“Pretty,” she mumbled.
“Hmm?”
“Your tattoo.”
She’d never pegged him as the kind of man to have one, but there it was. A blocky, black-inked bird rising from the center of his back, its wings spread out across one shoulder as if it were about to take flight.
Something flickered at the edge of his smile. He didn’t say anything more.
He climbed into bed beside her.
“Staying?” she asked. It came out slurred.
“Yes.”
“M’kay.”
There were all kinds of reasons to be concerned about the idea, but one by one they drifted away. Muscles flexing, he leaned to the side to flick off the lights.
Blessed darkness surrounded her, and the mattress suddenly felt like a marshmallow she had sunk to the bottom of. She never, ever wanted to get up.
Especially not when he rolled into her. Wrapped an arm around her and tugged her close.
“Promise you’ll wake me,” he said. “If something doesn’t feel right.”
How could anything not feel right?
“Okay.”
He chuckled, and it was the richest, warmest sound in the world. With a kiss against her hair, he said, “Sleep.”
So she did.
chapter NINE
“That’s a nonnegotiable.” Shaking her head, Lexie crossed her arms over her chest.
Dane’s mouth watered. Her tits looked amazing when she did that. He’d always struggled to ignore her cleavage when she pushed her breasts together, but now that he’d seen her naked, it was almost impossible.
He clenched his hand into a fist beneath the table. He was a professional, goddammit all, and he could act like one.
Mostly.
Professionals didn’t take their gorgeous bosses to bed or fuck their mouths or demand to be ridden. Professionals didn’t fantasize about doing it all over again.
And it was starting to look like he might have the chance to. Lexie had gone deep again last night, but as far as he could tell, she’d slept straight through until morning. No shaking crash, no second thoughts or instant regrets. She’d woken up in his arms and let him kiss her gorgeous, sleep-soft mouth.
Sure, she’d pulled away not too long after, putting some distance between them as she buried herself in the numbers Rylan had sent at some point in the night. She hadn’t given them the chance to talk about what had happened between them or when they might be able to do it again. But she hadn’t looked him in the eye and told him she couldn’t fuck him again, either. So. Progress.
Now here they were, four hours into negotiations for the acquisition of the biggest financial company in Spain. She had her jacket off and her sleeves rolled up, her cheeks flushed as she refused to budge on point after point after point. Concessions had been made where she could allow them to, but she was standing her ground with a ferocity that was new, even to Dane.
Being put on her knees had clearly only improved her game face, and God what a game face it was.
He had to force himself to look away before he embarrassed himself. He liked submissive girls and demure girls, but holy hell, apparently he loved fiery ones, too. Ones who stood strong and unmovable, but could then allow themselves to let go.
Yeah. He might be in trouble with this one.
At the other end of the table, Miranda sighed. “I will have to run it by my people.” He glanced at the clock. Then nodding to himself, he stood. “We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow.” When Lexie opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand. “Americans eat, too, yes?”
Now that he mentioned it, Dane was starving. Coffee service had come by in the late morning with refreshments, but it was getting on near two in the afternoon.
He closed the case of his tablet a little too loudly, betraying his eagerness, and winced internally when Miranda seized upon it. Looking around the room, he insisted, “Your staff is famished and exhausted. Come. I know just the place.”
Lexie might not have budged in the negotiations about the company, but apparently Miranda felt a lot more strongly about lunch than he did about his business. He railroaded them out the door and down the street.
The next thing Dane knew, he was settling in at one end of a long table in the back of a chic, contemporary restaurant. He blinked, glancing around. Somehow, he’d ended up next to Miranda’s PA. The members of his team from legal and finance were sprinkled in among their Escudo counterparts.
Lexie and Miranda were all the way at the other end.
Acting on instinct, Dane rose. Before he could get very far, a hand settled on his shoulder. He shoved it off, bristling.
“Sorry, sorry.” Miranda’s PA, Carlos, pulled away. He seemed to shrink before Dane’s eyes as he explained, his accent thick. “You just looked like you were about to go over there.”
“I am.”
Carlos shook his head. “No. Miranda, he does this on purpose. He wants to talk to your boss as a person, you know? Wants us to do the same.”
Dane narrowed his eyes. When he took in their arrangement at the table, it did make sense, though. He cast a glance at Lexie. As if she could feel it, she turned her head to meet his gaze, holding it for a fraction of a second. She gave the tiniest shake of her head.
Flexing his jaw, Dane sat back down, and she nodded.
With a huff of relief, Carlos sat, too. “You see? All good.”
By some definitions of the word.
“Hablo español, si usted prefiere,” Dane offered. I speak Spanish, if you prefer. Catalonian would be better in this part of the country, but it was what he had.
The man lit up all the same.
With that barrier broken, all the Spaniards at the table seemed to lose a little bit of their guard. Dane felt like kind of an ass, because a couple of the other guys from Bellamy didn’t seem nearly as comfortable speaking Spanish as he did, but too bad on them.
The bigwigs wanted to have their own conversation? Fine. Dane could do that, too. Putting his own game face on, he started to subtly press the guys around him, trying to get the scoop about what stuff was like behind the scenes at Escudo.
