Chapter 21
Alex
I pouredcoffee into my cup as I leaned against the kitchen counter. Outside, rain was falling from the gray sky. It was after ten in the morning, but Kat was still in bed, asleep. We’d kept late nights the last few nights, and though she wouldn’t admit it, she was still recovering from her injuries and needed rest.
Normally, I’d be at the office right now. I was dressed for it—dress pants, dark blue dress shirt. This was as formal as I ever got, because this was Texas, and the people I did business with didn’t particularly care. I’d met plenty of guys who were multimillionaires and wore jeans and work boots. I’d met classy dressers, too. Texas had all kinds.
I was dressed, but I wasn’t at the office. I hadn’t been in days, and I wasn’t going now.
To say this was unusual for me was an understatement. When I looked back on it now, I realized that I’d spent all of every day since I was twenty-three working, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. I worked weekends, holidays, and Christmas—I had nowhere else to go and no one to celebrate with.
I’d told myself at first that I had to work so much because I came from poverty and I needed to get ahead. Then, once I had money, I told myself I had to work because I was competitive and I didn’t want anyone else—including my own partners—doing better than me. Then I told myself I had to work because my partners were relying on me, especially Aidan, and I couldn’t let them down.
But finally, something had started to shake loose. I’d booked the Hawaii trip, my first trip anywhere just for leisure. I’d started to think about what else I wanted to do. And then the Hawaii trip had been derailed by Kat, and the things shaken loose had pretty much exploded.
I checked my phone. I was due for an on-camera online meeting with the partners in four minutes, and I’d have some explaining to do.
When I got back from Nashville, I’d let it be known that I hadn’t gone to Hawaii after all. I’d spent a day in the office, dodging my staff and working. I’d thought it would be soothing, a return to normalcy, exactly what I needed after nearly getting my balls kicked in by a dirtbag outside Kat’s apartment.
Instead, after I got home that day, I had no inclination to go back to the office at all. I put my work cell on silent. I avoided emails. Every once in a while I’d go online and answer a handful of them, and then I’d log off again, mostly so I could get naked with Kat yet again. I kept trying to chastise myself, but I found that I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel bad about dodging my multimillion-dollar career for naked Kat Sloane. Maybe I was crazy, but it seemed like a perfectly good trade-off to me.
But I hadn’t addressed Aidan’s proposal to close the Dallas office and move me to New York. I’d told the partners that I would think about it while I was in Hawaii—but I didn’t go.
I sighed, taking my coffee over to the laptop I’d set up at my home workstation and waking it up. I could avoid work, but my partners were my brothers in all but blood. I owed them some kind of explanation.
The video conference started, and there they were. Aidan was in his New York office, dressed in his usual black suit, black shirt, and black tie. Everyone in New York knew him as the Man in Black, and he kept the image up, because it made him seem like a sinister, all-knowing villain. Which, in a lot of ways, he was. In any case, the image gave him the edge when it came to making real estate deals.
Dane was sitting, it seemed, in a closet. He was cross-legged on the floor with shoes next to him and clothes hanging behind his head. I knew he was at his house in Long Island, where he and Ava—Aidan’s sister—were home with their new baby daughter, Charlotte. I had no desire for children myself, but I’d seen plenty of pictures, and I had to admit that Charlotte was cute, if you were into that sort of thing.
Noah, of course, was outside somewhere, because he was in L.A. It looked like he was on his back deck, leaning back on a lounge chair, his dark blond hair ruffling in the wind. He even had sunglasses on.
“Jesus,” Noah said, his voice a lazy drawl. “I don’t know about this video thing. I preferred regular phone calls. I’d rather not look at any of you.”
“We don’t want to look at you, either,” Dane grumbled.
“This is better than a phone call.” Aidan’s voice was authoritative. “It’s more like a real meeting.”
“Shove it, Man in Black,” Noah said. “It isn’t a real meeting. Dane is in a closet. Why are you in a closet, Dane?”
“Because Charlotte is sleeping, meathead,” Dane shot back. “She’s taking a nap, and Ava is taking a nap, too. She naps when the baby does. I don’t want to disturb them.”
“See?” Noah said. “Very professional.”
Dane shook his head. “Dude, I don’t even work for this company.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“Stop it, children,” Aidan said. “We’ve got business to discuss.”
“Yeah, I guess we do.” Noah took a sip of something and pushed his sunglasses up on his head. “What happened to Hawaii, Alex? You were supposed to go get drunk and hopefully laid.”
They all went quiet, looking at me.
“I didn’t go,” I said. “Something came up.”
“Something like what?” Dane said. “We know all the deals you were working on. It wasn’t one of those.”
“It wasn’t a family emergency,” Aidan added. “Your parents are dead, and you hate your brother for some reason you never explained.”
