Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Holt
They say a person’s eyes are the windows to their soul. You can tell everything you need to know about them by a quick glance. Doors are like that for a business, and the ones leading into Picante are ornate and heavy.
It’s my favorite place in all of Savannah. Sitting atop a luxury hotel with views across the water on one side and the city on the other, it’s spectacular. Especially at night. It’s also impossible to get into without a reservation.
“After you,” I say to Blaire as she enters in front of me.
“I should’ve changed, Holt,” she says under her breath. “Look at these people.”
“There are people? What people?” I grin.
She tilts her head, clearly unamused.
“Fine.” Looking around, I spot the hostess and give my head a subtle nod. She scurries our way.
“Mr. Mason. Good to see you this evening.”
“Thank you,” I say, less amused at her wandering eye than usual. Moving slightly to the side so I’m closer to Blaire, I clear my throat. “Two, please. For the Radar Room, if it’s available.”
“I’ll rearrange for you, sir. Right this way.”
Blaire casts a look over her shoulder with her lips pressed together to hide a smile.
She follows the hostess along the wall to one of the private rooms beside the main dining area.
I place my palm gently on the small of her back.
I want to touch her so fucking bad, but I don’t want to come across the wrong way.
She tenses for a brief second before her shoulders relax; mine follow. I flex my fingers against the smooth fabric of her dress, finding her body warm against my touch.
There’s a conversation between Blaire and the hostess, one I can’t hear, but I’m not mad about it. Just watching her speak, hearing her laugh at the hostess’s jokes, is enough for me. Right now, anyway. It’s a world-class view without any pressure.
We enter the private room, lit with candles and ambient lighting, and I pull out Blaire’s chair before she sits. This seems to please her, which, in turn, pleases me.
Once we’ve made a drink selection and the hostess is gone, the energy in the room starts to shift. I finally have her to myself.
“Thank you for coming with me tonight,” I say as she drapes her linen napkin on her lap.
“I believe you came with me, but that’s just semantics.”
“Excellent point.” I laugh. “How do you know the Landrys?”
“One of my brothers, Walker, is dating, or engaged, I’m not really sure, to their sister, Sienna,” she explains.
Lifting the glass of water in front of her, she swirls it lightly around. My question seems to have made her think of something else, and I want to know what it is. I want to know everything about this woman.
“So you grew up around here?” I ask.
“Me? Oh, no. I grew up in a little town in Illinois. That’s where my family still lives. I live in Chicago.”
I can’t imagine living apart from my brothers. We all live and work together in some form, except Coy. When he’s not touring with his band, he’s right here with us.
“Is that hard?” I ask.
“What?”
“Not being around your family. I see most of mine every day. Hell, my mom still calls me to make sure I’ve eaten all the colors of the rainbow once a week.”
A smile parts her lips. “I miss them a lot. But …” Her smile wobbles a bit. “I went to law school and work in the city. I can’t do what I love to do and live in Linton with them.”
I nod.
“I’m still really close to them,” she says. “And I visit as much as I can—at least once a month to see Nana.”
“Nana?”
“My grandmother. She’s as feisty as my brothers, but God, I love her. She was my dad’s mom and spoiled us rotten growing up.” She takes a deep breath and then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Now I try to spoil her when I can.”
Something about the way she says this catches my attention. It’s sweet and careful, something I’m not sure I’ve really attached to Blaire so far. But when she looks back up at me, that’s all washed away.
“What about you?” she asks. “Are you close to your brothers?”
“I work with Oliver, so we’re together every day. We see Wade and Boone a lot. Coy is gone a lot, doing his thing.” I shrug. “But, yeah, we’re all close. We golf together, go boating, play some poker.”
“My brother Machlan has a bar,” she tells me. “They tried to have poker night there a couple of times until I advised him to shut it down. I had no idea those things got so serious.”
“Oh, yeah. If you ever meet Coy, ask him what joker’s wild means.”
She laughs. “I’ll make sure I never do that. Thanks for the warning.”
A soft knock on the door sounds through the room, and a waitress arrives. She takes our orders and disappears quietly.
Once we’re alone again, I relax back in my chair and look at the beauty across from me.
“So,” she says, resting her forearms on the table. “What do you do for fun?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes, honestly.”
“I work.”
Her laugh is the freest I’ve heard from her. It causes the corners of my lips to twitch.
“You sound like me,” she says. “I get such satisfaction from finding a bit of evidence the prosecution didn’t think I’d see or hearing a verdict go the right way.”
I lean forward and rest my arms on the table. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you ever have to take on clients you know are guilty?”
“Yes. Sometimes. But, before you go judging me, I’d like the opportunity to explain.”
I nod. “The floor is yours.”
She smiles, but her game face is on. A finger touches the gold chain sitting around her neck.
“My job is to ensure my clients are tried fairly in accordance with the Constitution. Yes, I’ll represent men and women who I know are guilty if, and this is a big if, they haven’t been accused of a violent crime.
And I cannot ethically encourage them to plead not guilty, and I won’t put them on the stand if I think they might lie. I have to sleep at night.”
Her eyes shine with a ferocity and intelligence that fucks with me. It raises a hundred questions that I want her to answer if for nothing but to watch her speak.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I think that’s highly admirable.”
And fucking hot.
I sit back again and try to block out the image of her in a courtroom.
“What do you do?” she asks. “Work-wise, I mean.”
“Business shit,” I say, trying to brush it under the rug. Going into the ins and outs of my world seems like a waste of time when we could be talking about her.
She grins. “I’m going to need a little more than that, Mr. Mason.”
