The Devil in Denim

by Melanie Scott

  Unless he was doing something stupid and male and wanted her to have to come searching for him. Like some damned supplicant.

  She paused, considering. She wasn’t going to play that game, that was for damned sure. She pulled out her phone and dialed his number.

  “Yes?” Alex said when he answered.

  “I’m standing in your damned foyer, where are you? I assume Gardner told you I was coming.”

  “Yes, he did.” The cool voice didn’t come through her phone. She turned and saw him in the doorway that led to the hall. “I’m sorry, I was on a call. What can I do for you, Maggie?” He didn’t come any closer.

  Well, that was good. She wouldn’t lose her mind if he didn’t come any closer. She would be able to say what she had come to say and then she’d be able to leave with her dignity mostly intact.

  “I came to tell you what I decided.”

  He went, if it was possible, even stiller. “I see.”

  “I said no to Sutter.” She steeled herself for what came next, hating the smile that bloomed on his face. She shoved a hand out to ward him off as he started to move. He stopped, looking puzzled. “I haven’t finished. I said no to Sutter and I want to keep working with you, but that’s all. I can’t sleep with you anymore, Alex.”

  He blinked. “Do I get to know why?”

  “Because I should have listened to my instincts in the first place. It’s too complicated. If we’re working together, you need to be able to tell me to do something and I need to not react like your girlfriend when that something affects me. Maybe some people can separate the two. Maybe you can. But I can’t. So we need to stop.”

  He bowed his head for a moment, took a single breath. Then a single step.

  “Alex—,” she said warningly.

  He took another.

  “You said you’d let me go,” she said. “Remember? Back at the very beginning. You said if I wanted out then you’d let me go. No harm, no foul.”

  “Then maybe I was an idiot,” he said. But he stayed where he was. His eyes had gone dark and flat and dull, turning more moss than green. “But all right. If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.” Fight me, she wanted to scream. Do something. Show me you wanted me in the first place. But that was the idiot part of her and she squelched it back down before it could explode and take the pieces of her heart that she was only just managing to hold together with it.

  Alex looked down at his watch. “In that case, welcome back. I’ll see you at Deacon in the morning. Gardner will send you a briefing, let you know what happened yesterday and today. I’ll want a report on whatever Sutter might have told you.”

  There. Flat and professional. Exactly how she wanted it. So why did she feel like he was stabbing her with every word.

  Idiot.

  “Okay,” she managed. She felt herself take half a step toward him, forced herself to stop. “In the morning then. Good-bye.”

  She turned back to the door, reached for the handle.

  Heard the steps behind her. Four quick strides and his hand closed over hers. Her breath caught and she turned and his mouth came down on hers and the world caught fire. There was anger in that kiss. Anger and longing and regret. But beyond that there was pleasure.

  Biting, searing pleasure.

  There is something wrong with me, she thought wildly as she kissed him back as hard as he was kissing her, as her back hit the door and her arms went around his neck. Something very, very wrong. She was breaking up with the man. She didn’t want him anymore. She couldn’t want him.

  She did want him though.

  Need screamed though her, gripping like talons. Alex took what she gave and returned it, beat for beat. His hands came around her waist, lifted, urged her legs around him. And then they were beneath the skirt of her dress and her tights ripped and his fingers slid over her and into her, driving her mindless. She writhed over his touch, sank her teeth into the curve where his neck met his shoulder, clung on for dear life as he set up a relentless rhythm. There was the sound of a zip and then his fingers slid free of her and he gripped her hips again.

  Green eyes blazed down at her. “Tell me no,” he said. “Stop me.”

  She shook her head. “Yes.”

  He made a sound of frustration and kissed her again as he thrust into her. His fingers had been good. This was better. The slide and power of him. His lips and his hands and the feeling of being helpless as he filled her and withdrew and filled her again, over and over and over.

  His fingers found her clit, pressed into her, and another wave of glorious pleasure spilled through her. She gave up, held on, let him take her as he wanted. Rode him and the pleasure until it broke and crashed over her, making her sob his name as she kissed him again.

  The return to reality was a long, long fall. Her breathing slowed with his as their foreheads rested together.

  But at long last sanity returned. He eased out of her, eased her feet down, held her a moment until they were both sure she could stand. And then he stepped away.

  Silence bloomed. Solid as the marble beneath her feet. She looked down, saw the laddered ruin of tights and her panties. Looked back up at Alex. Her body still throbbed with the feel of him but she wasn’t going to change her mind. She couldn’t change her mind.

  The man would be the death of her if she did. He’d just proven that. He was too much. Too hard to resist.

  She summoned every last ounce of willpower and stooped to pick up her abandoned purse. She left the underwear where it lay. Her dress was knee length and this was New York. No one would comment on a crazy woman going barelegged in the middle of winter. She’d catch a cab home. Simple.

  If only everything was that simple.

  If only the man standing in front of her could be.

  But he wasn’t. So she did what she should have done all along. “Good breakup sex,” she said. And she turned and walked out his door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Gardner was standing next to Alex’s parking space as Alex eased his Jeep to a stop. Damn it. Gardner only ever ambushed him in the parking lot if the news was very good or very bad. Judging by the frown on his face and the way he was studying the tablet in his hand, it wasn’t good news.

