by Nan Comargue
Leda shook her head. Where did that last thought come from? She certainly didn’t care where Zach spent his nights. Besides, he was too fastidious to forgo his own expensive domicile for a hotel or a date’s bed.
Argh, what do I care, anyway?
Maybe he preferred sex in the car, or the shower, or the kitchen—
Damn it. I have to stop this.
Leda actually succeeded in pulling her friend back a few steps before the assistant pointed at her with blunt fingernail and a frown. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I know you.”
Oh shit.
“I have one of those faces,” Leda said hastily. Sure she did, a face like a million generic plastic dolls stamped out of an industrial mold.
“No,” the woman said. “I know you from your picture. You’re the boss’s cousin.”
“Cousin by marriage.”
The assistant ignored the correction. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? You can go on in.” She waved in the direction of a well-lit hallway. “The boss won’t mind. His calendar is free all afternoon.”
“But you just said—”
“I say that to everyone,” the woman said, as if Leda weren’t one of the brighter students in her kindergarten class. “You’re family. That’s different.”
Now Rae had her hand around Leda’s and was leading them down the hallway. “Family. That’s a good one. This is so frigging hilarious!”
* * * *
“Mr. Zach? Your cousin’s on her way down to your office.”
The ‘mister’ was his old-fashioned assistant’s compromise between calling him ‘Mr. Benson’ and using his first name. It always made him feel like a kid. Perhaps that was why he didn’t hold back his surprised query in time.
“My cousin?”
“The Cabbage Patch Doll,” his assistant said matter-of-factly before banging the phone back down.
A moment later, Leda burst into his office with a strange woman by her side. Actually, the stranger burst in, towing Leda by the hand as if she were in danger of losing her.
The Cabbage Patch Doll. How fitting.
Something about the roundness of her eyes and the silkiness of her curls reminded him of the hideous dolls he’d glimpsed on the shelves of department stores, encased in cardboard boxes behind plastic sheeting.
Look, don’t touch, those plastic-screened boxes said, just as the cheerful mask Leda usually wore resisted closer contact.
But, God, he wanted to touch.
He wanted to sit her in his lap and devour her sweet lips. He wanted to lay her down on his office couch and eat out her pussy. Then he wanted to mount her and fuck her, all afternoon long.
There was nothing doll-like about her mouth, her nicely rounded body or her small pretty hands. How would they look wrapped around my cock? Jesus, his heart was pounding loud enough to be heard on the floor below. I’ve got to pull myself together.
Zach stood and walked around the desk to meet them.
“Who’s this?” he asked, looking to the stranger first.
Leda came forward slowly, like a recalcitrant student expecting discipline. “This is Rae. R-A-E.”
He smiled, though the name reminded him painfully of his jealousy. No, not the jealousy itself—he’d grown accustomed to living with those irrational reactions—but the fact that he’d displayed it so openly. For that, he couldn’t forgive himself.
“Of course. Short for Rachel,” Zach said. “I remember. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Rachel.”
The woman blinked at him as if trying hard to focus. Was she short-sighted and too vain to wear eyeglasses? Just the kind of odd friend Leda would pick up and now foist on him.
The friend visibly swallowed.
“I came to show you that I was a female,” she told him.
What the hell? The woman wasn’t merely odd. She was insane.
“Leda already corrected me.” He smiled again. He must be trying to set some kind of record. He rarely smiled in his office—or outside of it, for that matter. “Had I met you in person, I would have never made such a grievous error.”
The woman stared at him some more. She had to be at least a bit slow. Then she giggled. “You’re cute.”
Cute. Cute?
Dolls were cute. Kittens were cute. Zach was six feet one in his socks. He was a full-grown tiger. He even had the coloring to prove it.
“I’m sorry,” Leda said, moving closer to her friend. “We shouldn’t have disturbed you at work—”
“You always disturb me,” Zach said, leaning back against the edge of his desk. “It doesn’t matter where it is.”
This was what he’d wanted—Leda, on his turf, with his declaration still at the front of her mind. From her pink cheeks, she must have been thinking about his recent confession. Good. That meant she was thinking about everything else he’d said. Why should I be the only one suffering from graphically erotic images every time we are in the same room?
Those unwanted images shared between them might take them to bed and to the exorcism he’d decided was necessary to finally eradicate his obsession with her.
“And,” Leda said, still heroically trying to preserve a casual tone to the visit, “I’m sure you’re very busy, so we’ll get out of your hair now. Rae offered me a lift home.”
He’d managed to diagnose Rae’s problem in the past minute.
“Rae’s in no state to drive anyone anywhere,” he pointed out. “I’ll drive you both home.”
Relief passed over Leda’s open features. “Really? That’s awfully kind of you. Rae doesn’t live far from here.”
Neither do I.
“Not a problem,” said Zach.
Chapter Four
Leda felt awful. She’d barged into Zach’s office, interrupted his workday then landed him with the chore of taking care of both her and her tipsy friend.
Yet Zach seemed more amused than irritated by the predicament she’d foisted on him, if the half-smile he wore was any indication.
