Chapter 3 #2
"I pay attention. It's the job."
"No." She shakes her head once. "The coffee order is the job. Knowing I needed to see this view? That's something else."
The air between us shifts. I can feel it in my chest, a tightening, a pull toward her that has everything to do with the fact that this woman just cracked her door open three inches and I want to kick it the rest of the way down.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You seem to regardless."
"The email. Where you requested someone older. Was that about my qualifications, or was it about something else?"
Her chin lifts. Defense. But her eyes stay honest. "It was about control. I wanted a variable I could predict. An older operator would have been deferential. Professional. Predictable."
"And I'm not."
"No, Mr. Donovan. You are not."
I lean forward. Just enough to close another inch of the space between us. Her eyes drop to my mouth for a fraction of a second before snapping back up, and that fraction is everything.
"Hayes," I say.
"What?"
"My name. Hayes. You've called me Mr. Donovan for four days, and it's starting to feel like a wall you're building on purpose."
"Maybe it is."
"Then stop."
Her breath catches. Barely. The kind of thing you'd only notice if you were watching her as closely as I've been watching her for four straight days, cataloguing every micro-expression, every shift in posture, every time her controlled facade slips and something real shows through.
"Hayes." She says it quietly. Testing it. My name in her voice is low and careful, and my whole body responds to it. Blood and heat and a want so sharp it's almost pain.
"There you go," I murmur.
We're close. The rock is narrow, and the morning sun is warm on my back, and her face is eight inches from mine. I can count the pale freckles on her nose. I can see the ring of darker blue around her irises. I can see her pulse in her throat, fast, faster than a woman this controlled should allow.
Her gaze drops to my mouth again. Stays this time.
My hand moves to her jaw. Slow. Deliberate.
Giving her every opportunity to pull back, to slam that wall back into place, to become Ms. Morrison again.
My fingers graze the line of her jaw, and her skin is impossibly soft.
She doesn't pull back. Her lips part. A small sound escapes her throat, involuntary, surprised, and the sound travels through my nervous system like a lit fuse.
I tilt her chin up. She lets me. Her eyes are wide, her breathing shallow, and this close I can see that the ice queen is melting and she's terrified of it.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
The buzz cuts through the moment like a knife through glass. Lex blinks. The walls slam back into place so fast I can almost hear them. She pulls back, straightens, turns her face toward the valley, and takes a sip of coffee like nothing happened.
Like my hand wasn't just on her face. Like she wasn't about to let me kiss her on a mountaintop at seven in the morning.
I check the phone. Sully. Text message:
Encrypted call from Morrison Pharma legal team. Urgent. Routing to cabin 4.
I pocket the phone. "Your legal team's calling. Urgent."
She stands immediately. CEO mode. Shoulders back, jaw set, every trace of the woman on the rock gone so completely that I'd doubt she existed if I couldn't still feel the warmth of her skin on my fingertips.
"We should head back."
"We should."
She starts down the trail without waiting for me.
Her pace is faster than the climb up, and I fall in behind her, watching her navigate the rocky sections with the same controlled precision she uses for everything.
But her hands aren't steady on the coffee mug.
And twice, on the switchbacks, she touches her jaw. Right where my fingers were.
She knows. I know she knows. And she knows I know she knows, which is probably what's scaring her most.
We make it back to the compound in twenty minutes. She walks straight to her cabin without a word, presses her thumb to the lock, and steps inside. The door closes behind her.
I stand on the gravel path between our cabins and watch her kitchen light click on. Through the window, I can see her silhouette moving toward her laptop, already pulling up whatever urgent matter her legal team needs to discuss. Already rebuilding every wall I spent an hour carefully dismantling.
My jaw still tingles where her breath touched my skin. My hand still remembers the shape of her face.
Four days. It took me four days to know I'm in serious trouble.
Not the kind of trouble Deck warned me about, the professional kind where I lose my focus and compromise the detail.
This is the other kind. The personal kind.
The kind where a forty-year-old woman who thinks she's too old for me, too controlled to feel things, too smart to risk her heart, looked at my mouth on a mountain and forgot every reason she's supposed to keep her distance.
I want her. Not just physically, although physically is becoming a constant, low-grade emergency that cold showers and early morning runs are doing nothing to resolve.