  Fuck.

  He fought the urge to bang his head solidly against the steering wheel until he passed out. Maybe he’d wake up in an alternate universe. One without Will Sutter, baseball, and whatever the hell was making Gardner look like he was about to have a coronary.

  One without Maggie Jameson?

  No. That was this universe apparently. And that was the reason he was in no mood for still more shit.

  Maggie. He’d wanted to call her last night. Make sure she’d gotten home okay. Apologized for—

  For what exactly?

  For fucking her against the wall? She hadn’t seemed to mind that part. No, she just didn’t want to do it anymore.

  Wanted to keep things simple.

  He wanted that too. Simple.

  But he lived in the real world where things rarely were. He climbed out of the Jeep and braced himself for whatever Gardner was about to tell him.

  “Bad news?” he asked as Gardner nodded a greeting.

  “That depends,” Gardner said.

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not you wanted the world to know that you’re sleeping with Maggie.”

  “What. The. Fuck are you talking about?”

  Gardner held out the tablet. It was displaying—well, he couldn’t tell if it was a tabloid paper or one of those goddamn Internet gossip sites, but that hardly mattered. What mattered were the three pictures front and center on the page. One of him and Maggie at the football game, caught in a moment when she’d been laughing up at him at something he’d said. Mutual delight plain to see on their faces. Fuck. He thought he’d been careful. Apparently not careful enough. Because above the football picture was another one of him leaving the building where Maggie lived—neatly time-stamped and capti
oned as nine A.M. on Saturday morning.

  Worst of all was the third picture. Which someone must have taken just last night. It showed Maggie walking out of his building. Hair rumpled, lips swollen. She wore dark glasses but there was no denying that she looked like she’d just climbed out of somebody’s—his—bed.

  He shifted his focus to the headline. “Has Saint Maggie Lost Her Halo?” He didn’t bother reading whatever inanity the reporter had come up with to go with that. The picture and the words were clear enough. Busted.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He felt the distinct need to hit something. Hard.

  “Is Maggie here yet?” He’d told Gardner last night that Maggie was coming back.

  “No. I tried her cell but she didn’t pick up.”

  Because she was driving, hopefully, not because she’d read this news, turned around, and headed back to the city.

  “When did this get published?”

  “Only about half an hour ago. Our news search picked it up right away and it was sent through to me.”

  “You should’ve called me.”

  “I didn’t want you to crash your car.”

  “Are Lucas and Mal here?”

  This time, Gardner nodded.

  “I assume they’ve seen this?”

  “They get the news searches for the Saints too,” Gardner said. “They’re waiting in your office.”

  Perfect. He glanced back at his Jeep.

  “I don’t suppose you want to get my bat out of there and just whack me across the head a few times?”

  Gardner shook his head. “Blood is hard to get out of wool. Messy, you know. Is Maggie going to be upset?”

  “I think it’s likely.”

  “She didn’t want everyone to know about you two?”

  “Probably not. Considering she broke up with me last night.”

  Gardner blinked but wisely stayed silent.

  “Wait here for her. Bring her up to the office when she gets here. But don’t show her those damn pictures if she doesn’t say anything. I should tell her myself.”

  “You better hope that Hana Tuckerson or Shelly Finch haven’t seen them, then.”

  “Find out where the pictures came from,” Alex ordered.

  “I’ve got the media people searching. But it could just be paparazzi. You’ve been in the news a lot with the deal and the Saints. Maybe someone lucked out.”

  “Yeah, and maybe not.”

  “You thinking Sutter?’”

  “I’m thinking that whoever did this is a scum-sucking weasel, and I’d say that Sutter fits that bill quite nicely. I’ll see you upstairs.”

  He tried to calm down as he waited for the elevator to creak its way up to his floor—he didn’t care about the damned budget; he was going to tell Mal that the elevator had to be replaced as soon as possible—and then stalked down to his office. It was early enough that most of the staff weren’t at their desks yet. But Shonda was ensconced behind hers and she gave him a narrowed-eye glare as he passed her.

  Crap. Apparently she knew. Which meant the news would spread fast throughout the building.

  Maggie had better arrive fast so they could come up with a plan on how to deal with this.

  Shit.

  He’d been worried about seeing her today, hoping like hell he could hold on to his sanity and not repeat last night’s act of desperation, but he hadn’t imagined that he’d be outed just as she dumped him.

  The door to his office was open, and he could hear Lucas and Mal talking inside. No point in putting things off. He strode in and pulled the door shut.

  “Don’t start,” he snapped as both his friends turned to look at him.

  “You had to go and sleep with her,” Mal said, ignoring him.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Lucas followed, displeasure clear in his eyes.

  “No. And this isn’t the eighteen hundreds. People are allowed to sleep together.” Alex dropped into his desk chair and hit the button to turn his computer screen on.

  “Not when you’re trying to buy a goddamn baseball team. Not when it looks like you’re screwing baseball’s favorite daughter.”

  “She’s a grown woman.”

  “She’s Saint fucking Maggie,” Mal said.

