Not That Kind of Guy

by ANDIE J. CHRISTOPHER

  “It was really stupid of me to ask.” She stood up and crossed over to the coatrack in the corner of the room, anything not to have to face him.

  “I want to go. With you.”

  She turned around, and he smiled at her. Tingles hit her from her hairline to her toes. “Why?”

  He looked down and then and up under his way-long lashes. “You haven’t figured it out?”

  “Figured what out?” Yeah, she’d seen the way he looked at her, and she was flattered. But that didn’t mean anything. She’d enjoyed the feeling that someone other than Chris could find her attractive for the whole summer, and she’d been prepared to leave it at that—for the sake of her professional reputation.

  “I like you, Bridget.”

  Gah! She liked the way he said her name, the way it sounded like he rolled it around in his mouth first like expensive wine. But she didn’t want him to think that her asking him would have any impact on the glowing recommendation that she planned to give him.

  “Nothing has to happen.”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and smirked at her. “What if I’m hoping that something will happen?”

  “This has nothing to do with your internship.”

  “My internship that’s over now?” He moved closer to her, and she shifted on her feet. “Now that I don’t have any cases to work on.” He’d gotten in her space a lot more that morning than he had in the past. Like now that the internship was well and truly over, the invisible tether holding them apart had snapped, that magnetic polarity that had them moving away from each other had suddenly reversed.

  “This would just be a favor,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I think you and I both know that it’s more than that.”

  She echoed his motion, shaking her head. Some strands of hair came loose from where they were piled on her head. He smoothed one behind her ear, and she fought with all she had not to lean into his touch. They needed ground rules—and no more touching than necessary needed to be one of those rules.

  “I shouldn’t . . .” Even though he no longer worked for her as of this morning—she grimaced thinking about how the case had ended—it wouldn’t look good for them to run off and have a weekend of debauchery as soon as it wasn’t technically against office policy to do so. “It could look bad.”

  He sighed. “The way I see it, we’re both consenting adults. I no longer work for you. And I think you’re attracted to me, too.”

  She couldn’t deny it, and he wouldn’t believe her if she did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BY THE TIME SHE met Matt at the airport, Bridget had settled down. She’d had more than an hour and a half to reconsider her rash decision to ask Matt to be her date to the weekend’s festivities. She’d chewed so long on the impulse to text him and tell him to stay that she arrived at the airport before working up the courage to send the text. But something about the flush that spread across her skin when he’d looked at her and told her that this was not a favor stopped her.

  He was waiting right in front of the curbside check-in. She got out of the car, and he grabbed her suitcase from the driver before she had a chance to.

  Their hands brushed as she went for the bag’s handle, and some electricity that had always been there but that she’d successfully not acknowledged ran up her arm and heated parts of her that had been cold for way, way too long. Until this summer.

  And then she saw him. He looked . . . different somehow. He wasn’t dressed differently from how he’d dressed at the office. The collar of his crisp white shirt was open, and his sleeves were rolled up. But otherwise, nothing had changed about his outward appearance. He was still drop-dead handsome.

  It was something about the gleam in his eye, the smirk that made his mouth look lush and sexy, like she wanted to bite his bottom lip while she finally got to touch the silky black strands of his hair. It was as though her body knew that there were no longer any ethical or professional obligations keeping her from doing all the things to him that she hadn’t let herself think about while she was his boss.

  “You don’t have to get that for me.” Him taking her bag made this feel too much like a date. She needed to make this less like a date before she did something crazy like climb him like a tree and kiss him until they both suffocated on lust.

  She’d never been this way before. Not with Chris, and not with any of the guys she’d had crushes on while Chris was acting like a dingus. Because if she’d felt this kind of way about someone during the decade that Chris had taken a romantic evening to mean a steak house and half-hearted thrashing on top of her, perhaps she wouldn’t have stayed with him so long. She might have given in.

  And Matt didn’t just take her bag; he handed it to another dude and gave him stern instructions about its handling.

  “He’s probably just going to give it to our baggage handler,” Bridget explained, though she didn’t know why she needed to. “I mean, once he tags it.”

  Matt turned to her and smiled again in a way that told her she wasn’t the boss of him anymore—and she liked it. It didn’t help the tree-climbing instinct at all. “He’s bringing it to my plane.” He shrugged. “Well, my family’s plane. He is our baggage handler.”

  The fuck?

  Matt didn’t react at all to the way her jaw must be dragging on the floor. He just moved her purse to the top of her shoulder from where it had slipped down the crook of her elbow. And he took his time doing it. His lips parted and she could smell his minty breath as he caressed her arm through her clothes. Bridget had to lock her knees to keep from leaning into him.

  She had to remind herself that this was a fake date. She had to be strong. And she could absolutely not, under any circumstances, lean into the nape of his neck and sniff him. Highly inappropriate would not be even close to the way to describe that.

