by J. K. Coi
Nolan raised his hands in the air. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”
…
Liz left the bar after making the rounds during happy hour. Daniel hadn’t answered his cell all afternoon, so she stopped by his room to see if he wanted to go down to dinner. There was no answer at the door. Convincing herself he was with Laura and not playing poker was easier this time, and she went back to her own room instead of going to dinner alone. It would be a good night to hunker down and get some work done.
She was certain she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, but when there was a knock at the door three hours later, she looked up in surprise. With a stretch, she put aside her laptop and uncurled herself from the bed.
She half expected it to be Daniel, checking in on her, but Ben stood in the doorway. She couldn’t help giving him the once-over, even though she’d been eyeing him earlier in the bar every chance she got. He looked absolutely fantastic in a navy suit and bright green striped tie.
She looked down at her boxer shorts and tank top and crossed her arms. She was so not prepared for him right now.
“Hi. I didn’t see you downstairs for dinner, so I took a chance you might be up here,” he said, hands stuffed in his pockets. “I thought maybe we should talk.”
Feeling unaccountably nervous, she smiled stupidly and motioned for him to come in. “I’m actually glad you’re here. I’ve felt horrible about what I said to you this morning, and I need to apologize. I never meant—”
“Stop,” he interrupted her. “I’m the one who should explain.”
“No really, I never believed for a second that Jeffrey Olsen’s death was in any way your fault.”
“I know you didn’t—”
“And you’re absolutely right. Every industry is competitive, and this one can be absolutely brutal. You have to be a shark to succeed, and you can’t be responsible for the ways in which other people handle their failures.” She shook her head. “I had no right—”
She hadn’t realized she’d started pacing in front of him until he grabbed her wrist and pulled her up short. His touch started an immediate chain reaction of quivering sensation all the way to her toes, and she froze. Breathless, she looked up.
“Beth, it’s okay,” he said in a low voice. “I shouldn’t have walked away.”
She cocked her head. “Why did you?”
He sighed, touching his thumb to the center of her palm as if it was a subconscious impulse like when she flipped her hair back behind her ear…or paced the floor. His thumb rubbed drugging circles into her arm. “Seeing you again these last few days has reminded me of some things I lost—or forgot—when I went to New York.”
“Like what?” She drifted closer until she had to look up to maintain eye contact.
“Like the kind of man I used to be, the kind I want to be again. I used to love the simplicity of that spark of discovery in every code. Every day was a new adventure. But when you rejected me, that changed a little bit. Then Olsen happened, and I had to re-think everything. What you said earlier was no surprise. I’ve known for a long time that if you’d come to New York, I would have destroyed everything about you that I love. The purity of your gift, your love for the job…what we had together.”
“Oh Ben,” she whispered, undone by his honesty and vulnerability and surprised that he seemed to trust her enough to see it.
She trailed a finger along the shadowed line of his jaw, the scratchiness giving her shivers as she imagined how it would leave red marks all over her skin when he kissed her breasts, her belly, and between her thighs…
“I’ve missed you more than I even realized. We were such close friends and then…we weren’t, and I didn’t want to admit that I was the one who destroyed it,” she said. “I blamed you for rocking the boat, but it was me. I was the one who let my fears get in the way of something that might have been even better than friendship.”
He leaned down, a dark challenge shadowing his deep blue eyes. “Is that what we are?”
The same words he’d used earlier when she had talked about being enemies. “What? Friends?”
“No…” he said with a smoking look, making it obvious that he remembered their earlier exchange just as well as she did. He pulled her hard against him. “Close.”
After what he’d just told her, she had to be as honest as he’d been. “I’m torn between wanting you so much it’s penetrated every part of my body like a fever,” she said with a groan as her arms climbed his chest to his shoulders. “And needing my friend back, because I’ve missed what we had, missed the way we were before everything changed.”
“It’s too late. We can’t go back and reclaim what we had before,” he murmured against her skin, his lips already doing their damnedest to mark her as his with hot, open-mouthed kisses pressed to the spot under her ear and down the length of her nape. “But I’m a firm believer in seizing the moment that’s right in front of us here and now.”
“Ah, yes. A firm, um, believer. Oh God.” Her head fell back, and he dipped his tongue into the hollow of her throat where her pulse beat fast.
It was so hard to think, to form the words she should have said that very first time he’d kissed her. The words that would betray just how much he’d meant to her then and now, and how much fear those feelings engendered within her. She’d let fear get the better of her then. In trying to preserve what they had, she’d lost the very thing she’d valued the most.
So maybe it was best that she couldn’t speak, because she didn’t want to make the same mistake again.
When they finally took a breath, every sense she had was bloated with him. The feel of him, the scent of him, the rhythmic thumping of his heart against her chest. It was more than she could handle, and she needed a moment to try thinking about what was happening without the overwhelming influence of her physical desire clouding the matter.
