Olly
There was so much we hadn’t figured out.
I couldn’t help glancing across the room at Keaton every few minutes.
A new thought crossed my mind each time.
Would he want to tell people? How fast should we go?
Did he still really want to be my secretary?
For how long? Was he thinking he would get a promotion out of this?
That was an unkind thought. Did he mind who I was?
What I was like? Would he want me to change?
Things we needed to talk about. Things that couldn’t be spoken. So many of them swirled around inside my head that I thought I might be losing my mind.
At least losing my mind for Keaton was better than never having kissed him at all.
The taste of his lips ghosted across my tongue and the pressure of his mouth still pressed against mine in my head. I wanted to stop existing. Freeze everything. Only then would the sensation never fade away.
But it had to fade away.
And I found myself breaking my own resolve to do nothing but work when it did.
“Keaton,” I said.
He looked up. He was mid-type: his fingers poised above the keyboard. He looked like a startled rabbit. “Yes?”
“You must have questions for me.”
Keaton stared at me with that same expression for another beat before dropping his hands to the desk and smiling. He had a crafty look to him now. “What you mean by that is, you have questions for me.”
I hung my head a second before I could look at him again. I knew this was going to be a problem. I just had to figure out how to navigate it.
“There’s a lot to figure out about how we’re going to do this.”
“Well,” Keaton said and leaned forward on one of his hands. His tone turned conspiratorial. “You may not have done this for a while, so let me remind you. First, we need something to lubricate the whole procedure, and then -”
I could feel my face heating as I waved a hand to stop him. I wasn’t a prude. I just couldn’t handle that kind of talk in this office if we weren’t going to be acting on it right away. “You know what I meant.”
Keaton’s face sobered. “Has it? Been a while for you, I mean.”
I considered the timeline of my life. “Yes. Out of choice. I’m not a man with a lot of free time.”
“I guess that’s the good thing about me being right here with you in the space where you spend most of your time,” Keaton said. His grin was impish.
“Or the bad thing,” I groaned. “We’re supposed to be working.”
“We still can.”
There might as well have been a vast ocean of space between us. We couldn’t touch from here. I might be able to hit him with a balled-up piece of paper at best. But even so…
Keaton Dunbar was controlling me like a puppet on a string.
He knew as well as I did that there was no going back to work until this conversation was done.
“I’ve not been a monk for my whole life,” I clarified. “There were others. Before.”
“Why did they end?” Keaton asked.
I liked how direct he was being. His eyes were like magnets constantly drawing me in. I wanted to tell him the truth about everything. I couldn’t be anything but honest. That was what scared me.
“I wasn’t out,” I said.
There. My cards were on the table. The one thing I knew that could derail this faster than it had begun.
Keaton had already told me the one thing that truly mattered to him. The one thing that would stop him from getting into a relationship again.
It also just so happened to be the only boundary I wasn’t willing to cross yet.
Keaton looked down at the space between us for a long time. I resisted the urge to dive over my desk and sprawl on the floor into his eyeline. I prayed for him to look at me until he did and I wanted to hide.
“It’s different for you,” he said. Not a question: a statement. “You’re in the public eye. It’s rare for an agent to be well-known like you, but thanks to the fact that you and Coleman were both players, and your rivalry… it’s different.”
I frowned lightly. “Different how? I’m sure your ex had a reason for not wanting to come out.” I wouldn’t say his name.
“Jordan was…” I fought back a flinch at hearing it.
I hated the sound of it on Keaton’s tongue.
The sound of his ex-lover’s name. There was a tinge to it that he would never use for anyone else.
Primal jealousy roared like a beast inside of me.
“He had his reasons, yes. But they were selfish reasons. For you, I see it differently.”
“You shouldn’t give me excuses,” I said roughly. I wouldn’t hurt him on a technicality. That wasn’t fair.
“It’s not an excuse.” Keaton took a breath. “Or, it’s not an excuse for you. I’m… a little intimidated, if I’m honest.”
I tilted my head at him questioningly.
“Well, you’re… famous,” he said. I shuddered a little at the word but he held up a defensive hand.
“Kind of, anyway. People pay attention to what you say. You do press conferences and there are tabloid shots of you at games. If you’re out and people know we’re dating, then I’ll be caught up in that as well, and I’m a behind-the-camera kind of guy, you know?