Rae was duly bundled into her condo building and the arms of her exasperated older sister, who also owned a unit there. Before she let go of Leda, Rae had pushed her flushed face against hers and whispered loudly. “He’s scary but hot! I would do him.”
Rae’s sister shook her head. “She’s such a lightweight. I keep telling her not to drink until after dinner so the effects don’t hit her until bedtime. Didn’t I tell you that, dumbo?”
Leda left the two of them squabbling.
Something about the two sisters’ interactions left her feeling bereft. As an only child, she’d never had to deal with the arguments and name-calling, but she’d also missed out on the arguments and name-calling, if that made any sense.
Rather than a sibling, she’d ended up with a so-called cousin who’d turned out to be a red-haired devil in an Armani suit.
“Something wrong?”
Zach’s voice coming from the driver’s seat startled her from her thoughts. “No, not really. Why?”
“You’re sighing a lot.”
He still sounded amused, but, now that Rae was gone, it sounded more like the typical Zach amusement, which was the bitter, mocking kind.
“I was thinking,” Leda tried to explain. “Don’t you ever wish you had a sibling or even a close relative your own age?”
“God, no!” His answer was explosive.
She turned to stare at him. “Why not?”
“You’re more than enough for me,” he told her, his voice edged. “I can’t imagine having to deal with more than one of you. Although, on the other hand, it might have its benefits—”
Ugh. Was he wishing she came in a multipack so he could—? Ugh!
“I meant real relatives,” Leda said peevishly. His bad attitude was catching. “Biological ones.”
“Then, no,” Zach said. “One of me is enough for the world, too.”
“Really? I’m surprised.” She was in full sarcastic flight now. “Think of what a half-dozen Zach Bensons could accomplish.
Forget Regina, Saskatchewan. You could take over the country, the world.”
“That’s why I said one of me is enough,” he said, glancing over at her, green eyes gleaming. “I have to leave some of the world for others to conquer. I prefer local affairs.”
The way he said those last words made her think she was one of those ‘local affairs’ he claimed to prefer.
“Why are we stopping at your house?” Leda asked suddenly, recognizing the streets they were passing through.
“We’re not stopping. We’re going there.”
“I don’t want to go there,” she protested.
“I warned you before,” said Zach, “about taking rides from me.”
“You offered!”
“And you accepted.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t accept this.”
He paused at a stop sign and turned to face her. “I’m going to my house, and I’m going to pick up an overnight bag. I wasn’t planning on making a four-hour round trip tonight. You don’t have to accept anything from me, but I’m going to keep offering.”
Leda hated how reasonable he sounded. By comparison, she’d probably sounded like an outraged Victorian virgin.
“That’s not fair,” she mumbled.
“What’s not fair is ten years of this endless torture,” he told her. “I never asked to feel this way about you.”
No, that was obvious from his tone. He didn’t seem to like or respect her. It must have been horrible to still keep wanting someone like that.
Despite herself, she wanted to help him.
Hell, he was right. She did always say yes. She wanted to be liked. All she liked about Zach was his chiseled face…and his sculpted body…and the way he moved. She’d never noticed the last one before, but now it seemed to be the focus of her attention whenever she glanced his way. He even drove sexily—fast but perfectly in control.
She swallowed. She was crazy. It was all Zach’s fault, putting wickedly graphic ideas into her head.
Leda waited to speak until Zach pulled in his driveway. “What do you want me to do?” She’d tried to sound casual about it, but he’d still ended up grinding the car’s gears awfully loudly. Somehow, that was the sexiest driving move of all.
* * * *
Inside the house, Leda asked for a glass of water. It came with a great deal of cursing and slamming of cupboard doors.
“Something wrong?” she asked, echoing his question from the car.
Zach turned. His expression was furious but also sheepish, as he handed her the filled glass.
“I’m angry with myself,” he told her.
“I gathered that.” She sipped her water then smiled. “If I’d thought for a second you were angry with me, I would have run out of here. You’ve got a temper. I’ve never seen it before.”
“You’ve seen it,” Zach said. “You probably didn’t recognize it, but it’s there. It’s often there where you’re concerned.”
Fascinating as that confession was, she returned to the previous topic. “Why are you angry with yourself?”
“For wasting time,” was his prompt response. “Tell me I couldn’t have simply told you about the crush ten years ago and you would have agreed to help.”
Leda smiled. ‘Help’ was a nice euphemism. He was enormously attractive. Add to that his intense focus on her, and how could she possibly resist ‘helping’?
He was attempting to exorcise a ten-year-old ghost that she felt obscurely guilty about breathing life into.
In spite of his more offensive traits, she did care about Zach. She could even like him. From those many magazine profiles, she knew that both he and his company gave back to the local community with scholarships and donations. He was good to his father and her aunt. He’d been kind to Rae when they’d invaded his office.
Plus, with Zach, she’d never have to worry about future fallout. He’d shown he was capable of bottling his emotions when he needed to. And she didn’t have any deep feelings of her own to worry about, not where Zach was concerned.
Ten years ago, the situation had been very different.
