He cut the power. Bit back his rising temper. Because that was damned insulting. Slowly, Knox said, “I don’t need to hustle a woman to get her into bed.”
“Then why are you?”
Maddening. Infuriating. Every bit as much as she was beautiful. Why was she so damn certain he had an ulterior motive for spoiling her? Had all her previous dates been jerks?
Knox took her hand. “Look, Madison, I had a great time with you. Cards on the table, it was one of the best dates I’ve had in a long time. On top of that, you’re beautiful in a totally different way from the stick-figure, fashion-obsessed types who fill these streets. So yeah, I want to sleep with you. But not until we get there. Two dates, five—whatever it takes.”
Jerking her hand away, she stabbed him in the chest with her index finger. “Then why the hard sell?”
“Because I had such a great fucking time with you!” Exasperated and probably just as pissed off now as she was, Knox shoved his hand through his hair. But he’d forgotten the sunglasses perched up there, and they flew right overboard. Great. “Yes, I wanted to impress you. To give you a date that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.” He threw an arm out toward the Lincoln Memorial as they drifted near it. “I thought I’d show you some iconic sights at sunset, and yeah, kiss you and then some. Just to put a smile on your face. Not to pool your panties on the deck.”
Those snapping eyes cooled, and then warmed again. Madison dipped her head a little, and gave him a winsome smile. “That’s actually very sweet.”
The abrupt turnaround surprised him. He sure didn’t mind, though. Nothing Knox hated more than a pouter. “Look, I can afford it. No more skin off my nose than if we grabbed pretzels off the food trucks on Constitution Avenue.” Time to reboot this date. “Can you wipe that chip off your shoulder about this boat and simply enjoy it?”
“Mostly. I believe that you just wanted to spoil me. Truly.” Then she waggled a hand side-to-side between them. “I’m still a little put off that you’d think this all would matter to me. That I’d be swept away by its grandeur.”
“Have you got some moral objection to flowers, crab cakes, and champagne?”
“Not at all.” Madison sank onto the curved white leather banquette behind the captain’s chair. “The thing is, whether you’re rich or poor shouldn’t define who you are. I don’t care to discover your bank balance. I want to know who you are on the inside.”
Knox flicked the switch to power the boat up again and steered them around to the Virginia side of Theodore Roosevelt Island. It was out of the traffic lane, so boats didn’t come there often. Then he dropped the anchor. Without speaking, Knox took her hand and led her back outside to the table with flowers. Poured them each a flute of champagne.
Out of ways to stall, Knox looked her square in the eyes. The ones that drew him in like a fly stuck in their honeyed color. “What if I told you that being rich absolutely defines who I am?”
Madison started to answer. Caught what had to be the This is no joke expression on his face and closed her mouth. She took another second to think through her answer. “I’d ask for an explanation.”
They had covered the whole favorites thing—music, movies, books—on their first date. Guess the second date was the belly-flop-into-the-deep-shit date. At least with Madison. Which was unusual. Sure, people asked him how he got rich. But nobody ever asked Knox why being rich mattered to him. Of course, everything with Madison seemed to be a little unusual.
“Well, I grew up poor. Really poor. School lunches were my only meal of the day on the really bad weeks. My mom worked, all the time. But having me when she was just a teenager kept her from college, and kept her from getting a job that would let her get ahead. I was the scholarship kid who got hand-me-down clothes from my friends’ parents.”
Madison laid a soft hand right above his watch. His Breitling, a four-thousand-dollar watch that probably didn’t impress her even the slightest. “My mom’s a bush doctor. Her patients rarely paid in cash. Lots of it was the barter system. Food, supplies for whatever house we rented that month, and sometimes hand-me-down clothes. Looks like we’ve got more in common than we realized.”
“Guess so.” Weird, sharing that with somebody. Knox had spent the first half of his life being ridiculed for being poor, and the second half of his life doing everything possible to expunge the memory of those days. It was rare he thought about it, let alone mentioned it. “Although I prefer our mutual passion for pepperoni and pineapple pizza.”
