I glared at her. She’d already asked about three times to go home for the evening, and I was almost ready to give in and let her go. I was starting to doubt my own motives for keeping her around and punishing her. The incident with the banana was days ago now, and if I was being completely honest, I knew I’d probably put her through more than enough to make up for it by now. But it wasn’t that simple anymore.
I took in her chestnut hair and brown eyes as she dangled in the doorway, sticking only her head and shoulders in my office like she thought she might need to make a quick escape if things turned south.
“There’s actually one thing you could do before you go,” I said. “Go get some Chinese for us or something.”
She stepped in the room then, widening her eyes and covering her mouth in an exaggerated portrayal of shock. “You? Eating takeout food? Aren’t you worried you’re going to turn into a ball of blubber and I’ll have to roll you out of the office tonight?”
“I eat the way I do because I want my mind sharp. The right nutrients at the right time of day keep your energy levels stable and your mood good.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So that’s the problem then. Your nutrients must be way off, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a good mood, except when you were groping me that one time.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d blushed, but I thought I felt a little bit of warmth spreading in my cheeks then. “I wasn’t groping you. I was trying to get the coffee out of your shirt before it stained.”
“Right. You just started with my boobs.”
“They were the… closest thing I could reach.”
She blew out a surprised laugh and fixed me with an intoxicating smile. “Is what your brother says true? About your secretary fetish?”
“I’ve never had a secretary fetish.”
“Past tense,” she noted.
I grinned. “Listen. If you want to interview me, you’d better go get some food. Quickly. I think we have about ten minutes before the only noises I can make are frothing and growling sounds. I don’t handle hungry well.”
“I’m pretty sure frothing doesn’t make a sound, for the record.”
She saw the look on my face and raised her hands defensively. “Okay, okay. What do you want from the Chinese place?”
“Anything, but make sure you get crab rangoons. I haven’t had them in years and I think I’d do anything for one right now.”
“Anything?” she asked with a mischievous little sparkle in her eye.
She came back thirty minutes later with two huge brown bags full of food. It was the worst kind of food in a nutritional sense. I thought my dietician would probably have a heart attack if she saw, and I was sure I’d feel like shit the next morning, but for some reason I didn’t care. Maybe it was just the ravenous hunger in my stomach, or maybe Natasha, the walking disaster, was rubbing off on me.
I started pulling out containers while I looked for the crab rangoons and then realized Natasha was just watching me.
“What?” I asked.
“I feel like I need to call your handler or something. Are you sure nothing is wrong?”
I set down the waxy paper bag filled with rangoons and shrugged. “Why would something be wrong?”
“Oh,” she said casually. “No idea.”
I bit into the rangoon and leaned back in my chair, smiling as I chewed. “Damn, these are good. I used to get them all the time in college. Some places make them into kind of a wing shape with a pocket of filling at the bottom and a big crusty flap at the top. But these? These are the best kind.” I turned over the rangoon in my fingers, showing her the four, smaller pointed tips of crunchy pastry that spiked up from the juicy and crunchy pocket of crab and cream-filled deliciousness at the center.
“I’m glad you like them.”
“Are you going to eat, or are you just going to stand there being weird?”
She sighed, sat down, and opened the most boring container she possibly could. It was just a bunch of plain white rice. It seemed like something was bothering her, but I wasn’t sure if I was exactly the person she would prefer to confide in, so I settled for enjoying the meal across from her for a few minutes without making any conversation.
She eventually looked up from the rice, which she was barely touching. Her forehead was knotted together. “What was the deal with everything you did at my apartment?” she asked.
The question surprised me. I set down the stick of skewered beef I’d been working on. “It was nothing.”
“No. Nothing would’ve been using your bazillions of dollars to call some personal assistant to come dump me back at my place. What you did was actually considerate. And you gave my dog a carrot. I know you did, so don’t even try to deny it.”
“Was the carrot the tipping point, or?”
“No,” she said. “There’s no tipping point. I’m just tired of thinking I have a read on you and then you go and do something that doesn’t make any sense. You hire me to punish me. You practically force me to be your slave. You demean me whenever you get a chance. Then you also make dirty jokes, flirt with me, grope me, and do something confusingly considerate when I get blackout drunk. You even fixed my stupid window in the kitchen that never opened.” She gave a defeated kind of shrug. “I’m just tired of it. I want to know if I’m supposed to hate you or like you, and you’re making me feel like the emotional equivalent of a pinball.”
I leaned back in my chair. “A pinball between hate and like,” I said. “So that means you like me, at times?”
She rolled her eyes in that way she had. It wasn’t disrespectful or immature like it would be from someone else. It was playful and sexy. It made it feel like we were in on some joke together. “It also means I hate you, at times.”
Warning bells were going off in my brain. Disengage. Abort. End this. Now.
The security system I’d spent two years building inside my body wanted to do anything to keep me from taking this conversation any farther, but Natasha had a way of bypassing all of that. I couldn’t control myself around her. Not always.
“Well,” I said. “That makes two of us.”
She flashed a half-smile. “So that means you like me, at times?”
