“Do you have somewhere else you’d rather be?” I asked in the most saccharine-sweet voice I could muster. “I thought you had cleared your day, Mr. Sterling.”
I nodded to the bookstore clerk as we walked through the entrance toward the back of the store, where I knew they kept their music section. Hunting for vintage music arrangements was one of my favorite past times, and the old bookstores in Cambridge often had the best caches. Brandon followed me back with a loud harrumph. He had been game for the first three shops we’d entered, contending himself by perusing the science fiction and engineering sections, even purchasing a few books he claimed would help with one of his projects on the roof. But after two hours, he had clearly met his limit of browsing bookstores.
“Red,” he said as he came to stand beside me, leaning against the massive wooden bin of sheet music as if in pain. “You’ve made your point. My turn, okay?”
I turned triumphantly. “Ha! Okay, but you’re not allowed to choose something you think I’d like. I just dragged you to every bookshop in Harvard Square, so now you have to take me somewhere equally selfish.”
“Thank God,” he breathed, grabbing my hand and dragging me out of the shop so fast I barely had time to lay the music I’d taken out on the counter on my way out.
Once were back on the street, he called David, who promptly drove around the corner to pick us up.
“You packed your running stuff, right?” he asked as we slid into the backseat of the Mercedes.
I nodded. I figured I’d jog at his place on Sunday instead of swimming my normal two thousand meters.
“Good,” he said. “David, can you take us down to the river?”
Ten minutes later I made my second important discovery about Brandon that day: he was an exercise junkie. After changing in the car, we ended up at popular jogging route that bordered the edge of the Charles River, from Watertown all the way to downtown Boston. We both wore thin workout gear that wasn’t particularly suited to the chilly February air, although I wore Brandon’s sweatshirt over my regular indoor kit of a sports tank and leggings. Brandon jogged in place to keep himself warm given the fact that it was a clear twenty-seven degrees outside and he wore only a t-shirt and track pants.
“This is supposed to be fun?” I asked doubtfully, flapping the sweatshirt sleeves that hung over my hands like limp penguin wings. The hem fell just above my knees. Even with the added layer, I was freezing, and Brandon’s face was starting to resemble a cherry popsicle.
“Nothing feels better than endorphins, gorgeous. Well, except maybe you,” he said with a leer as he picked his knees up again and again. “All right, how far can you go? Two miles okay for you?”
I didn’t run much, but my swimming habit meant I had better endurance than most. I smirked. “How about this: first man down owes the other a foot massage when we get back tonight.”
“Ooh, a challenge, Ms. Crosby? You sure you know what you’re getting into?”
“You’ve got the legs, babe, but I’ve got the lung capacity,” I smarted as I reached to one side to stretch. “We’ll see how long you last.”
Forty minutes later, I was on my back again on the sheepskin rug, but this time in a decidedly less seductive fashion. I gasped for breath, waiting for the world over me to stop spinning while Brandon chuckled from the couch, removing his shoes before he knelt down to gently remove mine.
“You all right down there, Red?” he asked good-naturedly, all sign of early surliness gone in his current endorphin-fueled state. Plus, he had definitely won the bet.
“Why?” I asked some less sharply that I had intended due to the fact that I was still sucking in air like a wind fan. So much for lung capacity.
“Well, you just fell over like a one of the Three Stooges, and you’re the color of a tomato. I’m just checking in.”
“I’m a redhead,” I snapped from my place on the ground. “Yes, I flush when I’ve exerted myself in any way. Ha fucking ha.”
He leaned back with a smile, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “All right, all right. You seem like you’ve got it under control. You want a water or something? Maybe a B-12 shot? A physical therapist?”
Now that the ache in my side had started to subside, I managed to prop myself up on my elbows to glare at him. “I’m actually in decent shape, you know.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve got firsthand knowledge of it.” From his vantage point, he looked me up and down and gave me a lewd wink.