“So if you started out with no money, you see why it doesn’t matter.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. That’s exactly why it matters more than anything. I can’t go back to those days. Every decision I make is based on whether or not it’ll be profitable. I started working back in high school. Not to make cash to take dates to the movies, or buy trendy sneakers. I did it to help my mom with the rent and the groceries. A teenage boy running his ass off on a soccer team eats twice as much.”
Madison took his hand. The soft weight made it a little easier to share the rarely told story. She curled her fingertips just beneath the edge of his palm. Knox looked down at their paired hands. Her paleness contrasted sharply against his summer tan. It made him think of her probably being the same creamy shade over her entire body. It made him think of how badly he wanted to taste that creaminess for himself. Everywhere.
“What did you do?” she asked in a quiet voice.
He appreciated the small break she’d given him before leading him back on track. “Tutored the basketball team and the football team. Wrote more than a few papers for slackers who didn’t want to be bothered to do it themselves.”
“You cheated?”
He could’ve easily stolen from his über-wealthy classmates and pawned it all. He’d been approached more than once to move drugs, as his spindly size back then would have kept him under any cop’s radar. There’d been other options open, but Knox had made sure to choose the one that exercised his brain. And hurt the fewest. It eased his guilt, as did paying for groceries every week.
“I didn’t cheat. I helped others cheat. Never more than once, and never at my school. I didn’t hit my growth spurt until senior year, so I was too little to make good money on construction. I had to work with the only asset I had: my brain. My mom already worked two jobs to keep a roof over our heads. I couldn’t just sit back and watch her work herself to death.” Knox gave his head a hard, swift shake. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to drop all that on you.”
“You adore your mom, don’t you?”
“I owe her everything. She gave up her life for me. Because she wanted me. Now I work hard to pay her back. Bought her a house. Send her anyplace she wants to go whenever the fancy strikes her.” Shit. He’d pretty much snapped those words out like pellets from a paintball gun. Knox took a deep breath. “When I was in college I wrote a hacker’s guide to a popular video game. It sold big. Still does, to this day. You know what I did with my first check from that? I took Mom to a salon. It was the first haircut she hadn’t given herself since I was born.”
Tears balanced along Madison’s long lashes. She lunged for the napkin on the table. “Damn it, Knox, that’s just heartbreaking.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for your life story. I’m touched, is all. I understand why you don’t want to go back to being poor.” She sniffled. Dabbed beneath her eyes in that weird way women had instead of just wiping at the wetness like a guy. “So you helped a whole bunch of people cheat on a video game.”
Damn, but she pushed his buttons. Knox grinned. “You’re a hard-ass, aren’t you?”
“Just keeping the facts straight.” Madison tucked her feet up beneath her on the cushions. “Then what happened?”
Lots of late nights banging his head against the wall. Lots of forays down avenues that got him nowhere. Until a professor at MIT told him to stop trying to think like everyone else, and think about what interested him. To have fun with the idea,
the process. That sent him down a whole different path.
“I discovered a flair for making things that people don’t even realize they need. High-end widgets and designs that bigger companies pay for hand over fist. I find something that interests me, figure out how to make the next leap with it, and start a company. When I get bored, I sell it off to a bigger fish and move on to something new. Because when I’m bored, my brain might as well be a stagnant pond. Nothing moves.” He tapped his temple. “The moneymaker’s in here, and it has to stay active to make all the money.”
An interviewer went gaga for that phrase once, so Knox tended to use it whenever asked about his business-hopping. It saved him from admitting the rest of the truth. The nagging fear that if he ever got complacent and stopped constantly trying to come up with something better, he might lose the ability for good.
Madison gaped at him. “You sell the whole thing? Lock, stock, and barrel?”