“You didn’t just chicken out,” Noah said. He was watching me, calculation in his gaze. Noah put out a California-surfer-flake vibe, but it was a convenience. He was much smarter than he let on. “That isn’t like you. So something came up. Something important. What the hell was it?”
“Herpes?” Dane asked. “Did herpes come up?”
“Jesus, Dane,” Aidan said, and Noah laughed.
Yeah, there was ribbing. I’d known these guys since we were fifteen, so I expected it. And it was true, I wasn’t acting like I usually did, booking vacations and then ditching them. I didn’t have the flaky reputation Noah did.
“It wasn’t herpes,” I said. “Guess again.”
“We have no idea,” Aidan admitted. “I’ve been racking my brain. You’ve been keeping secrets from us, it seems.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t been keeping secrets from you at all. This was a surprise for me, too. But it happened.”
“What?” Dane asked, baffled. “What happened?”
I smelled a familiar scent, and I heard the soft pad of bare footsteps behind my chair. Kat leaned down, looking over my shoulder at the screen. She was wearing a light pink satin robe tied tightly, and her black hair was draped over her shoulder. “Hello, boys,” she said.
There was a second of stunned silence.
“Kat.” Noah was the first to speak. He looked as thunderstruck as the others, but then his face broke into a grin. “Holy sweet Jesus, woman, it’s nice to see you. Damn, you look beautiful.”
Kat smiled, one of her real smiles, and I tried not to curse Noah. The man had uncanny abilities when it came to charming women. He made the rest of us look bad.
“Hi, Noah,” she said. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
Dane scrubbed a hand through his short brown hair, then over his beard. “Hi, Kat.” I could tell he didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t blame him. My friends all knew Kat, of course. They’d been there when we got together and when it all fell apart. But I’d never told them what had happened with Damon, and all they knew was that for the past thirteen years, they were banned from mentioning Kat’s name.
That seemed screwed up to me now. Even with everything that had happened, why had I thought I could erase Kat as if she’d never been?
“Hi, Dane,” Kat said. “Congratulations on the baby.”
“Thank you.”
“So.” Aidan pressed his hands together under his chin, villain-style. “We finally have an explanation for what happened to the Hawaii trip.”
“I happened,” Kat said.
“It seems you did. Hi, Kat. I’m happy you’re back.”
It was my turn to be surprised. Aidan was happy about this? Why?
“I had a bit of a problem,” Kat said. “It’s a long story, but Alex helped me out of it. He’s still helping me. And here I am. Here we are. That’s basically the story.”
Noah laughed. “I think there’s a lot more to the story than that, Kat honey. We’ll get it out of you two someday.”
“It’s going to take several drinks to do that,” I said.
“Is this a permanent thing?” Dane asked.
I felt Kat’s body stiffen beside me, and my body mirrored hers. Kat and I weren’t doing anything but living in the moment right now, and we hadn’t talked about anything else.
I was going to say something vague. No comment, maybe. Or, That’s to be determined. But Kat spoke first.
“I’ll be going back to Nashville once my life gets back to normal,” she said.
I kept my features schooled. She was saying nothing but the truth: Once the scum who had attacked her were arrested, her problem was fixed and her time here was done. It was what we’d agreed on from the first. There was no reason to feel like someone had sucker-punched me in the stomach.
“Nashville’s a great place,” Noah was saying. “I always wondered where you ended up. You were destined for big things.”
It was Kat’s turn to stiffen, her body tensing beside my shoulder. She didn’t think she’d achieved big things at all, but I agreed with Noah. She wasn’t going to work in a bar forever.
“That’s very sweet of you to say,” she said.
I broke in, saving her. “Wasn’t there something else you all wanted to discuss?”
Kat waved at the boys and left as Aidan started talking about the reorganization plan. I heard her in the kitchen, pouring coffee. She could hear everything said in this call, and I didn’t mind. I didn’t have any business that was a secret from her.
“I need more time,” I said when the idea of closing the Dallas office had been tossed around yet again.
“How much more time?” Aidan asked. “I checked the lease on the Dallas office, and it renews in six weeks. If we renew, you’re in Dallas for another year.”
“Give the guy a break, Aidan,” Noah chimed in. “You’re asking Alex to pack up his entire life and move.”
“Fine, fine,” Aidan said, as if me leaving the city I’d lived in for over a decade was a minor detail. “You don’t have to decide today, Alex. But an answer in the next few weeks would be appreciated.”
I was used to Aidan. He was bossy and liked to tell everyone what to do, and as one of his oldest friends, I had no problem telling him when to shove it. It normally didn’t even bother me, but today I didn’t have the patience. “I’ll answer when I feel like answering, lease or no lease,” I said. “How’s that for an answer?”
