Chapter Six #2
She set the phone down, lifted her gaze, and found Leo watching her over the rim of his water bottle with an expression she couldn’t entirely identify. It might be amusement.
“Problem solved,” she informed him.
“Was that your office?”
“Yes. BeBe Hale. She has a stylist.”
“Of course she does. That woman is incredible, and I’ve only met her briefly a couple of times.”
BeBe had been paralyzed from the waist down when her bicycle was hit by a car while training for the Olympics. Her nickname around the compound was “Hell on Wheels.”
“CObrA Securities agents attend a lot of black-tie events for senators, foreign dignitaries, and the occasional billionaire wedding.” She picked up her toast. “We dress for the room we walk into.”
“Makes sense.”
“I’ll need ninety minutes off-site this afternoon. You’re coming with me.”
“Okay.”
She finished the toast, reached for her water, and ran the rest of the day in her head while she drank it.
Two hours to finish the drive imaging with Tyler.
Ninety minutes for the dress. An hour back here to clean up and brief Leo on the questions.
Forty minutes to the Chase Park Plaza, factoring in the Saturday evening traffic.
They’d be walking through the ballroom doors at 6:15, which gave her time during cocktail hour to read the room before anyone sat down.
It was tight, but it was workable.
She set the empty bottle down.
“De Luca?”
“Yeah.”
“One more thing.”
“A matching handbag?”
“Funny. No. Whoever built that library knows your firm from the inside. There is a non-zero chance that somebody in that ballroom tonight has seen at least one of those photographs before they went on the drive.”
His mouth firmed. “I know.”
“You’re going to shake their hand anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“Because if you don’t, they’ll feel it.”
“I know, Anja.”
She held his gaze across the kitchen island longer than she’d meant to, then reached for the dirty plates and slid off the stool. If she stayed, she was going to do something genuinely unprofessional, like putting her hand over his and squeezing.
“Then go shower,” she instructed him, carrying the plates to the sink. “You look like you slept in your shirt.”
“I did not sleep in my shirt.”
“De Luca.”
“What?”
“You look like you slept in your shirt.”
Anja smiled as his low laugh followed her to the sink. She didn’t turn around because the feeling he’d planted in her heart forty minutes ago was still sitting there, and the night had only just started.
#
Leo made it to the bathroom under his own power, which frankly felt like a meaningful accomplishment.
He turned the taps to hot and stood with one hand braced against the tile while the shower warmed up. Watching the water pound against the stone bench, he tried to remember the last time he’d put actual food in his body. The eggs didn’t count. They had been a survival event.
Bellerive. He’d had a club soda and three of those crab cakes at the cocktail tent in the early afternoon. Twelve hours ago. That explained why he was leaning on a wall to keep his head off it.
He stripped, stepped under the spray, and let the heat do what it could.
It wasn’t enough. He’d been running on caffeine and adrenaline since the news alert hit his phone on the eighteenth fairway, and his body had finally figured out that the threat in the room was not, in fact, a charging bear.
The adrenaline was draining out of him through the soles of his feet, and the caffeine, which had carried him through the drive home, the wait for Anja’s arrival, and the file-by-file march through the worst photographs he had ever seen of people he loved, was wearing off in real time.
Leo washed his hair on autopilot. He stood under the water for thirty more seconds than he needed. If he turned it off, he would have to think about putting clothes on, and that seemed like a gargantuan task.
Finally, with effort, he turned it off, toweled down, and pulled on a clean white tee and a pair of black joggers because he wasn’t getting back into pants tonight. He walked out of the bathroom barefoot.
Anja was hovering over her laptop with one hand on the trackpad. She lifted her head as he padded into the living room and held his eyes for a beat that turned, very quickly, into a frown.
“De Luca.”
“I’m fine.”
“You walked through that doorway like a man on his third concussion.”
“I did not.”
She closed the laptop.
He stopped in the middle of his own living room and watched her come toward him. The detached part of his brain doing inventory observed that she’d unzipped her jacket at some point and that the tee underneath fit her in a way that would be a problem if she got within arm’s reach.
She got within arm’s reach.
“Sit down.”
“I’m—”
“Leo. Sit.”
Damn it, he felt like a chastised puppy. He plopped onto the arm of his couch.
She studied him with the same methodical attention she’d given his foyer two hours earlier. Whatever she found in his face must have confirmed what she’d already concluded, because her expression eased ever so slightly at the edges.
“Here’s what we’re doing,” she informed him. “Tyler’s finishing the imaging without us. The drive isn’t going anywhere. The fundraiser isn’t for another fifteen hours. You’re going to get five hours of horizontal, and then we’re going to get up and work the dossiers fresh.”
“Anja—”
“You crashed twenty minutes ago. You haven’t noticed yet because you’re a stubborn man.
If you try to work the rest of this drive tonight, you’re going to miss something I need you to catch.
Plus, I am not going to walk into that ballroom tomorrow night with a principal running on three hours of nothing. ”
“Five hours.”
“Followed by a proper breakfast and the rest of the eggs in your fridge. Then we resume.”
He opened his mouth to argue, and what came out instead was a yawn so deep his jaw cracked.
Anja’s wide grin transformed her face. “Persuasive rebuttal, De Luca.”
“That wasn’t an argument. That was reconnaissance.”
“Bed.”
“Anja.”
“Bed.”
He almost said he’d go if she came with him, but that was a Pandora’s box he didn’t have the energy for tonight.
Instead, he pushed up off the arm of the couch, and his knee, the bad one that had ended a career and started another, gave him a familiar warning.
He caught the back of the couch with one hand to ride it out.
Anja gripped his elbow before he’d registered her crossing the floor.
She didn’t make a thing of it, just held his arm until he straightened up and then let go. The spot where her palm had been kept on telling him about her for several seconds after she’d taken it back.
He cleared his throat.
“Guest room’s down the hall on the left. Bathroom’s across from it. There are clean towels on the top shelf of the linen closet. The thermostat’s by the front door if you run cold, and help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
She watched him. “You’re putting me in the guest room.”
God, he didn’t want to. More than anything, he wanted to lose himself in her arms and, eventually, her body.
He wanted to forget about everything that had happened in the last ten-plus hours.
Leo vividly remembered how incredible she felt, the sexy sounds she made when he was buried deep inside her.
But he was dead on his feet, and falling asleep on top of Anja Johansen wasn’t something he wanted to experience.
“I’m putting you in the guest room.” He almost tacked on “for tonight only,” but held back.
She tilted her head a quarter inch, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn’t, because if he had, he would have spouted something he was too tired to clean up afterward.
She let him off.
“Got it.”