“I’m the CEO of Mason Limited. My grandfather started it. My father expanded it. Oliver and I are ushering it into a new age.”
“I love the sound of that.”
“It’s fun.”
She slides a lock of hair behind her ear. The candle in the middle of the table casts reflections across her high cheekbones. She looks like a model sitting across from me, but one you could touch without knocking her over.
I’ve been with a lot of women, but none quite like her. She might just be the total package.
“What?” she asks, catching me studying her.
I could toss her a canned line or redirect the conversation to something that’s not how gorgeous she is. But if I know anything about Blaire so far, it’s that she can pick out a line of bullshit a mile away.
“You’re beautiful, Blaire.”
She flushes. “Thank you.”
“It’s not a line. I mean it—you’re fucking beautiful.”
The candlelight flickers as she shifts in her seat. Her eyes pull away from mine, and I instantly regret opening my mouth.
She clears her throat as her fingertips touch her necklace again.
“I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable,” I say carefully. “That might’ve been a little forward.”
“It’s fine.” She takes a deep, steadying breath. “To be frank, I’m not used to situations where someone would say something like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sits up a bit straighter. “I don’t have a lot of dinners with men who I’m not trying to outwit or outplay. This whole thing tonight is a little foreign to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t date,” she says simply.
My brows shoot to the ceiling. “You don’t date? At all?”
I tilt my head as though it will help me hear her better—as if the idea of Blaire not dating will make more sense if the octaves are a bit higher.
It’s baffling. How could a woman like her not date? Sure, women say that shit all the time because they think it ups their desirability. But I actually believe Blaire. And, lo and behold, I need to adjust my cock at the thought. So maybe they’re on to something with that line.
“I mean, I’ve dated,” she says. “Just … not often. I’m just too busy to entertain another human. I can barely keep my own life on target, let alone adding someone else’s life in.”
“I feel the same way,” I say. “My life goes a hundred miles an hour. I can’t be thinking about buying flowers or chocolates or making sure I pick up my shoes.”
“See? That’s a hard limit for me. Pick up your own damn shoes.” She laughs. “That is one of the reasons I find men to be barbaric creatures, as you so carefully noted.”
I point a finger at her and wink. “That’s what you tell yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“You like to think you find barbaric tendencies in men to be appalling. Society has taught you that. There’s no place in the world for aggressive men, men who know what they want.” My smile deepens. “But deep down, you enjoy an alpha male.”
She bites her bottom lip. “That’s not completely true.”
“Is it not?”
“No. I do find those tendencies appalling. Truly. They insinuate that the woman is the lesser sex—that we should pick up men’s shoes, make them dinner, have a lower paying job—and to that, I call bullshit.”
She lifts her glass and takes a drink, keeping her eyes glued to mine over the rim. There’s a steeliness to the blue irises that feels like a challenge. But as they stay trained on mine, I see a softness, too, that feels like an invitation.
“As you should,” I say, my voice lowering. Breathing in the warm notes from her perfume, I watch her chest rise and fall at a quickened pace. “I have no doubts you are as capable and intelligent as any man I know. But I also know something else.”
She sets the glass down. Her finger runs around the bottom, her chin lowered as she looks at me through her lashes. “What’s that?”
I lean forward and run my teeth over my bottom lip. The movement catches her attention. Her gaze drops to my mouth as her own lips part.
The air between us warms, the connection between us cackles with energy. Her brows arch as if she knows the answer and is waiting on me to deliver.
So deliver I will.
“I have no doubts that if I bent you over a chair and buried myself in you, there wouldn’t be any complaints.”
Her eyes widen as she shifts in her seat.
She wants it as badly as I do, but there’s no way I’d do that. Not here. Maybe with another woman—one who would orgasm all over my balls in the middle of this dining area and not regret it. But Blaire? She’s cut from another cloth, albeit one I’d like to mark.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I silently curse whoever it is. She hears it and motions for me to take it. While I type a quick response back to Rosie, I glance up. She’s watching me carefully.
“Like what you see?” I tease, slipping the device back into my pocket.
Her mouth opens as if she’s going to say something but snaps it shut again before she does. Her brows tug into one long line as she mulls over a thought.
Giving her space to work whatever it is out, I sit back in my chair. She starts to speak again yet stops herself.
“Blaire?”
She looks up through her lashes again, her eyes wide.
“Say it,” I demand.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you keep stopping yourself from saying.”
She makes no movement to do anything of the like, but I see exactly what she wants.
As soon as our eyes meet, really meet, the desire burning in the blues is undeniable. Her lids hood, her tongue swiping along her bottom lip as she watches me very slowly push away from the table.
My cock is pressed so tightly against my pants that I think it may burst through the seams. It’s all I can do to ignore it for the time being and, instead, sidle up behind Blaire’s chair.
She doesn’t turn to face me. She doesn’t flinch as I brush all the hair off her shoulders so it lays down the middle of her back.
“I’m going to touch you,” I say just loud enough for her to hear.
Pausing to give her just enough time to object, I lay my hands on her shoulders. A slight gasp escapes her lips as I knead my palms against her skin.
She’s warm and smooth and supple, and I want to bury myself in her body on this damn table.
Her head bends to the side, almost laying her cheek on my hand. I continue to work it back and forth, listening to her soft moans as I go. Finally, she sits up again and clears her throat. My hands drop to my side.
She doesn’t turn around to face me. She doesn’t move at all. The only thing that changes is her voice when she says, “Do you think it’s possible to rent a room here tonight?”
“I’ll be right back.”