Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3)

by Ainslie Paton

  But not even Colby, trained to slay with a kiss, had made her feel so aggressively needy to be touched.

  “Get out of the pool, Dev.” He looked like he could happily sink to the bottom and stay there. She’d cheerfully hold him under except that wasn’t going to put her fire out.

  He waded to the side, put his hands to the concrete and pressed up to his feet, coming to stand with a torrent of water caressing down his torso and sluicing off his legs. He palmed a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face, but he kept his eyes down.

  “Take me home.”

  Up came his chin. “Sarina, I—”

  “Shut up.” She’d made the mistake of watching his mouth and that’d never been action, reaction in her body before. Now it was all she could do not to order him to her lips.

  She went for her towel but velvet cotton wasn’t what she wanted on her skin. Impatient, she wrangled shorts on, almost strangled herself getting her t-shirt over her damp body.

  Beside her, Dev was slower to move, but he didn’t leave for the change rooms. She shouldn’t watch him scrub dry his hair, side-to-side a towel over his back and hold it to his chest where droplets caught in fine dark hair. It only made her anger fizz so loud in her veins it crackled in her ears. She wanted to be the damn towel.

  Last time she’d seen him this undressed was when they swam here as students. He’d been more towel than body. Skinny, awkwardly shy and terminally polite. So damn earnest, humble and sweet. Trailed by Reid who was gorgeous to look at and didn’t know it, whose lack of self-awareness was hypnotically bad, his introversion painful to watch. Dev had learned confidence for both of them, on a personal mission to ensure Reid didn’t flame out, a casualty of his own genius. Dev had been quietly awe-inspiring then, bringing them together as a group and driving them forward with his pragmatic, egoless belief and unfailing good cheer.

  Like this, elegantly near-naked but stripped of his usual calm and collected, he didn’t look like her Dev. He was all the more vulnerable for not being buttoned down and in control. For having shown her his appetite was made of unexpected carnal ingredients: a teasing touch, a bruising grip, a hard-bodied hug, the sweep of a tongue that poisoned her nervous system and made her sick on lust.

  She walked off while he was still trying to get wet arms in a t-shirt, giving him no chance to swap sopping board shorts for dry pants. Ten minutes in the sun would’ve baked them, but ten minutes not being able to take her eyes off him could’ve blinded her.

  He’d muscled Gita in the direction of her place, and that made her mad too. She should’ve slammed her front door on him, driven herself here, never exposed herself so thoroughly to him.

  “Are we going to talk about this?” he said.

  “What is there to talk about? I asked you to be my donor, you said no. You asked me to marry you, I said no. That pretty much shuts things down.”

  “Not for me.”

  “You should have thought of that before you kissed me.”

  “Are you furious about the proposal or because you kissed me back? I’ve got nail marks on my chest.”

  “You were lucky I didn’t take an eye.”

  “What’s happening here, Sarina?”

  “You’re chauffeuring me home so I can punish myself further for my stupidity, and when I see you at work we’re going to pretend this—whatever this lunacy was—never happened.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  What she needed was not to have this new understanding of the word want. What she needed was to lick the salt from Dev’s shoulder, climb over his lap, grind up a fire, and take out the universe with the blast radius from a single kiss, so she never needed to want so intensely again.

  What she wanted was to be unaffected, nonchalant. Ice princess his ass so hard he’d have frostbitten ambition. She was sorry that Ana’s baby was Dev’s shared responsibility, but he had no right to propose out of nowhere as if that was a tidy solution that would allow him to manage all his mission-critical projects effectively on separate timelines without disappointing anyone.

  She was not a project to be managed. Not a line item on a plan you could move around, realign inputs and outputs until you reached a satisfactory deliverable. He could not simply say he loved her and have it unexpectedly mean something different to all the other ways he’d told her he loved her, with food and company and being in her life, caring for her, over years.

