“Not now. Now I need to go home.” I glanced out the window. We’d been driving around Midtown aimlessly while we’d talked, but we were only a few blocks away from my apartment. “You should drop me off.”
Donovan waited a beat as though he wished I’d asked for something else. But then he leaned forward. “Next time around, John.”
“I won’t be able to get out to open her door here with the snow piles,” the driver warned.
“That’s fine,” I said, before Donovan could say otherwise.
We were quiet for the next few minutes, but both of us were right there, present, aware of each other’s every move. Every breath. I wondered what he was thinking. But I couldn’t ask because I didn’t have room for anymore on top of all that I was thinking.
And then we were almost at my apartment, and I already missed him.
“We can talk after Audrey’s gone,” I told him, feeling terrible that I wished it wasn’t a week away.
“When does she leave?” Was I imagining how eager he sounded?
“Sunday morning at ten-thirty.”
“I’ll be at your place at ten-thirty-one.”
I chuckled. It felt good to laugh. No, it felt good to have a date planned, to have something to look forward to, to know that we weren’t yet done.
I peeked over at him and found him staring at me. Really staring.
“What?” I asked suddenly self-conscious.
“I’m thinking about asking if I can kiss you.”
My heart did the sort of acrobatic flip it hadn’t done since I was a teenager.
God I wanted that kiss.
But I wasn’t ready to admit that. “You say you know me, and all of a sudden you think I want to be asked?”
He smirked. With that devil’s smirk that had taunted and teased me for so many weeks.
The car pulled over to the side of the road, angled next to a bank of snow.
I undid my seatbelt.
Then Donovan undid his seatbelt. And he leaned across me, caging me in without touching me. I was suddenly too hot again. My heart beat too loud. My breathing grew faster as I waited for him to bend down and press his lips to mine.
But all he did was pull the lever on the door and push it open.
My eyes pricked unexpectedly. I was going to blame it on the rush of cold air. It didn’t matter. This was a start. We’d made a start.
I put one foot on the ground and bent forward to step out. Suddenly Donovan’s hand was cupping my face, pulling me back, and when I turned, my mouth crashed into his.
I sighed into his kiss, letting his eager lips tell me all the things he hadn’t had time to say. Letting his mouth remind me that he’d confessed feelings I had yet to absorb. Letting his tongue make dirty filthy promises of nights to come.
When he broke the kiss—much too soon—I stared at him with glossy eyes.
“You hold the cards right now, Sabrina,” he said, his nose almost touching mine. “But don’t begin to think I’ve forgotten who’s in charge.”
He brushed his lips across mine once more, then pulled away entirely. “You better go before your sister worries.”
I was in the building and he’d driven away before I was sure I remembered how to breathe.
Five
“He kissed you?” I did not think that I’d be the one saying that tonight.
Turned out I wasn’t the only Lind sister who’d gotten kissed on the way home by a Reach executive.
“More like I kissed him,” Audrey said dreamily.
“You kissed my boss?” Jesus, I hadn’t even gotten my coat hung up before she’d attacked me with this information, let alone gotten a chance to tell her anything about my car ride with Donovan.
She pulled her knees under her on the couch. “Dylan is not actually your boss. He’s more like your boss’s equal, if you want to be technical.”
I threw my coat on the back of the sofa next to her along with my purse. Forget making it to a hanger; it wasn’t happening. With my hands free, I put a fist on my hip. “If you want to be technical, he’s old enough to be your father.”
She rolled her eyes. “He is not. He’s just experienced and wise.”
“He’s twenty years older than you.”
“Maybe I have a thing for dads. Don’t knock my kink. I don’t knock yours.”
That shut me up for a second. I hadn’t actually ever told her my kink, but Audrey wasn’t stupid. She could probably figure out enough to guess that I at least liked a good spanking.
“Fine.” I dropped my hand. “I won’t knock the age difference.” I circled around to the front of the couch and plopped down next to her. “I don’t actually care what you’re into anyway, as long as it’s consensual.” It was the truth, too. I wasn’t just blowing sunshine up her ass. “I just don’t want you getting hurt. Dylan doesn’t seem into relationships. You get that, right? Not to mention that you live on entirely different continents.”
“It was just a kiss! God,” she huffed, shifting so her legs were out in front of her. “I’m not planning to marry the guy.”
“Just a kiss.” I sounded skeptical only because, with Audrey, it was never just a kiss. The minute she decided she liked a guy, she liked a guy. She started doodling their initials on the back of napkins. She changed her Facebook status to In a Relationship. She gave her heart when she swapped saliva. She didn’t do one-night stands. She didn’t do casual hook-ups. She didn’t do just a kiss.
Audrey sighed up at me with doe eyes. “I felt bad for the guy. All that doom and gloom. ‘Love’s dead. Grump, grump.’ He needed something nice for a change.”
Uh huh. “So you thought you’d kiss him and that would show him. Make him magically believe in hearts and romance again?”
“Shut up,” she said with a pout.