“I keep the patents, of course. But yeah—once it is up and running, the responsibility and day-to-day repetition bores me senseless. Starting companies and then selling them off is a well-established practice, and a particularly lucrative one. In fact, I’m toying with the idea of selling my current company. No new money left there. Time to upgrade to a newer, more profitable…something. I’m not sure what yet. That’s the fun part, for me.”
“Forget the fun.” She scrambled to her knees. “What about all the people?”
“What people?”
“Your employees.”
It was his company, wasn’t it? A business, not a charity. “Depending on who I sell to, they’ll either have to relocate or exit with a generous severance package.”
“In this economy? Jobs aren’t easy to come by. Unless your severance is a full year’s salary, it isn’t enough. And people with families wouldn’t want to relocate. They’ve got a home, a support system, established here. You’re costing them jobs, uprooting them. How can you do that to people you’ve worked with, side by side?”
Now he was ticked again. How did she set him off so quickly? Madison had known him for, what—a total of six hours now they’d actually spent together? Where did she get off challenging his entrepreneurial spirit? Or his business acumen? Which, by the way, totally worked, as was evidenced by the freaking yacht beneath her very fine ass.
Knox scowled. Which was not an expression in his usual second-date rotation. Madison, however, was forcing him to toss out his playbook. “Nobody is laid off. Nobody. That’s a stipulation of the sale. Nonnegotiable, every time.” Which almost never happened in a standard takeover. Knox bent over backward to ensure that. He wasn’t a monster. Didn’t she see what a big deal that was?
“But you’re putting them in a situation that might force them to quit? Just to make a bigger profit for yourself?” she pressed.
His R&D team volleyed ideas back and forth with him. His assistant fought to make him stick to his overscheduled calendar. But being a millionaire several times over, as well as the head of the company, provided Knox with a barrier against most arguments.
These days the ACSs were the only ones who really challenged him on a personal level—because when you almost died alongside your closest friends, when the world gave you a stupid group nickname like Americani Calcio Sopravvissuti, it gave those friends the right to razz you forever. And now there was Madison, not willing to back down or give him a single inch. Sparring with her, working to make her see his side of it, the right side of it, was equal parts fun and frustrating.
“I’m not a human resources department. I refuse to feel guilty about a sound business decision.” Profit wasn’t evil. The spirit of capitalism practically founded America, after they got that whole religious freedom thing out of the way. Knox stood. Sitting down was suddenly too confining for the heat roiling through him. “I’m also not a cheapskate. They’re all treated very well, compensated while they’re with me at well above the market standard. Bottom line—business isn’t about emotions.”
Madison shoved to her feet, got right in his face as though they were about to go nine rounds in a boxing ring. “No, but it is about people.”
Caring about people didn’t keep a business running. It didn’t provide him with the profit and capital necessary to start a new business and employ more people. It didn’t sock away funds and stocks for retirement. All it did was complicate things. Good business both streamlined and removed all the complications standing in the way of profit. What a bleeding heart she had.
“Are you trying to start a labor union right under my nose? I’m telling you, I don’t run a sweatshop. I’m not a monster.” And he resented like hell her continuing implication that he was one.
Voice rising, her magnificent chest heaving beneath the low-cut neckline of her dress, Madison came at him again. “You’ve never given a second thought to the employees whose lives you turn upside down on a dime.”
Why’d she have to look so darn fuckable in the middle of a fight? Still, Knox didn’t even try to dial back the condescension in his voice. “Trust me, it’s for considerably more than a dime. I probably earned a thousand dimes while you spit out that last sentence.”
She couldn’t have looked less impressed if he told her that he had forty-seven cents saved in a piggy bank. Madison’s sneer made it clear she didn’t give a rat’s ass about how much money he made. “So literally everything you do is measured in how much it makes you?”
“Yeah. Although sometimes the measurement is in what it costs.” All he wanted to do was shut her up. One surefire way came to mind. “And I’m pretty sure this is gonna cost me a lot.” Giving in to impulse, Knox grabbed her by the arms, pulled her in fast and tight, and kissed her.
