“How about coming downtown and having your sandwich here? I’ll have Kate order something for us.”
“You’re inviting me to lunch?” she asked. He’d joined her in Shadyside once or twice, but had never invited her downtown.
“I’m inviting you to lunch,” he said. “You know, I never did get to have you bent over my desk. I think you owe me a position.”
Her cheeks heated remembering the first time they’d had sex. But then she realized, “There’s no way I could get downtown on a bus and get all the way back here in time to start my shift.”
“Oh, I’ve already taken care of that. Go to the parking lot.”
“Did you send a car service again?” she asked, walking toward the lobby and out the glass doors. “My lunch hour doesn’t start until one today.”
“Do you see a red Mini?”
Layla found said red Mini in one of the closer parking spaces, gleaming under the August sun. It still had its dealer’s plates. Her heart stopped. “You didn’t…”
“I’m sick of you using that ‘no car’ excuse to squirm out of anything you don’t want to do.”
Layla ran out to look at the car, which happened to be exactly the one she had always dreamed of owning.
“I’ve never used not having a car as an excuse. I’d love to have lunch with you, but I can’t possibly take a car from you. It’s bad enough that you got me the new phone, because you said you wanted me to be accessible by email. Now you’re buying me a car?” But even as she said this, her eyes ran greedily over the delectable vehicle. She’d always had a thing for Minis. “A really nice car.”
“Layla, do you seriously want to fight me on this? Haven’t I proven how hard I am to say no to yet? What else do I have to do?”
He made it sound like he was the aggrieved party here, and Layla was just being difficult.
“Don’t be difficult,” he said, echoing her thoughts in his all-business tone. “I just want to ensure I see you in a timely manner not dictated by the Pittsburgh bus schedule.”
“Yeah, but how can I ever pay you back for this?” she asked, her voice small.
“Well, I do have this black-tie fundraiser for the Pittsburgh Opera next Friday. It’s going to be hellishly boring, but I have to go because I’m on the board. You could come with me. Then we can call it even on the car.”
Layla smiled into her phone. “I would have come with you anyway,” she said. “All you had to do was ask. No car needed.”
“I’ll remember that next time,” he said. “Kate left the keys on the front wheel.”
She groaned. “Please tell me you didn’t inconvenience her again for me.”
“I’m hanging up on you before you convince me to triple her holiday bonus just for doing her job.”
She bit her lip. “It doesn’t have to be triple. I’d settle for double.”
“Goodbye, Layla.”
“Or at least let me pick out something really nice for her Christmas present before I leave. It’s the least I could do.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get here. See you then.”
Before she could answer he hung up, leaving Layla alone with her new car and the feeling it was just going to become harder and harder everyday not to fall in love with him.
***
A couple of hours later, Kate buzzed into Nathan’s office. “Two things,” she said. “Layla’s on her way up.”
“Great, great,” he said. “Just send her straight in.”
“And your brother’s on line one.”
Nathan paused. At the beginning of the summer, he would have jumped at the chance to harass his brother to come back to Pittsburgh. Nathan had been handling all the negotiations with Matsuda along with the other global initiatives Andrew had abandoned. But with Layla on her way up to his office, Andrew was the last person he wanted to talk to.
He sighed. “New plan: keep Layla out there with you while I deal with him.”
“Yes, Mr. Sinclair.” Kate signed off.
He pushed line one and said, “Andrew.”
“Nathan,” his brother answered. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I can’t come home. Not yet. I’m going to ask Diana for a divorce, and if you don’t want me to do it before the ball, then I’ll just have to skip it. It’s dishonorable to be in the same room with her, when I know we’re only using her to host a party at this point.”
“You and your honor,” Nathan said, his thoughts going to Layla. “I’m sure Diana’s alimony check will more than make up for all of her hostess duties.”
“She’s a human being with feelings,” Andrew said. “Do you get that I’m about to ask her for a divorce? Our marriage has fallen apart. Why do always assume everyone can be bought off?”
Again Layla drifted into his mind. His parents hadn’t approved of her and Andrew’s relationship, but everyone else had. Their friends, the Sinclair servants, even strangers on the street had said they made the perfect couple. Jealousy burned through Nathan just thinking back to those days when he’d had to watch them afar, wanting what Andrew had so badly, but not being able to do anything about it.
“Fine, don’t come to the ball,” he told his brother. “I’ll handle it and Diana, who keeps on calling me, asking if I know anything about your whereabouts. I’ll let her know you’re not coming home until after the ball, because you’re oh-so-concerned about her feelings, which is obviously why you disappeared and haven’t given her so much as a call since you did. I’m sure she’ll come away from this all seeing how honorable you are.”
Then, for the second time that summer, he hung up on his brother.
***
Outside Nathan’s office, Layla twiddled her thumbs. She was experiencing a certain sense of déjà vu, sitting on the same couch as before, waiting for Nathan to finish up whatever business he was conducting behind closed doors.
“Do you know how long he’s going to be?” Layla asked his assistant. “I only have an hour for lunch.”