  “You ready?” He pulled back, and she could just tell that he knew she’d turned the corner from her carefully cultivated indifference of how handsome he was to something more. He took her elbow and ushered her into the airport, bypassing the long ticket lines, and through some sort of expedited security check. They shuttled to an area where Bridget had never been—the hangar where private jets stood by—and up to the tiniest jet she’d ever seen.

  Fear seized her. Although it looked to be in good repair, it really wasn’t that much bigger than a propeller plane. Like the prop planes that went down in fiery conflagrations in the middle of suburban neighborhoods all the flipping time.

  “Ouch.” Matt’s word snapped her out of her imaginary scenario—the one where she and Matt’s corpses decorated someone’s trees in Nebraska. She looked to see that she’d made a white-knuckled grab for Matt’s arm.

  “Sorry.” She grimaced. “I can’t . . .”

  “Get on the plane?” Matt guessed at her anxiety, though it wasn’t a hard guess. God, he probably thought she was such a plebe. He’d probably never flown commercial, and here he was. He was fine, not a scatter of limbs across a cornfield somewhere. “Listen, if you want to fly commercial, we can. We’ll just get there at the same time as your family if we fly this way.”

  “You did this for me?” It touched something in her that he would be so thoughtful. Chris had never been thoughtful, but she needed to stop comparing him to Chris or anyone else. Despite her dogged resistance to his charms, there was really no one like Matt.

  That’s what made him so dangerous. He was nothing but her intern—her former intern now—and she couldn’t have a crush on him. She was too old for him, anyway. Given that he had a private plane at his disposal, models in Ibiza were probably more his thing.

  Shame coated her as she recalled her late-night Google searches of Matt Kido. Although she was older than him by half a decade, he was definitely more experienced than her in the dating sphere. Models, actresses, American aristocrats, all numbered among his exes according to the Int
ernet. Naomi Chapin, his childhood friend and law school classmate, had been only the most recent.

  And even though it didn’t seem like he’d dated anyone over the summer, now that he was free and going back to school, the merry-go-round of women who were more attractive, and probably much nicer than Bridget, would likely resume.

  He was probably just being thoughtful in hopes that she’d write him a good recommendation to whichever circuit court judge he was going to clerk with after school. That’s the one thing she had over the circles he usually ran with—a recommendation from her wouldn’t be tainted with cronyism.

  “Should we turn around and go back to the airport?” Matt bent his knees slightly so that they were eye to eye. “It’s been a while since I’ve flown commercial, and it would probably be good for me to remember why I hate it.”

  Bridget shook her head. “No, I trust you.”

  To her chagrin, it was true. She trusted him when he said it was safe to fly with him. It wouldn’t do very well for him to kill his boss.

  * * *

  • • •

  MATT HAD MADE AN error in judgment. He’d been trying to impress Bridget when he arranged for the family’s private jet to take them to Vegas instead of to meet his parents at their beach house in Martha’s Vineyard for a holiday before heading back to school.

  His mother had had questions about all of it. Is this about a girl? When can we meet her? Who is her family? She’s not another model, is she? Why won’t you give Naomi a second chance?

  He could probably have avoided his mother’s questions by saying that it was his boss at the state’s attorney’s office. Although he knew that his mother would love Bridget if she got to know her, his mother should think of her as a dowdy bureaucrat until Matt convinced Bridget to be his girlfriend and introduced them properly.

  Still, he’d had to suffer through a good five minutes of lecturing about not doing anything that would look bad for the family while in Vegas. Matt shook his head.

  “What? Is something wrong with the plane?” Bridget’s voice came from behind him. She really was worried about riding in the small plane. He’d been flying private since he was in diapers, so it sort of rolled off him. And seeing Bridget afraid of something—anything—and being vulnerable endeared her to him even more. He’d seen her tough, angry, and disappointed. But afraid was something entirely new. He didn’t like it, but it gave him more of her, and he was thirsty for every swallow of her she’d let him have.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Matt said, trying to keep his tone reassuring. They entered the plane and the flight attendant showed them to their seats. Matt took the seat facing the back of the plane because he thought that Bridget would appreciate facing forward. That’s how she liked to face everything. “I was just thinking about what my mom said when I asked to use the plane.”

  “Was she mad?” Bridget sat down, and she really must be scared of flying because she let him buckle her in. She’d let him touch her more today than he had all summer. If this kept up, he wouldn’t be able to stop. One of these times he grabbed her bag or made sure she was steady and safe—like a goddamned gentleman—he was going to forget himself and kiss her.

  Since he still didn’t know whether she would slap him or kiss him back, he needed to not let that happen.

  “Nah, she was curious.”

  “About me?” Bridget’s eyes got big.

  Matt didn’t answer but handed her a glass of champagne. “Drink up.”

  “I haven’t had anything to eat. Fair warning, it will go straight to my head.”

  “Do you want water instead?” Matt wasn’t trying to get her drunk, even though he assumed that was part of the agenda for the weekend because—Vegas.

  He started to motion for the flight attendant, but Bridget said, “No. Champagne is good.”

