A Kiss For You

by Rachel Van Dyken

  We both sat perfectly still, collapsing in on each other.

  “Wow,” I whispered. “Holy fucking wow.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “We’re…we’re going to need to do that again.”

  “A few times.”

  Jensen was right. As we spent the rest of the night in each other’s arms, we found that he did like my screams best when I rode him.

  Chapter 13

  Jensen

  I came to, holding a beautiful, naked woman in my arms. My eyes jolted awake, as I was unable to believe the turn of events. Not because I’d had the most amazing sex of my life. Or that the person I’d had it with was Emery Robinson. Or even that I was enjoying having her in my arms the next morning.

  It was because I had slept.

  I had really slept.

  My eyes darted to the red alarm clock on the nightstand next to the bed we had migrated into at some ungodly hour last night. But, right now, it read nine o’clock.

  Nine o’clock.

  I had slept for seven blissful hours. I didn’t even care that I was late for work for the first time in my life or that I probably had a thousand emails and just as many texts and calls to find out if I was alive. I hadn’t slept seven straight hours since my father died nearly a decade ago.

  “Mmm,” Emery groaned, rolling over to face me.

  In the light of day, she was even more gorgeous than lit by candlelight, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. I’d been a fool to think she was beautiful as she could get coated in makeup with her hair done. Here she was with traces of last night’s mascara on her eyelashes and her hair down and messy in a freshly fucked way, and I was done. I was…totally fucked.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Nine.”

  “That early?” She stretched her arm out.

  “Mmhmm,” I said, suddenly realizing how utterly fucked I was. Utterly and completely fucked. I needed to get out of here and stop this now.

  I couldn’t have had fucking incredible sex and slept through a whole night with a woman who was so wrong for me on every level. Attachments were overrated, and I had prided myself on being emotionally unavailable. I needed to find that in me now.

  Emery Robinson had belonged to Landon. She was living in Austin. She’d grown up here. And I could think of a hundred other strikes against her.

  I flung the covers off my naked body and moved to get out of bed. Emery reached for me with her delicate little fingers, and I careened away from her. I avoided her gaze. I didn’t want to see if she was hurt. I wasn’t an asshole. I just…couldn’t do this. I couldn’t feel anything for her.

  I searched in the closet for clean clothes. Ours were still strewed across the living room.

  “I’ll just…get your things, so we can go,” I said, stomping out of the room before she could say anything.

  I found my cell phone first and glanced at the influx of messages. I texted my secretary, Margaret, to let her know I would be coming in late. Something had come up unexpectedly.

  My phone dinged with a message from Vanessa, and I nearly threw the thing across the room. Just what I wanted to deal with my ex-wife after the night that I had and the morning that only reminded me why this was all a bad idea. Instead, I returned the message, because I knew she would hound me if I didn’t, but I made sure that my impatience was blatantly clear.

  I ignored everything else and scooped up Emery’s clothes from the floor.

  She was sitting up with the charcoal-gray sheet wrapped around her body. She seemed off-balance, as if last night had been a dream and she was waking up and realizing it hadn’t happened. She had been so comfortable with her body last night that it seemed a damn shame that she was covering it up.

  “Just late for work,” I told her. “We have to get going.”

  “Right. Of course,” she said.

  She took her clothes out of my hand, and I gave her privacy to change. The notion was absurd, but between being late for work, how content I had felt the moment I woke up, and the text from my bitch of an ex, this morning itself felt absurd.

  Emery appeared a minute later, dressed in the clothes she’d worn last night, with her dark hair up in a high ponytail. “All ready.”

  “Great.”

  We hustled back into my truck. The drive across town was quiet, punctuated only by the Christmas songs that were still playing on the radio. I didn’t have it in me to turn it off even though they reminded me of our night together. I pulled up in front of her sister’s house twenty minutes later.

  She smiled weakly at me. “Have fun at work,” she choked out.

  I wanted to kick myself. But I’d known that this wasn’t a smart idea. I didn’t date girls in town—whether or not they were here for a weekend—for a damn good reason. It made things…complicated. And complicated was not something I could afford outside of the boardroom.

  “Thanks. Have fun with your sister.”

  “My sister,” she repeated numbly. “Okay. Well, um…bye.”

  She hopped out of the truck, gave me a half-wave, and then darted for the confines of the house. She didn’t look back before disappearing into the house, and I had the distinct feeling that I had just made her feel cheap.

  “Shit,” I whispered in the still-freezing air.

  I hurried back to my house, took a much-needed shower, and then changed into a crisp black Tom Ford suit that I’d had custom-made at Malouf’s in town. It was like the Nordstrom of Lubbock. Family-owned, the store provided and tailored designer and custom-fit clothes by appointment only. I had a standing appointment. I looked like a million bucks. I should feel like a million bucks after last night. Instead, I felt like something had gone horribly wrong when it should have been much simpler.

