“Have you talked to them about it?” Spence asked.
Bree blinked. “Of course not. This is the first time I’ve heard of it.”
His smile was entirely too smug. “Then you might not want to dismiss it so easily. You never know what kind of results you can get from an experiment.”
Oh God. She shouldn’t have worn pink. It added color to her face as it was, and with that little dig—which she knew damned well was a greenhouse reference—she was certain that she was now redder than Taylor Swift’s lips.
Not from embarrassment, though. Oh no.
“Well, Mr. James,” she said with all the sweetness she could muster. “I suggest an experiment of your own. Let’s have some drawings made up. Some with a space suitable for weddings, others with a playground. Take them to the student union and park yourself down there for a few hours and see which one garners you the most signatures.”
“Interesting proposition,” Spence said. “But you’re the expert in conducting experiments.” His smile was pure taunt. “Me, I’m more a man of action.”
What the hell was happening here? Was he teasing her? Trying to make a point? Trying to get under her skin?
The heat pooling in her nether regions made it abundantly clear that under her skin was winning her vote.
This was insane. She still wasn’t even sure she liked Spence. She certainly didn’t approve of his past, though, okay, maybe it was time to chalk that up to youthful idiocy. But no matter. She definitely shouldn’t be entertaining fantasies of wiping the grin off his face by stripping off her cardigan and tossing it across the table.
But damned if her fingers weren’t fiddling with the buttons anyway.
Mercy Rodrigues coughed nervously. “Is there any reason why we couldn’t have both those facilities? They both sound like great ideas to me.”
Fred Gettman jumped in. “I agree. I like both of them. Why can’t we see about incorporating both?”
“Because there’s not enough room.” Spence reclined somewhat, his arm hooked over the back of his chair like he owned it. “To make this a viable food forest instead of just a park, we need to keep the emphasis on food: fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes. We have room for some open space. Probably enough for one or the other of these suggestions”—he paused, no doubt for dramatic effect—“but not both.”
This was so definitely a walk back into high school. The weird part, though, wasn’t how familiar it felt to spar with Spence again, or how easily she fell into old patterns—it was that this time around, she kind of liked it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been pushed to articulate and defend her proposals this way. Well, other than when she was defending her master’s thesis, and that had been such a formality that she had barely had time to get into her answers.
This, though—this was different. She liked this feeling of being pushed. To her surprise, she realized she’d missed it. It had been a long time since she had locked eyes with an opponent and sent out a telepathic order to bring it, but that was exactly how this felt. Add in the buzz of arousal that hitched up a notch every time she looked at him, and—
Bree’s mouth sagged. Was this why she had secretly enjoyed sparring with Spence back in school—why she had been so fixated on beating him? Because she had been attracted to him?
Note to self: go home and find your yearbook ASAP.
“Well,” she said, “it seems we’re at an impasse. I doubt anything needs to be decided today”—she glanced at Alice, who nodded—“but I, for one, would be very willing to experiment and evaluate the results.”
The bastard pulled a pack of Tic Tacs from his pocket and shook one loose, filling the air with the scent of mint.
Her nipples tightened.
“Are we wedded to this location?” someone asked. Bree should have known who, but it was difficult to focus, what with the way all her energy was being directed at holding Spence’s bait at bay. She felt as if she were the starship USS Enterprise and Captain Kirk had just ordered all power to be directed to the shields.
If Spence hadn’t been watching her every move, she would close her eyes. As it was, she forced herself to stay focused on Alice, making a show of following the conversation as people discussed other possible locations for the forest.
But inside, the Enterprise was shaking.
* * *
Spence wandered the unfamiliar halls with determined steps. Did he know what he was going to say once he found his destination? No. But winging it had brought him this far, and he wasn’t going to mess with that now.
He stopped outside an office, checking the number he’d looked up on his phone against the one on the open door. Success.
There were no voices coming from inside. That, he decided, was most definitely a sign.
He knocked on the door, walked in, and closed it before Bree even finished telling him to come in.
She stood behind a standard issue metal desk in a room barely big enough to allow a fully grown human to take more than two steps in a row. Her hand went to her throat. She started fondling those damned buttons again, and with that, he knew she was absolutely feeling it, too.
The only question now was what they planned to do about it. And when. And where, too, though at the moment, he wasn’t feeling particularly picky. In fact, if this place were bigger . . . though now that he looked, that uncluttered desk seemed pretty sturdy . . .
“Mr. James.” She raised her eyebrows. “I wish I could say I’m surprised, but the fact is, I’m not.”
It wasn’t what anyone would call a warm welcome, but at least she wasn’t playing the innocent card. Nor had she stopped playing with her buttons.
And unless he missed his guess, her sweater looked pointier in a couple of very strategic places. Highly encouraging, since the room was anything but chilly.