  That’s not how it was supposed to work, not that it mattered, because she couldn’t love him for his sacrifice, for wanting to marry her to save her from the wilds of dating and sex with strangers in hotels and designer sperm and single motherhood.

  It was all too much and too late. So very late.

  Fuck that. Fuck how she wanted his kisses. Fuck him.

  She’d stuck to Gita’s leather and the big freaky car’s door was heavy. Dev always did the gentleman thing, but she got it open and dragged her sports bag out and had her key in the front door before he spoke again.

  She blocked whatever he said but she couldn’t block the feeling of his hand not quite touching her shoulder blade, hovering there as if he couldn’t decide if love meant driving his road-killer heart away or hugging it out.

  She was tired to the fibers of her heathen soul of his second-guessing caution and his sudden impassioned declarations. She stepped inside, dropped her bag, whipped around, grabbed a handful of his shirt and yanked him forward. He stumbled and they crashed together, his arms wrapping around her, their feet tangling She didn’t let him recover his balance because he’d shredded hers.

  Payback.

  Revenge on her lips, fastened to his, retaliation in her hands gripping his arms. It wouldn’t feel the same now she knew his kiss. It wouldn’t make her moan when he gave back as good as he got, when he backed her into a wall with a thud, with his hand cradling her head and his knee shoved between her legs so she had nowhere to go and was aching to stay.

  It was better.

  It made her tremble and whimper and grip his face.

  “What are we doing?” he said, voice gone bear growl low, before he sucked at her neck.

  She jerked his head up. She wasn’t losing his lips yet. Wasn’t fighting the urge in her gut that told her to hold him closer, touch him everywhere: his still damp hair between her fingers, the flat of his stomach under her palm, the ridge of his hip bone on the inside of her knee. She wasn’t taking it slow or being careful, she was spinning the wheel, car-crashing him into doing all the things they never had. Kiss after luscious deep kiss, each a little more savage than the last, asking for more; shared breathlessness and throaty, needy groans. God, his shirt had to go, and underneath he was dangerously overheated, steamed up and hissing when she dropped her mouth to his chest, fumbling for a way to belt them in before they flipped, hand-braking her knee higher on his hip and fisting his hair.

  He was so hot he bent and bowed and rippled with it. Her fingers must have been like flame on his skin. He moved under them like he needed to be welded whole and only her roving touch would do it. Join his reticence to his sternum, his ridiculous humility to his rib cage, his need to peace-keep to his collarbone. Melt all his status quo loving, change avoidance, self-justification into sticky glue and use it to render the two of them together so firmly they never came unstuck.

  But that would be like apology, like winding back the clock on time wasted, the sense of what might’ve been and wasn’t. The wrench to escape the jaws of that impossible time shift made her cool fast.

  “Get out.” Words spoken into his neck. Palms holding him off. “Go.” Limbs unhooking, bodies retracting, and wonder reeking like spilled petrol at the scene of an accident.

  He stepped away and shook himself, checking for lasting damage. Adrenaline making his hands shake, making her tremble from the near miss of that collision. Another mindless minute and they’d have slid too easily sideways into each other and locked on, but Sarina had driven her whole life defensively and she was braced for the impact
.

  Dev heaved a shaky sign and looked about for his shirt. His eyes were big and dark and uncomprehending. Still she rubbernecked as he put his tee back on, scooped his keys off the floor. Some disasters you simply couldn’t look away from, you had to take it all in so you’d recognize the gory details and be able to describe them later, entertain your friends, scare yourself. There was a warped pleasure in knowing it hadn’t happened to you, but that two inches to the left and you’d have been a goner, your future inextricably concertinaed with someone else’s.

  Someone you ached to forgive, to hold onto so tightly you were protected from anything sad and bloody and insensitive ever happening.

  He surveyed the wreckage of her. She must’ve looked as unmade and scared as she felt. He stood apart and she held herself from crumpling, only the wall at her back keeping her upright.

  “I had an insemination.”