That’s what I was afraid of. Just a kiss and now she was head over heels for Dylan-love-is-a-myth-Locke. Thank God she was leaving in six days. And he was leaving. She might not even get a chance to see him again.
Audrey sank further into the couch beside me. “You think I’m naïve.”
I looked over at my baby sister, ready to tell her all my worries, but stopped myself at the last second. I couldn’t tell her to change how she felt any more than she could tell me to change how I feel about Donovan.
And she’d never try to tell me to change how I feel in the first place. She’d just encourage me to feel it.
So instead I kissed her hair. “I think you’re amazing.”
She peered up at me and grinned. It had been the right thing to say. Score a sister point for me.
She nudged me with her shoulder. “Hey. Tell me what happened with Donovan. He wasn’t on a date with that woman, was he?” She said it with certainty, as if she had an inside scoop.
“He said he wasn’t.” I threw my feet up on the coffee table in front of us. “How did you know?”
She shrugged. “The way he looked at you.” She followed me with her feet on the table too. “What else?”
“He said he came back to the States for me.”
“To talk to you? To be with you?”
“That’s what I don’t know yet. We have more to talk about, obviously.” I pulled a lock of hair down and twirled it between my fingers, replaying everything he’d said. There was so much I wanted to remember. So much I wanted to obsess over and hold too preciously.
“He said he loved me,” I said softly. Well, he hadn’t actually said it. I’d said it, and he’d confirmed. Was that the same thing? I was counting it as the same thing.
“Wow. That’s big.” Her excitement was hard to contain, but she was doing a pretty good job being cool about it. For me, I guessed. Probably trying to figure out how I felt about it before she let loose her own enthusiasm.
I nodded. It was big. But…
“But you already knew that he loved you,” Audrey said, filling in the blank that I couldn’t.
“Yeah. I did.” That was the problem. Everything he’d said had o
“Still,” Audrey said, “it had to be nice to hear.”
I had a list of arguments why nice didn’t matter. Then I remembered that I should just feel it.
“Yeah,” I said, genuinely. “It’s really nice.”
I’d heard Donovan tell Dylan he’d be in the office the next day, I just hadn’t really thought about it until it was the next day. Suddenly I was nervous and anxious and totally unprepared. All night I’d tossed and turned, and that was believing there were several more nights before I’d see him again. Now that there was a possibility I’d see him sooner, I was going out of my mind.
I settled on the simplest game plan—I’d hide.
My office was nowhere near Donovan’s and since I was taking Wednesday off to spend with Audrey, I had a lot of work to keep me busy anyway. I just had to stay on task, holed up in my little corner, and everything would be good.
The plan worked well for the most part. By late afternoon, I’d gotten all my must-complete projects done and had gone the whole day without leaving my office.
All I had left to do was drop off some forms that needed to be signed off on. Forms that couldn’t be emailed because they contained client payment information.
I walked down to the edge of the hall and glanced toward Donovan’s office. It was dark, which should have made me feel relieved. And it did. Mostly. I didn’t even know if he’d actually made it in like he said he’d planned to. Now I wouldn’t know at all because I’d been too chicken to look for him.
I was seriously ridiculous.
I wanted to see him; I didn’t want to see him. It was confusing even to me.
Anyway, Weston’s office was in the opposite direction and it didn’t matter if Donovan was in or not.
So I headed toward Weston’s.
Halfway there, I passed the glass-walled conference room and realized it wasn’t empty. Weston, Nate, and Dylan were sitting around the far end of the long table. And standing behind them, as though he might have just walked in and hadn’t sat yet, was Donovan.
As soon as I saw them, I snapped my head away, back to the hallway in front of me. They hadn’t seen me. They were wrapped up in their conversation. I didn’t need to interrupt them.
God, my stomach was fluttering like a teenager’s. Just because Donovan was nearby. I didn’t want to see him, but I wanted him to see me. My face was flushed, and I couldn’t think and—
“Sabrina,” Weston called through the open door, eyeing the stack of files in my hands. “Are those for me?”
Adrenaline shot through me at the shock of being “caught.” I looked down at the pile, having almost forgotten what my original agenda had been. “I was dropping them off at your office.”
He used two fingers to gesture me toward him. “I’ll take them.”
My heart was beating so loud I could hear it, and shit, I suddenly couldn’t remember how to walk in heels. Somehow I made it to him without falling on my face, and without obviously staring at Donovan the entire time.
“Executive meeting?” I asked as if speaking would make me look somehow more collected than I was.
“Just shooting the shit, really,” Weston said.
“Ah.” Dumb, but fine. It was all fine. I’d gotten through it just fine.
But after I set the files next to Weston, I looked up, and Donovan was right across the table from me, staring at me in that way he always did. That way that saw into me and knew me.
It always rattled me when he looked at me like that. But today when he saw me, I remembered that he loved what he saw and the butterflies fluttered again inside me.
“Hi,” I said quietly. Like a dork. Like a lovesick kid.
