by Cari Quinn
Sawyer let out a scoff. “Yeah, my mom would be all over this job.”
“You don’t have other close family or friends? No girlfriend?”
Yep, definitely a hook. It was probably his fault for coming up with that lame cousin story, but he had precious little practice with lying. Nor did he want to develop the talent. “I’m single. My family’s back in Nebraska, as I mentioned this morning.”
“You’re new to the area, correct?”
“Five months here.”
“So’s Layla. She’s been here just about the same amount of time, actually.” Con gave him a wide, friendly smile. “But you’d already know that, since you’re cousins and all.”
“Distant cousins,” Sawyer muttered. “Real distant.”
Con chuckled. “Still. You must know her fiancé. Big-shot doctor, or at least he was. Hung up his scrubs for teaching, I’ve heard.”
Was it his imagination or had Con’s voice softened? There was something in the man’s shrapnel-sharp green eyes. Concern, maybe. Even pity.
Jesus, did everyone think he was in over his head with Layla? Even the ones who were pretending not to know a damn thing? “I’ve met Aidan, yes.”
“Difficult when you’re new in town. Especially a town like this, where everyone’s so into their own life. Can be hard to meet people. Sometimes you end up drifting toward the wrong ones, just to make some sort of connection.”
Sawyer’s back went from merely itchy to ramrod straight. Despite being from corn country, he wasn’t a goddamn hick. And Layla wasn’t some evil seductress about to steal his soul. She was just a lovely, lonely woman who needed someone other than her fiancé.
Right.
“I’m a good judge of character, Conrad, but thank you for the warning.”
Con arched a brow. Apparently he’d noticed Sawyer’s usage of his full first name. “Well, as I said, you’ve got time to make your decision. When you’re ready to talk, you know where to find me.” He stood and slid a silver business card across the desk. “It was good to meet you, Sawyer.”
“Thanks. You too.” He juggled his portfolio and the attaché case, finally managing to shake Con’s extended hand without dropping both. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I hope so. Have a great night.”
Sawyer walked out into the misty gray twilight. His shoulders slumped when he didn’t see Layla waiting outside. He lifted his face to the sky and closed his eyes, letting the light smattering of rain buff away the heat still scorching his cheeks. At least he wasn’t blushing externally—he’d checked—but he’d yet to shake the anxiety broiling in the pit of his stomach.
And now Layla had ditched him.
He didn’t think of himself as shy or inexperienced under normal circumstances. He’d definitely fooled around with enough girls to give him some confidence. He also wasn’t completely oblivious to how a lot of women reacted to his looks. But that didn’t help him feel less like a bumbling idiot, both at the agency and with Layla.
Con had been right to warn him. A guy like him, so slick and sure of himself, probably heard the “sucker” bell go off every time Sawyer stepped into his office.
He unlocked his Mazda and slipped inside. His stomach grumbled as he started the engine and headed down the street. The agency was less than a mile from his own modest home in Brooklyn and under two from Layla and Aidan’s townhouse. Not that he needed to go there tonight. He glanced at the rearview mirror. She’d sent a pretty clear message that—
Shit, she was following him.
A black compact sedan trailed him a little too closely. One look at the driver’s wild red hair, and he started to grin, all the knots inside him coming untied at once.
God, he wanted to be with her again. Longed to feel that sweet hot pussy tightening around his cock while her dark eyes bored into his and sucked every damn thought from his head. She took up every inch of his mental real estate, leaving no room for anything else.
When she smiled, he almost bumped the curb. She flipped on her turn signal and coasted by him before taking a right. Like a fool, he followed.
In no time, they pulled up to the street outside her townhouse. He parked behind her and clenched his fingers around the wheel. His pulse had already entered the red zone. His cock already curved against his jeans in a desperate attempt at freedom.