Kate didn’t look up from her computer. “I’m sure it won’t be long.”
Layla sat forward on the grey couch. “By the way, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done since my apartment door got vandalized. I loved all the clothes you sent over, too. You have great taste. And I really appreciate you dropping off the new car. I’m already in love with it.”
“No need to thank me,” Kate said.
An awkward silence descended once again.
Layla said, “You must need a really interesting skill set to get a job like this. One day you’re doing administrative stuff and the next you’re shopping for Nathan’s women friends. Plus you’re on call twenty-four-seven.”
“Mr. Sinclair asks very little of me outside of office hours, so I really don’t mind the few occasions when he does,” Kate said.
“Really? Very little? I mean all the stuff he’s asked you to do for me alone, not to mention the women who came before me—that doesn’t seem like very little.”
“Actually it is.” Kate finally looked up at her. “He’s never asked me to do anything for the other women he’s dated. Not so much as buying a Christmas or birthday gift. Just you.”
Layla shook her head. Surely, Kate was kidding. She couldn’t be the only woman Nathan had ever asked Kate to shop for. She’d thought for sure all the gifts and clothes were his usual M.O.
But before she could question Kate further, Nathan buzzed into the outer office. “I’m off my call. Send her in,” he said. His voice sounded clipped.
When she walked in, she found a table already set with gourmet sandwiches, an open bottle of Perrier, and a cheese plate on one side of the office, and Nathan visibly fuming behind his desk on the other.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
Nathan just stared into space, his jaw set tight.
“Nathan?” she said, real worry creeping in as she rounded the desk to go to him.
But then the cloud passed over his face and he said, “Bad business call. Som
ebody I was counting on let me down.”
She stroked her hand through his soft hair. “Want to talk about it?”
He smiled, but to Layla it looked a little sad. “No, I don’t.”
Then, like a robot come to life, he stood up and began to remove her clothes with rough, jerking movements. “I need you,” he said.
Once she was naked, he swept the desk and bent her over it, working two thick fingers into her wet tunnel. “Open for me,” he said.
Layla could feel her juices coming down, as if they were at his command. The heat building up in her was in direct contrast with the cold metal of his desk, which she rubbed her pebbled nipples on as she moaned and squirmed against his demanding hand.
Behind her, he said, “You’re ready for me.”
She couldn’t tell if this was a statement or a question, but either way, she answered, “Yes, please, yes.”
This time there were no sounds of a condom being taken out and put on. She’d started taking birth control at the beginning of their two months together, so when he entered her, there was nothing but delicious skin-on-skin contact.
One hand worked her clit and the other hand held her steady while he pumped into her faster and faster until they both came. Layla moaned as load after load of his semen flooded her, his cock pulsing in her afterlight.
Afterwards, he pulled her up from the desk and turned her around in his arms, kissing her hard as their orgasms finally receded.
“How do you do that?” he asked against her lips. “Make me want you like this? It feels like I can’t get enough of you.”
She could feel him growing hard again as he said this, and her own desire reignited, despite the fact that she had just come. “I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GETTING cleaned up for a black tie fundraiser turned out to be serious business. Layla had to take half a day off of work because Kate had jammed her Friday with so many beauty appointments: first, she’d gotten exfoliated and buffed from head to toe, waxed just about everywhere, with a mani/pedi to top it all off. Then she’d had to rush back to the loft to meet up with Mark and Jacob, a hair and make-up team. They’d worked on her in a whirlwind of gossip, fake eyelashes, and flat irons, which culminated with them zipping her into the light blue sheath dress Kate had picked out and guiding her to the wall of full-length mirrors in the home gym portion of the loft.
At first Layla couldn’t believe the vision in the mirror was actually her. The dress hugged her curves perfectly, making her body look more like a work of art than the bag of bones she’d had to drag out of bed that morning. Though Jacob had spent an hour on her make-up, she somehow looked fresh and dewy, like she’d just thrown some lipstick on and her face was always this big-eyed and gorgeous. And her hair—in the up-do Mark had fashioned, she could have passed for a glamorous movie star from the forties. No one looking at this version of her would be able to guess she was an overworked physical therapist in real life.
“You’re miracle workers,” she said to Mark and Jacob.
They just laughed, and complimented her for being such a wonderful palette. Then Jacob spritzed her with expensive perfume and they left in a flurry of upkeep instructions and air kisses. Before she even had time to catch her breath, the car service buzzed to say the limo Kate had arranged was waiting for her downstairs.
But all the trouble was worth it for the look on Nathan’s face when she walked into the lobby of the Pittsburgh Opera. He’d been talking to another man in a tux, but walked away from the conversation without a word of explanation as soon as he spotted her, not stopping until she was in his arms, her lips crushed beneath his.
“You look good,” he said, by way of explanation when he finally released her from the kiss.
“You stole all my lipstick!” She laughed and wiped the color off his lips with her thumb. Luckily Jacob had given her an extra tube for reapplications.
He grinned. “You had it coming. Walking in here looking this good—you had to know how I would respond.” He secured an arm around her waist and guided her deeper into the party. “Let’s start doing the rounds, so we can get out of here in fifteen minutes.”