  An hour later, I tramped into my office and was ready for lunch since I’d foregone breakfast in my haste to get into work. Margaret was hot on my heels when I entered Wright Construction.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wright,” she said, shuffling along with a notebook, iPad, and a pad of sticky notes. “Mr. McCoy called this morning, said it was urgent about the merger, sir. You also had a call from Vanessa. Well, two calls, but I let one go to voice mail. Nick Brown left a message about canceling his appointment because he’s going out of town. Alex Langley called out sick. Personally, it sounded like he was out late and hungover. Elizabeth Copeland had an important update on the Lakeridge complex, sir. Sounded rather urgent as well.”

  “Margaret,” I said with a sigh as I reached the door to my office.

  “Yes, sir?” She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this early in the morning.

  “I feel a bit under the weather. Cancel all of my appointments for the day and let Mr. McCoy know that I’ll handle the merger in the morning.”

  “But, sir—” she said again.

  “Margaret, let me run my company.”

  “Of course,” she said in a daze, handing me the iPad with my daily notes on it. “Also, Morgan is waiting in your office.”

  I sighed heavily. “Thank you, Margaret. That will be all.”

  When I entered my office, Morgan was sitting on the top of my desk, fiddling with the Newton’s Cradle kinetic pendulum that swished back and forth. Her dark eyes met mine across the room. “Late night?” she asked with a sardonic tone.

  “Indeed.”

  I set the iPad down on my desk and flipped through the list of things for the day. Margaret would cancel all the extraneous items, but I had a lot to catch up on.

  “What’s with the late start, bro?” She hopped off the desk, landing on her sky-high heels, and grinned down at me.

  “I slept in.”

  Morgan’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Yeah, right! You don’t sleep. You’re a vampire.”

  I shrugged. I had no response to that because, up until last night, that had been true. “Don’t know what to tell you.”

  “How about who you were fucking when you slept in this morning?” she asked with a mischie
vous light in her eyes.

  I stared back at her with a blank expression on my face and then nodded at the iPad.

  “Wait…do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not,” I told her.

  That was a lie. Morgan would love the juicy details. She adored gossip. She read all those trash magazines just to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  “Okay, whatever. Landon called this morning,” she said.

  My head snapped back up to her. “What for?”

  She tilted her head. “Miranda, of course. Why? Why do you look so scared?”

  I painted my face back into a mask of indifference. “What did Miranda do now?”

  “She wants to keep him in Tampa for Christmas,” Morgan said with a wave of her hand.

  “He’s not considering it, is he?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I guess he is.”

  I grabbed my office phone off the desk. “I’ll call him right now and set him straight. He can’t stay there because of Miranda. It’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know, Jensen. Miranda has it in her head that Emery Robinson is here to win Landon back,” Morgan said with a roll of her eyes.

  “That seems very unlikely,” I said. I made sure to keep the edge out of my voice. “She’s leaving in a few days.”

  “What?” Morgan asked. “No, she’s not. Landon said she was staying here for a while.”

  “He…what?” I asked, my mouth going dry.

  “He tried to tell Miranda that she’d be leaving soon to get her off his case. But she didn’t believe him, and it turned out, she had a reason. Emery told Landon at Sutton’s wedding that she was staying here indefinitely. But I mean…I don’t know why Emery is back in town, but it sure isn’t for Landon. He doesn’t even live here. Miranda is out of her mind.”

  I was completely silent. My head was spinning. Landon had said that Emery was leaving only to appease Miranda. I’d never brought it up with Emery because I thought I already had all my cards in order. She was supposed to be leaving in a few days to head back to Austin. She was supposed to be finishing her PhD. She was not supposed to stay in town after we fucked all night.

  “Shit,” I hissed.

  “Right? So, you have to call and convince Landon to bring Miranda here for Christmas. Do whatever you have to, all right? I mean…I can even call Emery or whatever and ask her to stay away from Landon if that helps…” Morgan trailed off when I said nothing. “Why have you gone pale.”

  “Morg,” I said, meeting her worried gaze, “I fucked up.”

  Chapter 14

  Emery

  “And he just threw my clothes at me and then drove me home!” I recounted to Heidi over lunch.

  “Bastard!” Heidi said on cue. “What a bastard!”

  “Right? I mean…we had sex for hours last night, and then this morning, it was like a light switch had been flipped. Walking into this, I just knew it was a bad idea. He totally used me.”

  “And it sucked, using him back, right?” Heidi asked, digging into her pad thai—our requisite best friend meal—at the downtown Thai Pepper.

  “Dude, the sex was phenomenal,” I told her for the hundredth time. “The turning into a jerk in the morning and dumping me at Kimber’s, like a dorm-level walk of shame, not so much.”

  I twirled my own extra-spicy pad thai noodles on my fork and dug in. I was famished after my late-night sexcapades. I’d only had two tacos, half of a bag of marshmallows, and some Hershey’s chocolate in the last eighteen hours, and I was starving.

  “Yeah, well, at least you had some fun,” Heidi said. “That was good for you after Professor McJerkface.”

  I snorted into my food and then hacked and coughed to clear my airway. “Professor McJerkface?”

  Heidi shrugged and winked at me. “Pretty much.”

  “Well, it was a good time. But, you know…it was more than that.” Thoughtfully, I set my fork down and sipped on my water. “I kind of like him.”