Chapter 4
One second, Madison was seeing red, frustrated at Knox’s obstinacy and refusal to even consider her points. The next, she was seeing a whole different kind of red. The red of velvet wallpaper in bordellos, of red satin sheets, of the pulsing color that painted the backs of your eyelids when your heart pumped too hard. The red of passion.
Because she didn’t care that they’d been in the middle of an argument. This thing happened when Knox touched her: suddenly nothing else mattered. So when he grabbed her arms and took her mouth, that was it. Their fight didn’t matter. The wind lifting the back of her skirt didn’t matter.
Madison had devoted her life to books. She knew the sweeping tales of passion from the symbolically sexy Psalm 45 in the Bible through Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters to D. H. Lawrence and the bodice rippers of the seventies. Madison respected those tales as art. She also acknowledged them as vastly overblown. Sex was fun. Satisfying. It couldn’t possibly reach the heights portrayed in literature, though.
Or so she’d thought until being kissed by Knox Davies. The man was a master. His lips firm, his tongue demanding as it swept inside on her first surprised gasp. The gasp that turned into a moan. Because he was doing these stroking motions with his tongue on top of hers that literally, literally made her panties wet.
He smelled of some undoubtedly expensive cologne that made her think of moss and woods after a summer rain. No, it made her think about rolling around on damp moss with Knox naked on top of her.
Every time his tongue moved along the sensitive inside of her cheek, or twined with the tip of her own tongue, little zaps of heat and electricity sparked from her mouth outward. Outward to every single erogenous zone she had, and some she hadn’t actually known about before today. Like pinpricks of bliss in the center of her palms, her nipples, the soles of her feet, all jolting to her core.
As close as they were, it wasn’t close enough. Madison hooked her left leg around his ankle. That brought their lower bodies together the same as the top half. So close that his massive erection throbbed against her belly. She let out a moan. That got him to let go of her arms and clamp on tight to her ass. Such big hands. Such a strong, rhythmic kneading of her muscles while the tips of his fingers settled along the lace between her thighs.
&
nbsp; Now Madison could grab on tight. She thrust her hands through that short, spiked-up brown hair. Tugged just hard enough to be sure he knew that she could give as good as she got from him. When she moaned, he wrenched his mouth down to nibble at the edge of her jaw.
Madison flexed her fingers. Pushed him down to her neck as she arched and offered it to him. The man latched on with vampiric interest. And God, Madison had never craved a hickey before the way she did now. Not just want—need. She needed him to suck harder, to lick faster, to burn up right along with her. To lose his slick control the same way every swipe of his tongue demolished hers.
Pulling back to look her in the eyes, he stated, “You really pissed me off.”
“Ditto.” Stating the obvious made her want more kisses. Heck, just feeling the motion of his pecs with every ragged breath he drew in made Madison want more of his kisses. So she pulled his head down. Locked lips hard and fast and wet. Which also made her think of Knox on top of her, naked. Another amazing wash of warmth down her front had Madison’s knees going just a little bit weak. Good thing he was holding on to her ass like his life depended on it.
Knox picked her up. Turned, set her on the table. Moved his hands up to bracket her hips. Which put space between them that Madison bitterly resented. “You barely know me. Why does it matter to you what I do? Why does it matter so much that you’d poke at me with all the intention of shoving a stick into a wasp’s nest?”
Uh, because it was fun? “You can take it.”
“Of course I can.”
Even though he’d stopped their fast-forward to sex with—of all things, conversation—Knox still kept his hands in motion, curving around her ass. Which kept Madison at a constant simmer of need as well.
Well, if he wanted to be all gentlemanly and talk some more before getting busy, she’d get straight to the point. “It’s a way of getting to know each other, isn’t it? By fighting? Fighting about what we believe in?”
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