“I spent half a day getting ready for this party. We’re not going to just skip out,” she said.
“Okay, half an hour.”
“Two hours.”
“One hour. That’s my final offer.”
Layla laughed again. “Fine, Nathan.”
She thought she’d spend most of the party listening to Nathan talk business with his other associates, many of whom also served on the opera board, but to her surprise, he included her in every conversation, even going so far as to steer the dialogue back to topics she could discuss when it became too business-oriented.
It helped that Layla had already converted to Pittsburgh sports fandom, able to hold forth on why the Steelers were the best football team on earth, bemoan the ever-losing Pirates, and talk passionately about how the Mario Lemieux-led Penguins had convinced her to give hockey a chance.
Nathan disagreed with her on all counts, which meant even his own friends took her side over his and were happy to help her gang up on him when he tried to argue for the Patriots, the Cardinals, and Canada’s hockey teams. This started an inflamed conversation that kept them laughing, and soon other people at the party joined their circle, as if attracted by their loud arguments and sparkling back and forth.
Layla had expected a stodgy party, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed this much. And when Nathan called time on their hour, she groaned. “I’m having so much fun. Can’t we stay a little longer? I’ll give you a five-minute kiss break.”
“The reason I want to leave is so I can kiss you without time limits. Besides if we leave now, we don’t have to sit through the boring speech.”
Layla winced. “But shouldn’t we stay for the speech? I mean you are on the board. You should be more supportive.”
He chuckled, “Only you would try to guilt trip me about skipping a fundraising speech.”
“Just twenty more minutes,” she said. “I didn’t go to prom, so this is my first fancy party. Like ever.”
He pulled her into his arms, folding his hands behind her waist. “You did really well tonight, Layla. Haven’t you ever heard of leaving them wanting more?”
“But I’m leaving in two weeks, so even if they wanted more, I wouldn’t be able to give it to them.”
She had meant this as a joke, but a certain sadness permeated the air between them as they both seemed to realized this would indeed be the last “fancy” party they ever attended together.
But then he said. “No, we can do this again. You can be my date to the Sinclair Ball in two weeks. It will be our last hurrah.”
She scrambled to recapture the previous breezy mood they’d struck. “I don’t know,” she said. “Will it be as fancy as this event?”
He took her empty champagne flute and handed it off to a passing waiter. “Even fancier. Now do me a favor and go reapply your lipstick, so I can take it off again in the limo.”
But before she could untangle herself from his arms, he kissed her again, this time a chaste buss and then another and another, as if he was looking for any excuse to give her extra kisses, even though he was the one kicking her out of town.
When he finally let her go, Layla felt a now-familiar melancholy come over her at the thought of leaving in two weeks, and true anger rose within her. Why was he making her leave? Why couldn’t he just forgive her for whatever it was she’d done? Most of all, how could he not feel about her the way she was beginning to feel about him after six weeks together?
In the restroom, she reapplied her lipstick on autopilot, wondering if this was how all the women he dated felt, like they were the center of his universe and maybe had a chance at winning his love—until he got rid of them the way he was about to get rid of her. If only she could find his brother. Maybe he knew something, something she could
use to convince Nathan to let her stay.
“Layla? Layla Matthews?” a voice said to the right of her. She looked up to see a plump, red-haired woman in a black dress with a sweetheart neckline. “I thought that was you, when I saw you in the lobby, It’s me, Jessica.”
Layla shook her head.
“Oh, I know it’s been a while, but surely you remember that night with you, me, Nathan, and Andrew. That disastrous double date.” Suddenly her face fell. “You don’t remember me. It’s because I’ve gained so much weight, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s not it at all.” Layla reached out a hand to soothe the distraught woman. “I had an accident, you see. I fell and I lost a chunk of time, my entire first year of college. Maybe we met then?”
Layla sure hoped so, because the woman looked like she was about to burst out crying.
Jessica’s eyes widened. “Yes, that’s when we met. Really? You lost an entire year? You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
Layla smiled. “Well, I’m nice, but no I wouldn’t fake a head injury to make you feel better.”
The next thing Layla knew, Jessica had gathered her up in a hug. “Oh, you poor thing. You poor, poor thing,” she said. “I can’t believe something like this happened to you. You were so nice.”
“I’m still here,” Layla said, gently disengaging herself from the smothering hug. “No, need to refer to me in the past tense.”
“Yes, you’re still alive. How lucky. And I saw you kissing your college boyfriend in the lobby, so it looks like you’re back together.”
Layla demurred with a shy head tilt. “I wouldn’t say back together. I didn’t even remember him when we saw each other again three months ago, the first time since my accident. And I’m moving to Savannah in two weeks, so who knows how it will all turn out.”
But Jessica shook her head, grabbing Layla’s hands with emphatic fervor. “No, you two were perfect together. Everybody used to say so.”
“Really?” Layla said. “Because we’re pretty opposite in most regards.”
The Owner of His Heart Page 9