“No, really,” I insisted, ignoring his jibe and pushing off my hands further so I was fully sitting up. “I swim almost every day. I have the lung capacity of a porpoise.”
Brandon slid off the couch and squatted down next to me. “Sure, babe, sure,” he said as he patted me kindly on the leg. “It’s okay. You can admit you’re just a weakling compared to me.”
“I am not!” I squealed. Apparently Brandon wasn’t the only one who was competitive. “There is no way that was only two miles.” I yanked off his giant sweatshirt, which was suddenly stiflingly hot, and hurled it at him.
He only caught it and laughed, barely knocked off balance. “Skylar, relax. I might have hustled you. That was almost four and a half miles, and I run that route twice almost every day. Harvard Square and back just about every morning. Usually a little faster than that, too.”
“Faster than that?” I asked, dumbfounded. “What was our time?”
He smirked. “We were running an eight-minute mile for most of it. Actually, I’m pretty impressed you kept up at all.”
I flopped back into the rug, exhausted all over again by the number. No wonder I had felt like my sides were going to split.
“And you do it at that pace twice?” I asked as I smacked my palm on my forehead. I knew what he looked like naked. Of course he was in killer shape. “Ahh, you did hustle me, you big sneaky snake!”
Two big arms slipped under my back and knees. With one graceful movement, Brandon lifted my limp body from the ground and carried me toward the stairs. Too tired to argue, I wrapped my arms around his neck and laid my head on his shoulder.
“Shower time, babe,” he muttered into my ear in a more than suggestive tone. I was too tired to care, just grunted against his muscle.
“And after that,” he said as he tromped up the stairs, “I think you’ll owe me a foot massage.”
Lesson number three learned, I thought to myself as he carried me the rest of the way to dual-person shower in his master suite. Do NOT compete with Brandon Sterling. He played dirty.
~
Chapter 29
It was amazing how quickly I could fall into a rhythm with someone I hadn’t actually known for that long. While getting Patrick to commit his time to me with any sort of dependability had literally taken years, Brandon offered what little spare time he had freely. Our schedules meshed surprisingly well (probably because his assistant knew to schedule his appointments around my calendar. Despite the fact that we often didn’t get to see each other much more than the weekends and the occasional mid-week dinner, it didn’t seem to put any undue stress on our new relationship simply because we were both so busy. It also helped that we got in the habit of texting nearly constantly and talking on the phone almost every night before I fell asleep. It didn’t matter what he was doing—especially since Brandon was often occupied with work well past the time I usually went to bed—he always found time to, as he put it, “hear my voice.”
Before I knew it, nearly a month had passed, and I had spent three of the last four entire weekends at his house. Although we usually went out for dinner or some kind of event on Fridays to celebrate several days of not seeing each other, we generally spent the remainder of each weekend lounging around his house, snacking on the foodstuffs Ana left in his fridge and catching up on work when we weren’t rolling around in the bedroom. Or the couch. Or his office, come to think of it.
It was actually nice to do nothing together, I thought as we sprawled together on massive sectional in the top floor rec
room. I was comfortably ensconced in one corner of the couch, flipping through some of the files I’d taken home with me for the clinic, while Brandon sat perpendicular to me, keeping my socked feet securely his lap while he went through some things on his laptop. Occasionally he’d reach around absently to squeeze my toes or rub the inside of my arches with his thumbs. A few times (okay, several times) his touch ended with both of us naked and panting on the organic, alpaca-blend carpet, but most of the time it was just a sweet, absent gesture that let me know I wasn’t far from his thoughts.
Unshaven and unkempt, Brandon looked about as far from a CEO as possible in a faded t-shirt, a pair of baggy track pants, and his favorite, worn Red Sox hat on backwards. I was just as casual in my favorite yoga pants and my HLS sweatshirt. A rerun of Star Wars was playing on the massive HD screen mounted on the wall, but neither of us were paying much attention. After spending more time with Brandon in his own space, there were other small, seemingly inconsequential yet fascinating things I continued to learn about him. He was a closet comic book fanatic, with a reasonably massive collection stored in his office, and could tell me everything that was wrong with the second three Star Wars movies in terms of plot holes. He had a very mild nut allergy, but almond butter was his favorite food.
