Chapter 11
ELEVEN
JULIETTE
I cannot believe I’m doing this.
Alone in the elevator, my neck tilts as I watch the numbers go up for every floor I pass, a countdown to my private humiliation.
Twenty-eight.
Thirty.
Thirty-four.
“Oh my god. What floor did he say again?”
I sneak a look at my phone to check our messages.
The penthouse.
Right.
Of course this is where he lives. Because why wouldn’t the most intimidating, broody, mysterious professional athlete I’ve ever met live at the literal top of the city?
“Relax,” I whisper to myself.
My reflection stares back at me from the mirrored wall, and I touch the pearl barrette in my braided hair, second-guessing my entire “chill hang out” outfit.
Oversized cream sweatshirt: It’s slouchy and made of the softest material. My brain was screaming “touchable!” as I was getting dressed, but now I’m not so sure. The gray sweatpants sit low on my hips. They’re thin and comfortable, but underneath…
Lingerie.
Pink bra. Skimpy matching thong.
It’s the kind I wear to remind myself that I am, in fact, an adult woman.
Cookies in my hands.
Lingerie under my fleece.
The contrast feels ridiculous but empowering.
Another thing I’m second-guessing? The box of cookies are warm, fresh from the oven, baked before I left my apartment. The chocolate chip smell is sweet and delicious and suddenly feels so… juvenile.
I should’ve brought wine—something imported.
Why didn’t I?
Instead, I brought freaking baked goods, making it all the more glaringly obvious I’m not the type of woman he’s dated in the past.
UGH!
I shift the box in my arms, fingers tightening around the edges.
This entire evening was a bad idea. Why did I suggest it? What if Aaron thinks I’m boring? Or childish? Or…
Am I out of my damn mind?
Too late to turn back now.
A soft ding echoes through the elevator when we reach the top floor as the doors quietly slide open.
Wait.
“Huh?”
I’m confused when the doors open because I’m not stepping into a hallway like I’m expecting, I’m stepping into a small lobby. Another room? I glance around and up and down at the brown marble floors and mahogany paneled walls.
There’s even a round center table with a vase of fresh flowers on it.
It looks and smells rich.
“Jeez,” I mutter. “Is this where he lives?”
I take one cautious step out of the elevator.
Then another.
At the end of the room looms a large door and, in the center of it, etched into brushed gold metal, instead of an apartment number:
P
P for Penthouse.
My stomach drops straight through the marble floor.
Oh my god.
I clutch the cookie box tighter to my chest.
“I do not belong here.”
This isn’t a casual hangout location. This is a man with expensive taste and high standards and probably a stock portfolio, who lives in a building so far above my paygrade, I barely know how to behave.
My brother certainly doesn’t live like this.
His condo in the sky is more like every bachelor pad you’ve seen in the movies: stark and modern and full of take-out containers.
Wet towels on the bathroom floor, even when he knows he’s having company.
Pizza boxes on his shiny stone counters that he can never manage to keep clean.
I know with certainty that behind that one massive door labeled P lies the opposite of those things.
Lies my Hall Pass. Seriously, how many women get the opportunity to sleep with theirs?
Not that I’m here for sex—god no, that’s not me at all.
But I am curious, and I did make the pact with Blaire, and if I chicken out now, she’ll kill me.
On the other hand, this is so unlike me.
I do not put the moves on men!
The rubber soles of my sneakers squeak when I slowly turn back toward the elevator, breathing an audible sigh of relief to see that the doors haven’t closed and it hasn’t descended to the lower floors.
“Thank god it’s still here.” I can leave.
My getaway car.
I step back toward it, the tip of my shoe over the threshold of my escape plan when the one door in the room opens. One more step, then another.
“Going somewhere?”
Oh my god.
Every muscle in my body locks.
I don’t turn to face Aaron right away because if I don’t see him, does he see me? Maybe he’ll disappear. Maybe this is a hallucination brought on by anxiety and the overwhelming scent of browned butter and chocolate chips.
“Um…” I pivot slowly.
Aaron Bishop is leaning his big body against the massive penthouse door, looking dangerous and handsome. Barefoot. Navy sweats. Fitted T-shirt that stretches across his broad chest, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
Shit. Men in sweatpants are my weakness.
He lifts one eyebrow, waiting.
“I forgot something in my car,” I blurt out.
A low chuckle. “Oh? What did you forget?” he asks.
“I—” Think, Juliette, think.
His mouth twitches. “If you’re having second thoughts, I totally get it. We’re good.”
I swallow when he pushes off the doorframe and swaggers toward me, not fully closing the distance, but enough that I can see the faint bruising from a gash on his chin.
“Do I scare you?” he asks, and it’s not cocky.
He looks concerned.
“Not at all.” I gulp. “I’m a bit thrown off by…”
I gesture around the hallway. The mahogany crown molding. The expensive painting hanging next to his door. The fact that he has his own elevator. “This.”
His gaze flicks to the elevator still waiting patiently behind me.
“So, you were going to bolt?”
I give a feeble nod. “Maybe?”
A corner of his mouth tips up into an amused smile. “Juliette. It’s an apartment, not a brothel.” His eyes rake lower, landing on the pink container in my hands. “Are those for me?”
“Yes,” I whisper, embarrassment rippling through my entire body. “I brought baked goods to a man who looks like he busts beer bottles open with his teeth.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners. “You think I don’t want your cookies?”
“I think you probably have lobster and blue crabs in your freezer. And drink aged wine that requires decanting.”
His grin widens and, for several seconds, all I can do is stare at his teeth.
Because it’s not the polite mask of control he’s been wearing since he opened the door; this face is different. Uninhibited. It starts slowly on one side of his mouth, like he’s trying to hold it back, then spreads fully—lifting his cheeks, softening the hard planes of his face.