  He jerked as if she’d slapped him. “You’re pregnant?”

  She’d sat with her feet in stirrups for fifteen minutes while a catheter was inserted into her vagina through her cervix and into her uterus. She was injected with donor sperm number 196325 and didn’t feel a thing.

  Number 196325 was a neurosurgeon. He wasn’t tall like Reid or blond like Owen or anything like Dev. He was pleasant looking. He had a nice deep voice. He’d written an essay about why he’d first become a donor to support a colleague who’d been unable to conceive with her partner. His heartfelt logic had made her want to sing.

  His sperm had been bought online, transported and washed at high speed because she’d had the choice of sex and she was trying for her family’s first boy child, but really she wanted a healthy, fit-to-thrive baby and any sex, any coloring, any symmetry would be dream perfect.

  “I won’t know for another seven days.” She’d take a home pregnancy test. Any sooner than two weeks after the insemination could give a false result.

  A thousand micro-expressions filtered across Dev’s face. She couldn’t read a single one of them, but surely they were lost to each other in a way that disagreeing before now was irrelevant.

  She almost folded to the ground when he put his hand to her face, and the brush of his lips on hers was resuscitation. His, “I love you. I’m not giving you up without a fight,” buckled her knees, but she couldn’t afford the long-term price of letting him see her fall so she closed her eyes and let him walk away and when Gita’s engine roared to life she slipped to the floor.

  Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Dazed. Unhurt. Twenty percent chance of being pregnant and unbelievably turned-on.

  Somebody call 911.

  SIXTEEN

  Dev couldn’t stop staring at Sarina as she listened to Owen. He wanted to do a midnight drive-by of Eyes Right Optometry, and pitch a brick through Dr. William Chang’s window, because despite Dev’s tested yearly perfect vision, he’d never seen Sarina clearly before.

  Willie should pay for that in broken glass and damaged stock, because Dev was paying for it in a soul-deep way.

  He didn’t love her as a friend. He didn’t want to risk losing that. He wanted to bend her quite possibly pregnant to another man’s body over the desk and touch her in pornographic ways that would require Willie Chang to fish both their pairs of eyes out of the backs of their heads.

  Willie had insurance against damage. Dev had lost years and had regret so strong it had a physical taste that made his stomach churn. Not being able to see what was in front of him tasted like every meal he’d ever cooked for someone was made from Mumbai smog, sweaty gym socks and pieces of motherboard. He might choke on it.

  He’d made a marriage proposal sound like it was Sarina’s last chance for respectability. As if she had no other option but settle for the safety of him. As if he was the one stuck in 1950 and driven by a set of values long since given a reality check.

  He should be struck by lightning just for that.

  He’d tried to bargain with her to wait on falling pregnant for a time that was more convenient for him, a man who’d only a week before brutally rejected her and never once, never once, tried to kiss her like it meant something.

  Not once in more than a decade had he done anything more physical than be her leaning post, pillow her head on his shoulder, offer his lap for her feet, put an arm around her, touch his lips to her forehead.

  There was something clearly wrong with him.

  And when he had finally kissed her properly, it affected him at a molecular level, made motherboard look like rare beef and taste like chocolate pie and there was no rational explanation for how he’d been living for the last decade.

  He’d touched her, places his hands would never have strayed, her hips, her thighs, her rib cage, her breasts in his palm, with just clinging swimsuit and damp t-shirt between them. Oh, God on an elephant, that had done for him.

  He couldn’t think about anything else but touching her again.

  The fact that she wouldn’t look at him now was nothing compared to the assassins she should’ve sent to take him out. She kept her eyes on Owen as he talked about the spate of resignations they’d been hit with.

  But she’d touched him too. Like she’d needed to. She’d made him hard, grinding on his leg, clawing up his chest. She’d licked his neck. She’d clamped her teeth on his lip and it’d stung; he felt it again all down his backbone and grunted at the memory.

