Chapter 10 It Was Just a Kiss
IT WAS JUST A KISS
Brendan
Home.
That’s all I could think.
I’d trudged up the six flights of her decrepit building like there was lead in my shoes, dreading the fact that I wasn’t coming here to talk or date her or do anything else but offer her a deal that would benefit us both but somehow made me sick to my stomach.
Then Simone opened the door, her blond hair a messy corona around that beautiful face, a smear of flour on her adorable upturned nose, blue eyes wide as the sky while that pink mouth dropped.
A folk singer’s voice warbled in the background as the smell of freshly baked bread wafted out of the apartment and transported me back to brief moments in childhood where I was actually happy.
The scent of freshly cut firewood in the Berkshires.
A ray of sunlight gleaming through beach grass in Newport.
My mother’s voice as she welcomed me for a visit.
The sweet tang of cinnamon sugar on bread she toasted.
Kissing Simone wasn’t even on my mind, but right then, it was all I could do. The second our lips met, the word echoed like a gong through every cell in my body.
Home.
Home.
Home.
Doubt shot through me like an arrow even as I couldn’t stop kissing her. Even as she seemed, by some miracle, to have recovered her shock enough to start kissing me back.
I released her and stepped back as if shockwaves had literally pushed us apart. Simone stood in front of me, fingers pressed to her now-swollen mouth while she gulped air and stared at me.
I was breathing hard too. Even more heavily than when I ran the Boston marathon for the first time. I rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth and cleared my throat a few times before I managed to stand up straight.
“Jesus,” I mumbled. “I’m so—fuck, I’m sorry.”
Again with the apologizing.
“I—you’re sorry?” Her eyes were wide, round moons, watery with something that looked strangely like desire instead of regret. “But you’re…you’re here. In my home.”
Simone looked around herself as if to make sure she was still in her apartment.
I swallowed. Hard. She was messier than ever in a pair of faded jeans, a threadbare white T-shirt, and a black apron smeared with flour. Her blond hair was still in its ponytail, now loosened from our kiss, and her cheeks were painted pink too.
She was a goddamn masterpiece.
And I couldn’t help but kiss her again.
Her mouth was addictive. Full and lush, as sinful as the rest of her was angelic. Two seconds in, and I was already a junkie for that honeyed flavor, angling to kiss her deeper, groaning when she opened for me.
As my hands slid to grab two lush handfuls of the most perfect ass known to man, she hopped up, and when I caught her, she wrapped her legs around my waist to squeeze me tightly on a squeak, almost as if she had surprised herself with her response.
She looked like an angel, but she kissed like a demon.
The kind I’d happily follow to hell and back just for another taste.
“Christ!” I growled as I ripped my mouth away.
Her mewl nearly sucked me right back into that inferno. “B-Brendan?”
“Oh, fuck.” I dropped her to the ground and stepped back, trying not to notice the way her legs were shaking like a baby deer’s. “Fuck, that was not how this was supposed to go.”
She reached behind her like she was searching for something to steady herself. “I-it wasn’t?”
“No. It wasn’t.”
I couldn’t look up as I fixed my tie, smoothed my hair, and retucked my shirt. Because then I’d see just how debauched I’d left her, and I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t do it a third time if confronted by the evidence. My trousers were already indecently tight as it was.
It took ten deep breaths and a memory of my grandmother in a bathing suit to calm myself down enough that I could look up again.
To my surprise, I found humor lurking in those luminous baby blues.
“What?” I asked.
A shy smile emerged that just about cracked me in two. “Your accent. I noticed it at the hospital when we met. It comes out when you’re emotional, doesn’t it?”
I scowled. Emotional? I didn’t get emotional. I wasn’t some teenage girl on the rag.
My response only seemed to amuse her more.
“So, um…you got me a nanny,” Simone said.
I nodded. “I did. You seemed to need one.”
I’d called Ginny after getting Simone’s address from our PI and immediately sent her over.
That lush mouth opened and closed a few times, taunting me. It was everything I could do not to slip my finger in and tell her to suck like a good girl before she got down on her knees for the real thing.
Fuck.
“I do,” she finally said. “I mean, I kind of did. I don’t know, maybe I will.” She cocked her head like I was a puzzle she was trying to figure out. “But it’s not exactly a cup of sugar, is it?”
I shrugged. How could I tell her that to me, Ginny’s salary really was no more significant than a cup of fucking sugar without sounding like a self-important prick?
Answer: I couldn’t.
Behind her, a buzzer went off, and she turned toward the sound.
“You’re baking,” I said. “Bread?”
Simone turned back with a shy smile. “Yes.”
My throat felt thick again. It was hard to swallow. “It smells…good. Like a home.”
Fuck, what was wrong with me?
But she didn’t tease. “I’ve always thought so.”
My heart seemed to skip several beats before I pounded a fist into my chest and frowned. “Can I come in?”
I didn’t wait for a response, just barreled my way inside. I knew I was being impolite, but I couldn’t wait any longer. What I was about to ask this woman was anything but polite. Better she know what she was getting from the start.
Simone closed the door behind me. “Um, okay. I just need to take out the bread.”