“It’s the strangest thing.” She leaned forward, palms braced on the flat of the desk. “We’re making progress, but there’s still a part of me that isn’t sure I want to be in the same room with you. And a part that can’t help but feel like I’m sixteen or seventeen all over again.”
“Seventeen looked good on you.” No lie. He’d hauled out his old yearbooks the other night to check out what he’d missed all those years ago. Freshman and sophomore years hadn’t been her friend, but something happened after then that had left him squinting at her junior-year photo and wondering how the hell he had been so blind.
She dipped her chin and turned a little pink. Not as much as she had in their meeting, but he’d definitely hit the target.
“Seventeen was a long time ago,” she said softly.
“Funny thing. When we were in that meeting, going back and forth and trying to score points off each other, it felt like it was just yesterday.”
“It did at that.” She leaned back against the windowless wall behind the desk, arms crossed, eying him as if she was assessing his ability to navigate a maze. “I wonder if that has something to do with our relationship back then. Perhaps we were so focused on being adversarial because it was safer than admitting that—”
“That we had the hots for each other?”
She scrunched her eyes closed but didn’t deny it.
“It’s an interesting theory,” she said softly.
It was the breathiness in her voice that clued him in. She was as turned on as he was. And he would wager all the money her father had bilked out of his that she was scared shitless by it. The whole experiment line in the greenhouse . . . the way she started spouting about theories and the past . . . it was her way of hiding. It was as if she was trying to remind herself she was an intellectual, an academic. Trying to remember that she was above things like the many pictures his imagination was throwing out right now, all of them starting with peeling that sweater off her one hot inch at a time.
“Here’s the thing about theories.” He took a co
uple of steps closer. “Unless you test them out, you’ll never know if they’re true.”
She blinked. Slowly, like she was processing her thoughts. Maybe her reactions. Whatever the reason, it left her looking just bemused enough that he knew he needed to get her truly confused, then truly certain, then truly desperate. As soon as possible.
“Bree.”
Her fingers froze on the buttons.
“I’m not going to pretend I understand this any more than you do. Probably less, since you’re the one who can read people’s minds and all that.”
Some of the steel snapped back into her spine. “I do not—”
“Right, I know. Figure of speech, okay? Let me rephrase. You have insights that not all of us would share.”
She glared at him over her glasses but didn’t dispute him.
“But just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I mean, look. I work with plants all day, but do I really know how they grow, or what makes them start sprouting? Hell no. Some things just are. And the best I can hope for is that they’ll do their thing their way, and that it’ll turn out the way I planned.”
“And how do you hope this will turn out?”
He could tell her. He could describe everything he wanted to do to her, do with her, and he could do it with words that would leave her so weak with wanting that she’d be clinging to that damned desk like a lifeboat.
But personally, he’d always been a fan of his English teacher’s advice to show, not tell.
So instead of answering with words, he moved. Around the desk. Against her. Moving forward until they were toe to toe, eye to eye, longing to longing. But he didn’t touch her.
“Here’s how I hope it will turn out, Bree.” He kept his voice low, leaning close, speaking directly into her ear without making contact. “In about, oh, two, maybe three seconds, I’m going to take another step. I’m going to press you up against that wall and feel you against me, and I’m going to take off your glasses, and I’m going to kiss that little hollow at the base of your neck, and then I’m going to work my way up. Or maybe down.”
She swallowed hard. He grinned.
“If that’s not how you want things to turn out, Miss Elias, then I suggest you walk away now. Because I promise you this: if this unfolds the way I think it will, it won’t take long until you won’t be able to.”
“Won’t be able to what?”
“Walk away.”
At that, a disbelieving look came into her eyes. “Very sure of yourself, aren’t you, Mr. James?”
“Not at all.”
She blinked.
“I’m very sure of you.” He reached for her then, hands on her glasses, but before he could tug them away she had sidelined him with a kiss that seemed to come out of nowhere. Seriously. One second he was touching the metal of her frames and the next thing he knew, her thumbs were looped over his waistband and her mouth was on his and she was the one moving him backward, weakening him with those lips that seemed to know exactly how to throw him off rhythm, pushing him until he was the one braced against the wall and she was the one pressed against him and everything in him was rising to meet her more than halfway.
“You should never tell a woman that you know what she’s going to do,” she said against his mouth. He would have protested—his masculine pride seemed to demand it—but her hands were sliding across his rib cage and her knee was between his and she was wriggling against him in all the right places. And if the sounds slipping from her mouth were any clue, she was feeling pretty all right, too.
This was insane. But he couldn’t seem to stop.
Not when she kissed her way down his neck.
Not when his hands moved lower, cupping her curves and hauling her even closer.
Not when she leaned back, blinked, then grabbed his tie and tugged him while she stepped back. Though since his mouth was still firmly fastened on hers, it wasn’t like he had much choice. Or resistance.
She let go abruptly. He opened his eyes in time to see her reach back, push, and boost herself onto—a filing cabinet?
