by Katee Robert
Right. Dressed. Because this thing between them couldn’t happen.
Despite the fact he pointedly wasn’t watching her, Trish kept her head up and her shoulders squared as she grabbed the first things she got her hands on—a red flare skirt and a white blouse—and retreated into the bathroom to get dressed. She stared at herself in the mirror for the space of a breath. Yeah, definitely don’t need blush if I’m going to be spending time around Cameron. I keep acting like an idiot, so I’m going to walk around with permanently pink cheeks. Wonderful.
Her life would be so much easier if she could just find another job—preferably in a company run by women so she wouldn’t have to deal with falling into lust with her boss.
This isn’t just to help Aaron and you know it. You need experience to be able to get in for the jobs you really want instead of an unpaid internship or something entrance level. Because, let’s be honest, you couldn’t even get one of those jobs after you graduated. You can’t afford to quit.
She really sucked at pep talks.
Trish found Cameron exactly where she’d left him and she gave a silent sigh. They could be in bed right now, doing fun, filthy things instead of about to have yet another conversation about why he couldn’t want her. She got it. She so got it.
There was nothing for it. If she didn’t do something drastic, he’d sit her down and gruffly reject her over and over again with his words. She’d had quite enough of that for today.
For always, really.
She straightened her shoulders and grabbed her purse from the table. “Shall we?”
“Trish.”
Oh no. It wasn’t a gruff talk she was going to get—it was a gentle one. So much worse. She blasted him with a bright smile. “We’ve already wasted enough time, don’t you think?” She marched out the door and barely waited for him to step into the hall to lock it behind them. Then she was off, charging for the elevator, Cameron’s muttered curse in her ears.
It wasn’t until the elevators closed—shutting them in—that she realized her tactical mistake.
He shifted to face her, not quite blocking the doors, but ensuring she’d have to slide past him to bolt. Cameron slipped his hands into his pockets. “I’m not rejecting you.”
Trish stared hard at the numbers ticking down and silently spit out a few curses of her own. Correct choice or not, it sure felt like rejection. She made a blatant—if panicked—offer. He turned away. End of story.
Except it wasn’t the end of the story, because he was still taking up too much space in the previously spacious elevator. Since she couldn’t will the machine to move any faster, she smiled at him. “It’s irrelevant. Message sent and received. It won’t be a problem.” She made a face. “Well, it won’t be a problem again. I guess I should apologize—again.”
“Knock that shit off.”
She forced her smile brighter and tried not to hunch her shoulders. “What are you talking about? I’m being professional.” For once, when it comes to Cameron.
He didn’t step back as the doors opened. He just frowned at her like she was a puzzle he didn’t have all the pieces necessary to put together. “You don’t have to wear the mask with me, Trish.”
If Cameron had reached out and slapped her, he couldn’t have surprised her more. She jerked back. “Actually, Cameron, I can do whatever I damn well please when it comes to how I arrange my face around you. I am being pleasant and professional and I don’t know you well enough to expose an emotional vulnerability just to give you the satisfaction.”
“You know me well enough to strip naked.”
No way he just went there.
Except he most definitely just went there.
She shouldered past him and into the hall leading to the entrance of her apartment building. Though she could tell herself all sorts of true facts to try to calm down, she didn’t much feel like calming down at this point. Cameron might take being blunt to a whole new level, but he was just being a flat-out dick with that statement and she wasn’t in the mood to give him the benefit of the doubt.
No, she was more likely to give him a literal kick in the ass.
Into slow-moving traffic.
“Trish,” he said as she exited the building.
She ignored him and swung around a group of three guys to head in the direction of Home Depot. It was too far to walk, especially on her way back with paint cans in tow, but if she hailed a cab, either Cameron would climb in with her—which would just piss her off further—or it would be a childish fleeing of the conversation he obviously wanted to have. It didn’t seem to matter that she didn’t want to.
Clear the air. If you don’t, it’ll fester.
Trish spun on her heel and got a little perverse pleasure at the fact Cameron had to skid to a stop to avoid running into her. She glared pointedly at the distance between them until he backed up a step. They had an audience in the form of people passing by, but she didn’t care. “I don’t care if you are half owner of Tandem Security or my brother’s best friend or richer than sin or anything else. You do not get to talk to me like that. Even if we were fucking six ways from Sunday, you still don’t get to talk to me like that. You’re a cranky asshole. I get it. Everyone gets it. That is no excuse to be a jackass and throw the rejection that’s supposedly not a rejection in my face. A good guy would never speak of it again, but I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’d know that without me telling you.” She pointed at herself. “This is me telling you—do not bring it up again. Do you understand me?”
Cameron narrowed his eyes but seemed to realize that there was only one right answer in that moment. “I understand.”
“Good. In that case, I will see you back at the office.” She turned and flagged down a cab, sending a silent thank-you to the universe that she didn’t have to stand there like an idiot during her dramatic exit.