“At times,” I said. “And generally at the times when it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”
She chewed her lip. “When was a time that you liked me, for curiosity’s sake, of course.”
“When you had the balls to point out the schedule conflict with WeConnect at dinner. When you wore the ridiculous caddy outfit I asked you to wear. When you tried to slip sugar into my coffee. When I could tell you were turned on when I was cleaning that coffee off your... shirt.”
She lowered her eyes and took in a deep, shuddering kind of breath. “And how could you tell I was turned on?”
“The same way I can tell now,” I said. “You’re hardly breathing or blinking. Your cheeks and chest are red. You’re sitting as straight as an arrow. Every part of your body is on high-alert. I bet your skin feels like it’s prickling with electricity.
She absently rubbed her hand over her arm, where the hairs were standing on end and her skin was rising with goosebumps. “Wrong,” she said quietly. “It’s more like sunlight. Like there’s a warm light making me feel hot all over.” She paused, looking up at me and chewing her lip again in a way that had me seriously questioning all the promises I’d made myself about avoiding complications.
“And this warm feeling,” I said. “What does it make you want to do?”
She grinned. “Honestly? It’s making me crave bananas.”
I felt jarred out of the moment by the sheer ridiculousness of it. “What?” I asked.
“Something cold. Like the banana split I picked up after I got the Chinese. I left it in the break room and there’s enough for two.”
9
Natasha
I saw Bruce Chamberson smile for the second time since I’d met him when I pulled the banana split out
of the freezer. Thankfully, it’d only been in there about twenty minutes, and the bananas were still the perfect temperature. It was a monster of a split. There were two bananas on either side of three mounds of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla ice cream. The entire beast was covered generously in whipped cream, chocolate syrup over the chocolate ice cream, strawberry syrup over the strawberry ice cream, and a caramel drizzle over the vanilla.
“You’ve been talking to William, haven't you,” said Bruce.
“Maybe,” I admitted.
Bruce gave me a look that could’ve had a nun stripping out of her robe in an instant. It was pure sex. Pure fire. “The last time William talked someone into getting me a banana split, he told me he had said it’d get them in my pants. Does this mean you’re hoping to get into my pants?”
“That would be crazy,” I said quickly. “I’d never fit.”
He burst out laughing. He had a good laugh. It was an honest laugh. Infectious, even. I smiled along, watching him to wait for his next move. Whatever was happening, the ball was in his court. I may have dragged us to the court to begin with, but I knew it was up to him from here, and I was glad for it. I still wasn’t sure where I really wanted this all to go. The only thing I knew was there was no use fighting my attraction to him. Who knew if a relationship would ever work between us, but it was like Candace said. I was a big girl. I didn’t have to like him to sleep with him.
But it would’ve been easier if I knew I didn’t like him. The problem was that I wasn’t so sure anymore. I found myself thinking of him all the time. I craved those glimpses of happiness he’d sometimes let slip. I liked being the cause of that, feeling like I had some kind of special effect on him.
He didn’t waste any time digging into the desert, but he did make sure I got a spoon as well and could share. It felt intimate, sharing the desert with him, especially when he kept making the most adorable and somehow sexy noises of enjoyment. It was like he couldn’t help himself.
“You have any family?” he asked. The question came out of nowhere, but when I realized we’d just been stuffing our faces for close to five minutes, I guessed he might have started wondering about me. All he knew was what he saw. Bruce knew next to nothing about my home life, my past, or my family. It was a little flattering that he was curious.
“Yep,” I said, licking the back of my spoon clean and sighing. I set it down, because I didn’t want to feel bloated and gross in front of Bruce, no matter how much I wanted to keep eating. “My mom and dad live outside the city. They’re teachers. My older brother lives with them.”
Bruce gave the nod I was used to seeing when I revealed that little tidbit about my brother. It was a kind of mixture between sympathy and curiosity.
“He never really found his direction in life,” I explained. “He spends all his energy on get rich quick schemes. He’s tried the multi-level marketing stuff. Once he was running a kind of scam where he’d list items for sale that he found on big store’s websites at a markup. Like if they were selling mittens for two dollars, he’d list a bunch of them on eBay for four, and then once someone placed the order, he’d go drive up, buy the stuff, package it, and sell it for a profit. I’m pretty sure it was illegal, but his account got shut down for some other stupid thing he did, anyway.”
“I’ve known the type,” said Bruce. “My parents are a little bit like that. They think William and I are their personal, bottomless ATM machines. Forget the fact that they did just about everything in their power to stop us from getting where we are in the first place. Now that we’re here, it’s thanks to them, of course.”
“That can’t be easy. I’ve thought about it before,” I said. “How it’d be hard to make it big at something. Pretty soon, you’d realize almost everyone you knew was just after their own piece of what you had.”
He laughed, but it was a sad sound, and the way his eyes went distant told me I’d struck a chord. “Is that what happened?” I asked. “With the girl, I mean. The one your brother mentioned.”
Bruce seemed to think about my question for a long time. I wasn’t sure if he was deciding whether to answer or trying to find the right way. “It’s not really something I want to think about right now,” he said finally.