  Owen turned to him. “You don’t have need to worry. No one from engineering or product development has resigned. Today at least.” His glance swept back to Reid and Sarina. “No one else backflipped off a desk,” a reference to how Cara had quit in spectacular all-over-social-media fashion. “But six senior level resignations in nine weeks. That’s more than we’ve had in any twelve months. That has to be a pattern.”

  “Someone is poaching our people,” said Sarina. “Not that those leaving are saying, but my team think another start-up is making a move on us. Losing anyone isn’t good, but losing our head of marketing is a huge blow—yesterday Nerida resigned.”

  “Let me talk to her,” said Reid.

  “She’s done an exit interview and said she’s going to a new opportunity, with a higher salary,” Sarina replied.

  “Remind me why we don’t throw more money at her,” Reid grumbled.

  She gave Reid her because look. “We have no real proof of what salary a person is going to, unless they’re prepared to show us a signing letter, and we always said we wouldn’t buy loyalty.” Her eyes flicked over to Dev and bounced away. “Never works out.”

  That’s when he figured she hadn’t told Reid or Owen about the insemination. She had no proof yet and she wasn’t testing their loyalty till she did.

  Reid bounced a knee. “But it’s Nerida and she’s been with us a long time.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” said Owen. “How long do we expect to keep employees? Did we know she was unhappy?”

  Again Sarina’s eyes to his. “No, she didn’t say anything at her last review. I don’t think she was unhappy, more enticed to something new.”

  “Someone is poaching our people and we need to stop them,” said Reid.

  “We need to find out who,” said Owen.

  “If it’s one of these sharing economy jokes trying to Uber dog walking or garden watering, I’ll wring her neck rather than let her go,” said Reid.

  Owen laughed. “Why are you so down on the sharing economy model?”

  “Because it sounds great on paper but it doesn’t take into account the human element. We only like to share what we don’t love or what we’re well compensated for.”

  Dev’s eyes met Sarina’s. No, he didn’t want to share her. Not even with an anonymous donor, but if he could touch her again that would be all the momentary compensation he needed.

  “Are you okay, Dev?” Owen said.

  “Thinking,” he said. But not about the sharing economy, not about poaching, or resignations, or their business being stripped of talent.

  Sarina expected him to quit on her. She expe
cted him to resent her going ahead without him. She expected him to withdraw and to tell her he didn’t approve or worse. All he wanted to know was if she’d let him kiss her again. He had so much to make up to her, but if he could start with another kiss, it might be possible to end with everything.

  “I still want to talk to Nerida,” said Reid.

  He witnessed Sarina talk Reid out of that, watched her take his bullheaded impatience and wrestle it to the ground with logic Reid couldn’t ignore. Watched her mouth curve around persuasion and purse around objection and her tongue lick patiently at the problem, soothing until Reid stopped fussing. He watched her eyes monitor and her hands gentle and saw the moment she knew she’d won in the lift of her cheeks and the subtle incline of her head.

  He’d watched these actions of hers a million times and never found they bottled up his breathing, made him grip the arms of the chair so he didn’t order everyone out of the room so he could take her lips for himself.

  “Dev? What do you think?”

  He looked at Owen and knew by his frown that he’d clocked out of the discussion when he should’ve been paying attention. “I think we’re done here.”

  Reid shook his head. “Not done. We need to solve this.”

  Dev had other needs. “We’re not going to fix it now. I need to speak to Sarina.”

  She stood, twisting a leather band on her wrist. “I’ve got people to see.” She gestured to the outside world. “But one last thing. I chose a donor and had an insemination.” She put her hands up to stall the reaction. “I don’t know if I’m pregnant yet and chances are it will take more than one shot at it. I’m not going to give you all the details, but I wanted you to know Project Offshoot is well underway. I’ll let you know when I hit the next big milestone.”

  “Which is?” said Owen, eyes bouncing between Sarina and Reid.

  “When the baby sticks at the end of the first trimester,” Reid said.