by Elise Faber
Heather had frowned. “You’re beautiful, Lexy. You—”
“You don’t want me.” Pale blue eyes had locked onto hers. “Not really. Trust me, I can tell.”
Heather hadn’t liked that. She didn’t like being wrong about anything, but most especially about herself. But she couldn’t deny what Bec had said, nor Lexy, if she was being entirely honest with herself.
So, she’d stopped trying to turn her mother’s hair gray and had focused on her father. He thought men were better at business? Well, fuck him, she’d prove him wrong. He thought only men could have one-night stands and relationships where they don’t let emotion get involved? Double fuck him, she’d sleep with so many men that . . . she’d started to hate that part of herself.
And so . . . therapy.
Her dirtiest, darkest secret was that she’d started therapy about five years before.
No more empty sex. No more trying to be something she wasn’t. No more trying to stick it to her parents.
She was her own person. She worked because she enjoyed her job and the challenges it created.
She was sane and stable and the person people went to for advice. She wasn’t crazy Heather who slept with anything with a pulse or even sad, torn up Heather trying to find her own place in the world.
She was content.
And so what if content meant a little bit lonely . . . or that her lady bits felt shriveled with disuse.
At least she had her friends and her work.
But now, Clay fucking Steele.
Goddamn it.
What the hell had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been. That was the problem. He’d touched her, and five years of celibacy had gone up in flames. She’d wanted so, so badly.
And he’d given. So, so good-ly.
Heather snorted again and flopped an arm over her eyes. God, had he given it “good-ly.” Probably the best ever, if she was being completely honest, and since she was alone and didn’t need to hide anything from anyone, she could freely admit that Clay had skills. Even drunk, he’d used every single one to play her body like she was his personal instrument, celibacy be damned.
But marriage? Commitment?
Down that path led ruination.
Yes, she was well aware that she was sounding like a bad gothic novel, but Heather wasn’t like CeCe or Abby. She wasn’t built for commitment. She was her parents’ daughter and didn’t have the capacity to care for another person in that way.
She was broken deep inside, and no amount of therapy could fix that part of her.
Friends she could do.
Love? Breaking down every single barrier between herself and another person? Being open and sharing all the intimacies that came with building a solid relationship?
No.
That ability was just not in her.
And so she grabbed her phone, sent an email to Bec asking her to schedule her some time when she got back to San Francisco to discuss a few “legal matters”—ha!—then set her cell onto the nightstand and closed her eyes.
One breath. Another.
Sleep stole her under.
Chapter Six
Clay
The plane touched down with a jolt, and Clay attempted to shove Heather from his mind.
Not that it was easy.
The woman had wormed her way deep inside his psyche from the moment he’d met her, six months before.
Blonde hair the color of sunshine peeking through clouds, blue eyes that mimicked the indigo of the early morning sky. A body that should have sonnets written in its honor—curvy and soft and with an ass that he wanted to . . .
“Mr. Steele? Is everything all right?” Julian, the flight attendant, asked.
Clay blinked, shooting out of his seat and tucking his briefcase under one arm. His cheeks felt hot—from embarrassment or desire, he didn’t know. Okay, so maybe he didn’t want to examine too closely that he’d been caught daydreaming like a horny teenager.
“Yes,” he said, after clearing his throat. “Thank you.”
He nodded to Julian and disembarked the plane, heading toward the car that was waiting at the bottom of the jet’s staircase.
“The office, Mr. Steele?” his driver asked.
“Yes, thank you, Frank,” he said as he sank into the plush leather and turned on his cell.
It began to vibrate almost immediately, texts and emails pouring through. WiFi on the plane made it so he hadn’t gone a solid twelve hours without communication, but he’d turned even that off for the final two hours of the flight and had forced himself to sleep.
A snort. So much for that.
He’d spent the entire one hundred and twenty minutes picking through his fractured memories of the previous night, trying to remember every detail.
Except that hadn’t really helped his scrambled brain, his memories still in bits and pieces.
Smooth porcelain skin. Those sparkly red nails. Dusky pink lips. Breasts that had pillowed against his chest.
“Dammit,” he muttered as his cock hardened for what felt like the hundredth time in the last few hours.
It somehow remembered, but his fucking mind was useless.
“Everything okay, sir?” Frank asked as he drove them out of the airport, reminding Clay that he needed to lock this shit up tight and focus on the deals ahead. There was a reason no one ever asked him how he was.
And that reason was because he was always fine.
Or at least he was good at projecting “fine” and faking it until he was actually fine in truth.
But now two people in the last ten minutes had shown concern.
Clearly, he was losing his touch.
“Fine, Frank. Thanks,” he clipped, annoyed at himself for the lack of discipline. If his father could see him now . . . he’d be extremely disappointed.
Steeles are steel, son. Emotionless. Strong under pressure. We don’t break. We don’t bend. We endure.