I couldn’t remember if I’d ever just lounged like this with Patrick—we’d always been out and about in New York together, big as he was on networking. Brandon was busier than most, so it was somewhat relieving to find that he was as content to be a homebody in his downtime as I was. On top of that, he clearly respected my ambition and the time it took me to accomplish all of my work in pursuit of those goals. He never asked me to delay a reading assignment or push a paper until Monday, nor did he seem upset if I had to stay late at the clinic. Unlike Patrick, who always resented any work that took my attention away from him, Brandon actually seemed happy to observe and support my work ethic.
“Did you want to go out tonight?” he asked, interrupting my train of thought as I leafed through a child custody case file.
“Huh? Oh, I don’t know. Is there anything going on?”
It was as natural a response as I had, one that I’d usually say when Jane asked me the same question on Saturday nights. As she and most of my friends pointed out, I wasn’t terribly social, so I usually depended on her or other classmates to steer me in the direction of the occasional social gathering when I decided to get out of the house.
Brandon frowned. “Like what? I just meant for dinner. Margie mentioned an opera premiere we could go to if you want, but we’d have to get kind of dressed up.” He looked pointedly at my sweats and reached around to clasp my ankle under my pants. “Or we could just shock the hell out of everyone and go like this if you want. Those yoga pants are working pretty good for you.”
I darted a confused look at him and set down my files on my lap. “Don’t you ever just go out?”
“What, like to a bar or something?”
I raised my eyebrows at his oblique response. “Um, yeah. Or a party. Maybe a show. What are your friends doing tonight, since I haven’t met any of them?”
Brandon pressed his lips together and looked away, a slight flush rising through his tan face. “Ummm…”
I set my file as and pulled my feet out of his grasp so I could crawl back across the couch and kneel next to him.
“Mr. Sterling,” I asked mockingly. “Don’t you have any friends?”
“Yes, I have friends,” he retorted a little too strongly. “They’re just…I really only see them at functions, you know. Or business meetings. Sometimes at the gym.”
“I don’t think those qualify as friends,” I informed him gently. “I think those are business acquaintances.”
“I have friends,” he insisted as he shut his laptop a little too harshly. “I do.”
“Name three,” I dared him. “Three people you hang out with randomly, no plans needed, or else who act as a confidante for you.”
“Fine,” he said, turning toward me to take on the challenge. His arm snaked along the back of the couch, and his finger snagged a stray lock of my hair to twirl as he talked. “No problem. Okay, there’s Mark Grove.”
“Mark Grove is fifty-seven years old and your business partner,” I replied in a clearly disbelieving voice. “He is not your friend. What do you guys do, grab scotches after work and compare notes on guerrilla trial tactics?”
I had seen Mark Grove when he poked his head into the intern room occasionally. He was a spare older man, a cutthroat securities attorney with a sharp eye that tended to rove around the room like a hawk’s and a mouth that was twice as dangerous. We had all sat up a little straight whenever he popped in, worked just a little faster.
“Fine, fine,” Brandon conceded. He drummed his fingers absently on the surface of the sofa, thinking. “Okay, yeah, Kieran! Kieran is definitely my friend. We talk on the phone about stuff that’s not related to work, plus she’s known me since I was a kid.”
I nodded, thinking of some of the conversations I’d overheard at the clinic. “Okay, I’ll give you that. Kieran is your friend. That’s one.”
He ran through a few more names that I quickly disqualified on the basis that he barely knew them, they were only work or charity associates. One he even made up. The joke soon faded when it became clear that Brandon lived in his own sort of bubble, a giant ivory tower of his own making.
“What about your friends from Dorchester?” I asked, trying to help him out. I no longer cared about winning. “You said you see them sometimes…”
“I didn’t really keep in touch that well with any of them.”
