He slid his hands from her shoulders down to her breasts, cupping them in his big hands, his thumbs just underneath the sensitive tips. She squirmed against his hands, and he gave her a wicked half-smile and stroked just a little. And then he bent his head and covered her lips with his, firm and knowing. She expected him to ravage her, but instead, he gave her the sweetest kiss she’d ever had. The world spun, and Nell leaned into the wall at her back, surprised at how grateful she was for its presence and how oddly seductive it was to just trust him and enjoy the consuming tenderness of his mouth on hers. She parted her lips and darted the tip of her tongue out to see if he’d open for her, because she wanted to taste him again the way she had in the hot tub.
“Oh, you’re testing my self-control, Nella-bella,” he murmured against her neck. Then he wrenched himself away from her, with a twisted grin for the effort it took. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
Sometime in the night, the flood warnings for Okanogan County were relaxed and the highway below Champagne Cascades was listed as open. Nell hit the workday running.
By some small miracle, Jessalyn had been released from the hospital the day before. She answered Nell’s phone call with a gush of gratitude for her supervisor’s kindness and promised to go straight up to the site to report on any damage and how quickly it could be opened for bookings.
“Uh, you’re not at — where are you now?”
“I’m at my mom’s place in Chelan. She didn’t want me to be living on my own with this gestational diabetic thing in case I have another seizure. But I can drive up right away.”
Nell wanted to throw something. Would it be wrong to chuck an eraser at the wall? “Jessalyn, are you… sure this job is still a good fit for you right now?” Site managers needed to have initiative for things like going up to the site as soon as the roads were opened, without waiting for specific instructions. But she couldn’t snap at Jessalyn for not thinking, not when the poor woman was just coming off a concussion.
Jessalyn gasped. “Oh, please, I need my job! Especially right now. No one would hire me, pregnant like this, and I need the benefits.”
“I know.” Nell pitched her voice to be reassuring. “It is a live-in position, though. You need to be onsite. Call me when you get there?” This isn’t going to end well.
She let out a long sigh after she ended the call. Shook her head. Picked up the eraser she’d been eyeing before and rocketed it at her corkboard, knocking a couple of Tommy’s Post-It notes to the ground.
A familiar masculine laugh drew her eyes to the doorway, and there was Eamonn, chuckling to himself. He’d apparently seen her throw the eraser and was enjoying her little loss of temper. “What?! Also, did you just get here? It’s after eleven.”
“Uncle Tommy doesn’t care,” said Eamonn, with a shrug. “Hey, I brought you this.” He plunked a Starbucks cup down on her desk, gave her a look like he wanted to say something more, then strolled out the door. Moments later, she could hear him moving around in his office next door — the shoddy thin walls let every sound through. She sniffed the drink, then looked at the cardboard sleeve around the cup. Yes. A half-sweet coconut milk chai latte, the same thing she’d asked for as they were heading out on their road trip. He remembered.
And just like that, her day brightened.
When Nell got back from her lunch break the next day, she found one of Tommy’s yellow Post-It notes on her desk: My office — 2:30 pm. She stuck her head into Eamonn’s office, announcing her presence with a quick rap on the doorframe. “Tommy wants to see me this afternoon. You don’t happen to know what he wants, do you?”
“No, sorry. He stopped by to give me some of Aunt Betty’s lasagna, that’s it.” Eamonn gestured toward a Tupperware container on the corner of his desk, which held a half-eaten slab of lasagna with a fork stuck in it. “He probably just wants you to reassure him that the bubbles will continue to be profitable.”
“The bubbles? Oh, you mean Champagne Cascades.”
Fortunately, the resort had been spared the worst of the flooding, due mostly to its placement on higher ground but also some sheer luck. Jessalyn had called in the landscaping service and cleaners, François was back in charge of his kitchen, and the existing bookings for the weekend did not have to be canceled.
Maybe she could salvage her figures for the month. It’s only the thirteenth, still lots of time, she told herself. But she had a bad feeling about Tommy’s summons, and even though she tried to believe that you could make your own luck with perseverance and positive energy, the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach persisted.