But before he could get very far, Carlos held up his hand, cutting Dane off. A waitress approached. In rapid-fire Spanish, she asked them what they’d like to drink. Without a moment’s hesitation, Carlos called for wine—and lots of it. As an afterthought, he turned to Dane. “Tú bebes vino, sí?” You drink wine, yes?
As if the complete and total shift in his relationship with Lexie hadn’t been enough. Suddenly, as Carlos loosened his tie, all of Dane’s assumptions about a stuffy, repressed, exhausting, never-ending business trip from hell flew out of his head.
He’d been terrified to come here—afraid he’d be stuck in his suit, always on, never able to escape the role that he’d been forced into.
But now he had Lexie happily providing an outlet for the energy he couldn’t let go in his job. And he was staring down a lunch that looked like it was going to involve a hell of a lot more alcohol than business talk.
A smile overtook his face. “Sí,” he said. Obviously.
Once the waitress had moved on, he brought his hand to the collar of his shirt. Undoing the top button, he loosened his tie, and it was like he could breathe again.
“So,” he said, in Spanish. “What do you guys do around here for fun?”
Lexie was not jealous.
As Rylan continued rambling in her ear, she gazed out through the glass wall of the conference room she’d commandeered as office space for the time being. A little ways down the hall, Dane stood in a loose cluster of Escudo employees. Leaned up casually against the wall, he sipped at a cup of coffee before throwing his head back and laughing, exposing the long line of his throat, making the tendons there stand out against his collar.
She sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to look away.
They were deep into their third straight day of work here, and progress had slowed to a crawl. After Miranda had
agreed so easily to the basic plan for the acquisition, he’d done a complete about-face and decided to drag out the minutiae of every single minor point.
Her hopes for getting this wrapped quickly were fading with every passing minute. It was almost one o’clock. Soon, the entire place was going to empty out, and she’d learned the hard way that only a fraction of people bothered to return. Half of them tipsy. Considering it was Friday, this afternoon would probably be even worse.
She reached a hand to rub at her neck, but the tension there wouldn’t abate.
“So what do you think, Lex?”
She focused back in on the conversation. Rylan had been filling her in on another deal he was working on. Nothing he’d said had made her blink an eye. “Sounds reasonable.”
“We’ll start moving forward, then. Any chance we’ll have you back in the country before things get rolling?”
She sighed. “I’m staying until I get it done, right?”
That’s what he had told her when she’d posed her idea to him. At the time, it had seemed like a statement of his confidence in her, but as the obstacles toward closing continued to mount, it started to seem more and more like setting her up to fail.
Rylan paused. “Everything okay?”
She’d already given him her status update. “Fine, fine, I’m just tired.” And frustrated.
In a hell of a lot more ways than one.
As if on cue, Dane clapped one of the other guys on the shoulder, then hitched his thumb in Lexie’s direction. When he turned and strode toward her, his tie flipped to the side, and he could’ve been a model in a magazine, he looked so good.
Lexie directed her gaze firmly at her laptop screen. “Listen, I should probably let you go.”
“Okay,” Rylan said. “If you need anything . . .”
“I’ll let you know.”
She hung up as Dane gave a single, sharp knock before entering the room.
“There you are,” she said tightly, through her teeth.
“Sorry, did you need something?”
She needed him to bend her over this table and take her hard, to be honest, but she’d settle for him doing his job.
He’d been more or less as attentive as ever the past couple of days, but there’d been a shift in his attitude, too. Ever since that lunch out with the Escudo staff, he’d been socializing with them a lot. Which she didn’t object to, exactly. His going out for drinks with them after could be turned into a tactical advantage.
So what if she hadn’t been invited? Even if she had, she would’ve had to decline. It was all well and good for her PA to be seen letting loose, but she had a reputation to maintain. She’d stayed in and worked, same as she always did.
The fact that he hadn’t come back until late, that he hadn’t come knocking on her door with that dark look in his eyes . . . It was fine.
She’d gotten the wrong idea, but it wasn’t the first time. It likely wouldn’t be the last.
Keeping her gaze on her screen, she shoved a pile of papers across the table at him. “I need the top ones copied and sent off to legal. The middle ones are for finance to look over. And the last ones get overnighted to New York. If you aren’t too busy.”
An edge crept into her tone, and she cursed at herself in her mind. She wasn’t jealous, dammit all. Not of his time and not of anything else, either.
He stopped short. “Ms. Bellamy?”
She still couldn’t look at him. How dare he make her want him and then pull away? “Just do it, okay? And then get Miranda’s PA on the phone. I’ve asked him fifteen times for the reports from last year, I swear to God—”
“Lexie.”
She couldn’t seem to stop herself from looking up at that. A hot edge of command had seeped into his tone. He never did that at work. He never called her that. The combination of the two placed her right back in her hotel room the other night, on all fours at the edge of a giant bed while he fucked her mouth and yanked her hair and told her she was perfect, perfect . . .
Their gazes connected, and for a second it was as if he could see clear through her. Her lungs froze. He stared at her, eyes searing.