A small dimple appears in his left cheek.
A DIMPLE.
I did not know that existed.
Holy crap. He looks so much younger when he smiles. Warmer. Devastatingly handsome…
This is not the broody, emotionally unattainable guy I’d been constructing in my head and daydreaming about. This is a man with laugh lines. A man who looks like he might actually enjoy stuff. Like he might tease and grin and charm things without thinking them through.
I feel it down to my toes: this stupid, giddy, dizzying shift in my chest.
Oh.
That’s what Aaron looks like when he’s happy.
“Wine that requires decanting?” He laughs. “I’ll have you know, I ate cereal for dinner. Out of the box. Over the sink.”
“You’re lying.”
He holds up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
I glance over my shoulder.
“Juliette,” he says quietly. “Stay.”
He steps aside, spreading the open door, giving me a wide berth to enter, warm light spilling farther into the hallway, soft and inviting.
“Come in,” he mumbles. “Before you overthink this and climb back into the elevator.”
I hesitate half a second longer. Walk toward him instead.
“You’re so cute,” he says once I move past him, shutting the door behind me.
I glance around his entryway to avoid his intense gaze—and immediately regret it because the place is exactly what I imagined.
Historic. Dark. A massive piece of art stretching across the far wall. A console table with a single ceramic bowl placed on a stack of coffee table books. A gilded mirror above it.
No shoes kicked off by the door.
No pizza boxes.
It’s a penthouse more fit for an older couple who winter in Boca Raton and smells faintly like cedar; I imagine that somewhere there’s a candle burning that smells like man.
Lordy. “My parents could live here.”
He chuckles. “It’s near the arena, that was one of the perks.”
Aaron leads me farther into his penthouse.
He gestures for me to follow, guiding me down a short hallway off the main living space. The lights are dimmer here; black-and-white photographs of old stadiums, architecture, and historic cityscapes hang on the walls along the way.
“Do you like history?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
He steps into a den that makes my breath hitch.
Floor-to-ceiling bookcases filling three walls, painted a rich, deep green and lined with hardcover books. Biographies. History texts. Fiction novels. A ladder on a brass rail that slides across the shelves that has me wanting to climb it and slide from one side of the room to the other…
A huge sofa anchors the room, dark and inviting and could swallow me whole, with cozy-looking blankets stacked at the end of it. On the opposite wall, a massive movie screen.
“You have a whole library,” I say, spinning unhurriedly, taking it all in.
“It’s my favorite room. I spend most of my free time in here.”
Why is this turning me on?
The dimple, the dark wood, the library.
His manners!
All of this.
“I like it quiet,” he says. “After games. After practices. After a long fuckin’ day.” He gestures toward the couch. “This room makes it easier to shut my brain off.”
I find this so attractive. I blush, turning away from him, eyes to the shelves so he doesn’t see how flustered he’s making me.
“Climb it,” he says quietly next to me.
My cheeks are aflame. Hot. “What?”
“The ladder,” he clarifies. “You’ve been staring at it since we walked in.”
I have. “I am not climbing your fancy library ladder.”
Aaron grins. “Why not?”
“Because if I f-fall and crack my skull open, I would never live down the humiliation.”
He chuckles. “I’d catch you.”
I ignore him and go to the sofa, sinking into one of the magnificent cushions. Set the cookies on the coffee table and cross my arms. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who hunkers down at the end of an evening with a biography.”
He leans one shoulder against the doorframe, arms folding casually across his chest. “What do I strike you as?”
I’m unable to hold his gaze. “ESPN. Loud buddies piled in here. Ordering wings at midnight.”
A grin tugs at his mouth and there’s that dimple again. “I mean, I’m into that, too. Occasionally.”
He saunters all the way into the room now that I’ve settled, sitting beside me, close enough that his knee touches mine when he manspreads his legs.
“Movie?”
“Yes, please.” Because if he doesn’t do something to distract me with soon, I’m going to fixate on his mouth. And hands. And the way his hair is curling at the nape of his neck as it continues to air dry. “I’m down for whatever.”
Down for whatever? Ugh. I did not say that.
Aaron reaches for the remote, thumb scrolling lazily through options. The massive screen casts a soft glow over his face, catching the bump of his nose, the delicious stubble along his jawline. His knee is still touching mine.
He doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
He settles on an old romantic comedy about a wealthy woman on a yacht who falls off the side and loses her memory—and is rescued by the carpenter who’d been building her walk-in closet.
“This good?”
“Perfect.”
The opening credits roll. The room dims, green walls almost appearing black in the low light. We’re shut off from the world in here with floor-to-ceiling windows; the chaos and noise and pollution are trapped outside.
Aaron stretches his arm along the back of the couch behind me, casually, dangling dangerously close to my cheek. I feel the warmth of him pressing into my side. The solid weight of his thigh against mine. The scent of his soap and shampoo.
Ten minutes later, I realize I haven’t seen a single thing happening in the movie, despite having watched it at least three times.
“Comfortable?” he murmurs, eyes still on the screen.
“Yes,” I lie.
I am so uncomfortable, hyper-aware of him, made worse when his hand slides from the empty space between us on the couch to my thigh, the heat from his palm branding my skin through the thick fabric of my sweatpants.
“You okay?” he murmurs.
I nod, because my voice will betray me.
His thumb shifts then. A slow, absent stroke upward.
“Juliette?”
I find my voice. “Yeah?”
“Know what I can’t stop thinking about?”
I swallow. “What can’t you stop thinking about?”
I want him to say: kissing you, touching you, going down on you…
“Your cookies.”