Max gauged the situation, looking from Sunny to Cole with a smirk. “Yeah, fine, I’ll go. But, Sunny, if you need anything—” he pressed his palm to his chest and gave her a little bow in mock simulation of a true gentleman “—you know where to find me. I’ve just decided I’ll be sticking around to help dear, sick Nora.” His eyes clashed with Cole’s. “At least until the end of the summer, then maybe I’ll see you in New York.”
Cole probably would have toppled Sunny over in his bid to get to Max if she hadn’t dug her heels into the ground and used all her weight to keep him from moving forward. “Cole, no, I’ll go with you, okay? Please just ignore him,” she begged. “Please just get in the car or you’ll ruin everything. If Nora hears about this...”
She was right. He had to get himself under control.
He breathed and breathed and breathed some more, until the red faded from his vision and he was left with nothing but ice-cold rage. A welcomed numbness that filled him up from head to toe.
He pointed to Max. “I’ll deal with you later,” he said in a way that let Max know it wasn’t an empty threat.
He then said, “Get in the car,” to Sunny as he went around to the driver’s side with stone hard certainty that she would do exactly what he said.
* * *
They drove back to The Benton in complete silence, Cole staring dead ahead as if she weren’t even in the car with him.
By the time they got to his private elevator, Sunny began to have several doubts about the wisdom of getting into another enclosed space with him.
She’d never seen him like this. It was worse than his usual ice-sculpture routine. In fact, it was like Ice Sculpture Cole on steroids, like Frozen Nitrogen Cole. Something so cold, Sunny was afraid it would burn to even touch him.
She thought maybe he’d go back to the office and leave her to return to the penthouse alone. But Cole pushed the P as the door slid closed.
“I know what it looked like. It looked like we were holding hands. But it wasn’t like that,” she told him. “We were talking, just talking.”
Cole didn’t say anything, which was somehow worse than him yelling or punching Max. It felt as if she was in the quiet eye of an incoming storm. Make that an incoming blizzard.
Sunny tried again. “You know, you and Max aren’t that different. You just deal with what happened to you in different ways. And if you looked past your differences, I mean, really tried to talk to each other, you might find some common ground.”
The elevator dinged and Cole held the door open so that she could disembark first. An unexpected gentlemanly gesture, and for a moment, Sunny thought she might have misread his mood. For a whole second. Then he grabbed her from behind, and the next thing Sunny knew her front was pressed into a nearby wall with Cole against her, the heavy length of his erection, hard against her back.
“The only common ground Max and I have is you, Sunny,” he said into her ear. One hand disappeared up her shirt, finding her breast. Sunny gasped when his other hand found the front of her, cupping her core like it was his possession. “He wants to take you from me, and you gave him the perfect opportunity to do it...after promising me you wouldn’t go anywhere near him.”
Sunny shook her head in protest, not understanding why her body was responding to this, readying itself to receive him, even as she squirmed underneath his body and harsh words. “I didn’t promise I wouldn’t go near him. I said you didn’t have to worry, and you don’t because it was just lunch. I don’t...”
Her breath hitched when he suddenly pulled back, leaving her there against the wall alone.
And when Sunny turned around it was to the sight of Cole, his face set in stone. But there was something ragged in his eyes now, a wildness that hadn’t been there before.
“Cole?” She tentatively reached out for him.
But he took a step back from her, his body as stiff as a statue. Control, she realized. He was fighting for control. So hard, he wouldn’t even let her touch him.
“Cole,” she said again, her heart spiking with concern. But not for herself. For him.
That scene with Max had shaken him. Shaken him like that night they’d had the confrontation about her.
“Cole, what’s this about?” she asked him.
“You promised,” he answered. “You promised me you wouldn’t go anywhere near him.”
She shook her head at him. “Okay, say I promised—which I didn’t. But say I did? What you did was out of line. Dragging me out of that restaurant, punching Max—”
“Max?” he said, his voice tight. “You’re mad at me for punching Max? Max is exactly like his mother. He’s lucky I didn’t do worse.”
“He’s exactly like his mother,” Sunny repeated, shaking her head. “What does that even mean? And what does that have to do with me?”
He turned his head away from her, his fist clenching and unclenching like he was dreaming about going after Max again. And when his eyes swung back around, the ragged look was gone, replaced by a look that was all business.
“Here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to go downstairs and put in a call to my lawyer. He’s going to draw up an addendum to our contract, one guaranteeing you won’t talk to Max or be seen with him.”
His mouth broke into a menacing snarl but his voice remained an icy monotone as he said, “And then I’m going to come back up here, and I’m going to have you, Sunny. Again and again until I forget about you having lunch with him. Until I can’t see you holding his hand like you were a couple. Until you remember exactly whose bed you’re supposed to occupy.”
Any concern she’d had for Cole evaporated in that moment, frozen underneath his ice.
“No,” she said. Just one word. But it went off like a bomb between them.
Cole blinked like she’d just slapped him. “What did you just say?”
