by Lisa Childs
There was a reason for that. “I’m not a runaway,” he admitted.
She sighed. “You lied?”
“I never said that I was.”
“But you claimed you lived on the street with your partners,” she said as if she was about to call bullshit on him again.
He nodded. “I did. But I didn’t run away.”
She froze and stared at him, her blue eyes wide now with shock and her pale skin paled even more. “Your parents abandoned you?”
“Just my mom,” he said with a nonchalant shrug as if it didn’t matter. Hell, it had all happened so long ago that it really didn’t. “I don’t know who my dad is. I don’t know if she actually knows. I don’t even know where she was from. She moved to New York City to make it as an actress.”
“How old were you when you moved here?” Allison asked.
He searched his memory and sighed. “Young. I don’t remember ever living anywhere else.”
“What happened to her?” Allison asked. “Where did she go?”
“Hollywood,” he said. “She’d figured she’d have a better chance of getting acting jobs there. Maybe on a soap or something.”
“How old were you then?” she asked.
He shrugged again even though he remembered exactly how old he’d been. “Thirteen...”
And she gasped. “Only thirteen? Is that when you started living on the streets?”
He shook his head. “I stayed with the guy I worked for, refinishing floors. He let me live with him as long as I kept going to school.” Wally had only allowed Trev to help him after his homework was done. Wally Washington had also emphasized the importance of education, probably because he hadn’t had much himself.
Like Trev, he’d had to start working too young to help support his family.
She gasped again. “You were only thirteen. You shouldn’t have been working at all.”
“I had to,” he said. Despite all the auditions she’d gone on, his mother hadn’t landed very many acting jobs. He’d had to work or they would have starved. “I had no choice.”
Allison studied him quietly for a long moment, which made him uneasy. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking now. Then she asked, “How did you wind up on the streets?”
For the first time since walking down memory lane, he felt a real twinge of pain over the past. He flinched. “Wally died,” he said. “All the chemicals he’d been using on those floors had destroyed his lungs.”
That was the first big corporation he’d taken on, the one that had killed his old friend.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She hadn’t apologized about his mother abandoning him as if she’d known that hadn’t really bothered him. It had been easier in some ways to not have to worry about her; she’d never been a practical woman. But Wally...
Losing him had hurt. Trev was the only one who’d felt the pain. Wally’s kids hadn’t had anything to do with him for years. They hadn’t even come to see him when he’d gotten sick. But they had certainly showed up to see what they’d inherited once he’d died.
None of them had wanted the gangly fourteen-year-old kid. Instead of letting any of them turn him over to foster care, he’d taken off. Fortunately, he’d found his friends or he probably wouldn’t have survived.
“So that’s how I wound up living on the streets,” he said, and he jumped up from the chair. Restless, he paced near the tall windows of her office. “Will you be able to spin that the way you need to?”
“No spin required,” she said. “It’s a good story. The public will love it.”
What about her? Did she love it?
“But it’s not enough,” she said. “You’re going to have to make some changes.”
“To my past?” he asked. Despite how hard it had been, there wasn’t a thing he would have changed. He wouldn’t have wound up where he was if anything had been different.
“To your present,” she said.
“What do you want me to change?” he asked, and he neared her desk again. “My single status? Do I need a first lady?”
She gasped, and her face got even paler than it had been. She shook her head.
If he needed one, she obviously didn’t want the position.
“No,” she said. “You need to distance yourself from Street Legal. You need to leave the practice.”
“What!” Just the thought struck him like a bullet in the heart. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“There’s no way you’re going to win anything with them as your partners or even as your friends.”
The wound in his heart got bigger, leaving a gaping hole at just the thought of no longer being involved in Street Legal. “You want me to stop being friends with them?”
“That’s the only way you’re going to convince voters you’re trustworthy,” she said. “Your partners have had too much bad press the past few months.”
“I wonder why...” he muttered. That was her fault; the damn mole was tearing down Street Legal. Was that why she wanted him to leave, to destroy the practice all together?
He wouldn’t let her get away with it. But at the moment he was so angry he didn’t trust himself. It was almost as if she’d set out to deliberately infuriate him, to push him into losing control.
But before that happened, he strode toward the door and pulled it open.
“You wanted me to help you,” she called after him.
“I don’t need your kind of help,” he shot back at her before slamming the door behind him. Edward stood in the hall, just a short distance from her office.
He must have been listening, just as she had apparently suspected. The assistant smirked as Trev passed him. “Goodbye, Mr. Sinclair,” he called after him as if he thought he’d never see Trev again.
But Trev wasn’t giving up. His perseverance was one of the reasons he’d survived growing up as he had. Friendship was the other.
Wally’s and his partners’.