Instead of making tea and returning a call from Stu about the laundry service at Secret Creek as she’d planned, she printed out the Champagne Cascades bookings for the month and whipped up a quick analysis of what the closure had cost in lost revenue, vouchers, and person-hours, along with bookings and revenue for the same time period over the past three years. There hadn’t been a similar flood incident at Champagne Cascades in June previously, but there was a much longer closure recorded at the end of May two years before, so she printed out a report on that, and statistics on flooding across all Wildforest properties going back ten years. It was a regular occurrence at the riverside and lakeside properties, and the numbers bore that out, no matter how badly Tommy would like to lay blame.
Armed with a folder full of data, as prepared as she could be, Nell headed for Tommy’s office. Project confidence. But he’d make it personal; he’d find a way to criticize her. I hate my job.
“You wanted to see me, Tommy?”
“Nell.” He looked up at her in the doorway, then glanced at his watch, almost ostentatiously, pretending he’d lost track of time. “Right, it’s almost two thirty. You’re… three minutes early.”
She gave him a neutral smile to mask her frustration with his little power games. If she’d been right on time, he would have made a joke about it. “Do you need me to come back in three minutes?”
“No, you can come in. Oh — close the door, please. And have a seat.”
Close the door? Doors were never closed at Wildforest.
As she stepped into the office, she realized there was another person in the room. In the corner, out of the door’s line of sight, sat a woman in a grey suit, with a clipboard. “I’m Melody,” the woman said, “from Human Resources.” She did not get up or offer to shake Nell’s hand.
Nell perched on the edge of the chair Tommy indicated.
“Tell me,” he said, in the manner of a prosecutor, “when did you first find out that Jessalyn Roberts was pregnant?”
Tommy had handed Nell a cardboard box along with the letter of termination. No quiet chance to be escorted in after hours for the collection of her personal items — instead, he’d orchestrated the ultimate walk of shame. As she strode down the hall, chin up and game face on, she could feel herself jangling with fight-or-flight adrenaline and knew that she had hardly any time before she’d lose the fine motor control in her hands and maybe her grip on the box. Melody from Human Resources followed her. “We won’t need to call Security, will we?” the woman had asked with a faux-sympathetic smile. The building’s security staff — mostly retirees who’d taken a five-day basic security training course and passed an exam — were available to provide this kind of escort, for a fee. None of those guys would stand a chance against me.
She couldn’t focus on anything except her desire not to drop the cardboard box she carried, not to show pain or let anyone see her fear and despair. Would she lose her apartment? How would she pay for her training? They’d given her a month’s severance on the condition that she signed waivers and disclaimers — no right to talk about it, no right to sue, no recourse. And she’d signed where they told her to, of course; she’d had no choice. At least the severance would buy her a little time.
She shivered. Why am I so cold?
They reached her office — no longer her office, now — and she stared at the desk. Sh
e couldn’t think.
“That mug is yours, isn’t it? Let’s put it in the box,” the HR woman prompted her after a minute. Nell picked it up, looked at the quarter-inch of cold tea in the bottom of it, and drank it because she didn’t know what else to do. Her stomach churned. She held onto the mug with both hands and couldn’t remember what was supposed to come next.
A knock on the doorframe startled her into dropping the mug. It tumbled into the box, dribbling the last drops of tea onto the termination letter, as Eamonn leaned into the room, swinging himself off the doorjamb. “Hey, Nell, do you have—” He froze, his eyes on the cardboard box as she turned toward the sound of his voice. “Oh, shit.”
“They took my phone,” she said. “It was a company phone, but on an unlimited plan, and Tommy encouraged me to use it for everything so I’d have it with me all the time; he didn’t want me to have another. I never thought…” Appalled at how her voice shook, she fell silent.
Eamonn shook his head. “This has to be a mistake. They’d be fools to fire you. I’ll go talk to Uncle Tommy—”
“Please don’t.” She could barely say the words. “He… he found out that I knew Jessalyn was pregnant and I didn’t tell him.”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he asked.