  “And I asked them to get some food . . . just meat, cheese, and fruit for the flight.”

  Bridget took a sip, and a wry smirk twisted her lips. It made him want to kiss her. Well, everything made him want to kiss her. He would definitely get hard if she said something sarcastic right now. “You just think of everything, don’t you?”

  Yep, definitely hard. To hide it, he leaned forward so that he was in her space again. So he could smell a hint of the shampoo she’d used when she was all naked and soapy in the shower not that long ago. “It’s about time you noticed.”

  She leaned forward to meet him, and their mouths were so close that he could taste her if he turned his head a little bit. They just stayed there for a long moment, and the chemistry that had been fucking with him for months settled over her. He could see it in the glassy quality of her gaze, feel it in the speed of the tufts of champagne-scented breath against his cheek.

  But he couldn’t do the last thing. She had to come to him. Despite the fact that she thought it was inappropriate, in that moment he knew she was as affected by him as he was by her. But he knew her well enough that crossing the professional boundary that she imagined between them had to be her decision. If he kissed her right now, the wall would go back up—even more fortified than it had been before.

  So, he waited. And breathed in the scent of her—the one he’d only had hints of all summer. He wished for her mouth until the boundaries of propriety snapped and he had to pull back for fear of seeming like even more of a perv than he actually was.

  He leaned back in his seat. “The flight attendant will be out with food after we’re at altitude.” He winked at her, trying to seem much cooler than he actually felt. He checked his watch. “By the way, my internship is officially officially over . . . right now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE’D ALMOST KISSED HIM. And he totally would have kissed her back. Until today, she’d thought he’d been flirting with her so that he could look good for a clerkship or to rehabilitate his family’s image or because he was just a really nice guy.

  But he wanted her. Her mind flipped through the possible scenarios for this weekend. If they drank together—which they would—they were going to make out at the very least. God, she missed making out. It had always been high on her list of favorite things to do, even though Chris had always seemed to tolerate it in favor of getting to his favorite parts—the ones where he squirmed and grunted on top of her and she pretended to come more than half the time.

  All while lying to herself that she was lucky that someone like him wanted to be with her. And to give herself some credit, being with Chris had made her feel safe and secure when everything in her life had fallen apart.

  Chris had been safe, until he wasn’t.

  Matt Kido was anything but safe. He lived in a world of private jets with champagne that probably cost more than one of her car payments. He probably owned a tuxedo. Maybe he’d gone to boarding school, joined a secret society, and had all variety of indiscretions covered up.

  She didn’t know because part of her had always been too afraid to ask. She’d been too intrigued by him and hadn’t wanted to scratch the surface for fear of figuring out that he really was too good for her.

  That had been another advantage of her relationship with Chris—he’d been inside her heart from the start and had never put her life in danger. He fit inside everything she’d thought she’d wanted. Someone like Matt could change the whole game.

  It wasn’t like that, though, was it? He was doing her a solid because, for some reason unknown to her, he liked her. Maybe he had a thing for authority figures and wanted to sleep with her. And Vegas represented an opportunity to get that over with. She was probably an item on his summer checklist. That was all.

  Still, it would be better to get everything on the table beforehand. “Why are you doing all this for me?”

  While she’d been ruminating, he’d politely taken out his phone, leaving her to her thoughts. He looked up at her words. “All what?”

  �
�Coming with me.” She motioned around with the glass of liquid courage he’d so kindly provided. “The private jet, the champagne . . .” She hesitated. “That almost-kissing-me thing that you did just a second ago.”

  He smiled at her, and she was dumbstruck again. He had to stop doing that. His shit-eating grin with all those straight white teeth was going to be the death of her. “I didn’t almost kiss you. You almost kissed me.”

  She would have scoffed at him if he hadn’t been totally right. It wasn’t like she couldn’t have pulled back at any time. So she’d just ignore it and move on. “And everything else?”

  His smile faded. “To repay you.”

  “For what?” She was too surprised to mince her words—not that she could ever do that around Matt. “Being a bitch to you all summer?”

  “I think I was the one who was your bitch.” Something in the way he looked her up and down told her that their previous power dynamic—her being the boss—was as over as his internship.

  And now she had to find out if he’d liked that experience enough to want to hook up with her. “So none of this actually makes sense.”

  “You gave me a break from being a cog in my parents’ respective machines.”

  None of this made sense. He was a golden boy; everything he could ever want could belong to him with nothing more than a few phone calls. Why would he need a break from that? “Explain.”

  He scrubbed a hand through his hair, sending a few strands every which way. She wanted to smooth them, but that wasn’t going to happen. It looked so silky, though. She bit her lip and balled her free hand into a fist.

  “I love my parents, okay?”

  Bridget nodded. She certainly understood loving her parents but not wanting her whole life tied up in their bullshit.

  “But they want me to live a certain way.” He grimaced. “Being a part of my family comes with certain responsibilities.”