Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
ROZEN
“You stole my favorite client,” I blurted out.
This really awful squirming was happening in my stomach. Earlier I would have blamed it on being drunk. But my last drink had been hours ago, and between the dancing and all the coffee and food, I was almost fully sober again. Acting mutinous now, because I didn’t like this feeling, I jerked my chin up. “Yeah, Mrs. Green. She was my very favorite client of all time. The second day after you finished training, you took a call from her and suddenly she was yours.”
His expression was incredulous now, eyebrows scrunched as he thought. I would have expected just a little more… triumph about Mrs. Green, and less confusion like he was sick of my games and was about to get up and go home. Fuck, had I been… wrong about this too? This whole night, he hadn’t done anything remotely wrong and it didn’t fit in with the idea of him I had at work, but I’d been too drunk to realize it. I darted my hand out and grabbed his forearm, which was hot and dusted with soft arm hair, and that was the moment he remembered her. His confusion cleared and he stood up, but he kept his hand on the table carefully so I didn’t have to let go of him. The squirming melted into something else that I didn’t know how to handle either.
Looking down at me, he cut me to the core with a disappointed look, crossing his arms over his chest again. “Rozen, Balfour reassigned her to me,” he told me in a flat tone. “He said you’d just taken on Owens’ Construction and he needed to redistribute some of your smaller accounts and she was really nice to new employees… That’s what made you act so bad all this time? That’s what you wouldn’t explain when I tried to ask why you didn’t like me?”
I jumped to my feet too, relinquishing his hand, and croaked, “Balfour did? But I?—”
I bit my lip and rocked from foot to foot, feeling itchy.
His confidence had faded and his body language screamed that he was unhappy. He stared at me, his sweet honey brown eyes tired but sharp, like he could see straight through me. It wasn’t the first time he’d looked at me like that, but this time it didn’t annoy me.
If I was being honest, it hadn’t ever really annoyed me. It felt like an empty gesture. So why had I kept all this up? I let myself think about why I had been so offended that he’d stolen Mrs. Green, why I kept a detailed log of every time he hadn’t gone to happy hours I organized, and why I’d learned everything I could about him for what I told my non-work-friends was ‘opposition research’. Had I just always had… a thing for Henry, with his sweet, nerdy vibe?
I could tell he was about to leave, and we’d never get this chance again. In fact, I’d made it so much worse and we’d never be able to come back from it, and it would be my fault.
I couldn’t let it happen—and I didn’t think he wanted it to happen to either. He had come out somewhere he clearly hadn’t wanted to be after midnight on Valentine’s Day just because I asked him to. He’d accepted my clunky offer to get food afterward just because I asked him to, a second time. Maybe he really wanted me to not hate him as badly as I wanted him to stay.
Taking a deep breath, I inched even closer to him, and when he didn’t move, I dared to reach up and cup my hands around his neck, feeling his pulse beating wildly against my palm.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. He tore his eyes away from me, stubbornly keeping them aimed off into the distance. Fuck, I was so bad at sincerity. People wanted me to be light and fun, and I hadn’t been accountable to anyone else other than my twin in forever. But maybe… maybe Henry deserved that, because I’d hurt him. “I… Shit, look, I liked you, and then I thought you stole my client, and it made me feel stupid, so I overreacted and acted like an asshole.”
Slowly, his eyes dragged back to meet mine. “You… liked me?”
A spark of something suspiciously like hope lit up in me. I snuck in that last couple inches until our bodies touched gently, my heart thumping when he shivered delicately, and I sighed as dramatically as possible. “Fine, there’s the blackmail you were hoping for. Yeah. I liked you.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed and his fingers tentatively brushed across the sliver-thin band of bare skin between my pants and top before settling with his thumbs on my hip bones. “I liked you too. That was why I was so upset that you hated me. Or acted like you hated me.”
“Uh oh,” I whispered, “now I have blackmail on you too.”
A sweet, shy look reshaped his expression and I couldn’t help but smile back at him crookedly.
Henry’s thumb stroked over my cheek that was probably beet red due to my confession that I was obsessed with him, basically, and he rewarded me with another soft chuckle.
“I’m so confused right now,” he admitted, and when my face fell, his hand clasped my hip tighter. “Shit, um, I mean, yesterday you loudly invited anyone who walked by our desks to a hockey game next week, except me.” He winced and so did I, really embarrassed by my behavior now. “Then tonight you get drunk, call me the wrong Henry, say you’re strictly a hookup person, dance so well with me, ask me why I’m single, ask me out for food, admit you’re a jerk to me at work because of something I didn’t do two years ago, and… finally admit that you liked me.”