“You heard me,” she answered.
His jaw clenched, and he took a step back toward her, pointing down at the ground. “After what you did—”
“I didn’t do anything!” she nearly screamed at him. “But you did. You, Cole. Not me. All I did was have a perfectly innocent lunch with your brother. You’re the one who punched him out over it. You’re the one who embarrassed me for no good reason. And now you’re the one refusing to explain why you did it, which—since we’re talking about contracts—is a violation of the terms you made with me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “And now you want me to sign a contract and then let you use me to settle whatever grudge match you have going with Max? Nah, man, I don’t think so!”
Cole glared at her, his head tipping to the side. “You will sign that addendum, and then you will—”
She glared right back at him, her eyes shining with fury. “You’re not going to like what happens if you finish that sentence.”
But he took her up on her challenge. “And then you will prove to me you can be trusted.”
“Fine!” She threw up her hands, no longer guilty or concerned over what had happened. But just simply disgusted with the whole business. “I’m going back to my own room. Don’t come at me again until you’re ready to talk to me like I’m a human being.”
With that, she turned to leave. “Sunny...” she heard him call after her, his voice ominous and low.
She just flipped him off over her shoulder before walking into her room and slamming the door behind her. She was done taking crap from Cole Benton.
Chapter 20
Cole had messed up. Really, really messed up. He realized that a week later when he woke up to yet another tented sheet.
Of all the cut-throat business deals Cole had ever negotiated, the one he had with Sunny proved to be the most difficult. Not only because she had more business acumen than he’d given her credit for—countering his attack with on
e of her own for violation of her “talk to me” terms, but also because there was now a supply-and-demand issue.
Cole lifted the cover and inwardly groaned when he saw the straining erection underneath it. Not an unfamiliar sight these days, but damn, if he wasn’t sick of dreaming about Sunny all night, and then waking up to the hard evidence of those dreams.
Sunny made him furious, Sunny made him feel out of control. But the fact was, he still wanted Sunny, despite all of this—or maybe because of it? He didn’t know, and that made him feel even more out of control. Which he hated.
The pipes creaked in between the wall that separated her suite from his, and soon there came the sound of rushing water.
Cole knocked his head back against the pillow, a whispered cuss word flying out of his mouth. This again. A few days ago, she’d started not only getting up earlier, often around the same time he did for his morning workout, but also taking baths instead of her usual shower.
That meant he not only got to wake up to morning wood, but also imagine her in the smaller guest bathroom. Her naked body, slick with water, as she used one of the penthouse’s black washcloths to clean her bountiful breasts...
He threw the sheet off with an aggrieved yank. He’d be damned if he beat himself off again to that image. He was a grown man, he reminded himself when he turned on the shower. The very cold shower. If he didn’t have to worry about appearances, he could have any woman he wanted with a snap of his fingers.
But he didn’t want any woman, a small voice said in the back of his head. Only Sunny.
And that was the problem.
Sunny wasn’t letting him anywhere near her. Seemingly taking a page from his own book of interpersonal dealings, she’d frozen him out, not allowing him to touch her outside of public events. Polite enough when they met up for breakfast every morning, but on the rare occasion they found themselves alone together in a room—nothing but stony silence.
All the late-night visits to his office had come to an abrupt stop. And though he’d been prepared to fulfill his dance class assistant obligation—had even gotten dressed for the class last Sunday—he’d found a note next to coffeemaker from Sunny saying that she’d decided to go in early and wouldn’t be needing his help that day.
It shouldn’t have bothered him. He had better things to do than lift Lucia and her friends above his head. But it was a good workout—and dammit, he guessed maybe he kind of missed the challenge of learning new dance routines and earning one of Sunny’s rare “Good job” comment when he nailed it.
Yes, he’d definitely messed up. He shouldn’t have given her that ultimatum, shouldn’t have brought sex into it, or let the argument get so ugly. And as Cole drank a pre-workout coffee standing up at the kitchen’s granite counter, he had to give it to Sunny. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so rotten or unsettled. As punishments went, this one was definitely doing the job.
Cole stopped—thinking about that word job. More specifically, what he did when a big client got upset over something that was The Benton’s fault. Like when a corporation came in for a national sales meeting to find all their conference rooms already booked up.
“Cole, my boy. A good business is all about keeping the big clients,” he remembered his grandfather once telling him. “If one of them gets upset, apologize with a splashy gift.”
A gift was what he needed. A peace offering to open up new negotiations. A car?
No, too obvious. Sunny would see right through it. He needed something small, but meaningful enough to pack a big punch.
Cole looked around, thinking, thinking...and then his shrewd gaze fell on his state-of-the-art coffeemaker.
* * *
Sunny woke up sore and grumpy. She’d danced hard yesterday, choreographing the end of the summer recital, going over each girl’s part in the routine again and again until she was too exhausted to think of stupid businessmen and their stupid ultimatums.