I looked around the apartment. It was just one large room that was about three-quarters kitchen.
The exposed brick walls were just as crumbling as the exterior, and the leaded windows looked like they hadn’t been cleaned for at least a decade.
There were signs of water damage and cracked plaster on the ceiling, and the ancient wood floors creaked under my tread, but the rest of the space seemed clean, if cluttered with secondhand furnishings and cheery yellow paint.
She gestured to a stool on the other side of an enormous wood table in the center of the kitchen, the surface of which was just as battered as the floors, though it shined with new polish.
I took a deep breath as I sat down. It took everything I had not to reach across the table and wipe the flour from her nose.
“So, aside from the sudden need to kiss me,” Simone teased as she moved to an industrial-sized oven. “What brings you and your former nanny to my side of town?”
I could barely breathe when she opened the oven and the scent of bread flooded the room all over again. What the hell did she put in it? I felt like a kid in a nursery rhyme, except instead of the sound of the Pied Piper, I was entranced by a childhood scent.
“Brendan?”
I shook my head as she set a tray of golden-brown bread loaves in front of me. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. Again.
I was really cracking.
“For the kiss,” I clarified, though I wasn’t sorry for that at all. “Or for both of them. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You want to tell me why you did?” Simone set a second tray on the counter and started moving the loaves to a cooling rack on an opposite counter. “Not that I, um, didn’t enjoy them.”
“You enjoyed them?”
That smile appeared again. “Well, sure. I don’t get kissed like that every day.”
I rubbed my face. Every time she looked at me like that, I felt like I’d been smacked. “Right. Well. It won’t happen again.”
It couldn’t. This wouldn’t work otherwise.
I didn’t have time to address the flash of regret that crossed her face before she nodded. “Of course. So, how did you find me?”
I stalked you, I almost said, then wondered where the fuck my filter seemed to go with this girl.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
No. I had to follow my instinct.
“My family keeps a private investigator on retainer,” I said. “I had him and my chief of security run a profile.”
Simone looked legitimately surprised. “You keep a PI? To what, snoop on everyone you know?”
“We tend to be…targets.”
“For violence?”
I shrugged. “We have security for that. But when your family owns one of the largest corporations in the world, people are interested. It makes sense to find out as much as we can about those we do business with.”
One golden brow lifted as she pulled out another tray of bread. “Is that what you’re here for? Business? Did you want my services as a bartender, candy striper, or baker?”
Now was the time.
Or not.
It was difficult to focus when that saucy little smirk made me want to turn her over her own kitchen table and show her what other “services” we were both capable of providing together.
Christ. Get it the fuck together, Black.
“How long have you been living here?” I asked. Mostly because I was a coward and couldn’t quite get out the request I’d come here to make.
“A while. It’s not much, I know, but it had the space I needed. It used to be a catering business, so it already had some of the equipment.” She gestured at the oven. “The landlord is…flexible.”
Another word for slumlord. JP had been on the rise for decades, but certain pockets were still like this, where landlords did nothing to maintain their properties while they waited for a developer to overpay them for the land rights, knock the building down, and replace it with a high-rise.
Blackguard had a whole division dedicated to the practice, mostly stewarded by Owen.
We were responsible for half the gentrification of New England.
I’d never felt the slightest bit bad about it until now.
I was also wondering why none of this had appeared in the report the PI had produced on her.
It had included her address and the jobs she worked at the hospital and the bar.
Single, clean credit, no record (though her sister was a different story), along with confirmation of the story she’d told me about her family farm.
Granted, I’d only given Gavin a few hours to get it done instead of the usual week, but an under-the-table bakery seemed like it should have been an obvious find.
“Who is the bread for?”
She moved the trays to the enormous sink on the other side of the counter. “I do a pop-up at a local cafe. When it does well, I tuck a bit aside for saving.”
“Toward what?”
“Maybe my own bakery one day.”
I looked at the bread. “Seems like you’re on your way.”
“I was. Now…I don’t know.”
Instinct prickled at the back of my neck. I’d always had it. That internal knowledge that told me exactly when to strike and when to hold back. When a deal was ready to be pushed, or when the person on the other side of the table needed to be finessed.
“Maybe I can help with that.”
She snorted lightly but just audibly. It was adorable. “With another kiss?”
Jesus, angel, don’t tempt me.
“How about a business proposition that might include kissing?”
She turned to face me. “I know I’m poor, but I’m not ready for sex work. Yet, anyway.”
“What?” I reared. Christ, I thought we were joking. “No. That’s not what I meant.”
She cocked her head. “Didn’t you?”
“I—no. I do want to hire you. But not for sex.” Fuck finesse.
Fuck beating around the bush. I was out of time.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “I want to hire you to pretend to be my fiancée.” I pulled the contract I’d had drawn up from my inner jacket pocket.
“The initial contract would cover four months to get to the annual shareholders’ meeting, with the option to extend the contract month to month if they keep me as an interim CEO for another year. ”
I pushed the contract across the table. She looked at it like it might explode.
“A million dollars,” I said. “All you have to do is wear my ring, hold my hand, and pretend you’re going to be my wife.”