by Maisey Yates
And yet, it appeared there was chemistry between himself and Poppy that had been dormant all this time.
Her soft hands were suddenly pressed against his face, holding on to him as she returned his kiss with surprising enthusiasm.
Her enthusiasm might be surprising, but he was damn well going to take advantage of it.
Because if chemistry was her concern, then he was more than happy to demolish her worry here and now.
He reversed their positions, turning so her back was to his desk, and then he walked her backward before sliding one arm beneath her ass and picking her up, depositing her on top of the desk. He bent down to continue kissing her, taking advantage of her shock to step between her legs.
Or maybe he wasn’t taking advantage of anything. Maybe none of this was calculated as he would like to pretend that it was. Maybe it was just necessary. Maybe now that their lips had touched there was just no going back.
And hell, why should they? If she couldn’t deny the chemistry between them... If it went to its natural conclusion...she had no reason to refuse his proposal.
He slid one hand down her thigh, toward her knee, and then lifted that leg, hooking it over his hip as he drew her forward and pressed himself against her.
Thank God for the fullness of her skirt, because it was easy to make a space for himself right there between her legs. He was so hard it hurt.
He was a thirty-six-year-old man who had a hell of a lot more self-control now than he’d ever had, and yet, he felt more out of control than he could ever remember being before.
That did not add up. It was bad math.
And right now, he didn’t care.
Slowly, he slid his other hand up and cupped her breast. He had been right. It was exactly the right size to fill his palm. He squeezed her gently, and Poppy let out a hoarse groan, then wrenched her mouth away from his.
Her eyes were full of hurt. Full of tears.
“Don’t,” she said, wiggling away from him.
“What?” he asked, drawing a deep breath and trying to gain control over himself.
Stopping was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to strip that dress off her, marvel at every inch of uncovered skin. Kiss every inch of it. He wanted her twisting and begging underneath him. He wanted to sink into her and lose himself. Wanted to make her lose herself too.
Poppy.
His friend. His assistant.
“How dare you?” she asked. “How dare you try to manipulate me with... wth sex. You’re my friend, Isaiah. I trusted you. You’re just...trying to control me the way you control everything in your life.”
“That isn’t true,” he said. It wasn’t. It might have started out as...not a manipulation, but an attempt to prove something to both of them.
But eventually, he had just been swept up in all this. In her. In the heat between them.
“I think it is. You... I quit.”
And then she turned and walked out of the room, leaving him standing there, rejected for the first time in a good long while.
And it bothered him more than he would have ever imagined.
* * *
Poppy was steeped in misery by the time she crawled onto the couch in her pajamas that evening.
Her little house down by the ocean was usually a great comfort to her. A representation of security that she had never imagined someone like her could possess.
Now, nothing felt like a refuge. Nothing at all. This whole town felt like a prison.
Her bars were Isaiah Grayson.
That had to stop.
She really was going to quit.
She swallowed, feeling sick to her stomach. She was going to quit and sell this house and move away. She would talk to him sometimes, but mostly she had to let the connection go.
She didn’t mean to him what he did to her. Not just in a romantic way. Isaiah didn’t... He didn’t understand. He didn’t feel for people the way that other people felt.
And he had used the attraction she felt for him against her. Her deepest, darkest secret.
There was no way a woman without a strong, preexisting attraction would have ever responded to him the way she had.
It had been revealing. Though, now she wondered if it had actually been revealing at all, or if he had just always known.
Had he known—all this time—how much she wanted him? And had he been...laughing at her?
No. Not laughing. He wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t cruel, not at all. But had he been waiting until it was of some use to him? Maybe.
She wailed and dragged a blanket down from the back of the couch, pulling it over herself and curling into a ball.
She had kissed Isaiah Grayson today.
More than kissed. He had... He had touched her.
He had proposed to her.
And, whether it was a manipulation or not, she had felt...
He had been hard. Right there between her legs, he had been turned on.
But then, he was a man, and there were a great many men who could get hard for blowup dolls. So. It wasn’t like it was that amazing.
Except, something about it felt kind of amazing.
She closed her eyes. Isaiah. He was... He was absolutely everything to her.
She could marry him. She could keep another woman from marrying him.
Great. And then you can be married to somebody who doesn’t love you at all. Who sees you as a convenience.
She laughed aloud at that thought. Yes. Some of that sounded terrible. But... She had spent most of her life in foster care. She had lived with a whole lot of people who didn’t love her. And some of them had found her to be inconvenient. So that would put marrying Isaiah several steps above some of the living situations she’d had as a kid.
Then there was Rosalind. Tall, blond Rosalind who was very clearly Isaiah’s type. While Poppy was...not.