The corners of his lips pressed up just slightly, just for me. If we were alone I’d kiss him there. One kiss on each corner before—
“Donovan,” Nate said, interrupting my daydream. “I meant to tell you—I saw the early footage from the France campaign. Sun Le Chen looks stunning.”
And then it was all gone—the butterfly flutters, the racing heart, Donovan’s smile. Left was stark, bleak reality.
“Sun was with you in France?” My voice was even because this wasn’t shocking. This made much more sense than any of the amazing things he’d said last night.
He didn’t answer. The silence in the room was answer enough.
“Excuse me, fellows.” I turned and walked on steady feet out of the room, but not before hearing Donovan mumble “fuck” under his breath.
Unlike at the restaurant, he was right on my heels. “Sabrina, stop.”
I didn’t want to stop. But I could feel the eyes of the other men on me, and who knew who else was watching from their offices? So I stopped.
“What, Donovan?” I said through gritted teeth. “Go ahead and tell me what you’re going to say. You’re going to make sure I hear it one way or another anyway.”
“I explained last night that she is the spokeswoman—”
I interrupted him, my voice escalating. “You said you were negotiating terms. I didn’t know she’d been with you all along.”
“She wasn’t with me.” He was obviously frustrated. “She was—”
I glanced toward the conference room. Weston wasn’t even pretending not to gawk. “People are watching us.”
“I don’t care who’s watching us.”
“I care.”
Of course he didn’t care. He owned the goddamn place. I was the one who’d be laughed at in this situation. Not him. Never him.
Half a beat passed. Then without any warning, he grabbed me by the elbow and roughly escorted me down the hall. At the first open room, he dragged me inside and shut the door behind him. After a second, he locked it.
I folded my arms across my chest and fumed, my eyes locked on his. At least now we were in the privacy of the copy room, and I could say what I really wanted to say. Ask what I really wanted to ask. “Did you fuck her?”
“I haven’t fucked anyone since I last fucked you. And before that the only woman I’d been with was you since you showed up in town.” He stood in front of the closed door and braced his hands in the frame, barricading me from trying to go past him.
“You were only in France two weeks. Seems her campaign got arranged awfully quickly to get her there that fast. And then she got back to the States when you did? That’s awfully convenient.” Models were scheduled months in advance. They didn’t do shoots at the drop of a hat unless they were fucking someone.
But he had an answer for this too. “She’d been booked to do the campaign since Reach proposed to Elizabeth for Weston. You can look up the contract information yourself and check out the date. She was already in France when I got there. She left a week ago.”
Okay. More plausible. “Still gave you lots of time together there.”
“We weren’t together at all.” He took a step toward me. “What else? Ask me what you want to know.”
I inhaled then exhaled, my cheek twitching. “Did you kiss her? Stick your face between her legs?”
He shook his head sharply. “I barely saw her off the set. And I never touched her.”
God, it was maddening! There was no reason not to believe him. We weren’t even technically together, and even without a commitment, all signs had pointed to him being faithful.
It was just that we were unbalanced in our relationship in general. We were on a teeter-totter with him solid on the ground, and me dangling in the air. He had so much more of the picture than I did, and it left me to grasp and reach at anything and everything.
“Too bad I didn’t hire a PI to follow you around Europe,” I said, acting petty and rash. “I have to ask you these questions instead of reading a report. How am I supposed to know you’re not lying about all of this?”
“I guess you’ll have to trust me.”
I pouted. “Well that fucking sucks.”
“That does suck. Having to trust me.” He sounded a little annoyed and a whole lot dangerous.
He took another step toward me, and I started to step back, but there was a counter behind me, so I had to stay put. And maybe I wanted to stay put. He was only a foot and a half away from me now.
“But I haven’t lied to you, Sabrina.” His gaze never left mine. “And I’m not lying when I say I don’t give a fuck about anybody else’s cunt but yours.”
We stood there, not touching, not speaking, each of us standing our ground. But I had no basis to keep my position, and it felt like he’d won so much already.
I couldn’t back down.
“Prove it,” I said.
His expression flared, his eyes growing dark and mean, and I realized what I’d done. Donovan wasn’t one to be provoked.
I’d just invited the devil out to play.
“Unzip your skirt and put your hands on the counter behind you.”
My heart hammered and my belly twisted. My panties were embarrassingly drenched all of a sudden, and I wanted him. But I stood completely still. “I didn’t—”
He cut me off. “No talking and unzip your skirt.”
My mouth slammed shut, but I still didn’t move. If I moved, I’d be asking for this. But if I talked, I’d be telling him to stop.
And I didn’t want this to stop.
I just didn’t want to ask for it because I was stubborn and stupid for wanting him in the first place.
But he would give it to me without the words, without my obedience. Because he knew me. He knew what I needed.
With his eyes never leaving mine, he found the zipper at the side of my waist and pulled it down. After that, the skirt was loose enough that all he had to do was tug it once and it fell easily to my feet. He nudged his knee against my inner leg, and automatically I stepped that foot out of the pool of material on the floor, widening my stance.
He gave a nod of praise, sending a jolt of warmth through my entire body.
Then he bent down in front of me.
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