Okay, so she was a coworker, and he should never have been flirting with her, should never have set his sights on getting her into bed. But from the first time he’d ever laid eyes on the hot little blonde with the sultry brown eyes and the lush, taste-me lips, he’d wanted her in the undeniable way that made guys do stupid things.
“Could we actually be this lucky,” Carson said, “that we get to witness our very own Macy Thomaston pretending to have the big O?”
“It seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Griffin said, his gaze still locked on her. He couldn’t have looked away if someone had set his table on fire.
She stepped up to the microphone, and a song with a sexy dance beat began to play over the speakers. She didn’t look drunk or overly afraid. A little half smile played on her lips, and she closed her eyes.
“Mmmmmmmm,” she purred into the mike, a sound that resonated right between Griffin’s legs.
He shifted in his seat, his breath caught in his throat. Her hips were rocking to the beat of the music, creating a show almost as entertaining as her voice was.
“Oooohhhhhhh.” Her head tilted back, her eyes still closed, one hand gripped the mike and the other traveled up the side of her neck, behind it, and into her long, wavy hair. “Yesssss… Mmm…”
She breathed quick and shallow, gasping and crying out, making hot, girly sounds that Griffin had thought up until that moment were too spontaneous, too visceral, for a woman to fake. Her face, transformed by some imagined pleasure, wore the sort of blissedout expression he’d thought more times than he cared to count that only he could put on a woman.
And then her performance reached its groinstirring crescendo, with a series of moans and mmm’s and yeses that had every guy in the place cheering and whistling. When she finally fell silent, he realized beads of sweat had formed on his temples, and his shirt had grown damp around the collar.
“Damn,” Carson said.
“Yeah. Damn.”
Part of him wanted to sidle up to Macy’s table as soon as she sat down and watch her horrified expression when she realized two of her coworkers had just witnessed her Oscar-worthy performance.
But it wasn’t the right move. He knew information like this needed to be saved and used at just the right moment. He wasn’t sure what that moment was yet, but he’d find it soon enough.
“Look, man,” he said to Carson, “We can’t let her see us here.”
“Why not?”
“We just can’t.” Not exactly his most persuasive argument, but he was still in a sexual daze from the show.
“I’m not leaving when the orgasms are just getting started.”
A second woman had taken the mike, though she didn’t have half of Macy’s acting skills.
Griffin stood up and placed enough money on the table to cover his drink and tip. “I’m out of here. Don’t let her see you, okay?”
Carson’s expression turned annoyed. “How am I going to hook up with her friend without Macy seeing me?”
“Pick another woman, and I’ll owe you big-time.”
“Fine, go ahead, run off like the wuss you know you are.”
Griffin gave Carson a look and headed for the door. His every guy part wanted to go in the other direction though, toward Macy and all the trouble she had to offer. But his guy parts would have to wait.
He’d have Macy, the object of his desire, but only when the time was right.
2
TURNS OUT, Macy was damn good at faking it. Good as in she was beginning to wonder if she’d missed her calling in life. Well, maybe not that good, but she’d impressed the crowd at O’Shaunnessy’s Pub last night enough to win the weekly fake orgasm contest. It wasn’t exactly her proudest accomplishment, but it had been a lot more fun than she’d expected.
She placed the silly gold plastic shamrock trophy that had been the prize on her desk, not sure what she’d tell anyone who asked about it or why she’d even brought the thing to work. No, that wasn’t true. She knew why she’d brought it to put on her desk—because it was a reminder to be confident, to take risks, to use the talent she had to get where she wanted to go. It was a reminder that she was no longer the chubby nerd, who still haunted her psyche, but was now a girl who could incite a whole bar to whistle and applaud by moaning into a microphone.
She turned her attention to the onslaught of e-mail messages that had somehow invaded her inbox overnight. Bronson and Wade wasn’t a huge advertising firm, but the thirty or so people who worked there managed to produce enough interoffice e-mail for a few hundred. She skimmed for important subject lines, and her gaze immediately fell on one entitled, Las Vegas Trip from Griffin Reed.
Just as she opened it, the sender himself appeared at her desk, his sudden presence both pleasant and irritating in that paradoxical way he had. “Are you up for the trip?” he asked.
Macy tried not to be impressed that he could look so gorgeous before noon, but she failed. Griffin, who was maybe a year or two older than her twenty-nine, always looked annoyingly, distractingly good, with his short, dark brown hair and his smoldering gray eyes, his custom-tailored shirts and his Armani suits. He was clearly aware of the fact.
“Why do you even bother with e-mail if you’re going to come here and ask me the question anyway?”
“I sent you that two hours ago. I didn’t realize you’d be coming to work late today.”
She glanced at her watch and confirmed that it was only 9:05 a.m. “I’m not late.”
Which he knew, but he loved to bait her. “Right,” he said with a little smile. “I forgot you operate on Macy time.”
“What do you want? I haven’t even had a chance to read your e-mail.”
“We got the Golden Gate Resort and Casino account. Now they want a couple of us from the creative team to fly there this weekend and check the place out before we start working on the campaign.”