I nodded quickly, and in my hurry to apologize for asking such a nosy question, my hand catapulted his spoon out of the dessert dish, spraying both of us with bits of ice cream and syrup from the base of the bowl. I looked down at his lap in horror at the three large spots of ice cream, one of each flavor, quickly seeping into his expensive pants.
I half-reached to wipe it away before I realized I’d be the one doing the groping if I did.
He looked down at my hand, watching as I pulled it back awkwardly and blushed like an idiot.
With no apparent hurry, he swiped up a bead of the melting chocolate ice cream on his index finger, inspected it, and then extended his finger toward my mouth. “Are you going to clean up your mess, intern?” His voice was a deep, sexy rasp, and there was no mistaking the way his eyelids looked almost heavy beneath those thick eyelashes.
Did he want me to… Oh, God. I felt immediately and totally sexually inadequate. I wanted this. I knew I did. It wasn’t awkward college-level sexual tension. This was real. The big leagues, and I had never been aware of how woefully unprepared I was for this.
“Uh,” I stammered, reaching for a napkin.
“No,” he said firmly. “Not with the napkin.”
I swallowed hard and lifted my fingertips to his wrist, where I pulled him closer to my mouth, inch by nervous inch. I brought the tip of his finger into my mouth, letting my lips wrap around it. All my uncertainty and nerves were blasted away when I saw the look on his face. He was rapt with pleasure, absolutely over the edge with need and desire.
It felt like I could bring him to his knees with the slightest movement of my tongue, and I thought I could get drunk on power like that.
I pulled away from his finger, my hand still on his wrist, and when our eyes met it sent a jolt of pure fire lancing through me. “I don’t… This isn’t the kind of thing I do,” I said.
“So you just make messes and don’t clean them up?” he asked.
I looked down at his finger, smirking a little. “I don’t typically use my mouth, especially when the mess is on someone else’s crotch.”
“Typically? So you do at times, just not always?”
“Believe it or not, this is a first.”
“Good,” he said. “I like the idea of having you to myself.”
His words sent a warm tingle across my skin, like they were a spell that bound me to him in some way. I wasn’t sure how he intended them. I knew our bodies were both probably moving on auto-pilot at this point, drawing us closer and closer to the inevitable, but I didn’t know what happened after that. If I believed Candace, I wasn’t supposed to care. It was just supposed to be sex. Just fun.
That wasn’t enough for me, though.
“Is this a good idea?” I asked.
He was standing now. His body was so close to mine I could feel the heat radiating off of him. I wondered if I’d feel the hardness of his arousal if he moved another inch closer.
Bruce brought his fingers to my cheek, letting them drift from my jaw to my chin as he traced a path and followed it intently with his eyes, almost like he expected to find something there. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe you’re just after my money, and maybe I’m just looking for a taste of you before I’ll toss you aside. But we could talk about it for days and we still wouldn’t know unless we tried.”
I leaned forward, letting my forehead touch his chest as my thoughts raced. “How do I know you’re not after my money?” I asked after a while.
His chuckle rumbled through his chest. “I guess you’re going to have to ask yourself a very important question. Do you feel lucky, intern? Huh, do ya?”
I looked up at him with a half-smile. “Right now? Yes. For once, I do.”
He kissed me then, and it was
more than I thought it could’ve been. The world closed in around us. The distant sound of cars rumbling across the street and wind against the windows and the air conditioner all blurred until they were nothing. It was like every sensory nerve in my body except my lips and hands shut off to focus as much as possible on the places where he and I met.
His lips were so unbelievably warm and soft, with just enough wet to keep from feeling dry but not so much to seem sloppy. I could taste the faint sweet tang of our desert on his lips and tongue. He kissed me like he'd been waiting since the first moment he saw me. He advanced on me, holding me by the shoulders to keep from knocking me over as he backed me up to the break room door and pinned me there.
I felt his hand thump against the door beside my head. His other hand threaded through my hair until he had a grip of my hair and he could tilt my face up more to meet his. The solid warmth of his body was flush against mine, and I could feel the distinct pressure of his arousal digging into my stomach.
“My brother was right,” he breathed between kisses. “But not exactly.”
“About what?” I asked. My hands were moving on their own, shamelessly exploring every bulge, curve, and crease of his sculpted body that I could feel through his dress shirt. I ached to strip it off him, but I was in uncharted waters. I wanted to let him take the lead. I wanted to trust him to guide me through this.
“About the pencil skirts and the secretary look. But it’s not a fetish. I just couldn’t stop thinking about hiking those skirts up and spreading you out, making you moan my name until your voice was hoarse.”
I gulped, forgetting to kiss him back for a few seconds as the dirty sting of his words worked its magic on me, from my tingling fingertips to the way warmth was exploding in my lower belly. And then, with the suddenness of a cold hand gripping my ankle from the darkness, reality broke through the moment. I needed to admit the truth to him. I couldn’t do this while still planning to write my story. He had to know.
His Banana Page 7
