Which meant she was speeding straight into heartbreak. Only she didn’t have the will to press the brakes.
She should find it. She really ought to find it. But it was nowhere nearby as he gently scooped her up from his desk, held her in his arms, and kissed her face.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fit
Work was out of the question, it seemed.
After straightening up his desk, he knotted his tie, and handed Michelle her jacket.
“I’m famished. Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked as he held the coat for her.
“Yes, and I’ll just carry my jacket,” she said. She didn’t need it for the weather; she’d worn it for the costume. “I only had it on for the effect.”
“I’d say it worked. So long as the intended effect was a spectacular orgasm. For both of us,” he added.
She shot him a smile. “Yes.”
He placed his hand on her back and led her out of the office, now bathed in the twilight glow of a building coasting into evening. Most of his employees had left for the day, and he waved quick goodbyes to the few remaining, hunched over laptops in their cubicles.
Perhaps she should have been embarrassed to be seen leaving with the CEO, knowing what they’d just done in his office. She wasn’t, though. Maybe because she believed him when he’d said his office was soundproofed, or maybe because she was still glowing from that earth-shattering orgasm he’d delivered. Honestly, she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a news report that one of the planet’s tectonic plates had shifted. It had been that powerful a climax. Unbidden, she shuddered, the sweet, memory washing over her.
“Chinese? Thai? Indian?” he asked as they walked past the gleaming white reception desk with the letter J embossed in silver on the wall behind it. Joy Delivered was the Louis Vuitton of sex toys.
An image of a Thai fusion restaurant on the Upper East Side flashed in front of her eyes. She’d been researching cool new eateries, so she mentioned the name, and some of the dishes on the menu. “I’ve been wanting to try it. Tonight seems a perfect opportunity,” she said, and he dusted her lips with a kiss saying yes.
“Do you want to walk there? It’s not too far away.”
“I’d love to.”
When they reached the lobby, he laced his fingers through hers, and squeezed. A private little gesture. A silent moment. Sending a message just to her that he liked holding her hand in public. Tingles skipped through her bloodstream, so happily and so quickly that she barely noticed a familiar face a few shops down, watching her from the fruit stands outside a bodega.
When it registered why the dark hair and thick glasses felt so familiar—like the man who’d bumped into her then held her elbow too long—he was gone. Worry shot through her bloodstream, but she quickly tamped it down. This was Manhattan, an endless island of people and faces. It was the land of the unknown, but when you live in close quarters with millions, the city has a way of fooling you. Tricking you into believing you know everyone.
Even so, she peered into the doorway of the bodega as they walked past, but the view inside only confirmed her theory. New York was jam-packed with people. He was nobody she knew, just like last time.
“You okay?”
She smiled. “Totally. I just thought I saw someone who looked familiar. This guy with glasses.” She returned to far more pleasant topics. Their hands together. “I never would have pegged you as a guy who likes to hold hands in public.”
“Why? Do I seem like an asshole who doesn’t want to have his hands all over his woman?”
She laughed, but thrilled inside—against her better judgment—at the use of his. She wasn’t his woman. She had no plans on being his woman. But she was his woman for another fourteen days. Happily.
“I just would never have thought you were that type of guy.”
“You didn’t think I wanted to have you in my lap, either. But yet I did,” he said, stopping to bring their clasped hands to his mouth for a quick kiss as they passed a florist, the front of the shop teeming with flowers in bright orange and yellows—late summer shades. “How else am I surprising you?”
How else?
In so many ways. He was not what she would have expected from the first night, or from what she suspected people saw on the surface—his gorgeous chiseled good looks, his sharp well-dressed style, his cool blue eyes, both warm and distant at the same damn time.
He had more contradictions than she’d ever have suspected, and she was someone who trafficked in contradictions. Who was accustomed to them. Who had come to expect them. But Jack was tender and sweet when he could have been removed; he was removed when he could have been calloused; he was self-protective when he could have been cruel.
“Well?” he asked, prompting her as they darted past a group of teenage girls hanging onto each other and their phones outside a yogurt shop. The girls clearly weren’t going to move. And Jack clearly wanted her opinion. “How am I different than what you expected?”
She parted her lips to speak, her natural instinct, her professional desire to speak the truth plainly kicking in. “You’re sweeter, kinder, and more affectionate than I would have thought, given why you were in my office,” she said, looking him square in the eyes.
He stopped in his tracks, forcing her to stop too. “You didn’t think I could be affectionate?”
“Well,” she said as if the answer were obvious.
“I so can,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her waist, and tugged her close, dropping his forehead to hers. They stood in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. Men and women in suits and clickety-clack heels with determined looks on their faces, rushing to catch trains and buses and cabs home, were forced to walk around them. “With the right woman . . .” he said and brushed his lips ever so gently against hers so that all thoughts tumbled out of her skull, leaving her with nothing but feelings. The fresh bloom of feelings for this man.
“Who’s the right woman?” she asked when he pulled away.
“You,” he whispered, in a voice that was clear and direct.
And cut straight through the walls. He couldn’t possibly be suggesting there was more to them? Could he? They were nighttime. They were deadlines. They were the city after hours. They weren’t more. They weren’t a couple. Whatever affection he felt for her was clearly borne of sex. So she turned the conversation in that much less frightening direction as they resumed their walk uptown.