“A couple of us as in whom?” A little sinking feeling descended into Macy’s stomach.
“You, me and Carson.”
“I’m supposed to spend a weekend in Las Vegas with you and Carson?”
“It’s a sweet deal. Free hotel rooms, free meals, VIP service. All we have to do is show up and debauch ourselves.”
“I’ll leave the debauching to you,” she said, but an image from another Vegas hotel’s recent ad campaign popped into her head.
A woman, dressed in black lingerie, crawling across a bed to her lover. He stood beside the bed, arms crossed, leaning against a piece of furniture, his expression vaguely pleased, looking as if he could be her client or her lover. The caption read, Embrace the fantasy.
She’d been studying Las Vegas ads ever since she’d first heard the possibility that they could get the Golden Gate Casino account, and that ad had been her favorite. Now she realized why—it appealed to her on a personal level. She was long overdue for a weekend of serious debauchery herself.
Griffin’s gaze settled on her shamrock trophy, and he smiled as if he recognized it. “What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing,” Macy said a little too quickly. “Just a good-luck charm.” Which wasn’t entirely untrue. The trophy’s lucky properties hadn’t been established yet, but Macy had a good feeling about the little hunk of plastic.
Besides, she believed in creating her own luck, so if she said the thing was lucky, it was.
Griffin looked as if he were about to say something else about the shamrock, but instead he said, “We’ll fly out tomorrow around noon, if you want to go.”
“Hmm, tough choice—leave work early and jet off on a free trip to Vegas for the weekend, or stick around here and get indigestion from the Friday-afternoon pizza meeting.”
“I thought you’d feel that way.” He dropped an airline ticket envelope on her desk.
And then he launched into a discourse on his ideas for the campaign. Blah blah blah. Griffin had a way of sounding sure of himself, sure his ideas were perfect, while at the same time never listening to anyone else.
Still, Macy found him ridiculously attractive. That, she just didn’t understand.
Never had, never would.
Ever since they’d first met there had been tension. Not always the hostile kind—more often than not, the sexual kind—but always enough to make working together difficult. And rather than being annoyed by their relationship, Griffin seemed to relish it.
Macy realized a moment too late that Griffin was staring at her for an answer about she-didn’t-know-what.
“What’s with the spaced-out look?” he said.
“You just caught me at a bad time. It’s a little early for me to be thinking creatively.”
“You weren’t even paying attention.” He smiled, and his eyes crinkled at the corners.
He always smelled great, and now, with his close proximity as he leaned against her desk, Macy could smell his spicy guy scent all too well. If she’d had to come up with a marketing spin for it, she’d have called it the scent of an alpha male.
She hated that she found him so damn attractive, hated that she loved the way his wavy brown hair always looked perfectly tousled, hated that his mouth was so sensual, so worthy of staring at for hours on end.
And she especially hated that she often caught herself wondering how he’d feel molded against her, acting out all the stupid fantasies she’d had about him when she hadn’t had anyone better to fantasize about—and a few times when she had.
“You weren’t saying anything I needed to pay attention to.”
“If we’re going to work together on this account, you should at least pretend to respect my ideas.”
“You’re right,” she said with a little smile. “I’ll be sure to pretend extra hard.”
“I think you’re just feeling disgruntled that you’ve got stiff competition for the creative director job.”
Macy shrugged. “A little healthy competition can be a good thing, right?”
“Right. Just remember that when I get the account.”
That was Griffin’s fatal flaw—overconfidence. And that was how she’d bring him down.
She turned to her computer and cast him a glance. “I really need to get some work done here.”
“Fine,” he said. “See you at the ten o’clock meeting.”
And then he was gone as fast as he’d shown up. No sticking around to ask her off-the-wall questions, no flirting, nothing.
Something was up, but it was too early in the morning for Macy to figure out what right now. Give her a few more cups of coffee and a few more hours, and she’d figure out what was going on. If nothing else, she’d grill Griffin later. For now she had all these e-mail messages to plow through. And work to wrap up before tomorrow.
When she’d be flying to Vegas.
The thought gave her a ridiculous little thrill. She was going to Las Vegas with Griffin, going to the one place where it was okay to be bad, where, if you got yourself into trouble, you could blame it on the city, on the booze, on the bright neon lights.
Not that Macy had any intention of getting into trouble, but somehow, she realized as she stared at her little shamrock trophy perched on her desk, it seemed inevitable that something was going to happen.
Something risky. Something wild. Something that could only happen in Las Vegas.
Lauren’s awful study popped into her head out of the blue. Then came the comment Lauren had made about Macy using the information for her own benefit before it became general knowledge.
When Macy had said she’d use the study results for her own evil purposes the next chance she got, she’d been kidding. She’d never imagined she might really have some nefarious plan to plot out.
A plan like the one forming in the sleep-fogged recesses of her brain right now. It was probably too crazy to give another second’s thought to.
Or was it?
What if…
What if she gave in to the lure of Las Vegas? What if she gave in to the attraction she’d been fighting for the past year, in the name of career advancement?