How would she ever...cope with that? With the inevitable comparisons?
He hates her. He doesn’t hate you.
Well. That was true. Rosalind had always gone after what she wanted. She had devastated Isaiah in the process. So much so that it had even hurt Poppy at the time. Because as much as she wanted to be with Isaiah, she didn’t want him to be hurt.
And then, Rosalind had gone on to her billionaire. The man she was still with. She traveled around the world and hosted dinner parties and did all these things that had been beyond their wildest fantasies when they were growing up.
Rosalind wasn’t afraid of taking something just for herself. And she didn’t worry at all about someone else’s feelings.
Sometimes, that was a negative. But right about now... Poppy was tempted—more than a little bit tempted—to be like Rosalind.
To go after her fantasy and damn the feelings and the consequences. She could have him. As her husband. She could have him...kissing her. She could have him naked.
She could be his.
She had been his friend and his assistant for ten years. But she’d never been his in the way she wanted to be.
He’d been her friend and her boss.
He’d never been hers.
Had anyone ever been hers?
Rosalind certainly cared about Poppy, in her own way. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have bailed Poppy out when she was in need. But Rosalind’s life was very much about her. She and Poppy kept in touch, but that communication was largely driven by Poppy.
That was...it for her as far as family went. Except for the Graysons.
And if she married Isaiah...they really would be her family.
There was a firm, steady knock on her door. Three times. She knew exactly who it was.
It was like thinking about him had conjured him up.
She wasn’t sure she was ready to face him.
She looked down. She was wearing a T-s
hirt and no bra. She was definitely not ready to face him. Still, she got up off the couch and padded over to the door. Because she couldn’t not...
She couldn’t not see him. Not right now. Not when all her thoughts and feelings were jumbled up like this. Maybe she would look at him and get a clear answer. Maybe she would look at him and think, No, I still need to quit.
Or maybe...
She knew she was tempting herself. Tempting him.
She hoped she was tempting him.
She scowled and grabbed hold of her blanket, wrapping it tightly around her shoulders before she made her way to the door. She wrenched it open. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk sense into you.”
“You can’t,” she said, knowing she sounded like a bratty kid and not caring at all.
“Why not?”
“Because I am an insensible female.” She whirled around and walked back into her small kitchen, and Isaiah followed her, closing the front door behind him.
She turned to face him again, and her heart caught in her throat. He was gorgeous. Those cold, clear gray eyes, his sculpted cheekbones, the beard that made him more approachable. Because without it, she had a feeling he would be too pretty. And his lips...
She had kissed those lips.
He was just staring at her.
“I’m emotional.”
He said nothing to that.
“I might actually throw myself onto the ground at any moment in a serious display of said emotion, and you won’t like it at all. So you should probably leave.”
Those gray eyes were level with hers, sparking heat within her, stoking a deep ache of desire inside her stomach.
“Reconsider.” His voice was low and enticing, and made her want to agree to whatever commandment he issued.
“Quitting or marrying you?” She took a step back from him. She couldn’t be trusted to be too close to him. Couldn’t be trusted to keep her hands to herself. To keep from flinging herself at him—either to beat him or kiss him she didn’t know.
“Both. Either.”
Just when she thought he couldn’t make it worse.
“That’s not exactly the world’s most compelling proposal.”
“I already know that my proposal wasn’t all that compelling. You made it clear.”
“I mean, I’ve heard of bosses offering to give a raise to keep an employee from leaving. But offering marriage...”
“That’s not the only reason I asked you to marry me,” he said.
She made a scoffing sound. “You could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m not trying to fool you,” he said.
Her heart twisted. This was one of the things she liked about Isaiah. It was tempting to focus on his rather grumpy exterior, and when she did that, the question of why she loved him became a lot more muddled. Because he was hot? A lot of men were hot. That wasn’t it. There was something incredibly endearing about the fact that he said what he meant. He didn’t play games. It simply wasn’t in him. He was a man who didn’t manipulate. And that made her accusation from earlier feel...wrong.
Manipulation wasn’t really the right way to look at it. But he was used to being in charge. Unquestioned.
And he would do whatever he needed to do to get his way, that much she knew.
“Did you take the kiss as far as you did because you wanted to prove something to me?”
“No,” he said. “I kissed you to try and prove something to me. Because you’re right. If we were going to get married, then an attraction would have to be there.”
“Yes,” she said, her throat dry.
“I can honestly say that I never thought about you that way.”
She felt like she’d just been stabbed through the chest with a kitchen knife. “Right,” she said, instead of letting out the groan of pain that she was tempted to issue.
“We definitely have chemistry,” he said. “I was genuinely caught off guard by it. I assume it was the same for you.”