He managed to flash her an easy smile as they both climbed out of their cars. Even managed to amble up the walk to her stoop and wait with his fingers tucked casually in his belt loops while she fumbled with her key. Then she sent him one of those looks that melted his brain cells and murmured, “You hungry for something other than my pussy tonight?”
“Holy Christ.”
Her laughter caught him off guard. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You were doing such an admirable Joe Cool impression, I had to mess with you.” She pushed open the door and waved for him to follow. “Want Chinese? There’s a great place a few blocks away.”
“You do realize when you start talking about sex that all other topics of conversation lose their importance, right?” He shut the door and turned to catch Layla’s impish grin. “Ah, I get it. You wanted it that way.”
She shed her black suit jacket and hung it on the coat rack. “Maybe.”
“You starved for attention in general or just mine?”
Her pause took him as much by surprise as her earlier comment. “Still figuring that out, actually.” She did some quick flip thing with her hair, tucking it up and back so that only a few strategic curls escaped. “So, Chinese?”
“Do I get pussy before or after?”
She grinned again and held out her hand. He took it, and they walked down the hall to the kitchen. “What’s your favorite kind?”
“Yours worked just fine for me, far as I remember. Though I’d have to give it another test run to be sure.”
“I meant Chinese food. God.” She turned on the lights and opened one of the drawers in the center butcher-block island. A narrow copper urn of fall mums cheered up the rather antiseptic space. The oranges, reds, and golds lent the only color to the room.
Well, other than Layla. She brightened up every place she went with that flame-red hair of hers. And her smile. And those beautiful brown eyes, so deep and thoughtful. Always thinking, she was. No matter how she tried to pretend otherwise.
“I’m never using that word around you again.” She sorted through a stack of menus. “Now you’re obsessed.”
“You’re the kind of woman a man could easily build an obsession around.”
She jerked up her chin. “You’re already going to get lucky tonight. No need to flatter me.”
Normally he would’ve chuckled at her utter cluelessness to her own beauty. Instead he leaned down to inhale a deep breath of her hair. Rain, grapefruit, and soap. Layla.
“Your fruit’s wet,” he said, stroking the inlaid grapes on the barrette holding back her mass of curls.
“How’d you guess?”
Her breathlessness made him smile. “Why the hell do I like you so much, Layla Palmer?”
Ignoring his question, she gestured at the menu she held. “Pork lo mein?”
“That’s why I like you so much?”
“Egg rolls. Chicken fried rice. Sesame beef. Stop me when I get warm.”
Apparently she had no intention of touching his comment. He supposed he didn’t blame her. This couldn’t go anywhere, so why bother? Better to enjoy what they had than to dwell on what they didn’t.
“Sweet and sour pork for me. Three eggrolls. And hmm.” He snatched the menu with one hand and rubbed her hip with the other. “Almond cookies.”
“I have way better cookies than that.” She darted to the cupboard and dragged out not one, not two, but three unopened boxes of Girl Scout cookies. “I’ve been saving them for a special occasion.”
He propped his hands behind him on the island and cocked his head. “This counts?”
“We’re making it count.” She carried her cookies to the c
ounter and frowned. “Hey, you didn’t bring in your stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Con must’ve given you things to look at from the agency. He never forgets, unlike me.” She gave him a sheepish grin. “Did you look at any of it yet?”
“No.”
“I want to see what he gave you. It’s always interesting.” She waggled her brows and grabbed the cordless phone. “How about I order the food, and you go get it?”
“Sure. But isn’t it mostly magazines and book covers and stuff like that?”
Her lip twitch made him distinctly nervous. “Never know with Con. He has a quirky sense of humor.”
Sawyer shrugged as she started to punch in numbers. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
When he returned, she wasn’t in the kitchen. Or the living room or dining room. “I’m upstairs,” she called just as he reached the foyer again.
He found her lounging on the bed in the master bedroom, surrounded by cookies. She’d opened all three boxes. “I figured we could have some of each,” she said, biting into what looked to be a Thin Mint.
