CHAPTER ELEVEN #2
“She’s going to come out here any second,” I said in a low voice, right at Clara’s ear. She shivered against me, which only ratcheted up my own desire. My heart thudded in my chest as I brushed my lips against her cheek. “We need to cap this off with something memorable.”
Clara's eyes fluttered shut, tilting her neck as though offering up the skin there for my lips to find. “Just make it good, whatever it is.”
That was the attitude I liked to see. Excellence in everything, even in faking a courtship. And it was all the permission I needed.
Since her neck was there for the taking, I swiped my tongue along it, gathering the salty heat against my lips, before taking a small bite. She inhaled sharply, a surprised laugh erupting from her.
“I thought you just ate lunch,” she said, swatting at my chest. But when I grinned down at her, I saw the way her nipples had formed two stiff peaks against her blouse.
My cock twitched in my pants, and I couldn’t help myself.
I traced the curve of her body through her blouse, my hand trailing dangerously close to those tits that I’d lavished so much care and attention on for one night a lifetime ago.
“I always have room for dessert,” I assured her, glancing over her shoulder. Haley was already here in the foyer with us, across the way, but not looking over. I hadn’t even seen her come in. Too distracted with this buxom honey blonde in my arms.
But Haley was here, and that was my cue. I smoothed my hand along the side of her face. Clara’s hazel eyes looked up at me with so much hunger, so much longing, that I couldn’t have stopped what came next if my life depended on it.
I dipped down, pressing my mouth to hers in a rough and hungry kiss.
Clara didn’t hesitate for a moment, her hands fisting my shirt, pulling me closer.
I held on to her like she might drift away or somehow decide to end the kiss.
Not on my watch. Our kisses were thorough, deep, fucking passionate.
I was rock hard by the time we finally broke apart.
Clara’s chest heaved as she looked up at me, and I could see the confusion on her face as clearly as her lips were swollen from our kisses.
“I said make it good,” she finally whispered. “Not life changing.”
“You want another.” My cock throbbed as I pressed a kiss to her forehead, a hand drifting back toward her tit. I dragged my thumb across the stiff peak of her nipple. “I can tell.”
She arched her back, looking for more of that pressure. “I think you do, too.”
I pinched her nipple, loving the splay of emotions across her face. “If we kiss like that again, we’ll be in trouble.” I pinched her other nipple and she whimpered, rolling her lips in.
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice came out breathy while she clenched her fist harder into my shirt.
“To be convincing.”
Her other hand drifted between our bodies, quickly finding the thick ridge of my cock through my pants. “See how you like it.”
Clara ran the heel of her palm over my erection. I inhaled sharply, tightening my arm around her waist to bring her flush against my body.
“Don’t do that again,” I growled in her ear, “unless you’re okay with thirty strangers seeing you grabbing your ankles in this lobby.”
“I’m just doing my part, Nash.” She smirked. “Did we convince her or what?”
Oh right. Haley. I scanned the foyer again, but there was no sign of Haley Reeves.
“I think we sold it, because she’s gone.”
I took a step back, adjusting myself so that we could walk out of the restaurant together, hand in hand. I pulled Clara into my arms as we waited for my driver to bring the car around, and she shivered against my chest in the unnaturally cold April wind.
Once we were loaded into the car and heading toward Clara’s building, she said, “Thanks for lunch. That was probably the best meal I’ve ever had.”
“You haven’t had my chef’s meals yet. That’s changing immediately.” I pulled out my phone, scrolling through my calendar. “Let’s do dinner Friday. My place.”
She bit her bottom lip, her gaze darting toward the driver then back to me. I could tell she wanted to say something but wouldn’t with other ears around.
“I’ll find a babysitter,” she promised. “Because we must have a formal ranking of meals.”
“I already know my chicken alfredo from dinner the other night is going to win,” I informed her. “So we can just take that out of the running now.”
“Right,” she said with a laugh. “You win by default. And now we can determine who gets second place.”