Except they hadn’t endured.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath. This trip was happening at the wrong time, too close to the anniversary of—
“I can get you to the office in just under an hour.”
Work. He needed to focus on work. On the deal, on making Steele Technologies more successful than his dad had ever dreamed.
And his dad could dream.
“An hour’s fine,” Clay said after a beat. Endure, he reminded himself. Strength under pressure. “Thanks, Frank. In the meantime, I need to make a phone call.”
“Absolutely, sir.” The divider between them rose almost before Frank had finished the sentence.
The call was a lie—well, at least having to make a pressing one. Yes, there were always people he needed to touch base with, but at that moment there wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait. Except sitting in the silence created by the divider snicking closed was a mistake. The quiet, the isolation made his devil come out.
His mother had always said he could be a holy terror when he put his mind to it and, well, Clay always put his mind to it.
Always.
Smirking, he sent a text to his assistant and got a response in less than two minutes.
Which was why Sebastian got paid the big bucks.
His lips tugging up, he keyed in the number.
It rang once. Again. A third time. And just when Clay was composing the message he was going to leave, a breathless female answered.
“O’Keith,” Heather panted into the phone.
There was noise in the background, a rapid pat-pat-pat that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite place, but Clay forced that out of his brain and focused on the way Heather’s voice had softened on answering.
It would harden as soon as he spoke, he knew that, and he wanted to hold on to that softness, before his voice raised her hackles, turned her tone into an icy blade.
He wanted to hear her as she’d been that night. And his instincts told him that she’d been sweet, almost gentle.
A concept he would
have laughed at months ago, but one he knew today was—
“Hell-o?” she said, less breathless, more sharp, and already those rounded off edges were being honed into precise points.
“My dear Heather O’Keith, are you taking a shower?” he asked, finally cluing into what the pat-pat-pat in the background was.
There was a long pause.
“Clay.” Another beat. Then a sigh and, “How did you get my number?”
“Husbands should know where their wives are, don’t you think?”
He could hear her teeth grinding. It made him grin.
“Clay, I’m naked and dripping, what the hell do you want?”
His lips curved. “Words a man lives to hear.”
She muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously as though she were counting to ten. “What can I do for you, Steele?” And though it was posed as a question, Clay knew it was more curse than concern.
He really irritated Heather, and for some reason that gave him great joy.
“Clay!” she exclaimed, impatient now.
Okay, fine, so he was acting like a second-grade boy with his first crush.
But he didn’t care, couldn’t find the strength to care. Not when his lack of reply made her sigh again. Her eyes would be flicking up toward the ceiling, her lips pursing as she breathed in and out on a long, slow exhalation.
“I don’t have all day, Steele. Give it to me now or so help me—”
“More words a man lives to hear.” He chuckled at the feral sound that came through the airwaves. “Ah, Heather, baby, you’re so sweet to me.”
Now her shoulders would drop as she attempted to rein in her temper, her chin joining her eyes in tipping up at the ceiling, the slender column of her neck exposed and delicate. That angle was a tease, he’d press his mouth, his tongue—
Fuck.
Many dreams—none of them of the PG variety—had been made envisioning all the things he’d do to Heather’s throat, sucking and licking and marking the smooth skin there.
And he had marked it. Just last night.
He’d nipped behind her ear, nibbled down to her shoulder, sucked a hickey on the gentle curve where her throat met her collarbone. He’d kissed, he’d caressed, he’d necked like he was a teenaged boy in the back seat with his first girlfriend.
“I’m hanging up now,” she said, the background noise growing as she apparently moved closer to the shower.
“You have something that belongs to me,” he said before she could disconnect.
A huff. “I’m taking the license to my lawyer.”
The click cutting off his words was probably a good thing.
Because something stupid had been about to come out of his mouth.
Like, “Not the license, you, you infuriating woman.”
And Heather O’Keith didn’t belong to any man . . . least of all him.
Chapter Seven
Heather
Heather dropped the phone onto the granite countertop. It clattered, skidding to a stop near the complimentary shampoo/shower gel/old-fashioned bar of soap/lotion tray.
No matter how much her room cost, the hotels never seemed to provide conditioner.
Didn’t they understand women at all?
Shampoo just didn’t do it.
Not that it mattered.
Her assistant had already unpacked her toiletries and clothes before Heather had even left Colin’s office.
The meeting had gone well, the woman who was overseeing the European portion of his business, competent and confident.
Heather slipped back into the water, sighing with relief as the hot water hit her cooled limbs.
She was also smiling.
Not because of the disturbance of the phone call—though she had the feeling Clay would probably like being referred to as a disturbance. No, she was smiling because the woman Colin had left in charge of his business operations reminded her of herself.
Francine was smart as hell and tough as nails, but she was also young in a way that Heather hadn’t been in ages.
Or maybe not ever.