Damn, she looked so sexy with her skirt hiked up her shapely thighs. Toes wiggling, smile glimmering. “You’re going to spoil your dinner.”
“So? That means there’ll be some left for a midnight snack,” she said when he set down the expandable folder and sat beside her. “In the meantime, we have cookies. Ooh!” She grabbed the folder and pried it open, scattering cookie crumbs everywhere.
He laughed. “How do you and Aidan live together? Does he keep a DustBuster under the bed?”
She flushed. “I don’t normally eat cookies in here. He kind of freaks.”
“I can’t imagine that. At all,” he said with mock seriousness when she slanted him a look.
“He doesn’t boss me around all the time. Our relationship isn’t like that, no matter what it seemed like the first night.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He doesn’t. We…well, we started experimenting a couple years ago. He discovered how much he likes to be in control.”
“You don’t say.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s never forced me to do anything. That’s the thing about us. He knows what I want, what I need, even when I can’t admit it to myself.”
He picked up the box of Samoas and pried one out of the tray. “I saw this book on TV. It’s making the rounds on all the talk shows. About this woman who falls for this guy who leads her around and tells her what to do all the time, but she supposedly likes it. A submissive, they called her. Women have gone nuts for this book. Think they all want to run out and get a guy who’ll tell them they can’t come unless he decrees otherwise.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions based on one night of interaction. He wasn’t like that on Sunday.”
“Even snakes occasionally curl up around rocks. Doesn’t make their bite hurt any less.”
“Are you asking if I’m submissive?”
He didn’t really know the terminology, but submissive worked. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“I like making him happy,” she said quietly, after a few moments. “The hotter he gets, the hotter it makes me. We’re that connected.”
Sawyer said nothing. What could he say? That every word she said about Aidan jabbed little pins into his gut? There was no reason for him to feel that way. He barely knew Layla and vice versa. Gut feelings and an insta-attraction didn’t mean anything. She’d been looking for a guy to fuck her to get her and her fiancé off. He’d been looking for…
Connection, just as Con had said. And there was that damn word again.
“But I don’t think I’m a submissive. Not deep down.” She nibbled a cookie. “I like playacting though. Good thing, because Aidan would never let me take charge in bed. Just not his thing.”
“Again, can’t say this is surprising information.”
She brushed crumbs off her lap. “At the beginning, we only took the dominant-submissive roles once in a while. But it got to the point where he liked doing it more and more, and we started growing further apart. Lately I’m more intimate with my toy collection than I am with him.”
Yep, he’d definitely entered a parallel galaxy. One where it made total sense to discuss his lover’s love life with another man. “Why is he such a control freak?”
“He’s a doctor. Used to holding lives in his hands. Hard to turn that off when you’re in your own domain, I suppose.”
“Shouldn’t be that hard if you trust your partner.”
“Sometimes I think it’s not me he doesn’t trust but himself.” She stared at Sawyer as if she couldn’t believe what she’d said. “He loves me. I know he does.”
“I’m sure he does,” Sawyer agreed, driven for reasons he didn’t care to explain to confirm her assertion. She gazed at the cookies she’d stopped eating. “You clearly care for each other a lot. He must love you, if he can share you with me.”
He didn’t believe that, not really. Oh, sure, there were probably situations where people in love could have sex with other people, assuming their lover consented. But what he’d seen between Aidan and Layla hadn’t been his idea of love. Possession, certainly. Even a deep affection. But eventually he’d begun to realize how fucking desperate Aidan and Layla seemed. For what, he didn’t know. But that wrenching sense of need had flowed between them as freely as the lust they clung to instead.
He hissed out a breath and bit into his cookie. Christ, what was he now? A shrink? Lust had obviously addled his brain too.
Not just lust. Stop lying to yourself.
“I used to fantasize about my wedding when I was a little girl.” The wistfulness in her tone made him glance at her. “Even staged mock weddings where I pretended to marry my brother.” She laughed at his frown. “We were young. Really young. I made the dog the ring bearer and my other brother my maid of honor. They didn’t enjoy the festivities.”