I want the woman behind the walls. The one who watches families with hungry eyes and makes dry jokes she immediately regrets and said my name like it was something fragile she was afraid to hold.
I'm falling for a client. A client seven years older than me who thinks I'm too young. A client I'm supposed to protect, not pursue. A client who has every reason in the world to keep me at arm's length and one terrifying reason not to.
She felt it too.
I head to my cabin, strip off my hiking gear, and step into the shower. The water is cold because that's all the plumbing offers this early, and it does absolutely nothing.
I press my forehead against the tile and let the water run over my shoulders. Close my eyes. Try to think about the threat assessment. The compound perimeter. Whitfield's financial anomalies.
Her mouth. The way it parted when my fingers touched her jaw. That small sound she made, involuntary, like I'd reached inside her and found something she didn't know was there.
My cock is hard. Has been since the trail, if I'm honest. Since she said my name in that low, careful voice like she was tasting it. Since her pupils blew wide and her pulse hammered in her throat and she looked at my mouth and stayed looking.
I grip myself. The contact pulls a groan out of me that bounces off the tile walls, and I don't have the bandwidth to be embarrassed about it because all I can see behind my closed eyes is Lex.
On that rock. Morning light on her skin.
No makeup, no armor, just the pale freckles on her nose and those silver-blue eyes and the way her body turned toward me like gravity had made the decision for her.
I stroke slow. Let the fantasy build the way I'd build it if I had her.
I'd start with her mouth. Kiss her the way I almost did, my hand on her jaw, tilting her head back so I could take my time.
She'd resist for about three seconds because she resists everything, and then she'd grab the front of my shirt the way she grabs everything she decides she wants, and the sound she'd make when my tongue found hers would be worth every wall she ever built.
My fist tightens. Pace picks up.
I'd peel that fitted base layer off her.
Slow. Watch her skin appear inch by inch, pale and warm, those curves that the corporate headshot hid and the hiking clothes only hinted at.
I'd put my mouth on her collarbone. Her breasts.
I'd find out if her nipples are pink or dusky rose, whether she likes teeth or just tongue, whether she'd arch into me or try to stay controlled while I took her apart.
She'd try to stay controlled. She'd fail.
The water's warming now, running down my back, steam curling around me, and my hand moves faster. I brace my forearm against the tile and let the images come.
Lex on my bed. Lex spread out underneath me, that platinum hair against my pillow, her thighs open, her back arched.
I'd go down on her. Bury my face between those long legs and lick her until every ounce of control she clings to dissolves.
She'd be vocal. I don't know why I'm sure of that, but I am.
A woman who holds that much back in public would let go in bed.
She'd grip my hair and say my name the way she said it on the mountain, broken and breathless, and I'd feel her come against my mouth and it would ruin me for anyone else.
My hips thrust forward into my fist. The pressure builds at the base of my spine, hot and tight and relentless.
I'd push inside her. Slow. Watch her face.
Those blue eyes locked on mine while I fill her, because a woman like Lex doesn't close her eyes.
She watches. She catalogs. She'd feel every inch and I'd see every reaction on her face, and when I bottomed out she'd make that sound again, the one from the mountain, the one that traveled through my nervous system like a lit fuse.
I'd fuck her deep and steady and watch the CEO disappear. Watch the walls come down. Watch her stop calculating and start feeling, and when she came around my cock she'd say my name like it was the only word she had left.
Hayes.
The orgasm hits hard. My hand slams against the tile and I come with a grunt that's closer to a growl, pulsing into my fist, my forehead pressed against the wet wall, her name on my tongue like a prayer I'm not qualified to say.
The water runs over me. My breathing comes back in ragged pulls.
The steam thins. My hand unclenches from the tile and the fantasy drains away with the water, leaving me standing in a lukewarm shower in a mountain cabin with come washing off my hand and the absolute certainty that I just made things worse.
Because the edge is gone for about thirty seconds. Then the ache settles right back in, deeper than before, because the fantasy only confirmed what my body already knew.
I don't just want to fuck Alexandra Morrison.
I want to wake up next to her. I want to hand her coffee and watch her drink it. I want to be the man she stops performing for.
I press my forehead against the tile one more time.
"Still in trouble," I mutter to the empty shower. "Still in so much goddamn trouble."
Challenge accepted doesn't cover it anymore.
This is something else entirely.