What if she could seduce Griffin out of a few IQ points? If she had the chance, would she even have the nerve to try? Last night, she’d proven to herself that she had the nerve to try just about anything.
If Griffin could stoop to using sex as his weapon—always flirting with her to distract her—then she could do it for one weekend. Only her weapon was sharper than his, and she was aiming it right where it would hurt the most—at his intellect.
Could it really be so easy?
Maybe it could. She turned her attention back to her computer, but before she could even open another message, someone cleared their throat beside her desk. She looked up to see Griffin there again.
“I forgot to ask, are you going to come in to work tomorrow?”
“I’ll probably just work from home in the morning.”
“Do you want a car to pick you up for the airport? If so, I’ll just need your address to give to the limo service.”
“Hmm, a limo,” she said. “That could be fun.” She purposely let her gaze travel over him as a little smile played on her lips. “Will you be in it?”
Shock registered in his eyes, but he quickly recovered. “Yeah, but so will Carson.”
“Too bad.”
His usual annoying smirk was gone, replaced by an inscrutable expression. If forced to name it, Macy would have to say it was desire.
He looked as if he was seriously hot and bothered.
Perfect!
She resisted the urge to rub her hands together in mock diabolical style. Macy had the distinct feeling of having just offered a sugary-sweet treat to a hungry toddler. A little bubble of guilt threatened to rise up in her chest and spoil her fun, but she ignored it.
How many times had Griffin upstaged her, purposely made her look like an idiot in front of management and used his own sex appeal to manipulate every female within a ten-office radius of him? More than Macy could count.
If she wanted to get ahead competing with Griffin, she’d have to get over the guilt. Guys like him didn’t feel guilty about things like this, and she had to think like him. Beat him at his own game.
“Why isn’t the intern doing this grunt work? Are you looking for reasons to drop by my desk?”
“The intern’s out sick today, and this trip just came up last second,” he said, ignoring her taunt.
She found some paper and a pen on her desk, then wrote out driving directions to her house.
Griffin leaned on the table and watched as she wrote. “Marina District?” he asked.
Macy nodded handed the paper to him. “I lucked into a rent-controlled loft. If I lean out my living-room window, I can almost see the Golden Gate Bridge.”
He smiled. “A place with a view—what more can you ask for in the city?”
“Indoor plumbing is always a plus.”
“Oh yeah, that too.”
“And neighbors that don’t belong to any cults or secret societies.”
“Well, now you’re just getting picky.”
Macy laughed. “You’ve adapted well to the city. It’s a far cry from your hometown.”
Macy knew from talk around the office that Griffin had moved from Wilmington, North Carolina, to San Francisco right after college when he’d taken the job at Bronson and Wade three years before she’d been hired. Macy had wished more than a few times that he’d pack up and go back to the tobacco farm where he belonged. Even the ever-so-slight Southern lilt that remained in his voice only served to make him more infuriatingly sexy.
“North Carolina isn’t so different from here,” he said. “There’s an ocean there, and lots of bad drivers.”
“Do you ever miss it?”
“Nah. There’s a reason so many people crowd into this one tiny part of the country.”
“Because it’s the best damn city in the world.”
“Right, and full of such modest locals.” He grinned.
“So you’re going to make this your permanent home?”
&nb
sp; He nodded. “When I get that promotion next week, I’ll be able to afford a house.”
When. Not if. Arrogant bastard. He assumed no one could beat him, no one was more talented than him and no one deserved the promotion more than he did.
Whatever misguided feelings of guilt might have been lingering vanished, and Macy knew without a doubt that she was doing the right thing. She’d sex Griffin out of a few IQ points, and he’d never know what hit him. It would give her the edge she needed to distract attention from Griffin’s oh-so-distracting presence, and then…
Then she’d have a fighting chance.
If she had her way, by the end of the weekend, Griffin Reed would be so dumbed down by sex, all of his best ad ideas would involve dancing bears and monkeys in tuxedoes.
MACY GLANCED at her watch. It was five minutes after twelve, and the creative team sat around the meeting room table, waiting for the endless ten o’clock meeting to finally wrap up. She hated these state-of-the-business meetings, where the partners took every opportunity to make the creative team feel as if they knew nothing about business and had no talent. It was their covert strategy, everyone believed, for keeping them from overestimating their value, asking for raises, or daring to look elsewhere for employment.
She had lost the ability to focus on what anyone was saying about thirty minutes ago, when her stomach had started rumbling and her desire for a cheeseburger had overpowered every other thought.
Across the table, Griffin appeared to be riveted to Gordon Bronson’s summary of the agency’s current accounts, and Macy was trying really hard not to look at him and imagine what sort of Las Vegas debauchery she might be involved in with him very soon. That seemed to be the only thought that distracted her from craving a cheeseburger.
She was afraid whatever she imagined about Griffin would be revealed on her face, and the last thing she needed was him getting all overconfident about her sexual attraction to him before they’d even gotten away from the office. She knew him—he’d find a way to use it against her.
“And our final item to address,” Gordon was saying, “is the matter of the vacant position of creative director.”
Sex, Lies and Dirty Secrets Page 2