She pulled away and hugged herself tight, desperately trying to focus on something besides Ben, but the only thing to catch her attention was the massive king-sized bed waiting for them in the middle of the room. “I have to…I’ll be right back.”
Like a coward, she retreated to the bathroom. The bright light blinded her, and she blinked into the mirror. “What am I doing?” she whispered.
When they were friends, they’d been friends, and the expectations of that relationship had been well defined. Then they weren’t friends, and he was gone, and she’d eventually gotten used to that too. Even when she’d contemplated having an island fling, she’d conceived of very distinct rules for how it should proceed.
But it wasn’t working out that way. Ben wasn’t sticking within her pre-drawn boundary lines. He was destroying all of her neat little boxes as if they were wobbly sand castles leaning toward the beach, and he was the tide crashing in over them all.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders before absently washing her hands so maybe he wouldn’t guess that she’d run to hide.
When she came back out, he was standing by the bed near her computer. “Have you eaten?” he asked.
She paused, taken off guard by the unexpected question. “Now that you mention it, I kind of skipped dinner. I got busy with work, and it didn’t seem like much of a priority.”
He picked up the phone on the nightstand and dialed. “Hello, this is Benjamin Harrison. Are you still serving dinner in the kitchen? Good. Charge my account, but bring up two of your specials to room 304. And a bottle of the Argentine Malbec. Yes, we’ll take some of that too, please. Thank you.”
He hung up and smiled. “What was that for?” she asked.
“I haven’t eaten either. It should be here in about thirty minutes.”
She shook her head. “I can’t let you do that.”
Her stomach chose that moment to growl at her. She slapped her hand over it, and Ben laughed. “How can you argue with that?” he said.
“All right, if you insist. But there isn’t much space in here.” She ran a hand through the mess that was her hair.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to get dressed, and we can go downstairs?”
He pulled off his suit jacket and shook his head. “I’ve spent most of the day networking and schmoozing, and I don’t want to have to see or talk to anyone else but you tonight.”
She quivered at the thought of a whole evening in this hotel room alone with him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it? I don’t do many of these types of events. Usually, it’s just me and Sarah in the office all day.”
“What about your brother? What does he do for your company?”
“He’s my business manager. I do all the programming, and he does everything else. I really couldn’t run the company without him.” She quickly changed the subject, feeling awkward talking about Daniel with him. “Okay, so if we’re staying in, what do you want to do?”
The blush crawled up her neck as soon as the words were out there. Obvious much? What else did two people who were attracted to each other do when alone in a hotel room with a king-size bed?
He grinned but only said, “You were working before I interrupted you. Why don’t I grab some things from my room, and we can work in here, together.”
He read her hesitation. “If you’re not comfortable with that, I can leave you alone.”
“No, it’s okay. Dinner is on its way already and I…I do want to spend the evening with you. I just don’t think this is really what you wanted to do with your time, is it?”
He cupped her chin and dragged his thumb over her bottom lip. “Hopefully, we won’t work all night.”
Even as her bones threatened to melt, her knee-jerk reaction was to take him to task for making assumptions, but he wasn’t assuming anything, was he? They both knew this thing between them was coming to a head. At least Ben was saying that he would leave it up to her to tell him when she was ready.
She couldn’t speak through the lump in her throat and only nodded.
He took her key card with him on the way out. For a long moment, she debated whether or not to jump back into the bathroom and try to bring some order to her hair and put on a little makeup, but stubbornly decided that if he was serious about wanting to work, this was the view he was going to have to deal with.
He returned fifteen minutes later dressed in a pair of cargo shorts and a white T-shirt stretched across his wide chest. She doubted he had intended to throw her senses into a dizzying spiral just by putting on a T-shirt, but that’s how she felt. She bit her lip. You’d think she would be immune after their day in the water, but good lord he was a sight to behold.
She had papers spread out across the desk, so she went back to the bed and sat up against the headboard, staring at him while her computer booted up. The only other potential workspace was the coffee table in front of the armchair by the window, so that’s where Ben headed.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay like that?” she asked. He’d have to hunch over with his elbows on his knees in order to use the keyboard. “I can move everything off the desk and—”
“Don’t worry about me.” He smiled. “I’m used to working wherever I can find some peace and quiet. I’ve even been known to take stuff into the emergency stairwell of my own office building when Nolan’s there because there’s no getting any peace and quiet with him around. God forbid there’s ever a fire and the alarm goes off.”
They both laughed. “Sometimes I have to call in ‘sick’ to my own company, because I’ll get more work done if I stay at home with the cell phone stuffed away somewhere so I can’t get to it before the voicemail kicks in. It makes me wonder why I bothered to rent office space.”
She paused. They’d just shared something about work, and this time it hadn’t made her feel like she couldn’t breathe, like she was on a one-way train to repeating all of her parents’ mistakes. In fact, it had been kind of…nice. The moment dragged out as they grinned at each other until Liz finally dropped her gaze
“Are you planning to stay in the same offices once you roll out nationwide distribution of your program?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It will depend on whether or not Diego Vargas is interested enough to make me an offer.”