  “I like that,” Maggie said from the doorway. “Has a certain ring to it.”

  “FUCK,” Alex said, and dropped his head onto the desk with a thump that vibrated through him but didn’t make him feel even the slightest bit better.

  “Sorry, Maggie,” Mal said. “I didn’t—”

  “It’s fine.” Maggie said. Alex lifted his head. She looked pale, he thought. Pale but beautiful. She was dressed in a very proper suit, with a shirt with one of those high collars that circled her neck. A red slash of lipstick and her hair piled up.

  Like a very hot librarian.

  Not that he was allowed to think she was hot anymore, so he was just going to have to come up with a different image.

  “I take it you heard,” Alex said.

  “I had about”—she pulled out her phone and looked down at the screen—“twenty-two calls on my way here. Luckily the first one was from Hana so I knew not to answer the rest. Though I’m forced to wonder why there wasn’t one from you.”

  “I swear Gardner told me about five minutes ago. I wanted to tell you face-to-face, not over the phone.”

  “Can I see the pictures?”

  Alex sighed and opened his e-mail. Found the message marked urgent from Gardner and clicked on the link. He swung the laptop around as the browser opened. Maggie walked over, studied the images.

  Her lips thinned. “Fuck,” she muttered.

  “I think we’ve covered that part,” Lucas said. “So now we need to figure out what this means.”

  Maggie ignored him, looking instead at Alex. “Do you know where the pictures came from?”

  “Gardner’s looking into it.”

  “I didn’t see any press last night. Which means that someone had to be following me.”

  “I’m guessing Sutter was digging for dirt.”

  “That’s what I figure too.” She stared down at the pictures. “He really is a prick.”

  “I guess you’re feeling better about picking us, at least.”

  She nailed him with a stare. “Actually I’m feeling that I wished I’d gone to Harvard and done a Ph.D. in English literature or something and forgotten I ever knew anything about baseball.”

  Lucas made a sympathetic noise. “This sucks and the tabloid press can rot in hell, but we still have to deal with the situation. We’re trying to hold our numbers here, and there’ll be owners who aren’t too impressed that Alex waltzed in and seduced Tom’s daughter.” He glanced at Alex, then at Maggie. “For that matter, I can’t imagine that Tom is going to be too happy about it either.”

  Alex felt his stomach drop. Tom. He hadn’t even thought about him. Great. Another complication. They needed Tom on their side.

  “It’s none of their business,” Maggie said.

  “No,” Mal agreed. “But that never stopped anyone from having an opinion about something. Either they’re going to think that Alex is an evil bastard or they’re going to think that you’re screwing him to keep your place here at the Saints or they’re going to come up with some other equally crazy explanation.”

  “Then we’ll tell them that Alex and I are just friends.”

  “No one who looks at these pictures is going to believe that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “You’re not sleeping together?” Mal asked.

  “Not anymore,” Maggie said sharply.

  “Oh no,” Lucas said. “Nope. We can’t go with that. ‘We shagged a few times and moved on’ is not going to fly right now. Sorry, Maggie.”

  “I doubt there’s anything we can say that’s going to make a good impression, so why does it matter? We’ll make it clear that Alex and I are happy to work together and they shouldn’t care about anything else.

  “Shouldn’t but they wil
l,” Alex said. “Mal’s right about that. Though there is one interpretation that might swing them in our favor.”

  “Which is?”

  “We tell them we’re head over heels in love,” Alex said bluntly.

  * * *

  “Have you completely lost your mind?” Maggie demanded, staring at Alex. Did he think they were back in the nineteenth century? “Next thing you’re going to be telling me we should have a fake engagement.”

  “No, I don’t think we need to go that far, but I think we need everyone to believe that we’re together and we’re happy. The press love a good whirlwind romance.”

  Maggie looked at Lucas and Mal, hoping for some support. Surely one of them could see that this was perfectly crazy? But no, they were both watching Alex as though he’d just offered the perfect solution to the problem. “Why?”

  “Because anything else is complicated and we don’t have time for complicated.”

  “So lying is better than complicated?”

  “It’s a tiny white lie,” Alex said. “And it doesn’t have to be forever.”

  “So what, I dump you after the deal goes through?”

  “It would be better if you waited until the season got started … it won’t be news then,” Lucas said. “Someone else will have done something stupid and there’ll be a whole new scandal to get everyone talking.”

  Maggie threw up her hands. “The three of you are insane.”

  “Can you come up with another story? One guaranteed not to piss off any of the owners? Or do you want to spend our meetings with them explaining how you had a fling with Alex but everything’s just peachy now?” Mal asked.

  “This is not exactly the ideal situation but Alex’s idea is better than anything else I can think of,” Lucas added.

  “I think we buy Sutter some concrete boots and the problem goes away,” Maggie said, wishing she wasn’t joking. Damn Will Sutter and his bloody male ego. This wasn’t business, it was personal. He was trying to take both her and Alex down now that she’d said no to him.

  So. She could tell the truth and give Will the advantage, or she could agree to Alex’s nonsense and they could win the bid and then she could ignore Sutter and put Alex safely back in the boss box where he belonged.