by A. L. Woods
“My girlfriend?” he asked, interrupting my reverie, his eyes finding mine again. For some inexplicable reason, my heart chose that exact moment to squeeze in my chest in a way I hadn’t experienced since high school. It fucking fluttered, like a freshman girl who had just been asked to the prom by a senior. My heart didn’t flutter. I’m not the fluttering type. But when he watched me with too much interest, when his eyes tracked my lips with every word that left them, despite nothing worth mentioning leaving his lips, my heart did the same thing again.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, wondering how the fuck someone forgot about someone like her, but based on the unbridled confusion filling his face, I suspected I had either befuddled him or made a gross error.
His thick left brow arched north. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
An iota of hope struck me dead smack in the center of my chest. Hope I shouldn’t have had. Hope that didn’t belong to the likes of someone like me. Sean was an enigma, a Rubik’s cube I struggled to solve. A handsome paradox with broad shoulders, a chiseled face and eyes so dark they appeared almost black.
My throat worked across the lodge that had re-formed in my throat, his darkened stare never leaving mine. “So, the girl from earlier…” I didn’t miss that the noun had been punctuated as it left me, my curiosity undermining the modicum of professionalism I was supposed to have, “she isn’t your wife, either?”
Sean sighed, his hands dropping to his lap. If he had been unimpressed before, it paled to the look he was rocking now. His features were granite, his eyes searched my face, looking for what, I would never know.
“She is not.”
“Who is she?” I wanted to punch myself this time. No, seriously. I should have knocked myself out earlier in the boardroom. I had no business being here. I didn’t know how to behave in front of a man who wasn’t a lewd city worker spreading his seed from one Hallmark princess to the next, a group of firemen who should have long since retired, or a man who was in an abusive relationship with the photocopier. I could barely get a solid read on the men I’d grown up around. Why would Sean be any exception?
This was dangerous. This was foolish. This was really fucking bad.
The bemusement that took residence on his handsome face from out of nowhere was a crippling hybrid of both sexy and infuriating that set my skin on fucking fire.
“Why?” he said. “Are you jealous?”
My expression must have escaped me, because he barked out a laugh that sent an inexplicable current of electricity rushing through me.
Lust and rage swirled inside of me like the insides of a snow globe, my skin prickling with an awareness that felt like my body and mind were betraying me, demanding two different things. Heat licked up the slope of my neck, my face growing ruddy, while my heart thumped loud enough that I felt its steady rhythm in the soles of my feet.
And still he looked on at me, the impish calculation a glint in his dark eyes, as if he had me all figured out. I barely had time to celebrate his singleness before he antagonized me once more, laying down a trap laced with a hearty slice of expensive cheese I would never be able to resist.
“Over what?” I conceded, taking his bait like the idiotic mouse whose foibles would earn it a quick death.
“That there might be someone in your place.”
I jerked my body out of the seat, my knees slamming into the front of that hideous desk that reminded me of that of Penelope’s father. Ostentatious. Cocky. Arrogant. The supposition that Sean might have gotten along too well with Mr. Cullimore left me unsettled, my vision momentarily tossing my equilibrium out of whack, raking in breaths as if I couldn’t draw air fast enough.
“Was it your dream to restore houses?” I repeated forcefully, in hopes he’d give me more than a one-word response. My spine steeled as I fought to regain control of the narrative. My blinks were rapid, the silhouette of his body blurring as I quarrelled with my sex drive and ego. I was breaking every fucking rule in the book today. You weren’t supposed to think about the people you were interviewing being naked. You weren’t supposed to be interested in their romantic status. Or whether or not there was a double meaning when they stared you down.
That was Journalism 101. Basic common sense. Somewhere between being impartial and accurate, there must have been a lecture that stipulated that you weren’t supposed to give the interviewee come-fuck-me eyes just because he gave them to you first. Maybe I had missed the class, had opted to sleep in that day.
His pheromones had done something to my brain in the last couple of hours and replaced my sensibilities with that of a teenage girl who was still dry humping her boyfriend in the back seat of his parents’ Suburban every Friday night because she was too scared to go all the way. That was the only explainable answer.
Sean was tall, lean, had a V-shaped waistline and looked damn delectable in a suit jacket—a far cry from my aforementioned ex-boyfriend, whose jeans sagged in the ass and for whom the idea of wearing a belt would have been a slight against his personal aesthetic. This was what it felt like to appreciate a man whose clothes fit. The gray fibers of the jacket had played with the intensity of his dark eyes. Outside, sunlight broke through the clouds, allowing a small stream to pour in from the window in the study, softening the deep opulence of the rich brown closer to his pupils, leaving a ring of whiskey gold around them. He was different. That was what made him interesting. That was what made my thighs clench together, heat roll through me, and an unfamiliar wave of lust tighten below my belly button.
That was all.
“Relax, it’s a joke.” The casualness of his voice cooled my blood pressure, my heart rate slowing. He nodded toward the seat, subliminally demanding my body to acquiesce. Whether I wanted to or not, my body decided for me, my legs sinking downward until my ass hit the lip of the chair again.
