13. Jameson
Kat and I slowed near the intersection to wait for the light to change so we could cross the street, and I studied her profile. She didn’t turn her head, but the tension that traveled across her shoulders and the tightening of her jaw made it clear she knew I was looking at her. “You’re upset about my dinner date.”
That made her whip her head toward me. “I… No… Of course not.” I continued to stare until the challenge in my eyes made her nice and uncomfortable. Her shoulders sagged. “How did you…?”
“The ‘that’s the problem’ when I said that I’d guide any woman the same way made it pretty clear.”
“I said that out loud?” Kat dropped her head in her hands, and I snagged her wrists and tugged them away from her face.
“One, I scheduled that dinner at the beginning of the week, and two?—”
“It’s not my business, I know.”
“I didn’t sleep with her.” I dragged my thumb over the soft skin on her wrist, wondering if her pulse was beating as fast as mine. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and how I’d rather you be seated across from me instead.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows drew together. “That’s, uh, nice, but you can’t very well just become abstinent while we’re working together.”
I nearly choked on air. Abstinent was the opposite of what I wanted to be while we were working together.
She jerked free of my grasp. “So I’ll try not to let it bother me.” “There’s another option, the one I’d highly prefer.”
She shook her head. Then her gaze ran up and down me, and she sunk her teeth into her bottom lip, and I could tell she was considering it. I closed the space between us, and she shook her head again and stepped away.
She was driving me crazy. If I were smart, I’d just give up and call Vivienne.
But then she turned to face the street again, and my eyes dropped to her perfect ass. I wanted to pull her closer and push up against it as I wrapped a hand around her slender throat.
I’d start slower, of course, because I didn’t want to scare her away, but eventually…
The light changed, and she charged across the crosswalk, a woman on a mission. I took long strides to keep up with her, and she cast me a sidelong glance when we neared the other side. “Where are we even going?”
“Just a few more steps and we’ll be there—the deli with the blue awning.”
She tilted her head. “I thought you wanted something else for lunch. You have a sandwich from here at the office already.”
“Well, someone told me the ‘something else’ was off the table, so I’m settling for a fucking sandwich.”
She bit back a grin—now she was laughing at the frustration she was causing me. I was going to have to find a creative way to punish her for that. “Mmm, a fucking sandwich,” she said. “Sounds yummy.”
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and moved my lips next to her ear. “Oh, it’d be delicious. Make no mistake.”
Her chest rose and fell with her rapid breaths, the sun catching her necklaces and adding extra sparkle to her cleavage, like it wasn’t hard enough not to gape at as it was. She relaxed into my side, and her lips parted. She was close to giving in, I could tell.
But since she kept backing away, I decided to back off first this time. I opened the door to the deli for her and ushered her inside.
We ordered and then took our food to one of the outside tables. It was a warm day, so I took off my suit coat and draped it on the back of my chair. I caught Kat giving my sandwich dirty looks as I squirted on some extra mustard.
“Mustard is seriously the grossest,” she said.
Keeping my gaze on her, I grabbed another packet and smothered on some more. Then I took a big bite and made a big show of how much I enjoyed it.
Her shoulders shook with a silent laugh. I felt the glob start to fall, but was too late. I glanced down at the mustard on my white shirt.
Her laughter wasn’t silent anymore, and it drew the attention of everyone around us, people smiling even though they didn’t know why she was laughing. “That’s usually my kind of move.”
I reached for a napkin and dabbed it off the best I could. At least my suit coat would cover it. “This never would’ve happened if we’d done ‘something else’ for lunch.”
“Pretty sure that’d make us hungrier, so then we’d have to eat faster, so the result would probably be the same.”
“The fact that you say that just proves you have no idea what exactly I planned to do to you.”
She crossed her legs, then reached for her drink and took a sip.
I could see she wanted to say something but was holding back. “Just say it.”
“Fine.” She glanced around and then leaned in. “Where exactly were you planning on doing all these things? The side of the street while people watched?”