Even though she knew better, she turned to look out the back window as the cab pulled away from the curb. Cameron stood there, watching her with an unreadable expression on his gorgeous face. She should have felt, if not peaceful, then at least sure that this was the end of things between them outside of the safe roles of boss and employee. Of Aaron’s little sister and Aaron’s best friend.
Too bad she couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that nothing had been resolved.
That things between them were just beginning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“NO. ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT.” Cameron shoved out of his chair and nearly threw his phone across the room. It wouldn’t help anything and finding a new phone was a pain in the ass, but that didn’t kill the impulse to banish Aaron’s voice from his ear.
His partner was, naturally, totally unsympathetic. “I already had Trish book the flights. Concord Inc. is a huge company and if we can impress them, they’ll keep us on retainer going forward. That’s not the kind of account we can afford to turn away just because you’re an asshole who hates people—or because you have a history with the COO.”
“I don’t hate people.” He didn’t sound convincing, which was just as well because he and Aaron had had this conversation more times than he could count. “They just waste my time.” He growled. “And it’s hardly a history.”
“For the potential price tag attached to this account, it’s the opposite of wasting your precious time. Hell, I took time out of paternity leave to talk to Nikki Lancaster. They’re not going to wait on this.”
Cameron paced another circle around his office but slowed as everything Aaron said finally penetrated his irritation over being commanded to leave the city. “You said ‘flights.’ Plural.”
“Yes. I did. Because Trish is going with you. It’s a huge-ass leap to toss her into shark-infested waters by doing this, so you’re going to have to buck up and try not to make her job harder than it’s already going to be.”
“She can’t go.” The sentence b
urst out before he could stop it.
For the first time since Aaron called, he paused. A second. Two. Three. “Why can’t she go?”
Because I have the picture of her naked imprinted on my brain and I’ve jacked myself off to the thought of tracing her freckles with my tongue every night since. A truth he would cut out said tongue before admitting aloud. Cameron scrubbed a hand over his face. “She’s too new. Nikki Lancaster will eat her alive.” Nikki had taken over as COO of Concord Inc. when it was a struggling corporate business and had almost single-handedly turned it into a Fortune 500 company over the last five years. Aaron was right—securing that account would not only be a shit ton of money in the bank, but it would open further doors.
Tandem Security wasn’t hurting for cash. They accepted the contracts they wanted, when they wanted, and without having to travel to do it.
“Trish can handle it,” Aaron said carefully, as if feeling his way.
“It makes more sense for her to stay here and handle the office while I go and deal with Nikki.” There. That was a nice logical solution.
That Aaron shot down without hesitation. “She’s too new to be left alone, and having on-site experience negotiating with a new client is an asset.” He paused.
“Unless there’s some problem neither of you have told me about?”
“No problem.” No way to get out of this without setting off Aaron’s internal alarms, either. He had no choice but to go forward with this trip. Cameron sat on the edge of his desk and stared hard at his closed door. “We have this covered.” He might not like the idea of being in close quarters with her—closer quarters, technically, since they’d been working together for over a week since the morning she overslept. It didn’t matter if they were going over notes before a client meeting or painting the boardroom. Trish kept a painfully bright barrier between them and deflected anything that might resemble flirting with a beaming smile and blatant change of subject. There was no sign of the temper she’d flashed before she took off in that cab, and the lack bothered him almost as much as having her tear him a new one had.
“Cameron?”
Shit, he needed to keep his head in the game. “Sorry. I missed that.”
“I can tell.” If anything, Aaron sounded more concerned. “Do you want me to come in and go over the details with you before you go?”
He clenched his jaw to keep his first response inside. Recent years hadn’t been kind to his track record when it came to dealing with clients, so Aaron’s offer wasn’t completely out of line. Aaron knew him better than anyone. Cameron’s patience wore thin with increasing regularity, and he found himself snapping at them before he had a chance to dial it back. So he stopped bothering to dial it back at all.
He and Aaron had met in college, and he knew his friend always assumed there was a deeper backstory to his being a dick. Some tragic past he never talked about. Some defining event that made him wash his hands of all the social niceties.
There wasn’t.
Cameron’s parents were good people. Nothing outstandingly bad had happened to him growing up, and if being a black man in this country came with its own set of bullshit and headaches, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. There were always others who had it worse.
No, the truth was that he preferred machines to dealing with actual humans because machines made sense. There was always a concrete answer, one that wasn’t open to interpretation. Every aspect of a computer was clearly defined and had its own set of rules to work around—but those rules were clearly stated from the beginning.
People were nuanced and managed to be multiple things, often at the same time. They said things they didn’t mean, and then got pissed when he took those things as truth and acted accordingly. They had masks within masks and motivations they rarely put out in the open. Cameron didn’t get people, and maneuvering through their needs and emotions, even for surface-level interactions, left him exhausted and feeling like an asshole.
Because he fucked it up. Every single time.
Just like you did with Trish.