Still, it made Heather like Colin even more for having chosen to put his faith in a woman like Francine.
Her business partner liked strong women. He respected them. He—
Clay liked strong women, too.
“And that, my stupid, sex-melted brain,” she said as she smoothed conditioner down the length of her hair, “is not a helpful sentiment at all.”
Because it didn’t matter what Clay liked.
It didn’t matter how she felt when Clay was around.
He was dangerous to her on a fundamental level.
She had seen it too many times. The risks were too close to home.
“A man is never going to change me,” she promised and let the hot water stream down her back, rinsing the conditioner away, leaving her hair soft, the rough edges smoothed over, temporarily or perhaps, permanently mended.
Which was fine for her split ends.
But men weren’t as effective as beauty products. They didn’t fix anything.
They were chaos and hurt and bending, and bending until he was happy at the expense of all else.
Of everyone else.
So no. Heather was perfectly happy with her rough edges.
They kept her safe, made her strong and tough and invulnerable.
You weren’t invulnerable with Clay, her brain reminded her, rather unhelpfully, she thought.
“And look where it got me,” she said, cranking off the water. “Married to a man I don’t know and everything I’ve worked for at risk.”
Her brain, conveniently, didn’t have a reply.
“Typical,” she huffed and reached for a towel.
After a few hours of restless sleep, Heather was aboard her plane and heading for Berlin.
It was such a beautiful city, one of her absolute favorites, but she doubted she’d see anything this trip except the insides of hotels, conference rooms, and cars.
Upon arriving, she went straight to the hotel to drop her bags and order room service then poured over the files for her first meeting. The hotel would be her temporary home base for the two days she was in Berlin, one that would allow her to sleep in a bed that wasn’t thirty thousand feet in the air while conveniently providing her decent meals at all hours.
Her business life wasn’t so easily managed.
At the moment, several new products were being proposed for development and while she’d already made a soft decision on each of them based on market projections and the scientific reports the research heads had sent her way, she always liked to meet directly with the development teams. Sometimes there was something in a person, an unquantifiable “something” that didn’t come through on reports and cost/expense ratios.
Passion or intensity or the ability to do good in the world.
And while Heather may be a businesswoman at heart and may seriously enjoy making deals and exceeding expectations when it came to the bottom line, she also truly wanted to make the world a better place.
Sometimes it was via a little robot that had made one child—and then about six million others—happy. Other times it was the project she and Colin were undertaking, trying to find a way to muster supplies in the wake of natural or man-made disasters and deliver them quickly to those people most affected. Occasionally it was partnering with the government to get better equipment to the military.
She’d never cop to it, of course, but those “side projects” were what fed her soul, what kept her going when she met another man who thought he could bully or manipulate or coerce her into doing something just because she was a woman.
Of course, she couldn’t deny that she derived great pleasure from turning the tables on those men who underestimated her.
Clay doesn’t underestimate you.
“Shut it,” she gritted and picked up her briefcase. Her phone buzzed at almost the same instant, informing her that her car was downstairs and her assistant wo
uld be up to unpack momentarily.
Her assistant was freakishly efficient.
When Heather didn’t give Rachel time off, that was.
Her assistant had just about shit a brick when she’d seen the state of Heather’s clothes as she’d boarded the plane for London, and had promised she would never take another day off again.
Meanwhile, Heather had thought she’d done a fairly decent job of seamstress-ing, considering her limited resources.
Not good enough, apparently.
Rachel was a little dramatic, but Heather liked her anyway.
Young, sweet, and slightly naïve, her assistant always managed to know what Heather required—often before Heather even realized she needed it.
And that’s why Rachel was getting a raise after this trip and a week of vacation.
No burnout on Heather’s watch, not when she wanted to keep her assistant around.
There was a knock before the lock disengaged and Rachel pushed the door open, thrusting a stack of files in Heather’s direction.
“Don’t bother reading them now,” she said. “These are for the next set of meetings. You’ll have a half-hour lunch break to review them.”
“Perfect,” Heather said, taking the folders and stashing them in her briefcase. “And the Pierce file?”
Rachel wrinkled her nose. “Still waiting on their firm to provide details.”
Heather frowned as she considered their planned stop in Amsterdam the following evening. “If they don’t have them to me by five tonight, the meeting’s off.”
“Good,” Rachel said, and at Heather’s raised eyebrow explained, “I told them they had to have them to me by four-thirty.”
“And that is why you’re getting a raise,” Heather said with a grin, adding at Rachel’s shocked expression, “I was going to wait until we were home, but how often has that been lately?”
A nod, though Rachel was still wearing a surprised expression that made Heather’s stomach sink. “What is it?”
She better not be planning on quitting.
Rachel’s chin wobbled before she waved a hand in the air. “Ignore me, I’m being ridiculous.”
Heather raised her eyebrow again, staring until Rachel caved.