My mind didn’t reject the idea as strongly as it should.
“An alley? A classy one, I hope.” She leaned even closer, close enough that I could make the different shades of green and brown in her eyes. “Or just a public restroom, with who knows how many germs lurking?”
“Now you’ll never know,” I said because it was more fun to tease her than to say she might have a point. We should avoid the office, and I worried she might take me saying I’d pay for a hotel room for an hour the wrong way, regardless of how nice a hotel— The Four Seasons wasn’t very far from here.
Plus, an hour wasn’t nearly enough time for all the things I wanted to do to her body.
“Did you grow up here?” she asked. “Talk about a change of subject.”
“I just thought I should…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Get to know more about you.”
I didn’t know if she wanted that information to convince herself to sleep with me, or not to. But she was easy to talk to, so I figured we could do the get-to-know-you exchange. “I grew up here, yes.”
“Does your family still live here?”
“My mom does, but my dad passed away about a decade ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
I swiped a hand through the air, not wanting to go too deep into that subject. Yes I missed him, and yes he was a good guy who people liked, but thinking too much about him brought up conflicted feelings about how he’d left my mom and me in such a huge financial mess, and how he’d basically given up once his company started to sink. That only added to our financial ruin, and every time someone made the connection between him and me, it made it that much harder to prove myself. Or to not punch them in the face if they talked badly about him. Like I said, conflicted.
And now Kat was looking at me with too much pity.
“It was a long time ago. My mom lives outside the city, not too far from my place. I’ve toyed with getting a place in Back Bay or Beacon Hill and living closer to the office, but I worry about her getting too lonely.” Now this line of conversation made me feel like I was revealing too much. I wasn’t very used to talking about myself in terms other than what I could do for a company.
“Aww, that’s nice. I sometimes worry about my dad being too lonely once he retires. My mom’s one of those social butterflies, so she belongs to all these clubs and has a big group of friends. People are just attracted to her.”
“You must get that from her, then.”
Pfft.“I’m hardly a social butterfly, and I tend to scare people away with my awkwardness. Numbers are easier to predict, which is why I like them so much.”
How could she have such a skewed view of herself? Maybe she wasn’t a social butterfly, but she had this contagious happy energy. In general, I didn’t like people, and I especially didn’t like big social gatherings. I could pull out the charm for the clients, but it was exhausting, and I counted down the hours till I could go home and run numbers and look over accounts in solitude.
Kat wiped her hands on a napkin. “I know everyone has a mom, but I can hardly imagine you having one, simply because that would mean you were a kid at some time.”
“You think I just sprang out of a rock, fully grown?”
“Of course not. Out of stone.” Her grin said she was way too proud of the pun.
“Very funny.”
“I thought so.” She took a drink of her soda, her lips wrapping around the straw in a hypnotizing way. “So, what’s your mom like?”
“Worries about me too much, cooks a mean pot roast, and belongs to a book club full of proper old ladies who read very smutty books—something she probably would rather I not tell my employees.”
I meant the last part as a joke, but the way Kat ducked her head and suddenly became super interested in rolling up her straw wrapper made me wonder about her reading preferences. I liked the thought of her curled up reading a steamy novel. She had this intoxicating mix of sweet and innocent while boasting pin-up girl curves made for sinning, and I once again had the thought of unleashing her inner hellcat. Of seeing just how wild she was, and if I couldn’t shake her cage and make her a little wilder.
“Would you like me to ask her if there’s a slot open in her book club?”
“No,” Kat said, too quickly. Then she looked up at me. “Actually, I kind of do.”
“I knew it.”
“You know nothing.”
If I wanted to unleash the hellcat, I needed to play this right. “Tell me, then.”
Her eyes widened—apparently she thought I was going to interrogate her on her late night reading materials. “Oh, I…Yeah, I can’t.”
She blushed a bright red, and while I loved watching her squirm a little, I decided to circle back around to the conversation we’d been having to put her at ease. “So what about you?
Did your family always live in Hartford?”
