One Hot December (Mills & Boon Blaze) (Men at Work, Book 3)

by Tiffany Reisz

  Ian felt sick, physically ill, recounting the story to her. He’d wanted to spare her the details, protect her from the knowledge of what could have been a nightmare for her.

  “That’s very sweet, Ian. But...”

  “But?”

  “But you should have talked to me. You should have told me what was really going on instead of saying, ‘Sorry, sweetheart. You’re not good enough for me.’”

  “That’s not what I said. I said I’m your ‘superior’ because I am literally your ‘superior.’ That’s the word they use for a boss who oversees your work. Your ‘superior.’ I had the company lawyer telling me to find a reason to fire you, and I could have done it and you wouldn’t have had a legal leg to stand on. That’s too much power to have over the person you’re dating. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I wanted to protect you. That’s all. There’s my confession. Not a week goes by I don’t tell myself I made the wrong decision, although for the life of me, I don’t know what other choice I had.”

  “You could have told me what was happening. You could have told me the entire truth. You could have mentioned to me that someone was blackmailing you and threatening to ruin your dad’s political career. I would have been upset, but I also would have been sympathetic. And I would have handled it my own way without getting lawyers involved.”

  “What would you have done? Or do I not want to know?”

  “I would have told everyone at work you and I slept together.”

  “That’s how you would have handled it?”

  “You can only blackmail someone over a secret. If it’s not a secret, then they can’t blackmail you, right?”

  “True. Then again if you went around telling everyone at work about your sex life, you could have been fired for creating a hostile work environment.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Now you see what an untenable position I was in?” he asked. “There was no way to win for you or me or us, only better ways of losing. Like could I let them fire you when you’d done nothing wrong so we could cover our asses? Not a chance.”

  “Wow.” It was all Flash said and then she said nothing more for a long time. He looked at the menorah she’d made him and saw it for what it was—a peace offering. He wished he had something more to give her in return than an ugly story.

  “I know I was cold when I broke it off with you,” Ian said. “I know I was an ass. I know I was being insulting by telling you I was your superior.”

  “You said, ‘Someone like me can’t be involved with someone like you,’” she said.

  “I meant a boss with an employee. That’s all.”

  “I thought you meant...”

  “You thought I meant you weren’t good enough for me,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what I meant because it’s not what I think or what I feel. I wanted to talk to you about it, you know, after all the dust settled. But you’d already moved on and put it behind you. At least it seemed like you did.”

  “Yeah, well, Mom and I moved a ton when I was a kid. She’d get behind on the rent and we’d have to pack up the car and drive out in the middle of the night, start over somewhere new a week later. At first you come to a new town and try to make friends. Then you move and lose your friends. By the fifth and sixth town you know you’re going to move again so you might as well not make friends. I got very good at walking away and leaving people behind. It was a survival skill. I had to learn fast how to cut my losses. Rule number one—don’t get attached in the first place and then when you leave you won’t miss anything. Or anybody. I broke rule number one with you. I got attached. But I didn’t break rule number two.”

  “What’s rule number two?”

  “When you see that you’re losing, quit playing. I was losing you so I folded my cards and left the table. I don’t stay where I’m not wanted.”

  “You were wanted,” Ian whispered.

  She stood up but immediately sat down again, not on the bed but on the floor with her back to the wall and the menorah in the window to her right. The candlelight danced across her face. She’d never looked more lovely to him or young or small or vulnerable. In personality and presence, she was huge. Physically she was a shrimp. An incredibly sexy shrimp.

  “If I’d known you still wanted me...” she said, and paused.

  “What would you have done?”

  “I would have quit my job,” she said. “So we could have kept seeing each other without you getting into trouble or your dad. Or me.”

  “You did quit your job.”

  “Too late,” she said.

  “Flash, you know I’m sorry, right? About everything?”

  And he was sorry. After he broke it off with Flash he’d determined to put the whole thing behind him. He’d let his father set him up on blind dates with preapproved women, mostly the daughters of friends and business colleagues. Ian had done it; he’d gone out with his father’s choices. Every last woman he went out with on these father-ordained blind dates had been elegant, sophisticated, with long hair, understated makeup, no tattoos and no piercings other than the earlobes. They were all in respectable lines of work—one professor at a Catholic college, one doctor of internal medicine, one financial lawyer who sat on the board of one of Dad’s favorite charities. All wonderful women—smart, attractive and accomplished. When his father demanded to know why Ian hadn’t asked any of them out on a second date, all Ian had said was, Sorry, she’s just not my type, when what he meant was, I’m not over Flash and I don’t know if I ever will be.