“Katrina is my sister.”
“You could have just said that.”
“Where’s the fun in that, Hemingway?”
Hemingway? I bristled, my hands balling into fists in my lap. He was openly making fun of me, humiliating me at every turn. Abusing my unintentional attraction with the breadth of his broad shoulders and intense dark eyes that were full of mockery.
“I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously,” I groused. I was the this in this situation. I wasn’t used to being made fun of. I was formidable at the paper. I commanded respect. Hell, even Karen generally stayed out of my way, even if she did get the better stories. I didn’t like the smirk that Sean housed on his face, as if he had just discovered that I was capable of being anything but professional. Challenge lit up in his face like he had every intention of starting a war.
And winning it, too.
CHAPTER FIVE
Watching Raquel sputter was a high I never wanted to rid myself of. It was the kind of euphoria that was achieved when you rode a high velocity rollercoaster that shot you through the air, lurching your heart up and down with it. Her cheeks had turned ruddy with the ease of my jests at her expense. I had practically preened in my seat, watching the heat crawl up her slender, creamy neck like wild ivy infiltrating a building’s outer walls. It hadn’t been my initial intention to antagonize her, but she had almost made it too easy at the mention of a wife.
Me? With a girlfriend? A wife? Nothing would have made my Ma happier, but I was mulish about waiting for the right woman to appear before I even so much as entertained the idea. I knew when that moment presented itself, it would be a thought that commanded all of my attention, and I would stop at nothing until that lucky woman was mine.
During our interview, I had remained fastidious about evading questions I didn’t want to answer. It had been endearing in the beginning, when she posed well-meaning questions about the origins of the family business; I had indulged her at best. Our exchange was controlled, my answers concise. That wasn’t enough for her, though, and her next batch of questions were more thought out, more complex, in-depth.
“If money wasn’t y
our motivator, what else would you do with your life?” The question had been neither pertinent nor salient to the interview, but it still nudged that deep-seated anxiety I kept carefully tucked away. I suppose when she wasn’t getting anything else out of me that was remotely interesting enough to twist into a story, she had to start digging the same way a dog might to excavate a bone.
“Money is, and always will be, the thing that makes the world go round,” I had replied. I didn’t have to look at her to know that the response had annoyed her. I could feel the loss of her patience dripping from her in heavy, drunken waves that pooled at her feet. Surprise had sucker punched me when I finally looked at her, only to find her visage a blank canvas.
Raquel wasn’t dense, not by a long shot. This was not her first time at the rodeo, and I was not the first asshole to try to play her at her own game. But I wanted something out of her, anything outside of what she was currently giving me. I needed to find something that would act as a guiding tool to ensure I steered myself clear from the chances of humiliating myself—even if it meant it was at this woman’s expense.
Undeterred, she just found another roundabout way of asking the same question. Sometimes she got away with it, but for the most part, I took a vow of silence that was on par with that of Buddhist monk, opting for the reliability of heavy sighs and knitted eyebrows.
If I’m being honest, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her. At least, it hadn’t been my initial intention to not give her the answers that she was hounding me for. I just discovered that I enjoyed watching her feathers bristle under my rankled apathy more than I did giving her what she wanted. With every averted answer, those slender shoulders of hers rounded upward, her brows lifted, the nostrils of her pert nose flared, and a darkness flickered in her eyes that I desperately wanted to see erupt into flames so I could taste her chaos.
I wanted anything from Raquel other than the controlled professionalism. Somehow it felt unnatural coming from her with her distinct outlier tendencies.
She was the lit wick in the candle, and watching her burn had become a sick fixation fast. My breath hitched unceremoniously every time she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, a petulant look flashing on her pretty face, until she schooled her features, subduing the muscles in her expression back into place like a piece of Plasticine that she had worked her thumbs over. A labored, tight breath would leave her in shallow exhales, her fingers finding the shutter on the camera again, illuminating each room as we went. I liked the way her features pinched with concentration every time she found something new to focus on, her mind loud with thoughts. Though I couldn’t hear them, I could feel them in the wayward glances she shot me when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I needed to know what lay beyond her schooled expressions, the even tone of her cadence, the pressing of her questions. I wanted to know what made her tick…what was her purpose…what made her grow hot.
I just hadn’t anticipated it coming to a head so easily.
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” she spat in my direction, seething in her seat.
A divide had appeared in Raquel’s facade when I suggested that perhaps she was jealous because she had detected a threat (although, if I’m being honest, there wasn’t a threat within a two-state radius that could have contended with the likes of her). She hadn’t liked that speculation much, the suggestion causing a bleeding chasm to appear in the otherwise still surface of her expression. Provoking her was the most fun I’d had in years, but I had my reasons: I was curious to know whether this attraction that thickened the air in the room was one-sided or not, and try as she may have to act otherwise, I practically smelled her arousal from the other side of the desk. It was heady, a scent I was almost too willing to get myself drunk off of.