“Yeah. I escaped for a little while to go to college, but other than that, it’s always been Hartford. Don’t get me wrong, I love it there. For as big as it is, it feels like everyone somehow knows my family, and it’s just a lot of pressure to live up to the Taylor name, especially since I wasn’t—gasp—born a boy.” She crossed her forearms on the table in front of her, and my gaze snagged on ample cleavage that showcased why I loved the fact that she wasn’t. “But one of the reasons I want to run the branch, and to do it really, really well, is because Taylor-Made Marketing has been in my family for generations. My great-grandfather founded it.”
Shit. In bringing up her family, I inadvertently remembered why having any kind of relationship with Kat was a bad idea. Once she found out the new direction I was taking the company and that it meant closing the Hartford branch, she was going to hate me.
I should care more about her future loathing, but I told myself that as long as I was clear about this being temporary fun and leaving emotions out of it, there was no reason we couldn’t enjoy some fun between the sheets.
Or against the wall.
Ohyeah,I’mdefinitelygoingtotakeheragainstthewallsometime.
And if she felt more comfortable with that after we knew more about each other, then I wouldn’t mind knowing more about her anyway…Yeah, it was weak, but when it came to fighting my attraction to her, so was I.
“Passion’s a funny thing, you know?”
“I’m not sure I do.” At the moment it didn’t feel very funny, it felt more like an annoying hurdle, one I should avoid but was probably going to rush toward anyway.
“Sometimes I wonder if people only have so much of it, and it’s either got to go to their career or their family, but not both. Like, you have to decide.”
“I’m not sure that’s the case. People seem to pull it off all the time.”
“Yes, they seemto. From the outside, my family looked perfect, to the point that people constantly commented on it. My parents are so opposite, and come from different worlds, so they have a unique dynamic. My mom supports the business as much as my dad does, but more by being out and about in the community and keeping up appearances. And I know that everyone puts on a bit of a show in public, but they’re completely different people at home, both of them.” Kat snapped out of whatever thoughts she’d drifted into. “I don’t mean to make it sound like… They’re still married…”
Even though she didn’t say the but, I heard it. “But?”
She smoothed her sandwich wrapper out, focusing on the motion. “But they live different lives like seventy-five percent of the time. They even have different bedrooms—he snores, she likes to stay up late. She goes out. He stays in. They get along, and I love them, and I had a great childhood and all that jazz…”
This time I didn’t have to prompt her for the rest.
“I just always hoped that relationships didn’t have to be like that, you know. I always wanted more of a passionate relationship, but maybe that’s just not in the cards for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” She crumpled the wrapper she’d spent so much time flattening. “It’s all future worries because that’s all someday stuff, and I’m not even sure how I started down this rabbit hole. Sorry.”
I wanted to push more and see if she’d expand, but my phone rang. “It’s the office.”
“You’ve got to take it, then. I don’t mind.”
I answered the phone, and Debra told me that my one o’clock was early—of course. I wanted to tell her to make him wait, but she stressed out about having someone waiting in her designated reception area like that meant she wasn’t doing her job.
By the time I hung up—after promising to be there in ten—Kat had cleared the table of our trash. She dipped a napkin in her water cup and then dabbed at the mustard stain on my shirt. I was going to tell her to leave it because it didn’t matter, but in this position, I could see right down her shirt, and I sort of forgot how to speak for a moment.
She reached into her purse and brought out a Tide to Go stick. She dabbed at the fabric and within a few seconds, the only thing left over from my mustard spill was a damp spot.
I pulled on my suit jacket and guided her down the sidewalk with my hand on her back. She didn’t bother with the dirty look this time.
Just before we reached our office building I dropped it, doing my best to honor her wishes.
We rode the elevator up in silence, and as the car slowed to a stop, Kat tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled at me. “Go get ‘em, Tiger.”
“No smack on the ass to go with the pep-talk?” I joked.
But the joke was on me, because she smacked my ass, hard. Then the doors opened and she shot me a saucy look before walking through them.