  “I regret it,” Ian said when Flash didn’t say anything to his apology. “And I’m not proud of myself. As much as my father loves me and I love him, there was a damn good chance he’d fire me if he found out what was going on. I’d not only slept with an employee, but I’d gotten caught sleeping with an employee. I didn’t want you to lose your job. I didn’t want me to lose my father’s respect.” Ian rubbed his face and groaned before dropping his hands to his knees and meeting her eyes again. “I made the wrong choice by not telling you the truth. It was a weak thing to do and I don’t like thinking of myself as a weak man. I wanted to beat Haggerty for threatening to do that to me, to us. Literally physically beat the shit out of him so much it scared me. I scared me. My feelings scared me. So I...” He shrugged.

  “You cut your losses.”

  “That’s what I thought I was doing,” he said. “Cutting my losses. I lost too much when I lost you. And when you quit work and walked out of the building, it felt like I was about to lose something I couldn’t live without.”

  “Dammit, Ian, I wish you’d told me all of this back then instead of keeping it from me,” she said.

  “I do, too,” he said. “Can you forgive me?”

  It felt like an eternity passed before she finally answered him.

  “Yeah, I can forgive you.”

  “I don’t deserve it. You’re a better person than I am.”

  “I know,” she said, the tiniest hint of a smile on her mouth.

  “I want to be with you,” he said. “In any way you’ll let me be with you. If you want to have sex—just sex—I can live with that. It’s not what I want but if it makes you happy, if it makes up for what I did, I’ll do it.”

  “What do you want from me? And don’t say you want to be my friend. We both know that’s not it.”

  “I want you. As much of you as you are willing to give me. I can’t deal with watching you walk out of my life again. You did it yesterday and I lasted three seconds before I was chasing you across the parking lot. You did it last night and I lasted two seconds before I was running to the garage to stop you. I screwed up last time. I’m not going to screw up this time. Please tell me you’ll give me another chance, Flash. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  “I’m here,” she said. �
��I drove to the top of a volcano that’s covered in two feet of snow to give you a gift I made with my own hands today. Did I mention the volcano part?” She turned to point at the top of Mount Hood, its snowy peak glowing a red and sunset gold in the window.

  “The volcano thing makes you nervous, doesn’t it?”

  “You make me nervous,” she said, turning away from the window to meet his eyes.

  “I make you nervous? Me? Ian Asher makes Flash Redding nervous? That’s like saying David made Goliath nervous.”

  “David killed Goliath,” she said.

  “But David didn’t make Goliath nervous.”

  “If Goliath were smart, he would have been nervous,” she said. “I’m smart enough to be nervous.”

  She raised her chin and looked him hard in the eyes, daring him to take this where he knew they both wanted it to go.

  “Tell me why I make you nervous,” he said. The time for questions was over. Orders only.

  “Because I have very strong feelings for you,” she said.

  “I have strong feelings for you, too.”

  “Anger? Fear? The usual dark-side stuff?” she asked.

  “Attraction, fascination, adoration, affection, erection.”

  “Is ‘erection’ an emotion?” she asked.

  “It’s definitely a feeling.”

  “What’s it feel like?” she asked, walking right into his answer, which he knew she did on purpose, because she wanted this as much as he did.

  “Come here and find out for yourself.”

  5

  FLASH GAVE HIM a long look and didn’t speak. They were in a standoff and he’d just fired the first shot. Now it was her move.

  She started to stand and Ian shook his head.

  “You know better than that,” he said.

  Flash lowered herself back to the floor. She didn’t move again, not for a few seconds. Stubborn girl, he knew she wanted it as much as he did. And she knew he knew, which was why she took her own sweet time obeying him.

  Not that he minded. He could wait. Luckily he didn’t have to wait long. Flash slowly tipped forward and came up onto her hands and knees. She crawled four feet from the wall to the end of his bed. Every muscle in his body went taut at the sight of this invincible woman on her knees in front of him. His chest heaved as she knelt between his thighs and his blood rushed and burned. She hadn’t even touched him yet.

  This time he made her wait, made her sit there while he took her chin in his hand and turned her face left and right and then finally up to meet his eyes.

  “So beautiful,” he said. “I like the nose stud.” He tapped the end of her nose to make her smile.

  “Thank you,” she said. No sarcasm. No talking back. She laid her head on his thigh and he couldn’t help but feel that was exactly where it belonged.

  “I love the way your hair looks after you take your welding helmet off. Sometimes you spike your hair up on purpose. But that’s when it’s spiked up just because it’s sweaty and out of control. It looks like you’ve just been fucked, long and hard. I like that image in my head.”

  “Me being fucked long and hard?”

  “Me. Fucking you. Long and hard,” he said.

  “I like that image, too.”

  With his hand still on her chin, he traced the outline of her lips with his thumb. She had full soft kissable lips, the kind of lips a man dreams of seeing wrapped around his cock morning, noon and night. Their first and only night together he’d made her suck him off the second they were inside the door of his Pearl District apartment. He’d been leaning back against his own front door, his hands twisted in her hair, and his cock down her throat. And the entire city of Portland lay before him outside his sky rise window that looked down onto the Columbia River. It felt like they were putting on a show for the town. They’d made it a damn good show.