Noah laughed. “I like that answer, not least because it pisses Aidan off.”
“That answer is fine with me,” Dane added. “Are we voting? I vote that Alex does whatever he wants.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Aidan said. “I can’t do anything with the three of you. Someone tell me something, sometime, that’s all I ask. This conference call is done.”
The call shut down. I closed my laptop and stood. Kat was standing in the kitchen, sipping coffee like she was watching a show that was very entertaining. “I see none of you have changed very much,” she said with a smile.
“Probably not.”
“I didn’t know Aidan wanted you to move to New York.”
“I haven’t thought much about it, which is why I didn’t bring it up.” It wouldn’t matter much if she was going to go back to Nashville. If she was actually going to go.
Did I want her to go?
Kat took another sip of her coffee. “Aidan is pissed.”
I shrugged, pushing away my thoughts of the future. “He’s usually pissed when it comes to business. It’ll last twenty minutes, tops. Why are you looking at me like that?”
She still had a crook of a smile in the corner of her mouth, but her gaze had gone dark as she looked at me. “You’re wearing glasses.”
“Oh, shit.” I’d forgotten. I reached up and took off the glasses with black frames I was wearing. “I have to wear them when I do computer stuff. Yes, I’m getting old. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.” She wasn’t. Her voice had gone a little throaty. “They’re sexy. Put them back on.”
“Kat. Glasses are not sexy.”
“Ummm,” she said, a little lusty sound that got my own blood to start to warm. “On you they are. Put them back on.”
“You can’t be serious.” But if it would make her look at me like that and make that little sound, I’d do just about anything. I put them back on. She went slightly blurry when I did, but I could still see her sleep-tousled hair, her long legs under the robe.
“Umm,” she said again. “Alex Blake, you age like fine wine.”
“Stop making that noise, or I’ll come over there and fuck you.”
“You don’t hear me objecting.”
Well, then. When a man makes a threat, he has no choice but to make good on it. I walked toward her and she put down her coffee cup. “I didn’t know you had a thing for nerds,” I said. “Maybe Dane was more your type.”
“You’re my type,” she said, reaching up to start unbuttoning my shirt.
Those words hit me in a strange place, low in my stomach, but I didn’t let on. She was leaving for Nashville as soon as this was over. “I don’t know why I bothered to get dressed,” I said as her hands worked.
“Me neither.” She finished with the buttons and pulled my dress shirt out of the waist of my pants, running her hands over my stomach. I took off the glasses, put them on the counter behind her, and kissed her deep.
Just like that, we were on fire. It had been like this between us for days, both of us pent up with years of frustration. I suddenly had the stamina of a teenager, and I hadn’t worn myself out yet. With Kat, I never wanted to stop. I never wanted this to end.
The words tumbled through my mind: I never want this to end.
I pushed them away as Kat untied the belt of her robe and let it drop to the floor. She was completely naked underneath it.
I broke the kiss and buried my face in the crook of her neck, taking in her sexy scent. “Fuck,” I groaned.
“As soon as possible,” she panted. She undid the button and zipper of my dress pants, and then she turned, putting her back against my chest and her hands on the cool granite counter.
This woman was going to fucking kill me.
In two quick moves I hitched her hips and slid inside her, and we both gasped. She gripped the counter as I started to move, both of us instantly finding our rhythm. Kat arched back in pleasure, her head resting on my shoulder, her nipples hard, her hair cascading over my arm and my back. I let my hand drift down, let my finger lightly brush her clit with every move I made, a tease that drove her insane.
She was mine in that moment. I owned her completely. But what I was starting to realize was that she also owned me. Because I never wanted this to end.
She started to chant my name, and to curse me, but I kept my finger where it was, brushing her lightly, torturing her.
“It isn’t enough,” she panted, begging me.
“Yes it is.” I kept my finger where it was. “I know you, Kat.”
She came, the sound of pure pleasure in her throat making me wild as I pushed to my own release.
She caught her breath, her hands still braced on the counter. “Jesus, sometimes I wish you’d spent the last thirteen years learning to be really bad at that.”
I let the long strands of her hair fall over my hand, brushing my fingers through it as I slid out of her. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
Her laugh was throaty as she turned in my arms. “No need to apologize.”
My gaze dropped down her body to the tattoo on her hip. She still wouldn’t tell me about the guy she’d gotten it for. I made myself stop looking at it.
“I suppose this will be a good memory when you go back to Nashville,” I said.
Her smile dropped slowly and her body tightened against mine, but her voice was soft. “And when you go to New York. Because Aidan’s going to get his way, you know.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. Kat was the first one to drop her eyes.
“That was fun,” she said, her voice shaky. She bent and picked up her robe, then slipped past me. “I’m going to get dressed.”
The bedroom door closed behind her, and she was gone.