And then he did an about-face, stalking toward the door. But just when she thought he was about to walk right through, he caught it in his grasp, and in an exact, precise movement, he swung it closed. With the power rippling through his arms beneath his suit, she half expected it to slam, but the click of the latch was barely audible.
He flipped the lock, and she clenched deep inside. A single see-through pane of glass stood between them and the rest of the world. There was no way anything was about to happen here, but it was the first time they’d been alone in days, and her body sat up, ready to beg.
But while the darkness in his gaze spoke of arousal, the set to his jaw stayed firm, his body language tight. He crossed the space to stand beside her, half a foot too close. His scent surrounded her, making her head spin.
She tightened her hand around her phone until she feared she’d crack the case. This was why she’d been so reluctant to sleep with him in the first place. Lines inevitably blurred, no matter how careful everybody was. Her time with Jordan had proved that much.
The vein in his temple pulsed. “What’s. Wrong.”
“Nothing.” She shook her head, looking away.
But he wasn’t having any of that. His hand landed on the back of her chair, and he spun her around until there wasn’t room left in her vision for anything but him. “I’m not going to ask again.”
“Fine. Don’t.” Indignation rose hot in her throat.
The fire in his gaze flared. “If we were in a slightly different context, I’d be ready to put you over my knee right now.”
Well, they weren’t. They were on her terms now.
She sat up straighter, every muscle in her body going rigid. “In this context, if you did, I’d fire you.”
He was deathly still for a beat before one corner of his mouth twitched up. “Fair enough. Tonight, however, is a different matter.”
The promise raced through her blood, warming it, zipping from her breasts to her pussy and back. She kept her spine straight and her shoulders high, though. “Oh?”
“Definitely. Someone sounds like she needs it.”
His tone was flirty and teasing, but the statement rankled her all the same. “Don’t put yourself out.”
“Believe me. I won’t be.” He considered her for a long moment. Then his gaze softened. “Is that what this is about?”
“Excuse me?”
He didn’t move at all—nothing about their positioning would have betrayed them to anybody looking in. But the tiny motion of his thumb to stroke so gently across her shoulder felt like an earthquake. “You’ve felt neglected.”
“No, of course not—”
“You have. My fault.”
“It’s not anybody’s fault.”
He shook his head. “I knew we should have talked, but I didn’t want to push. When I offered to come by, you didn’t seem interested.”
“I was working. Getting up early.”
“Or you didn’t want to put me out.” He echoed her own words at her, but somehow he made them sound less petulant. More like how she actually felt. “I won’t make the mistake again.”
“It’s fine.” Because it was. Even just this little reassurance made the knot between her shoulders loosen. And anyway, it wasn’t as if she’d been lying. “I really have been working,” she conceded. She did a better job this time of keeping her tone even. Letting less of the bitterness out.
“Of course you have.” It came out fond. Releasing her chair, he took a step back and sank into the seat beside hers. “What on?”
“Everything.” Without him to hold her in place, she swiveled to face the table again and played idly with the stack of files in front of her. “I . . . I know you’re getting along really well with everyone here, but I can’t seem to get them to do anything. They’re stonewalling me.”
A weight ros
e off her shoulders at the confession. She’d gotten where she was by working harder than anyone else, getting in earlier and staying later. She didn’t rely on others, because eventually she was always the one left holding the bag. But she couldn’t do her job here without the people on the Escudo side doing theirs. Working harder only meant smacking her head against the wall they seemed to have built around her with skull-cracking force.
Frowning, Dane took the files from her hands and paged through them. That also included her notebook with her hand-scribbled notes on the top page. He studied it for a moment.
Nodding to himself, he reached across her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up to have him so close. Her body had been ready for him the instant he’d walked through the door, and now that her worries had been appeased, her mind was on board, too. Her nipples tightened, and her abdomen flashed warm.
But he wasn’t moving to touch her. It took her a second to remember why that was a good thing.
Instead, he grabbed the landline by her elbow. He dialed with one finger, then brought the handset to his ear. “Hola, Carlos?” What followed was a flutter of Spanish too fast and fluent for her to decipher. He nodded a couple of times and made vague affirmative noises. He lifted his gaze to hers. Finally, with what even she could recognize as a good-bye, he passed the receiver to her.
She looked at it in confusion before he gestured toward its cradle. She hung it up, opening her mouth to ask him what on earth was going on. “Dane—”
“Miranda’s PA will have the numbers you needed ready for you in fifteen minutes. He promised to deliver them personally.”
“Oh.”
Hot humiliation flooded her cheeks.
“Lex. Ms. Bellamy. These folks—it’s not as if they don’t care about getting ahead. They want good lives and good incomes. But at the end of the day, they want a nice glass of wine and a decent meal and to go home to their families.”
“Oh.” Was that all she knew how to say?
“If you want to get things done, your way might not work as well as you’re used to.” Sympathy colored his eyes, and it made her squirm even more inside.
She was a successful businesswoman. She’d closed deals as big as this one on three different continents. She knew what she was doing, dammit.
Nine Kinds of Naughty Page 10