“Then what is all this—” I gestured to the bachelor-pad decor surrounding us— “for? Because as comfortable as this couch is, this room doesn’t exactly scream out for the ladies.”
He followed my hand gesture, then shrugged, slightly red-faced again. “I don’t know. I had some buddies from back home, but we sort of had a falling out. It’s…a long story with those guys. I had all of this stuff put in here a really long time ago when I first bought the place. I should probably have it redone.”
I glanced around at the various paraphernalia that looked like it would be more suited to a sports bar than the top floor of a mansion. It was a little juvenile, I thought, but there was obviously something more here than just wishful thinking.
I turned back to him. “I don’t know. I think anyone’s friends would probably like watching the Sox here.”
“Well, the TV does get a pretty good picture.” He gave me a shy grin that had my heart thrumming in response. “What about your friends, Red? What are they up to tonight, since you’re feeling social? It’s not like I’ve met any of them either.”
I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at him. Instead I leaned down to smack him a quick kiss on the mouth, quickly pulling away when he tried to turn it into something more. “I don’t know. Let’s see.”
I reached over to snag my phone off the coffee table and snuggled into the crook of his arm while I flipped through my text messages. There weren’t many; I probably had only a few more people that I could call real friends than him.
“Jane says she and her latest hottie are going to trivia night at Cleo’s,” I said, referencing the spot by HLS that so many of the law students frequented. “It’s a bar that—”
“I know what Cleo’s is, Red,” Brandon chafed. “I went to Harvard too, remember?” He leaned back to examine my face in faux horror. “Just how old do you think I am?”
I pulled my face into as serious an expression as I could muster. “I don’t know. It was pre-internet that you were there, right? Isn’t your fiftieth reunion a-coming, grandpa?”
“That’s it!”
Without further admonition, he tackled me into the massive sofa, tickling my sides mercilessly and making me laugh and cry for mercy all at once. Predictably, it ended with me pressed into the soft cushions under his big body while he clasped my face below his and pummeled my mouth wit
h short, vicious kisses that eventually turned into much longer, sensuous ones.
“Mmm,” I hummed into his mouth, luxuriating in the feel of his tongue and his touch. “We don’t have to go out, you know…”
“Don’t tempt me…” he said as he nibbled a path down my neck until he was thwarted by the high collar of my sweatshirt. His hands drifted down my sides until they clasped under my legs, and with a swift movement, he stood up and flipped me over his shoulder.
“Ah!” I yelped as I was suddenly hoofed out of the room and down the stairs to the bedroom.
“Come on, Red,” he said, giving me another quick smack on the butt that made me yelp again. “We’re going against our natural instincts toward hermitry.”
“Hermitry?”
He smirked and pinched me on the waist, causing me to yelp before dropping me on the bed. “Smart mouth,” he murmured with a quick kiss that almost had me begging to stay in for the night. “It’s a word. Let’s go win trivia night at Cleo’s.”
~
It took a little more time than originally planned, but after a quick romp in the sheets and another quickie in the shower, we finally managed to get ourselves to Cleo’s. Despite my constant teasing, Brandon had flatly refused to take the train, saying that if he was going to spend the evening drinking shitty beer, he could at least ride home drunk in his own car.
“Poor David,” I remarked as the Mercedes pulled away from the curb after dropping us there. “Does he ever get a day off?”
“Every Sunday plus overtime and three weeks vacation a year.” Brandon replied as he straightened the lines of his bomber jacket. He still looked more like a student than a CEO, dressed in stone-washed jeans, a gray Henley shirt that hugged his trim torso in all the right places, and the frayed bill of his Sox hat now curled around his handsome face.
He smiled down at me. “Don’t worry about him, Red. I pay him very well to keep the car up and drive me around for about an hour total most days. The rest of the time David gets to spend reading detective novels and Skyping with his grandkids. He’s pretty happy doing what he does.”
Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1) Page 30