I’m sorry I accused you of setting out to deceive me,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t know who I was.’

  In the silence that followed, she took a deep drink of her latte. Now she could see that it was a grown-up version of cowboy coffee. It wasn’t really as comforting as it should be.

  She put down her cup. ‘I don’t want to lose your friendship, Jonny. It—’ She hesitated, unused to exposing herself, but, this much, she had to. ‘It means a lot to me that we’re friends.’

  ‘Me too.’ He let out a deep breath, as if he’d been holding it the whole time she was drinking. ‘You’re the only person I’ve told about my father. And you’re only the second person who knows about my two careers. It’s important to me that I can trust you.’

  ‘Okay.’ She steeled herself, and then brought up the topic. ‘So we’ve both got to agree that it’s a bad idea for us to have sex again.’

  He frowned. She should have expected that, she guessed—he had, after all, pretty much told her this afternoon that he’d liked having sex with her—but it was still a surprise to her that he would want to continue.

  ‘No, I don’t agree,’ he said.

  She set her chin, because she had to win this battle. ‘Well, I do. And it takes two of us to do it.’

  ‘It was your idea for us to have sex together in the first place,’ he pointed out. ‘You were the one who brought it up originally.’

  ‘That was before I knew who you were.’

  ‘Yes, but it proves that there’s chemistry between us. Or do you usually have sex with a man on the first date?’

  She wouldn’t know, as she wasn’t much of a dater. She wasn’t exactly the type that men wined and dined and then tried to bed. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘You’re trying to use that logic thing on me again. It’s n
ot going to work. I don’t want to sleep with you, and that’s that.’

  ‘And now you’re lying to me again,’ he said, and his voice was quiet although Jane heard every word.

  ‘I’m not.’ Her heart was racing.

  ‘Yes, you are. Your eyes give you away every time, Jane. You want to pick up where we left off the other night as much as I do.’

  He reached across the table and touched her hand. Just one touch, one finger, between the two hills of her knuckles. It was enough to nearly make her moan.

  Jonny leaned forward. Above the aroma of coffee and chocolate biscuits she breathed in his smell of shampoo and warm cotton. She remembered pressing her mouth to the side of his jaw, his skin smooth from shaving, and the strong bones underneath.

  ‘Come on, Jane,’ he murmured. ‘Remember that I know you. Tell me the truth. You want to have sex with me.’

  His glasses somehow made his eyes an even deeper blue. Jane felt that if she kept on looking in them she would fall under some sort of Jonny spell and never come out of it. She shifted her eyes away from him, as if she could find the strength to resist him somewhere in the café.

  The two women who’d been standing behind Jonny in the queue were sitting a couple of tables away, giggling and glancing in their direction. The barista had paused while frothing milk, and had a faraway expression on her face as she gazed at Jonny. And the waiter had circled to the other end of the room to get a better view.

  Yes, she wanted to have sex with Jonny. And so did half the people in this room.

  ‘It’s just not going to happen, okay?’ She gave Jonny a hard look to show him she meant it and then took a drink of her latte in a way she hoped signified finality.

  Jonny exhaled sharply and sat back in his chair. She had to give him credit—he didn’t seem to notice that he was the focus of so many people’s lust.

  ‘Okay, I can accept that,’ he said. ‘For now. But do we have to put rules on this? Let’s date each other, see where it takes us, and keep an open mind about the sex issue.’ He tilted his head and a smile just touched his lips. ‘I think I could have fun trying to persuade you to change your mind.’

  It was the same naughty smile he’d given her before kneeling in front of her and giving her an orgasm.

  Dear Lord, Jonny could persuade her into anything.

  ‘I don’t want to date you,’ she said quickly.

  Now he really did look frustrated. ‘Why not?’

  Because I didn’t even love Gary and I couldn’t hold onto him.

  But that was too much to admit, not to the guy who half the café wanted. Not to the guy who was looking at her hard, as if he wanted to try to look straight through into her soul.

  ‘Because I don’t have any friends,’ she blurted instead. Which was bad enough, but better than the real truth.

  Jonny looked surprised.

  ‘I don’t have time,’ she explained. ‘I’ve had to work very hard to get where I am right now, and then there was Gary, and …’ She trailed off, fully aware of how lame she sounded. ‘I like lots of the people at work,’ she added.

  ‘But they’re colleagues,’ Jonny finished for her. ‘And you want to put up a good front with them.’

  ‘Not just that. It’s complicated. And I really don’t have the time.’

  She thought of the hours last night, alone and empty, with nobody to talk with. Not even via the internet.

  ‘I can’t lose you as a friend, Jonny. If we date and it goes wrong we can never go back to how we were before. And I liked how we were before. It made me happy to talk with you.’

  ‘I liked how we were before, too. But I’d also like more.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t risk it. We’ve known each other since we were kids. And—Jonny, all I wanted last night was to talk to someone about what was going on, how confused I felt about what had happened between you and me and how awful I felt about Gary. I wanted to talk to you about it. And I couldn’t because you were involved in it. I was so lonely.’