Not to mention that people will treat me a lot differently around here. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said slowly. “I didn’t hear anything after ‘we’re dating’.”
Keaton’s cheeks flared bright pink immediately. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Was that too much of an assumption? I mean, I know we haven’t, like, formalized anything, I just… it was just a turn of phrase, or…”
I smiled. “Keaton Dunbar,” I said. He shut up babbling and stared at me. “I would very much like to date you.”
Keaton blew out a breath. “Okay,” he said. There was a pause. He grinned. “Okay.”
I chuckled. “But that still means we have a lot to figure out.”
Keaton nodded seriously. The smile fell from his face and I wanted to go over there and paste it back on.
It wasn’t the right time. We needed to get through this.
“I want you to promise me something,” he said.
“Promise me that this – us – won’t affect our work lives.
I mean, you know. Kissing in the office or whatever is fine.
But you can’t fire me when we have an argument, or snap Ace’s head off for sassing me, or give me a promotion just because we’re together.
Actually, I don’t even want a promotion. No special treatment.”
I nodded. “I can do that.” I looked at him pointedly. “Can you?”
He took a breath before he answered. “Yes, I think I can,” he said.
“I can be organized and analytical and find the best way to be a good secretary for you without letting my emotions take over. I won’t cancel meetings without telling you if I’m mad at you, or tell you office gossip you’re not supposed to know unless it affects the work, or demand things from you that a secretary shouldn’t have. ”
“There’s something I want you to know,” I said solemnly when he was done with his list. “I’m glad you want to keep things under wraps. But… if you didn’t feel that way. If it was a deal breaker…”
Keaton nodded. “You wouldn’t do this. I know.”
I shook my head quickly. I waited until he met my eyes again. I needed him to look into my eyes and see how much I meant this. “I would come out for you.”
Keaton’s mouth formed an ‘o’ of surprise. “But… your last relationships…”
I shook my head again. He needed to listen and believe me. “I’m older and wiser than I was then,” I said. “I know now. It takes sacrifice and hard work for a relationship to work out. It takes equal sacrifice. If we ever come to that bridge…”
“You’ll cross it?” Keaton whispered.
I nodded.
Keaton looked down at his desk for a long moment. When he looked up again it was almost shyly. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to die alone,” I said bluntly. “I don’t want to miss my chance at love.”
Keaton paused. A small gasp of breath made his chest hitch up and down. He looked at his desk again and then up at me. I wondered if he wasn’t getting whiplash from all this up and down.
“Maybe I should go work for Ace,” he said. “Put some distance between us.”
“No,” I snapped.
“Or even Caleb,” he carried on. “No one would suspect us if I was working for Caleb.”
“Keaton.”
“I could still see you every day, we’d just have to make reasons and excuses. I could work with whoever your new secretary is. You see Ace every day, so I could just come over here to deliver messages.”
He wasn’t listening to me. I stood up and walked around my desk.
“Of course, if I’m at the Coleman Group, I can just get in his car when he’s heading home, and then when you have your secret dinners, we can go home together.
No one will ever know. You’ve never been caught before, having your dinners, so it could work.
And there are private meeting rooms and cars with blacked-out windows and our own homes, no one will know we’re there.
Oh, except my place, since Fernando is around all the time.
So, I guess, your place. I think we could pull it off. ”
I walked right up to him and still he was panicking his way through it.
“It would be hard, obviously, but if we’re together all the time, all day long, I think people will see it – I don’t know if I could stop them from seeing it – it’s going to be all over my face, and I’ve never been a good liar.
I mean – what if we’re swept up in the moment like earlier and then someone walks in, and –”
“Keaton Dunbar.”
He broke off and looked at me. I didn’t think he had even truly registered that I was walking over until I was right in front of him. I reached for his hand and he took it. I pulled him easily to his feet.
“You’re staying right here where I can keep an eye on you,” I growled.
I closed the distance between us with a single step and slipped my hand against the side of his face.
His eyes fluttered shut instinctively. I waited until our lips were almost touching to let my final words linger on his breath.
“No one’s taking you away from me again. ”
And I sealed my promise with my mouth over his.