He wasn’t giving up on Street Legal. And he was damn well not giving up on proving Allison was the mole and punishing her for all the trouble she’d caused.
But now when he thought of punishing her, it wasn’t with criminal prosecution. It was with his hand slapping her sweet ass. And that was why he’d had to leave, because no matter how badly she infuriated him, he still wanted her.
Too much...
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS OVER.
That was what Edward thought. He’d been gleeful over how angry Trevor Sinclair had been when he’d stormed out of her office earlier that day. He’d told her that she would never have to deal with Street Legal as a client again.
He’d said it like it was a good thing.
Allison should have fired him then. The guy had no idea that without clients, there was no McCann Public Relations and no position for him.
What had she been thinking to purposely infuriate Trevor like she had? She’d been angry that he’d been prying into her life. But more than angry, she’d been scared.
She didn’t like anyone getting too close but especially a lover. That was undoubtedly over.
Trevor was too angry to want sex with her. While he’d been passionate, it had been about his friends and his practice—not about her. He wouldn’t want her again.
But that was good. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about him getting any closer to her. While he’d been inside her body, she didn’t want him inside her head—or worse yet, her heart.
No. She’d been smart to push him like she had. But as the elevator carried her and her takeout to the top floor, she felt a flash of disappointment at the thought of spending the evening alone.
Which was crazy...
She loved being alone. Going for a run, enjoying a glass of wine, a book, the takeout that filled the elevator with the citrusy scent of the chicken in orange sauce.
Now that Grandpa was gone, she preferred her own company to anyone else’s. He would have liked Trevor Sinclair. He’d had a lot in common with him since Grandpa had had to start working young in order to support himself and his big immigrant family.
Glad she was alone in the elevator, she expelled a shaky breath. She’d started prying into Trevor’s past just as payback for his prying into hers. She hadn’t really intended to help revamp his image to run for political office.
But she’d learned more than she’d bargained on learning. He was definitely a very credible candidate for whatever office he wanted. He was also an incredible man. Maybe as incredible a man as he was a lover.
Not that she would ever experience sex with him again. Even if she hadn’t infuriated him today, she probably wouldn’t have. Like his partners, he was known for preferring one-night stands to relationships.
And that was fine with her.
She didn’t want a relationship. At least not a personal one.
And maybe it was good that their business one ended, as well, and if Edward was right, it had probably ended. Trevor had been furious that she’d told him to leave the practice and his friends. And she couldn’t blame him.
Good friends were hard to find. She had a few from her boarding-school days. She even had a few of Grandpa’s friends she visited: the women her widowed grandfather had called his “lady” friends. She smiled as she thought of them, of how they all treated her as if she was their granddaughter.
Those were the only familial relationships she really had now. The elevator dinged, pulling her away from the pool of self-pity she’d been about to dip her toes into. She never did that—never felt sorry for herself.
And she probably wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been thinking about Trevor Sinclair and never being with him again as she’d been the night before. But as she started off the elevator, she noticed a dark shadow near her door at the end of the hall. Her pulse quickened with excitement.
Could it be?
She hurried toward it, toward him. He glanced up from the cell he held in his palm. He wasn’t on a call, though. He must have just been looking up stuff.
“Find anything interesting on Google?” she asked, her heart beating fast.
His wide grin flashed, but she wasn’t fooled. She could see the tension in his body. He was still angry with her. “Your grandfather, Patrick McCann, had one daughter. Patricia. Your mother?”
She felt sick. He was hitting back at her just as she had him. Exchanging prying for prying. “Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To learn all my secrets?”
He tensed even more. And she realized that it was. Her pulse quickened now, but it wasn’t with excitement. It was with fear. But then she reminded herself that she had no deep, dark secrets. The only thing she really feared was Trevor getting too close—even closer than he’d been the night before.
“I am curious about you,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re beautiful,” he said. And he stepped away from the door so that only inches separated their bodies. “And smart and intriguing.”
She stared up at him. “You were very angry with me earlier today,” she reminded him.
“And infuriating,” he added, and this time when he flashed his grin, it reached his eyes, warming the green.
“You wanted my help revamping your image,” she said. “Is that why you’re here? Because you’ve realized I’m right?”
He shook his head. “I’m here because I want you. Not your help.”
So maybe she had been fired. But she didn’t care when he lowered his head and covered her mouth with his.
“Mmmm...” he murmured against her lips. “You taste good.”
She’d snuck a bite of the chicken from the container. And now Trevor snuck a bite of her lip, nipping the lower one between his teeth.
She moaned now. He tasted good, too, that rich flavor that was his alone. She slid her tongue into his mouth to savor him, to savor the kiss.
But he pulled back, lifting his head away from hers.