Gah , he was so fucking cute , I thought while we got lost in each other’s eyes.
What the hell was happening to me? Finding out that most of my ideas about Henry were wrong—that he’d stolen a client from me, that he was straight, that he hated me, for starters—shouldn’t be enough to turn my whole world upside down and give me an instant crush on him. I didn’t crush . I hadn’t had even a casual boyfriend in almost two years and I’d had hookups. The other Henry—I couldn’t think of him as the right Henry anymore—was the only repeat. Shit, so maybe I really had had a thing for Henry from the start. I mean… I hadn’t… It would be embarrassing if I’d… hooked up with the other Henry and thought of him immediately when Deston asked if there was anyone I wanted to call, just because his name was Henry , and I had subconsciously been wanting Henry Saunders for… ever.
My eyes got really wide as panic seized complete control of me.
“Henry?” I kind of squeaked.
Peering down at me, his eyebrows knit in concern as he cupped my neck and searched my face for something as he murmured, “What’s wrong?”
The kindness was so genuine and guileless, and had been there all along in him except I’d been too butthurt and afraid he’d never like me the way I’d liked him from the start. So naturally, my panic squashed my charms and made me demand, “Do you still like me?”
“One minute,” he said firmly.
Then he put my own move from earlier on me, taking my hand and towing me gently to the register. I stood next to him in a daze, and I might not have had a lot of experience with crushes, but I figured it was a good sign that he paid the full check and not just his part.
Once he was done, he took my hand again, intertwining our fingers this time, and I melted into a puddle of chocolate as we went outside… until the cold winter air hit my overheated skin. I whined and he immediately let me go to strip off his hoodie, making me whine again but for a completely different reason than the weather. When he held it out to me, I took it and quickly put it on, sniffing the fabric around my neck where it smelled like him. I definitely appreciated that now his nips were showing off through the thin cotton of his tee shirt.
“It looks good on you,” he said, his voice rumbly, while his eyes got heated and eager, and he wound the hoodie cords around his fingers, reeling me into him, his cock nudging mine.
Pressing closer, wanting to do something with all this heat and eagerness, I murmured, “Since it’s my birthday, can my present be we agree to forget about everything that happened before you touched my neck on the dance floor and told me all my ideas about you are wrong?”
“I can’t agree to forget it,” he said gravely, and I started to deflate, even though he had every right to hold a brand new grudge for at least another couple of years. But then he smiled crookedly, shaking his head, the wisps of hair falling over his eyes swaying hypnotically. “But because I’m indisputably the better person, I will agree to put a pin in it for thirty-six hours.”
I stuck my bottom lip out in a pout.
“Okay, fine, forty-eight hours,” Henry conceded breezily, his smile getting cocky.
“Only if you spend the next thirty-six hours with me too,” I bargained coyly.
Rumbling again, he nosed behind my ear while I quivered like a bowstring, then sucked my earlobe into his mouth and flicked his tongue around my diamond earring, toying with it.
“O-oh,” I said. No one had ever done that to me and it made my cock turn to iron.
Then he snaked his tongue up my neck and along my jaw until he got to my pout and nipped my bottom lip. I made an urgent noise and jerked my chin up to drag my mouth against his, digging my hands into his hair to anchor him to me. With the sweetest moan, he flicked his tongue over my bottom lip where he’d nipped it before he dipped it into my mouth. Groaning impatiently, I tangled our tongues together, jaws widening.
“Oh fuck,” he muttered with a gasp between kisses, driving me backwards down the sidewalk to his car, then pinned me up against it as we kept making out. I’d never thought about what kind of kisser Henry was, that I was aware of, but he was as dedicated to kissing as he was to being good at his job and working out. It may have sounded a little boring, but it felt amazing to have our kisses be what he was determined to get just right, the only goal to please us both.
My leg slid between his, pressing my thigh right up against his hard cock rutting against his soft sweatpants, and his hips punched forward while he let out a rough cry. He hooked one thigh around my hip, pinning us together so tight all we could do was writhe as we lost control.
“We better stop or we’re going to get arrested,” he said in that rumbly, sexy tone.
“I love handcuffs,” I groaned, rutting frantically against him now.