We teased each other like this the whole ride home, and I was surprised when we arrived at her building so quickly. In fact, I was sad to see her go.
“Thanks again, Nash,” she said as she slid out of the car. My chest bottomed out for a moment, and I slid toward her still-open door.
“One more for the road?” I asked, feeling a lot like that hopeful teenager after a first date with his crush.
“Mmm. So he liked his dessert,” she murmured, stepping closer. I snagged her at the waist, my fingertips sinking into the softness around her hips as our lips met one more time. Heat snapped inside me, sending awareness to every corner of my body. Fuck. I wanted more. I wanted so much more.
And that thought scared me a little. I needed to get back on track.
“Don’t forget we need to convince everyone. Marco has no doubt this is real now,” I whispered into her ear before I released her. Maybe now that would remind us both that this was fake. That sexy kiss-bitten look was on her face again, and it took everything I had in me to let her walk away.
Once she was back inside her apartment and I was marked safe from inventing another excuse to kiss Clara, I let myself sink deep into my thoughts.
I needed to reorient, because that lunch had awoken a hunger in me I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Not just the desire to get laid. It was more than that.
Because it was too easy to kiss those perfect lips.
Too easy to spend an entire afternoon with her, shooting the shit, enjoying each other’s company, moaning with delight over royal red shrimp.
A phone call from Archer jostled me out of my thoughts. My jaw locked tight and I swiped to answer.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Jeez, is that how you answer the phone nowadays?”
“Only when I feel like you have bad news.”
He scoffed, indignant. “How do you know every time?”
I rubbed my forehead, already worried about what news he had for me. “Just spill it.”
Archer let out a long sigh. “We have a big problem. It’s with the Gideon Hotel project.”
The Gideon Hotel was one of our quarterly cornerstone projects—the type of thing we took on not out of the goodness of our hearts, but out concern for the solvency of our bank accounts.
Gideon was one of those pure-profit endeavors that we needed in order to keep doing the rest of the work that we did.
It was a chain hotel brand, and we were developing their newest location in Brooklyn.
We’d just gotten the green light from the city last month, and the project had roughly three months ahead of it before it was complete.
“Long story short,” Archer went on, “the city revoked our permit.”
I blinked a few times, hardly able to understand the words. “Excuse me?”
“They revok—”
“There has to be some other definition of the word revoked,” I said. “We waited for that thing for six months. It went through.”
“It was conditionally approved, apparently,” Archer said. “And now it’s been yanked. No explanation, no warning. Just a sorry fucking certified letter informing us that any continued work on that property is subject to legal proceedings.”
I closed my eyes, thinking of the hundreds of millions we'd already invested in the project. And the hundreds of millions that awaited us once it was done. “So they’re going to fucking sue us if we stay on schedule? Or put us into, what, developers prison? How is this even possible?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out.” Archer groaned, and I could hear the depth of his frustration. “This is such poor fucking timing. We were on a tight schedule as it was. If we delay too long, we're looking at massive penalty fees from the company and potential lawsuits from our investors."
I shook my head, feeling a migraine begin a slow creep across the back of my skull. “This has to be a mistake. Where’d the letter come from?”
“The city planning office.”
Archer’s words jolted a cold fear into me.
I thought back to the Developers Summit, when I’d stood in front of Commissioner Torres and Sebastian Cross with Clara at my side.
Torres wasn’t in control of the borough that housed the Gideon project, but other commissioners who were there that night sure were.
“I’ve never seen something like this happen before,” I muttered. “In almost ten fucking years…”
“I know. It’s ludicrous,” Archer seethed.
“I’ll go there myself and talk to them,” I told him. “I’ll fix this. Somehow.”
“I fucking hope so,” Archer said. “Because if we can’t get his squared away…”
He didn’t finish his sentence, and he didn’t need to. I redirected Marco to our new destination, but I couldn’t pull myself out of my own anxiety pit.
Only one thought kept circling the drain of my brain—could Sebastian Cross have something to do with this?