“Don’t be obtuse. They’ll fire her now so Wildforest doesn’t have to cover her medical care or deal with maternity leave.”
Melody from Human Resources pursed her lips. “I have to advise against that sort of speculation. Wildforest would only terminate Ms. Roberts’s employment if she were unable to fulfill the requirements of her position. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Nell laughed, a hard and bitter sound. “It’s the flipping Dark Ages around here, if you hadn’t noticed. I gather you’re the token HR female they send to supervise females being fired so no one can claim anything inappropriate happened.”
A tinge of pink darkened Melody’s cheeks, telling Nell that her assumption had been accurate. “I hardly think my colleagues’ gender is relevant here, and I’m not a token anything.”
“No? Open your eyes; what they’ll do to others, they’ll eventually do to you. I knew this place was dodgy and I shouldn’t have stayed. I shouldn’t be surprised to find myself canned like this, but… I am.” The wobble in Nell’s voice surprised her, but for once she wasn’t capable of controlling her tone or projecting an assured face.
“Oh, babe…” Eamonn said, crossing the room to put his arms around her. Nell flinched and stiffened, and he looked at her in dismay, his arms dropping to his sides.
“You can’t hug me right now,” she muttered. “I refuse to cry in this hellhole, and a kind touch right now would break me. Just let me tough it out ’til I get out the door, all right?”
He raised his hands in a helpless gesture, then nodded and turned to Melody. “You can leave. I’ll escort Nell out, and you can tell Uncle Tommy that I’m not coming back, either.”
“I can’t. I have to see her off the premises,” Melody said, having the grace to look slightly embarrassed.
“Then be helpful, would you? What would she have that she’d need to take?” Eamonn gave Melody the sort of look that a rock star would give an incompetent roadie.
“A purse? Do you have a purse, honey?” The woman’s voice was almost kind.
“I’m not your honey,” Nell snapped, but she opened the desk drawer where she’d kept her purse since she’d moved to this office. Then she remembered her tea and dug it out of the bottom drawer. “That’s it, I think.” Think. I can’t think. Everything felt numb, surreal.
“I’ll carry your box,” Eamonn said, taking it. “Hold my hand? I want to show them all how lucky I am to be with you, even just to walk out for the last time.”
She remembered telling him that she didn’t want to be anyone’s under-the-table affair. It was rather adorable of him to get up and wave that flag at a time like this; it made the walk of shame hurt a little bit less. “Okay. Let’s do this.” She let him take her hand, his touch unexpectedly warm — or maybe her hands were just cold. She felt cold, inasmuch as she was feeling anything at all.
One foot in front of the other, chin high. Eamonn’s hand around hers gave her strength. Word had spread; curious and dismayed faces peered out of offices, and people passing in the hall stopped and turned to look, sympathy warring with an apparent fear of contamination. There were a few people Nell might have wanted to say goodbye to, but she couldn’t go looking for them, and she couldn’t think of what she’d say anyway.
They walked through the reception area, where Lila looked troubled as she waved goodbye. “I’ll miss you, Nell,” the receptionist offered with a weak smile.
“No, you won’t,” Nell said, feeling tired. “But that’s okay.” At Lila’s nonplussed look, she shrugged. Why pretend? Eamonn pushed open one side of the heavy glass double doors, and Nell passed through the Wildforest Vacations office entryway for the last time. Then she turned back and called to Lila, “I’m taking your advice, though. Just so you know.”
Lila’s eyes shot to Eamonn and she giggled, cheerfulness restored to her face. “Have fun, then. Take care, Nell. Bye, Easy!”
In the elevator, he held her. Just held her, as he pushed the P button to take them to the parking level. “I have my bike here today. Are you okay to ride with me? You’ll hold on?”
“You don’t have to take me home. I’ll be fine,” she told him, pushing herself away from the comfort of his arms as the elevator doors opened.