“I bet. My sister only made me kiss her friends.”
“What?” Another laugh.
“Yeah, she used to sell kisses from me for a dollar. This was when I was about eight or nine and they were ten or so. Her friends always thought I was pretty, because back then I had long curls like a damn girl. And I’d started kissing girls early.” He shrugged and forced a grin to his lips that felt foreign. Layla’s admissions had affected him more than he’d ever expected. “Never had any complaints.”
“So that’s when you discovered you could make money off your looks, huh?”
“Probably.”
“You certainly drew me in.” She traced a fingertip around his mouth, and it took every ounce of control he possessed not to shudder. “I’d pay a lot more than a dollar to kiss these lips.”
He whisked away crumbs from her chin and realized that they’d sprawled out lengthwise facing each other as if they were longtime confidants. Which was exactly what it felt like, though he’d known her for one measly week. How much longer would he know her before Aidan snatched her back again? “You, lovely Layla, get my kisses for free.”
“I’m a lucky girl, then.” None of the amusement in her voice touched her face. Her pained expression never changed. What a pair they were.
He cupped the nape of her neck and drew her closer, keeping his eyes on hers as he swept up the bits of cookie on her lower lip. Mint and chocolate and Layla, a heavenly combination if he’d ever tasted one. He needed more. Was damned afraid he’d never get enough.
Slowly, he licked her lips open and captured her tongue. His playful sucking extended into a lazy, relaxed kiss that belied every frantic emotion pounding in his body.
None of those emotions made sense. He barely knew this woman. Wanting her so much that his skin flamed and his balls tightened, that was logical. But the other needs, the ones he wouldn’t acknowledge, those had to be mistakes. False positives because he ached so badly to find a woman like her, someone he could be himself with. A woman he could trust to be waiting at the end of a long day. Someone he could turn to at night an
d laugh with and love in the darkness.
She shifted on top of him, crushing the cookie boxes in her rush. Neither cared. He fisted his hand in her hair and relished her moan as he tugged her head back to kiss her throat. That spot just beneath her defiant chin, the hollows under her jaw. She’d spritzed her fragrance here too, so that he tasted a bitter hint of the perfume itself along with her skin. She rode him with abandon, a ripping sound accompanying her urgent attempts to widen her thighs.
God, how wet she must be if he could feel it straight through his jeans, smell it with every harsh intake of breath—
The doorbell rang. Rang again.
“Dinner,” she gasped, her mouth meeting his with a furor he matched. In a minute, he would’ve been buried inside her. “Sawyer, dinner.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He palmed her breast and gulped down her sweet moans when he stabbed his tongue between her lips. Not only did she not seem to mind it when he got rough, she behaved as if he was freeing a trapped part of herself. An unexposed section hidden behind glass.
Just be careful.
He pulled back. Her voice echoed in his head, a warning he had to heed. Especially since he didn’t understand what it meant. Obviously she liked getting down and dirty. So what was her admonition about? How could he hurt her?
“What did you mean?” He grazed his thumb over her wet lower lip. “When you asked me to be careful?”
Layla climbed off him as the bell chimed again. “What’d you think?”
“That you didn’t like rough sex, no matter what you said. But that can’t be it.”
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you what I meant.” She gave him another of those secret smiles she flashed him just often enough to make him crazy. “If it turns out to be true.”
Chapter Eight
They ate in bed, with cookie containers, napkins, and Hot Shots’ paraphernalia spread out around them. Layla didn’t bother getting out plates and forks, instead insisting they eat out of the takeout boxes with chopsticks.
That she didn’t know how to use chopsticks didn’t discourage her in the slightest. Sawyer showed her his technique, which turned out to be stellar. Hers was not, so he ended up feeding her pork lo mein and laughing as she dropped more on her faded nightshirt than she got in her mouth.