I couldn’t take what she was offering. It would backfire and she’d have been hurt in the process. There is no good exit route once we step past the point of no return.
Could have handled it better, though.
Yeah, no shit.
“Cameron, you’re not even listening to me.”
He scrubbed a hand over his head and mentally made a note to shave his head again soon—before they went to London, for sure. Cameron might not handle people well, but he knew Aaron as well as he knew himself. The man didn’t want to come back to work yet. He just needed Cameron to say the right thing to assuage his guilt and let him take the break he’d more than earned.
He cleared his throat. “I have this covered. Go back to doting on your fiancée and baby and stop worrying about us.”
Another hesitation, but shorter this time. Aaron loved Tandem Security as much as Cameron did, but he loved his new family more. Which was how it should be. Aaron’s relationship with Becka had started unconventionally enough, but they’d found a good balance and their love for their new daughter filled up a room in a way that made even Cameron smile. It didn’t hurt that Summer was cute as hell and seemed to like him just fine. Babies were simple—simple needs, simple desires. If she cried, it was because she wasn’t having some need met, and that he understood.
Too bad adults weren’t that easy to figure out.
He didn’t begrudge his best friend his happiness. He just wished Aaron would stop worrying about the company. He was only gone for a couple months. Cameron could manage to apply a filter to himself for a couple months until his friend was back in the office. He wasn’t that much of a lost cause.
His partner got a dreamy tone. “Summer smiled at me today. The book says it’s probably just gas, but I don’t give a fuck. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
That, he believed. She was adorable. Cameron managed a smile. “I’m glad you’re happy.” If anyone deserved that happiness, Aaron did. He was a good guy, and he’d spent too many years putting up with Cameron’s shit not to have earned a good turn or two.
“Thanks. That means a lot.”
Cameron checked his watch. “I’ll check in once I have things lined up.”
“Talk to you then.”
He hung up and checked his email. Sure enough, confirmation for a flight to London had appeared. Since there was one for Trish as well, he assumed she had her passport updated. You’re focusing on minor details to avoid focusing on the fact that you’re going to be traveling with her.
Easier to remember why she was off-limits when in this office. There was no escaping the constant knowing that it was inappropriate to follow through on the look he sometimes saw lingering in her blue eyes, or to submit to the gravitational pull between them that seemed to grow stronger with every day he didn’t give in.
Put them in a different country, in a hotel together...
Getting ahead of yourself. Trish might have been interested before, but she’s made it pretty fucking clear she’s not now.
That was a good point.
Cameron sighed and rounded his desk to sink into his chair. Whether Trish did or didn’t want to start something still was irrelevant. They had business to conduct and they’d more than proven they could work together when required. He just had to keep his head in the game and not be the one to fuck it up.
Easy enough. Work comes first—end of story.
He had absolutely nothing to worry about.
* * *
Trish paced from one wall to the other and back again. “I can’t do this. It’s going to blow up in my face.”
“It might be helpful if you explain exactly what you’re not doing.”
She glanced at her almost-sister-in-law, Becka Baudin. She sat on the couch with Summer propped carefully on a pillow, nursing away
. When Trish pictured her big brother with someone, it was some straitlaced woman who probably thought doing taxes was fun and drank expensive red wine and vacationed to exotic places with topless beaches.
On second thought, Becka probably fits the last one.
She didn’t fit much else when it came to expectations. She was a blue-haired beauty who was both a personal trainer and led a bunch of hard-core fitness classes—at least before her pregnancy got too far along. She was also hilarious and nice and loved Aaron to distraction. In short, she was perfect.
Trish wasn’t here for perfection, though. She needed advice. “I’m traveling with Cameron. To London. Alone. For as long as it takes to secure this account.”
“I know it’s not super normal for the guys to travel but...” Becka trailed off and her blue eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh. You and Cameron?” She leaned forward and winced. “Sorry, Summer.” A quick adjustment and the baby was nursing happily again. Becka frowned. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Because there’s nothing to know about.” Nothing except she kept throwing herself at him and he kept setting her gently back and trying to explain why he would never touch her. Nothing except her pride being bruised beyond all repair because of her impulsiveness.
It was the height of insanity to still want him after he’d turned her down—more than once—but apparently her self-control had taken a vacation somewhere along the way. She couldn’t be in the same room with Cameron without ogling him, and it didn’t help that he kept wearing those fitted faded T-shirts that clung to his body like Trish wanted to.
Oh my God, I’m jealous of a piece of clothing.
“That tone of voice says there’s definitely something to know about, but okay. Nothing to know about.” Becka shook her head. “If you’re worried about doing something to screw up the account, neither Aaron nor Cameron would send you if they thought you weren’t capable. So they obviously think you can handle it.”
“I’ve been working there like two weeks. I heard Aaron say that Concord Inc. can boost Tandem Security up to the next level. If I botch this, they won’t get to that next level.” She’d already failed so many freaking times. There was absolutely nothing in her track record that should cause everyone around her to give her yet another vote of confidence.