“I wouldn’t have entertained making out with a teenager a decade ago,” Leda informed him.
He leaned back against the kitchen counter and surveyed her from narrowed eyes. “Even though you were only twenty-four at the time?”
“Do you remember what eighteen-year-olds are like?” Leda asked. “No way would I have said yes back then.”
It was clear from his expression that he didn’t care for her answer. What did he think, that he’d somehow been different from every other boy that age? If anything, he’d been less likeable than the average adolescent—full of ambition and impatient with any task that didn’t move him toward his goals.
“I can’t believe I didn’t even try to make you like me back then.” Zach shook his bright head. “This could have been over a long time ago.”
Setting down the glass on the counter, Leda avoided his gaze. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I still don’t like you.” Okay, not quite the truth, but it wasn’t a full-out lie, either. What did I used to say as a teenager? I don’t like-like you. With Zach, one ‘like’ was dangerous enough.
Now he was positively glaring at her.
“So, why agree now?”
It was a reasonable question and she had a believable answer ready, one she’d been desperately trying to string together since she’d uttered that fateful question that still amounted to one word—yes.
“Look at you.” She waved a hand in front of her in a sweeping gesture. “You’re three inches taller and, I don’t know, twenty pounds heavier than you were at eighteen. You look like a man now. And you look like you would know what you were doing.”
Zach moved his mouth into a grim line. “Is that a challenge?”
“Is what a challenge?”
“That last thing you said,” he said. “Was that a way of making me come up to scratch?”
“What’s scratch?”
He didn’t explain. Instead, he walked up to her, caught her face in his hands and bent his head to hers.
The kiss was breathless—probably because Leda wasn’t breathing. All her oxygen had caught in her throat the moment he’d started walking toward her and it was still lodged there like a rock.
Zach’s lips were hard and warm and unsteady. It took him two tries to land on her mouth.
His clumsiness convinced her of the genuineness of the crush far better than anything he’d said or done.
As thrillingly illicit as it was for her to be kissing him, for him, this kiss had been ten years in the making. She wanted to make it worth the wait.
Zach lifted his head briefly, moving his gaze hectically over her face, before he angled his mouth back down over hers, hot and eager. When Leda parted her lips, he was swift to take up the invitation, entering her with his tongue.
He groaned when she sucked on it. The sound held a satisfyingly ragged note.
Power was a heady aphrodisiac, but as powerful as Zach was, she held him in her hands. It was such a turn-on to be his temptation, his one enduring weakness.
When Leda drew back, she did it slowly. Zach followed the movement, pressing swift, hungry kisses on her mouth until she pulled away completely.
The edge of the countertop caught her square in the butt and Zach was just as close in front. He was already aroused, just from kissing. She marveled at that. She was accustomed to older men—slower men.
But, ten years of waiting… How much slower can a man get?
Except, once he’d made his own prescription for an exorcism, he’d followed through with it swiftly enough.
Zach buried his lips in her wild hair. “You’re a voodoo doll,” he murmured. “You’ve cast a spell on me.”
Leda laughed, the sound was tender and intimate in the empty house.
“Just as long as you don’t try to stick pins in me,” she teased.
He spoke in her ear. “No, baby, I want to stick something else
in you.”
She’d walked right into that one.
She almost laughed again at his quick retort but that word—baby—stopped her. That ‘baby’ made it somehow real—what they were doing, what she was contemplating doing.
In a way, that ‘baby’ was the most exciting word he’d uttered since he’d first confessed the crush. The easiness, the casual intimacy of it, dissolved her remaining inhibitions.
This was real to him. He needed what she was giving him, and that made it real to her.
After that, it was easy to lean in and let him tell her in that sexy voice all the wicked and wild things he wanted to do to her.
It was so easy to pretend.
She told herself that it wasn’t Zach giving her those delicious shivery thrills, it was the voice—low, convincing and effortlessly masculine. She wanted to follow that voice wherever it might lead—to the bedroom, the couch, the kitchen floor.
Zach seemed to sense the change in her, because, when his head dipped a second time, it was with a confidence and purpose that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
He devoured her mouth in long draws, stroking her tongue with his, taking it into his mouth. She could feel the determination in him, the force. He wanted to own her, thinking he needed to conquer her in order to conquer his obsession, but Leda knew it was the opposite.
Power wasn’t in the taking. It was in the giving. But how could she teach him that with the imperfect tools of her hands, her body and her yielding lips?
She let her eyes shut as she reached for him, stroking his lean face, learning him by touch. Forced blindness made him a stranger again. The bristled line of his jaw was stubborn, even by feel alone. By contrast, the hollowed place behind his ear was soft and warm, like silk.
Zach drew away abruptly, capturing her hands in his and pulling them down.
Leda opened her eyes again. A quick, strong pulse was beating in his neck and her gaze was level with it. That pulse told her he was far more agitated than he’d let on.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered. “Did I do something wrong?”
He shook his head, his look rueful. “No. You’re doing everything right. If we go on like this, I won’t be able to control myself. I feel like a fucking teenager again.”