Damn it. She’d said too much, especially considering that Ben was no doubt planning to meet with Vargas this week also…or maybe he had already. “I didn’t mean—” she stammered.
And now it was uncomfortable.
He shook his head, and his smile seemed genuine. “I’m sure he’ll pull through for you. He’d be crazy not to see the potential in your work.”
How would he know? Just how deeply had he investigated Sharkston?
No, it was a harmless comment. No need for her to get squirrelly about it. At least, that’s what she was telling herself. Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, she forced her attention to the computer screen.
Dinner arrived a few minutes later, and her mouth started to water when the server lifted the silver dish covers. She hadn’t realized just how hungry she was. Ben cleared off the small table while Liz poured the wine, and they both sat on the floor so they wouldn’t have to hunch over to eat.
“Oh God,” she moaned around a mouthful of crab cake. “These are to die for.”
She shook her head at the plate in front of Ben, almost empty already. “Some things never change. You still attack a meal like it’s a race to be won.”
He glanced down and grinned. “You mean it isn’t?”
She laughed. He reached over and brushed crumbs from her chin. The tiny touch gave her goose bumps.
They talked about everything but business, or about the past, and by the time dinner was done, Liz was surprisingly relaxed. She lifted the cloth napkin to her lips and regretfully looked back at her computer. “I guess I’d better get back to work.”
He refilled her wineglass as she got to her feet. “To keep you going,” he said with a smile.
He started flipping through a small stack of paperwork. She wasn’t surprised that he could so easily shift focus. She might be a decent enough diversion for a little while, but he obviously wasn’t tortured with temptation by her very presence, at least not enough to be distracted from what was really important, his work.
She stifled a grimace. She had absolutely no reason to be bitter about that. In fact, she should stop being distracted by him and get to work too.
Ben reached into his bag and rummaged for something. When he donned a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, she almost groaned. Whoa. And those were new. The glasses added a whole other level of compelling to this man. It left her mouth dry and sent her mind racing with hot nerd fantasies she never even knew she had until this very moment.
What was she saying about focus, again?
His mouth was moving. He had a Bluetooth in his ear and was speaking so quietly she hadn’t even realized he was on the phone. Allowing herself one last glance his way, she finally stopped obsessing and turned around, although it took a long time before her determination to focus became a reality.
…
Ben was looking over his coding notes one last time when across the room Beth suddenly jumped up from her seat with a little whoop of excitement.
He looked up over the rim of his glasses and watched her victory dance. Her happiness was infectious, and tension he hadn’t even noticed he’d been carrying in his shoulders released.
He glanced down at his watch. It was almost midnight. The few hours since they’d finished dinner passed mostly in easy silence as they worked. Not side-by-side exactly, but close enough that the light scent of her perfume and her occasional mutter of frustration had been a constant and tempting reminder of her presence.
She waved her hands in the air now, swinging her hips back and forth. Her eyes were bright, and she looked relieved. He didn’t know what problem she’d just solved, but he certainly liked the end result. Beth deserved this chance to show the world what she could do.
“I did it! I fixed it!” She turned to him with a huge grin on her face. He tossed his gla
sses to the table and leaned back with crossed arms, admiring the way her body moved. He couldn’t tear his gaze away. It didn’t matter that she wore only a pair of printed men’s boxer shorts and a plain tank top. To him, it was as good—maybe better—than an evening gown. Beth Carlson was a knock-out by any measure.
As she turned to him, her movements slowed. Awareness bloomed in her cheeks, and the knowledge of the effect she had on him lit those devastating green eyes. “Are you still working?” she asked, her voice low and husky.
He shook his head. Which was true, but he could have been right in the middle of the most important task of his job, and he still would have blown it off. For her.
She grinned and leaned over to take his hand and pull him up from the chair. “Then let’s celebrate. I don’t know about you, but after the day we’ve had, I think it’s definitely time to unwind.”
Ben didn’t want to make assumptions about what she may or may not be ready for. “Do you want to go out?”
He’d love to get her out on a darkened dance floor. Had been thinking about it since the boat. He wouldn’t care what she was wearing as long as it was skimpy as hell, and she moved all up against him, her skin hot and slick, her breathing heavy, her hips driving him crazy.
He tucked his finger under her chin until she lifted her gaze back to his. The chemistry between them was close to exploding. The proof of it was in the sizzle he felt every time he touched her. It was in the widening of her eyes as he looked down into her face.
Yes, they should leave this room. If they went somewhere public, at least he’d have a fighting chance of keeping his hands to himself. And he needed to keep his hands to himself, because he was determined that she would be the one to decide when it was time for them to take this thing to the next level. He didn’t want her to feel any pressure from him.
But she shook her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” she whispered.
Her hair was loose. She’d been playing with it all night, twisting it around her fingertips and pulling the ends to her mouth to nibble on while she worked. He plunged both his hands into the depths of its softness, cradling her skull and tilting her head up.