  Her voice sounded pathetic to her own ears. But it was the truth, and probably the only way that she could salvage her friendship with Jonny was to trust him with this weakness.

  He looked at her for a long time. Behind his glasses, behind his sharp gaze, she knew he was thinking, weighing up what she’d said, how she felt, how he felt, the whole situation. Jonny was clever; he’d always been clever, more than she was. He’d sent her a copy of one of his how-to computer books one time and she’d marvelled at how he could take something so incomprehensible and simplify it down so that anyone could understand it. That, as far as she was concerned, was a more difficult skill than understanding it in all its complexity in the first place.

  She’d only presented him with the simplest of her motives for not dating him. If he was clever enough to see through her to her real fears …

  ‘All right,’ he said, finally. ‘Just friends. For now.’

  Jane didn’t quite like how he said the last two words. It was as if he had some intention to make ‘now’ history as soon as possible.

  ‘Promise me,’ she said.

  Jonny sighed. ‘Jane, you can trust me.’

  ‘Okay.’ She bit her lip, because the most difficult part was coming next.

  ‘So now that you’ve agreed that we’re not dating,’ she said, ‘I need you to pretend that we are.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JONNY had been about to take a drink of coffee. Instead he put it down.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Just for a little while, until all this dies down. And you’re going back up to the Lake District after you finish this job, right, anyway? So it’s not for long at all.’

  Jane was speaking too quickly; there were spots of red on both her cheeks. She was acting as if this were a normal thing to ask, but he could see that she knew that it was deeply strange.

  ‘How long isn’t particularly the issue,’ he said. ‘The issue is that you’re asking me to do it at all.’

  She didn’t answer. She toyed with her glass and avoided his eyes.

  ‘I want to date you, Jane. But instead you want me to pretend to do what I want to do for real.’

  ‘If you want to do it for real, then pretending won’t be so hard, will it?’ She glanced up at him, and then back down at her glass.

  She was most definitely not telling him everything about this. He felt the same anger and frustration he’d felt this afternoon come rushing back. ‘Do you mind if I ask you why?’

  ‘Everybody saw us this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Plus, it seems that Gary didn’t stop with telling Thom about what I’d said to him. The entire company is buzzing about it. I mean, I hadn’t even told anybody that Gary and I split up, and then all of a sudden I’m kissing the campaign model in my office.’

  ‘So what? Tell them it’s none of their business, and get on with it.’

  ‘It’s not that easy. Nobody’s saying anything to me. It’s just whispers.’

  She met his eyes finally and he saw the baffled hurt there.

  And he remembered that hurt. He remembered the whispers.

  There had been a year or two, when he was a teenager at school, when he’d been the recipient of both of them. His tormentors had mostly been boys, and boys were usually pretty straightforward about their bullying. Their preferred method was generally to ambush him after school and kick him around a bit. But there had been whispers, too.

  His anger could take a back seat for a moment.

  ‘Jane, you can’t let other people get to you. You have to fight back. It’s one of the things my dad taught me; when I was getting beaten up at school he made me take up running and helped me learn boxing. When I was strong enough to confront the bullies, they stopped.’

  ‘This is different,’ Jane answered quickly. ‘I’m not being bullied. It’s just that—this job is important to me. I need the people at work to respect me. And from what’s happened, it looks like I’m somebody who’s been dumped by her boyfri
end for another woman and has straight away thrown herself at the nearest male. I need to prove to them that I’m not desperate. And that …’ She blushed harder. ‘You know, you want me, too.’

  ‘I do want you. But not like this.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, we can’t have a relationship. Our friendship is too important.’

  Jonny felt like jumping up and pacing around the room. As they were in a crowded café, he restrained himself. But only just.

  Jane must have seen how he felt because she leaned forward on the table, her hands clasped together in supplication.

  ‘Please, Jonny. I don’t want to look desperate, but I am. It’s not just the people at work. It’s Gary. He came to my office this afternoon and told me that since I’d found a new boyfriend, he’d be bringing Kathleen to Thom’s agency party. If I turn up on my own—’

  He was trying to stay calm, but it wasn’t working. ‘Ah. I see it now. It’s back to Gary and using me to make him jealous.’

  ‘It’s not just about making him jealous.’

  ‘But is about using me.’

  Her pleading hands clasped into fists. ‘Jonny, I’m asking for your help, that’s all. You were the one who had to go and kiss me this afternoon! If you hadn’t done that, this all would have blown over.’

  ‘Tell me the truth, Jane.’ He was leaning over the table now, as well. ‘Are you asking for my help because I’m your friend, or because I’m working as a model and it’s some kind of strange status symbol for you?’

  ‘Dude! I should have known you’d be hiding away canoodling with your new babe, you crafty dog!’

  A chair scraped back and Thom threw himself down in it, blond hair flopping in his face. As usual, he looked as if he’d just stepped off a beach.

  ‘Hi, Thom,’ Jane said, and leaned quickly back in her chair. Jonny sat back, too.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to me, my friends, you go right ahead and make all the goo-goo eyes at each other that you want. Jane, I’m stoked you like my man Jo—Jay.’