  Ian pushed his thumb past her lips and into her mouth, resting the pad on top of her tongue.

  “I remember this mouth,” he said softly. “I remember how it felt on my cock. I remember this tongue licking me. You wanted it even more than I did. I didn’t even have to tell you twice to get on your knees. I kissed you, whispered, ‘Suck me off,’ in your ear and you hit your knees so fast I thought you saw someone with a gun outside the window.”

  She couldn’t laugh with his thumb in her mouth holding her tongue down, but he felt her body shiver with the suppressed chuckle.

  “You moaned when I put my hand on the back of your head,” he said, lightly fucking her mouth now with his thumb. “I’d never had a woman moan with pleasure while she was going down on me. But you did. That’s when I knew you and I would get along just fine...wouldn’t we?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. Her dark lashes, heavy and thick with black mascara and eyeliner, fluttered on her cheeks. The softest moan escaped the back of her throat.

  “You want me,” Ian said. “You want my cock.”

  She nodded again, eyes still closed. He stroked her tongue again with the pad of his thumb. Soft and wet and warm, he needed that tongue on his body.

  “Suck me,” he said. “But don’t make me come yet. I’m saving that for later.”

  He pulled his thumb from her mouth and leaned back on the bed on his hands. Flash didn’t hesitate one second, not that he expected her to. She unbuttoned his jeans with eager, dexterous fingers, pulled the zipper down carefully and lifted his T-shirt to press a long hot kiss onto his lower stomach. Ian wrapped his feet around her thighs to trap her body between his legs.

  Ian didn’t allow himself to make any sounds when she put his cock into her mouth. He’d make her work for it before he rewarded her. Oh, but he could have groaned when she sucked him deep into her hot mouth. He’d thought of this a thousand times since their one night together. He’d dreamed about it and woken up hard. He’d even come in his sleep once while dreaming about Flash sucking his cock, something he hadn’t done since he was a teenage boy. He dug his fingers deep into the sheets of his bed to keep himself from coming immediately into her mouth. For six months he’d ached to have this again. Six months was a very long time to go between the two sexiest blow jobs of his life.

  Flash touched him while she sucked him like she did last time. She seemed particularly fond of his stomach and the bottom of his rib cage, which she tickled and traced with her fingertips. She loved his body and he knew it because she’d told him that night not only in words but with her every hungry touch. He’d held her down onto the bed by her wrists and she’d pouted because she couldn’t touch him like that. Eight thick inches of cock inside her and still she’d wanted more of him. He’d laughed and called her greedy. She’d said, “With me it’s all or nothing, Ian. Give it all to me.” God, he’d wanted to give her all of him. Instead he’d given her nothing and he bitterly regretted it.

  No more regrets. Not after tonight.

  Ian lifted his hips with small pulses, thrusting gently in and out of her mouth. Everything in his body from the waist down felt so tight it could pop, like a violin string wound too many times around the peg. He leaned back on his elbows to ease the pressure, but Flash was relentless, drawing him into her mouth again and again, sucking hard, licking harder. Every time she moaned he felt the vibrations all through his body from her throat to his.

  A hot red flush burned across his chest. The room felt a million degrees and then some. Blood pounded in his ears. His vision swam as he looked up at the ceiling where the north wall met the south wall in a triangle. Dizzy with desire, he looked down the length of his body at Flash and watched her mouth moving up and down his cock with a look of bliss on her face. Mistake. Big mistake.

  “Stop,” Ian said.

  Immediately Flash stopped and sat back. Slowly Ian sat straight up again and breathed a few times to clear his cloudy head. His throat was dry fro
m breathing so hard.

  “You almost made me come,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “How awful.”

  “It is awful, and I don’t think you’re nearly as sorry as you should be.”

  “It was very naughty of me,” she said, her eyes briefly meeting his before she lowered her gaze again. “You told me not to make you come, and I kept going even though I knew you were close. But it felt too good, having you in my mouth again. I’m sorry.”

  “Forgiven.” He brushed a stray lock of red hair off her forehead. Her hair was only about four inches long and soft as silk on his fingers. Some days she’d put gel in it and style it like a punk star. Today it was free of product and swept back off her face, making her look far more innocent than a woman who could suck cock like Flash should look. He would never, ever tell anyone Flash had this submissive side to her, that she got off on being used sexually by a dominant man. And she would never tell anybody he got off on it as much as she did. It was between him and her. Their dirty, sexy little secret.

  “What should I do with you now?” he asked as he laid his hands on each side of her neck and pressed his thumbs into the hollow of her throat. He didn’t do it hard, certainly not hard enough to hurt, but only hard enough so she felt him touch her in her most vulnerable spots. Her head fell back a little, her eyelashes fluttered again. She was never more beautiful to him than when he had her on her knees before him, making her his sexual property, if only for a night.

  “Fuck me,” she said.

  “I had a feeling that’s what you’d say. One little problem—you have your clothes on.”

  “I can solve that problem.”