“I am taking it seriously, Hemingway,” I replied evenly, my face reflecting with boyish charm and all the other appeal I had used to woo countless women before her. The moniker hadn’t been well thought, but it seemed fitting nevertheless. I didn’t believe Raquel had gone to school to become a journalist; I didn’t think any writer really did. Just like I hadn’t gone to culinary school with the intention of inheriting my father’s business before I ever got the chance to really work in my knives. I had been on an entirely different trajectory before tragedy had struck, and my family’s untimely loss had equipped me with the foresight to see when other people also had to abdicate on their initial ambitions for the realities and confines of real life. She had dreamt of something much bigger, larger than her, something that was on scale with the real Hemingway’s influence.
“Stop calling me that.” She shot me a scowl.
“Why?”
“’Cause that’s not my fucking name.” Her facade parted like Moses and the damn Red Sea, her chest heaving with every inhalation she took.
I grinned, glad to see her personality bleeding out from behind her pretense. “You’ve got a wicked temper on you.” My cadence emulated hers, my inflection rolling upward.
She didn’t miss the mockery. “Fuck you.”
I rolled my neck, felt the tight heat of her eyes tracking me like a lioness about to pounce on her prey. And I was ready to be hunted. I was ready to go to war.
“I think you’d like that,” I murmured, my voice barely perceptible over the hum of the house’s HVAC system kicking to life.
Her eyes popped up, her brows hitting her hairline, jawline growing as hard as a piece of fucking steel. “Don’t kid yourself.”
“I never kid around when it comes to fulfilling a woman’s needs.”
I expected her to flee, but instead, she leaned forward, her elbows biting the edge of the desk, a storm of curiosity brewing in her cinnamon-colored eyes that practically had me panting.
“I don’t think you’d know what to do with me if I came with a fucking instruction manual.” Her face belied the force behind her statement, and this time I took the bait.
“Well, lucky for both of us,” My hand shot out just as she moved to withdraw her arm, the pad of my thumb working across the smooth stretch of skin, an eruption of goosebumps lighting up her skin, “I’m a quick learner. I’ve got the patience of a saint, and the prowess of a god.”
Raquel’s lids dropped, and she made a little choking sound, as if an unbidden thought had imbibed her senses and captured her mid-exhale. When her lids flipped open, the intoxication had all but vanished from her eyes, leaving behind a warpath of rage in its wake.
She ripped her arm away, my hand slamming onto the desk with an unprepared thud.
“Two things,” she snarled, collecting her things and shoving them back into her bag. “From my experience, guys who have to talk a big game like they know what they’re doing, generally don’t have a damn clue about the female anatomy.” Her fingers fought with the zipper of the camera bag, the fastener getting caught the harder she pulled.
“And the second thing?” I blew out a breath, pissed at myself for the folly that caused my own downfall.
“The closest you will ever get to fucking me is in your dreams. But then again, I suspect that even your fantasy version of me would have the good sense to tell you to go fuck yourself.” She punctuated the last three words, her accent raw. She rose to her feet again, her body trembling with anger that rolled off her in heady waves, her hands snatching her things from the chair next to her.
“Raquel,” I called after her. She swung the doors open with such force that the handles bit into the drywall. It was a miracle that the glass didn’t shatter. I winced, making a mental note to check if the wall needed to be patched. Rising to my full height, I rounded the stupid desk and trailed after her. Her perfume lingered in the air.
“Pen,” she called, her voice quaking, “I’ll meet you at the cafe.” She shoved her feet back into the boots I had made her take off, not bothering with the laces. When she put her hand on the doorknob, I took the opportunity to touch her again, my big palm wrapping around her slender fingers. The kindling between us
sparked another inferno, its warmth running through every strand of hair on my head. She felt it, too. I knew she did from the way her eyes widened, confusion filtering through them, a lack of understanding in the unexplainable dynamism that was coursing between us.
I watched as the blaze was extinguished before my very eyes, her expression darkening, her hand stiffening in mine.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she said, her voice a growl.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.” It wasn’t a lie. Yeah, I had pushed her for my own gain, but I hadn’t intended to make her so…rattled. I had gotten carried away. Cocky. Arrogant.
She wasn’t buying it from me. Her lips tightened into a thin line and her eyes narrowed. “Cute attempt at an apology. Try that shit on someone who cares.” She slapped my hand away.
My skin stung from the contact, but my desperation to feel her again stung more.
“Move,” she ordered.
I had all of twelve seconds to contemplate her request when the unsettling sensation that came with being watched swept over me, sending a wave of chills down my spine.
A loud harumph from the top of the steps summoned my attention. Trina cleared her throat three times, an unimpressed look blooming on her face. It was hard to discern how long she had been standing there, how much she had seen, or how much she had heard. I dragged an open palm over my face, then shoved my hands back into my pocket and stepped aside. Raquel glanced at the stairwell, a pained expression taking residence on her visage that almost made me remorseful for how strongly I had come onto her.