But then she reeled him in again and the only details he cared about were that she was kissing him and her skirt had hitched and she was pulling him between her knees and those legs that had called to him from their first meeting were wrapping around him.
The piece of his brain that wasn’t busy trying to get as close to her as possible immediately recognized the benefits of the filing cabinet. It boosted her to exactly the height he needed for maximum Oh Yeah. Almost better, it put the wall at her back. Meaning she had support. Meaning she could lean back against the wall and push up against him from the tip of that pointy sweater to the tilt of her hips.
To think he would have wasted time against a wall or trying to get to the desk.
With her secure and supported, his hands were free to roam, and roam they did. Up her sides. Down her curves. Settling on the exposed length of her thighs, pushing her skirt even higher, stroking with his thumbs and wishing to hell it was summer so he would be feeling skin instead of pantyhose.
Then she tilted farther back, pressing against him even harder, and he grinned against her neck. Because now he knew how to use this to his advantage.
“Do you know what I would be doing to you right now if you weren’t wearing these?” He skidded his fingers over the pantyhose while he whispered against the soft skin below her jaw. Her answer was to sink her fingers into his shoulder.
“I’d be doing this,” he said, and walked his fingers higher, nudging her skirt out of his way and letting his thumbs drag slowly behind the rest of his hand, running them against the inside of her thighs. She wriggled impatiently.
He laughed. Low, so she would know that while there was desire behind it, it wasn’t from any wish to make her feel bad. No. He wanted her feeling better than she had ever felt in her life.
She fisted her hands in his shirt and pulled him in closer, not that he’d thought that was possible. Her fingers were at his buttons now, sliding them open, sliding her hands over his undershirt, molding her palms to his ribs. He brought one hand to her sweater and ran his finger up and down the row of pearl buttons, lightly at first, then pressing harder with a flattened palm that brushed the slopes of her breasts and had her arching against him and making it almost impossible to breathe, let alone think enough to plan a seduction.
“All through that meeting,” he said. “I sat across from you and all I could do was count these buttons and wonder what would happen when I undid them.”
Her eyes flew open, first in some kind of surprise—hadn’t he made it clear that he’d been imagining undressing her all through the meeting? But when her expression shifted to something that looked like satisfaction, he got the feeling that he might be the one who’d been played.
“You wore this on purpose, didn’t you?”
“I might have been”—she kissed the edge of his jaw—“experimenting.”
He popped the top button. “Aren’t you supposed to get permission before you do experiments?”
“Paperwork.” She nuzzled his neck. “Forms.”
He bent enough to breathe against the tiny vee he’d exposed. His mouth was still on fabric, a little shirt thing she wore under the sweater, but her heat reached him anyway. He kissed her through the fabric while one hand worked the next button and the other glided down to her thigh. She jumped at his touch. Made a small noise that he was pretty sure could turn into the sweetest music he’d ever heard. Let her hands slide to the sides of his hips and tried to tug him even tighter while her legs opened wider.
“I don’t remember any paperwork.” He opened the button. “What happens when you don’t follow the proper procedures, Bree?”
She looked straight into his eyes. Her lips curved up.
“The experiment could be stopped.”
�
��Wrong answer.” Seriously wrong answer. Which was the only reason he slid his hand between the layers of sweater to run his finger over the firm tip of her breast.
“Sanctions?” It came out more of a gasp than a word, a plea more than a statement, and even though he knew this was lunacy, they were in an office, for Christ’s sake, the thought of Bree Elias being needy and uncertain for once did things to him that pushed sense far down the list of things he wanted at the moment.
Instead, he slid his hand higher up her leg and over some intriguing curves until he located the seam of those damned pantyhose.
“Sanctions,” he said, and let his finger slide slowly down the seam, following it down the curve and into the valley, slow and steady and strong enough to send her arching back, pushing against him. He drank in the sight of her, flushed and open, her mouth an O of need, and knew that all he had to do was grab the waist of those pantyhose and give one good yank, and they could make this old filing cabinet rock hard enough to create a whole new alphabet.
Except he couldn’t. Not yet. Not when there was something between them that was a lot more important than a wisp of fabric.
But neither could he leave her like this. Bad enough that he was going to walk around the rest of the day in agony. He couldn’t do that to her, too.
He shifted his hips. Back.
Glazed eyes flew open again. “Spence?” She blinked. Something like awareness began to return to her eyes.
God, he wanted her.
“Shhh,” he said, and without giving her time to anticipate, he moved. His lips locked on hers while the hand on her breast teased and the hand between her legs pressed as deep and as hard as he could through the fabric, there, again, and he knew he’d hit home when she tilted against his hand and gasped against his mouth and froze beneath him, one, two, then shuddered so hard that he was pretty sure that the files were going to need some serious rearranging after all.
For one second, they stayed that way, locked but not joined, her suddenly pliant, him aching in ways he hadn’t since he was a kid.
Romancing the Rival Page 11