She blinked and stared up at him. Why had he stopped? Was he just messing with her?
But now his eyes were dark, the pupils dilated with desire. The same desire that burned inside her.
“Where are your keys?” he asked between pants for breath.
The kiss had affected him just as much as it had her. She fumbled in the front pocket of her purse and pulled out the keys. But her hand shook so much that she struggled to get the key in the lock.
Trevor wrapped his hand around hers. But instead of steadying it, it unsettled her more. Her skin tingled. Her pulse raced. She wanted him so badly.
His hand over hers, he turned the key and pushed open the door. Then he gently pushed her inside and slammed the door shut with his foot. Fortunately, she had a table in the foyer because she quickly dropped her purse, the takeout and keys onto it to free her hands.
Then she reached for him, her shaky fingers fumbling with the buttons on his shirt like they had the keys in the lock. She only undid a few before he stepped back and jerked it over his head, dropping it to the floor.
He undressed her, stripping away her jacket and her blouse before reaching for the clasp of her slacks. “You’re wearing too damn many clothes,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. But then the slacks dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them, left only in her heels and her silk underwear.
He groaned. “Maybe it was a good thing you were wearing all that when I saw you earlier or Edward might have heard something else through your office door.”
“What—” But before she could ask any questions, he covered her mouth and kissed her again, deeply. And as he kissed her, he touched her. He unclasped her bra and pushed it from her shoulders. Then he cupped her breasts in his palms, teasing the nipples into tight buds with his thumbs.
She moaned into his mouth. Then he moved his hand lower, between her thighs.
He groaned. “You’re so wet.”
“For you,” she said. He made her so damn hot. Her clit pulsed with the need for release. Then his thumb brushed over that, and she cried out.
“And hot,” he murmured.
She needed him—so badly...
She reached for the button of his jeans, freeing it before jerking down his zipper. His cock sprang free, pushing against the knit material of his boxers. She pushed those down and closed her hand around his shaft. He was so big, so long.
She needed him inside her, filling her.
But he jerked back.
And for a moment she feared that he’d just been messing with her, getting payback for how she’d treated him. But then he ripped open a condom and sheathed himself.
And she expelled a shaky breath of relief—one he swallowed with his mouth. Then he lifted her right out of her heels. And he wrapped her legs around his hips as he guided his shaft inside her.
She shifted in his arms, clutching his shoulders and his back, trying to take him deeper. The muscles rippled in his arms and his chest as he held her up. Then he began to move inside her, thrusting.
And she moved, too, riding him in a frenzy. Desire overwhelmed her. She needed a release from the madness to which he’d driven her with just his touch, his kiss...
He continued to kiss her, their tongues mating like their bodies. He slid in and out. And she rode up and down. Her nails nipped into his shoulders as she struggled to move faster. She was so close.
Suddenly, she shattered, her body convulsing in a powerful orgasm that went on and on.
He drew it out of her as he drove inside her—over and over again.
She screamed his name. Then he tensed and a low groan ripped from his throat as he found his release. His body shuddered, his legs shaking slightly.
“If Edward is listening outsi
de this door, he won’t like what he just heard,” Trevor murmured.
“If anyone was listening outside this door, they probably just called security,” she remarked.
He lifted her off him, but when he set her on her feet, she found her legs were wobbly, so wobbly that she would have fallen had he not caught her.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he clutched her arms in his big hands.
She nodded and stepped away from him. But she wasn’t okay. She wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened. “I thought you were mad at me.”
He nodded. “I am,” he said. “I’m furious with you.”
* * *
Trev was still very angry with Allison. But as angry as he was, he hadn’t been able to stay away from her. And not just because he needed to find proof that she was the mole. He’d needed her physically. He had needed that powerful release she’d given him a short while ago.
He’d cleaned up, and she’d changed into yoga pants and a tank top. And now they sat at her breakfast bar eating the takeout she’d brought home. It was all very comfortable, so comfortable that it felt right, very right.
Which struck Trev as very wrong. This wasn’t his scene—sharing a meal with a lover. Hell, it wasn’t his scene to spend much time with anyone but his friends.
Was this the existence to which his friends had succumbed? Was this why they had fallen in love, what they considered domestic bliss?
He snorted.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Everything.
She was the mole. She had to be.
But why?
And why did it bother him so much that she was? It wasn’t as if he wanted a future with her, like he wanted to sleep with her every night and eat meals with her and...
No. He did not want that kind of life. He was not the lovesick fool every one of his friends had become. The only thing he felt for Allison was desire.
And suspicion.
He shook his head and lied to her, “Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re still mad at me,” she said.
He chuckled. “After what we just did, you think so?”
“You can have sex with someone when you’re mad at them. Sometimes it makes it even hotter.”