  “A Wright brother?” Heidi asked with wide eyes. “Aren’t you President of the Anti-Wright Family Fan Club?”

  “Something like that,” I agreed. “But he was different.”

  “Oh, boy! Here it goes,” Heidi said.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You’re doing that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know,” Heidi said. “The whole the guy is a jerk, but he’s different with me. News flash, Robinson, he’s not different. He just wanted to fuck you.”

  I flinched. “Thanks for that cheery message.”

  “Gah, I’m sorry. I had a weird night, and I worry about you. What happened with Landon was bad enough.”

  “You were the one pushing me into Jensen’s arms.”

  “Yeah, but that was before you got all doe-eyed and decided he was different. I like Jensen just fine. He’s a great boss. He cares about his employees. He knows what he’s doing, and he makes us all a lot of money. But I can’t pretend that he’s this perfect person either. I’ve heard that he sleeps around when he’s at business meetings out of town.”

  “Ugh! I don’t want to think about it. We’ve all done stupid things. I don’t want to judge him. Maybe he’s just a manwhore, and that’s what last night was about. But you should have warned me!”

  “I thought you’d fuck around with him as a nice rebound, Em. I didn’t think it’d be anything.”

  “Well, it’s not,” I said instantly. “It’s definitely not. Remember the whole dropped me off at Kim’s like he was taking out the trash? Because I’m pretty sure, no matter how different he was with me, that asshole sure shone through.”

  “Good. That’s good. I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

  “I’m not going to get hurt. Now, what was this about a weird night?” I asked her.

  She brushed her hand in front of her face and laughed. “Nothing honestly. I had a strange phone call, and I ended up talking to the person all night. It was unexpected.”

  My eyebrows rose in question, but Heidi was already moving on to another topic.

  “Do you want to go shopping with me and Julia sometime this week?”

  “Two weeks before Christmas. Your favorite time to shop.”

  “All the crowds and sales and screaming—it makes for a great horror flick.”

  “Sure, I’m in. I can never resist a good bit of horror.”

  Right then, my phone pinged noisily.

  “Fuck,” I groaned, digging it out of my pocket.

  I’d forgotten to turn the ringer off this morning. I’d taken a good long shower and an even longer nap once I got home and left the ringer on, so I could get Heidi’s text when she got out of her morning meeting.

  I clicked the button, and my screen lit up. I had a text message from Jensen. My stomach dropped, and I glanced up at Heidi.

  “Let me guess…lover boy?”

  “Yeah.”

  I swiped to open and read the message.

  Emery, are you free this afternoon? I canceled my meetings for the day and wanted to see if you would be interested in getting coffee. I know this little place over by campus; it’s my favorite—Death by Chocolate. I don’t know if you’ve ever been since it’s pretty new. I could meet you. Say two o’clock?

  “What does he have to say?”

  I passed the phone over to Heidi. “I’m way more confused now.”

  “He wants to meet you at Kimber’s bakery?” Heidi asked with a chuckle.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t know that she owns it.”

  “True, but damn. I wonder what happened in his head. Besides the fact that canceling meetings is so not like him. I’ve never heard of him willfully canceling a meeting. He must have realized how much he fucked up.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or he wants round two.”

  I snatched my phone out of Heidi’s hand. “There’s no way.”

  “Well, are you going to meet him?”

  “Did curiosity kill the cat?” I a
sked her.

  “Yeah, but it had nine lives and shit.”

  Death by Chocolate was the love child of my sister’s bachelors in food science and her achievements in culinary school. The sugary-sweet smell was what I always associated with Kimber. When we were younger, I used to jokingly sing the Bagel Bites commercial jingle to her with new words about all the baking she did.

  “Cupcakes in the morning, cookies in the evening, chocolate at suppertime. When Kimber’s in the kitchen, you can eat baked goods anytime,” I hummed to myself as the bell dinged overhead.

  It was a quaint and totally adorable coffee shop and bakery. The floors were black-and-white tiles, and the walls were iced in mint glaze. The countertops were powdered-sugar white granite, and the cabinetry was a buttery lemon bar. Each table was a different-flavored French macaron with cushioned fruit-tart chairs. Elaborate wedding cakes in glass boxes decorated the room. The best part was the bar filled with row after row of sweets hiding behind glass, just waiting to be enjoyed.

  “Can I help you?” a girl asked. She wore a Death by Chocolate apron and looked to be a Tech student.

  “I’ll take a snickerdoodle cookie and two of the strawberry macarons, please.”

  “And a slice of death by chocolate cake,” Jensen said from behind me.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin and whirled around. “Jesus, you scared me.”

  “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I thought you’d have heard the bell chime,” he said.

  My eyes traveled the length of him, and I enjoyed every single moment, as if I were looking at my last sunrise. He had on a midnight-black suit that had to have been custom-fitted for his body. His button-up was white and crisp with a herringbone texture that had always been my favorite, and his Texas Tech Red Raiders red tie. And, even though he was dressed as sharp as ever, it was his eyes that caught me. Dark as Kimber’s famous chocolate cake and looking at me like most of the customers did when the cake was presented to them.