She blinked. He really had no idea? Did he really not know that her response to him wasn’t sudden or random?
No. She could see that he didn’t.
Isaiah often seemed insensitive because he simply didn’t bother to blunt his statements to make them palatable for other people. Because he either didn’t understand or care what people found offensive. Which meant, if backed into a corner about whether or not he had been using the kiss against her, he would have told her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Now he looked genuinely confused. “You’re apologizing to me. Why?”
“I’m apologizing to you because I assumed the worst about you. And that wasn’t fair. You’re not underhanded. You’re not always sweet or cuddly or sensitive. But you’re not underhanded.”
“You like me,” he pointed out.
He looked smug about that.
“Obviously. I wouldn’t have put up with you for the past ten years. Good paying job or not. But then, I assume you like me too. At least to a degree.”
“We’re a smart match,” he said. “I don’t think you can deny that.”
“Just a few hours ago you were thinking that one of those bottle blondes was your smart match. You can see why I’m not exactly thrilled by your sudden proposal to me.”
“Are you in love with someone else?”
The idea was laughable. She hadn’t even been on a date in...
She wasn’t counting. It was too depressing.
“No,” she said, her throat tightening. “But is it so wrong to want the possibility of love?”
“I think love is good for the right kind of people. Though my observation is that people mostly settle into a partnership anyway. The healthiest marriage is a partnership.”
“Love is also kind of a thing.”
He waved a hand. “Passion fades. But the way you support one another... That’s what matters. That’s what I’ve seen with my parents.”
She stared at him for a long moment. He was right in front of her, asking for marriage, and she still felt like he was standing on the other side of a wall. Like she couldn’t quite reach him. “And you’re just...never going to love anyone.”
“I have loved someone,” he said simply.
There was something so incredibly painful about that truth. That he had loved someone. And she had used the one shot he was willing to give. It wasn’t fair. That Rosalind had gotten his love. If Poppy would have had it, she would have preserved it. Held it close. Done anything to keep it for always.
But she would never get that chance. Because her vivacious older foster sister had gotten it first. And Rosalind hadn’t appreciated what she’d had in him.
It was difficult to be angry at Rosalind over what had happened. Particularly when her and Isaiah being together had been painful for Poppy anyway. But right now... Right now, she was angry.
Because whole parts of Isaiah were closed off to Poppy because of the heartbreak he’d endured.
Or maybe that was silly. Maybe it was just going to take a very special woman to make him fall in love. And she wasn’t that woman.
Well, on the plus side, if you don’t marry him, you’ll give him a chance to find that woman.
She clenched her teeth, closing her eyes against the pain. She didn’t think she could handle that. It was one terrible thing to think about watching him marry another woman. But it was another, even worse thing to think about him falling in love with someone else. If she were good and selfless, pure and true, she supposed that’s what she would want for him.
But she wasn’t, and she didn’t. Because if he fell in love, that would mean she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. She would lose her chance at love. At least, the love she wanted.
How did it benefit her to be that selfless? It just didn’t.
“
I’ll think about it,” she said.
Four
“I’m not leaving here until I close this deal,” he said.
“I’m not a business deal waiting to happen, Isaiah.”
He took a step toward her, and she felt her resolve begin to weaken. And then, she questioned why she was even fighting this at all.
He was the one driving this train. He always was.
Because she loved him.
Because he was her boss.
Because he possessed the ability to remain somewhat detached, and she absolutely did not.
She could watch him trying to calculate his next move. She could see that it was difficult for him to think of this as something other than a business deal.
No, she supposed that what Isaiah was proposing was a business deal. With sex.
“You can’t actually be serious,” she said.
“I’m always serious.”
“I get that you think you can get married and make it not about...feelings. But it’s... I can’t get over the sex thing, Isaiah. I can’t.”
There were many reasons for that, not the least of which being her own inexperience. But she was not going to have that discussion with him.
“The kiss was good.” He said it like that solved everything. Like it should somehow deal with all of her concerns.
“A kiss isn’t sex,” she said lamely. As if pointing out one of the most obvious things in the world would fix this situation.
“Do you think it’s going to be a problem?”
“I think it’s going to be weird.”
Weird was maybe the wrong word. Terrifying.
Able to rip her entire heart straight out of her chest.
“You’re fixating,” he said simply. “Let’s put a pin in the sex.”
“You can’t put a pin in the sex,” she protested.
“Why can’t I put a pin in the sex?”
“Because,” she said, waving her hand in a broad gesture. “The sex is like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. In lingerie. It will not be ignored. It will not be...pinned.”
“Put a pin in it,” he reiterated. “Let’s talk about everything else that a marriage between the two of us could offer you.”