“Fine or not, I’m not just going to put you on the bus.”
Nell blinked at him in the dim light of the parking garage. “Don’t you have to go back up there?” She tried to remember what he’d said to them as he was walking her out, but it all seemed to blur in her memory and she only had the haziest sense of how the previous half-hour had unfolded.
He chuckled. “I think you might have missed one small fact about me, babe. I don’t need that job. Uncle Tommy thought it would be good for me to do something with my days while I figured my next steps out, and I agreed because Mom wanted me to and I honestly wasn’t doing anything much else.” They reached his bike and he took the two helmets out of the top box, holding the spare out to her. “Ride with me?”
She didn’t have it in her to push him away. Why not get a lift home? A little bit of speed and thrill on the back of a bike might blow the cobwebs out of her mind. “Fine.” She took the helmet and put it on while he transferred her things into the top box and kicked the empty cardboard box into a corner. And when she settled herself behind him on the big motorcycle and wrapped her arms around his waist, the world felt a little less dark.
The last time she’d been on his bike, she’d been focused on not getting close to him. This time, she snuggled into his back and let herself savor the feeling of having his hips wedged between her thighs atop the smooth purr of the motor. In all the mess — the humiliation of walking out with her cardboard box and everyone staring, the sudden financial vulnerability, the sick fear of losing her apartment and being unable to pay for training if she didn’t find work soon, and the anger that she hadn’t been able to protect Jessalyn and had lost her own position for it anyway — it couldn’t be wrong to take comfort in holding close to Eamonn’s fine body for a short while, could it? Just for the ride home. And maybe the night, if he’d stay? Her guts cramped in visceral, achy need. No more waiting.
Unexpectedly, Eamonn turned down a side street and pulled over. They were nowhere Nell recognized as being part of her route home. Still astride the bike, he pulled his helmet off and gestured for her to do the same. “I was thinking,” he said, turning his head to look at her over his shoulder. “If I take you back to your place, you’ll just worry, right?” Then his voice deepened, and his eyes met hers with unmistakable desire. “So, you wanna come home with me instead?”
“You’re asking me to stay the night with you?” she clarified, as the urgency insid
e her turned into a swarm of fiery butterflies.
“Yeah. Let me be your distraction.”
She nodded slowly. I want to have the whole night, he’d said, at least the first time, and I want you to walk like you’ve been well fucked the next day. And the way he was looking at her now told her he meant to give that his best shot. “Okay.”
“Good. Helmet on and hold tight. I’m going to go fast.”
She locked her arms around him, letting the adrenaline wash through her as he pushed off and picked up speed. The big bike hugged the road and screamed around corners, faster than Nell had ever experienced on the back of a motorcycle. Did he mean to give her a thrill, or was he just eager to get to their destination? Either way, it made her heart pound as the air whipped around them and she felt the muted thunder of the engine and Eamonn’s masterful control of all that speed and power.
On a tree-lined street with modern brick townhouses and gated driveways, they slowed. One of the gates opened, the wrought-iron halves sliding apart on tracks in the pavement, and Eamonn turned the bike into the driveway, coming to a stop in front of the garage door that was slowly rising. “If you want to hop off, I’ll just roll in here and park, then I can take you inside properly through the front door. Makes a better first impression than the laundry room, you know?”
She looked around as he put his motorbike away — it was a nice street. Capitol Hill wasn’t an overly fancy neighborhood, but these townhouses were maybe a dozen years old and beautifully maintained, definitely in the three-million-dollar range. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected his home to be like — perhaps a Playboy mansion or some sort of rock-and-roll frat house — but it wasn’t this quietly elegant place.
“There. Come on,” he said, and took her hand, leading her up a few steps at the side of the driveway to reach the gleaming black front door with its small brass knocker and keyless entry deadbolt. He punched in the code and turned the knob, snickering. She looked at him with a curious lift of her eyebrows. “The code is sixty-nine sixty-nine,” he explained. “Easy to remember.”
Rock God in Exile (Smidge Book 2) Page 14