But at least the bathtub in the guest bathroom had a jet stream feature. So that morning she poured a small mountain of Epsom salt into the beautiful free-standing tub, just as she’d been doing every morning since she’d started her extreme choreography stint in a fit of desperation to not think about a certain businessman, whose name she wasn’t even going to let cross her mind because she wasn’t thinking about him. And twenty minutes later, sitting in the bubble bath by herself, with the jets blowing hot water on her sore muscles, she was glad she did.
But one thing continued to get in the way of her complete relaxation. Her muscles were all taken care of, but her core...it was throbbing. Even worse now, because the jets pushing hot streams of water over her breasts and the aching triangle between her legs weren’t exactly helping.
Stupid businessman whose name she refused to let herself think. Why did he have to be so good in bed? Maybe if the sex had been just okay like it had been with Derek, certain parts of her wouldn’t be refusing to get on message with the rest of her brain.
She brought her hand down to her swollen sex, probing it with her first two fingers. However, her body’s response was less than enthusiastic. Like, “okay, if this all you’ve got to offer, I’ll take it, but it’s no C—”
She stopped herself from thinking his name. She hated him now, she reminded herself. She really did. Every time she thought about him sneering down at her, saying he couldn’t trust her and demanding she sign a piece of paper like she was some kind of good-time girl who couldn’t keep her hands off him or his brother.
The thought of that argument still made her furious a week later. And that should have been enough to cool her down.
Yet it wasn’t. Her sex continued to pulse under the assault of the jets, and eventually Sunny gave in, pushing her fingers a little farther down, into her tunnel.
Just a little necessary relief, Sunny told herself, closing her eyes. It was like medicine, in a way, a quick fix that would free her mind, so that she could think of other things like the end of summer dance recital. Not things like the last time her businessman had punished her for being naughty.
She caught her bottom lip with her teeth, moving her fingers faster as she thought about how he’d forced her legs to stay spread wide and butterflied at the knees as he stroked into her. The way he’d hit her clit on the upstroke, getting her closer and closer, even as he intoned, “Don’t come yet, Sunny. Not yet...”
“Sunny.”
Sunny nearly slipped and fell underneath the water, she was so surprised to hear Cole’s voice. Not in her head this time, but in real life. In the very same room as her.
But when she looked up, there he was in the doorway. With the coffeemaker from the kitchen in his arms.
* * *
When Cole had walked in with the coffeemaker, it had been meant as a sort of peace offering. But he opened the door to the bathroom without knocking to offer it to her, because he doubted she would have invited him in there if he’d announced his presence first. He’d expected her to be peeved and maybe a little taken aback, neither of which was necessarily a bad thing in a business negotiation
What he hadn’t expected was to find her in the bath, teeth on her bottom lip, eyes closed, back arched, so that the top half of her breast were floating above the water, very obviously pleasuring herself.
Cole gave himself a lot of credit for not dropping the coffeemaker.
A lot of credit. Because unlike Sunny he hadn’t pleasured himself this morning, and watching her do it was hot as hell. So hot, he wanted to keep on watching, but knew it would be another thing for Sunny to hold against him if she opened her eyes at any point and found him there.
So ignoring how painfully hard he was at the moment, he forced himself to do the right thing.
“Sunny,” he called out, letting her know he was there.
She sat up with a gasp, splashing water around and s
pluttering. And Cole had to work hard to keep a smile off his face as he reached for one of the nearby black hand towels. He passed it to her and she took it, refusing to meet his eyes as he did so.
“I brought you the coffeemaker,” he said in the ensuing silence. “You’ve been spending so much time in the bath lately, I thought you might enjoy having it in here. I can get another one for the kitchen.”
He reached over and set it on the ledge beside her before standing back up. Then, since she still had her head turned away from him, refusing to meet his eyes, he let himself drink in the sight of her for a few moments. He’d considered her dark skin beautiful before, but wet and glistening like it was now, he once again had to force himself to do the right thing.
He moved away from the tub. “Anyway, it’s a peace offering. I don’t want to fight with you anymore, Sunny, and...” He struggled with the words but found he really meant it when he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the way I acted last week.”
The apology was sincere, but Sunny still hadn’t turned to look at him. She just sat there, with her knees drawn up to her chest, which made him feel like a pervert, because he couldn’t stop ogling her.
He made himself look away. “I’m going to go workout, so you won’t have to worry about me coming back in here,” he told her, turning to leave. “Feel free to do whatever you want.”
He was almost out the door, when he heard her say behind him, “Wait.”
He turned around and found her brown eyes on him, frank and curious.
“You were serious last week when you made Tomas drive me to your grandmother’s house, weren’t you? All that stuff you were saying about control. You weren’t joking. You really were trying to punish me for making you lose control at The Benton Girls Revue—it wasn’t just because your brother was there. It was about control.”
It had been for both reasons actually, and Cole wouldn’t have been able to tell her where one reason started and the other began, but yes, it had been about control. He silently acknowledged her assessment of the situation with a nod.
Vegas, Baby Page 13
