Aching for Always (12 page)

His fingers found her bud and rolled it open. Fire crackled in her veins.

“Can't?” he said. “Or shouldn't? There's a difference.”

She was wet. More than ready, and he could see it on her face. Her thighs ached for joining, and she said nothing as he stripped her of her panties.

He flung his coat on the floor and loosened his trousers, letting the shirttails fall on either side of his granite length. The flushed skin there shone like polished wax, and he was as wide and long as a pillar candle.

He caught her knees and lifted them, pushing her onto her palms. With a wild noise, he spread her legs.

Every cell in her body demanded she submit to the fire, but she knew she must not. “Please, no. I'm engaged.”

“I don't want to marry you. I want to plow you.” He tore off his shirt, and after two exploratory presses he gave a thrust hard enough to bury himself inside her.

His eyes widened, as did hers. He beat his hips against her, and she writhed, trying to harness the stormy pleasure.

“You came for this,” he whispered.

“No.”

“Say it.”

“No. No.
No.
”

“No, you don't like the ops plan, or no, you don't want a fill-up?”

Joss jerked from her fantasy. Everyone in the darkened conference room was looking at her. Louis, her ops man
ager, who had refilled his own cup, was holding the coffeepot over hers.

“I mean, it
is
empty.”

“No, no,” she said, flushing and waving him on. “Coffee's fine.”

“But the plan's a problem?” he said, cautious.

Christ, she'd barely heard the plan. What was wrong with her? Why would a tailor or whatever he was have such an impact on her? It was the chiton, and the way his eyes had sparkled when she'd talked about maps. She reminded herself to stick to the facts. Just because he'd watched her walk all the way up the alley when she left didn't mean he was about to bang her senseless on a tabletop, now, did it? She looked around quickly. She hadn't said that out loud, too, had she?

“No,” she said, “the plan is, um, good.”

“Is it what you were imagining?”

She shot him a look and immediately regretted it. He hadn't meant her fantasy.

“I mean, if you're not sure,” he said, “the team would be happy to hit the drawing board again—”

“No, no, no. The plan is . . . well, what can anyone really say about a plan like that? I have the utmost confidence that you guys can make it work.”

He nodded hesitantly. “All right, then. We'll make it happen.”

And you wonder why your company is teetering on the edge of insolvency?

C
HAPTER
N
INE
 

The dark, handsome man won the hand of the mapmaker and they married. They had a beautiful daughter, and they gave her everything she could want—toys, dolls and even a magical place guarded by a pair of lions. She lived like a princess. Everything was perfect until the dark, handsome man began to want more. “But we have so much,” said the mapmaker, who needed nothing more than her little princess daughter and her handsome husband and her lovely maps.

—The Tale of the Beautiful Mapmaker

This time he heard Fiona's footsteps, though he fervently wished he could have been left to the quiet of his thoughts. The woman with the love of maps had a fire in her that intrigued him. He had enjoyed their discussion and could still feel the softness of her skin on his fingers and see the engaging sway of her hips as she'd climbed the path to the high street. He touched the ball of white silk. Aye, he would very much like to see that chiton on her. In truth, he would very much like to see it off her as well. He'd known enough to be wary, but the fact that she'd openly mentioned maps to him had reduced his concern.
It would take a canny spy indeed to be that purposefully provocative.

“What did she want?” Fiona demanded.

“Nothing. An adjustment to her garment.” He lifted the silk and began to fold it.

“Nathaniel says you were dressing her.”

“Nathaniel would do well to concentrate on his own assignments.”

Fiona watched him. “I don't like her.”

Hugh said nothing.

“I think she was watching for us. I think she knows.”

“You're wrong. She's curious about a shower of sparks that knocked her senseless, as any intelligent woman would be.”

Fiona snorted. “You know nothing will stop me from reversing the wrong that's been done to my family.”

“I'm well aware of the assignment.”

“She had best not return.”

“She will, however. And I shall handle it.” He gazed at the brocade skirt on the odd twisted-metal contraption for hanging and allowed himself a private smile of anticipation. He wished, however, the skirt were not to be a wedding garment.

Fiona, evidently growing tired of this game, changed the subject.

“I have news,” she said. “It concerns Brand.”

“Aye?”

“The publican did something called a ‘search' for me.”

“And?”

“Brand's dead.”

Hugh swayed. He thought he might be sick. His life
had been ordered by this imagined meeting with Brand. Every step in his career had been taken to bring him to this place. Every skill he'd pursued—pugilism, tracking, fencing, pistols—had been chosen for its value in his mission. For the second time in his life, his reason for living had been snatched away. “Are you certain?”

“Aye. He died three months ago. After a brief struggle with cancer.” She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read. “‘A descendant of the wealthy Brand family, Alfred Brand steered Brand Industries in the direction of computer electronic parts in 1980s. The company, which had struggled in the last few years, was burdened with debt and sold just before his death. He is survived by a daughter.'”

Josephine. She's alive.

“What else? What about his fortune?”

“It says he drained the family fortune in recent years to save the company. In fact, it says he was about to file for personal bankruptcy when he died.”

“What about the company? He wouldn't have let the secret die with him. Someone has to know. Someone has to have been charged with protecting the map. It was the key to the Brand family fortune and 'twill be the key to anyone who hopes to continue to harness that power into the future.”

“The daughter,” Fiona said.

“Not the daughter,” he said sharply, thinking of that innocent dark-haired child. “Someone else. What else does your paper say?”

She ran her finger down the words. “‘The company was purchased by Brand's handpicked successor, CEO
wunderkind Rogan Reynolds, and a team of investors.'”

“
Rogan
Reynolds?” He endured a stab so real he could almost feel the edge of the blade.

“Aye. Why?”

He smacked the counter with his fist. “Bloody hell, she
is
a spy.”

C
HAPTER
T
EN
 

“Another martini, please,” Joss said.

“Oh, I don't know,” Di warned as old Sam, the longtime bartender at the William Penn Hotel bar, reached for the gin. “It's your second. Don't you have to stay on your toes for business? You never know when a map crisis is going to precipitate.”

“Funny.” Joss nibbled at the remaining olive, thinking about the morning's visit to the tailor shop. “You know, I can loosen up when I want to.”

“Right. Look at your bachelorette party: you, one pregnant woman drinking club soda and a teething baby. Just doesn't get more rowdy than that.”

“You know I don't like big parties. Never have.” Well, at least since her father's company started going bust and everything in her life became so cost focused. She wiggled her napkin at Luke in his car seat on the bar. He gazed at her with wide, unblinking eyes, oblivious to the fountains of saliva pouring down his fist into the crevasses of his neck.

“You don't like big parties because you never had time for big parties,” Di said. “You're the only person I know
who attended college orientation week with their corporate attorney.”

“We were being sued. It was a great chance to learn how things like that work.”

“You need to have more fun. We need to have a stripper or something. Isn't that what Rogan's having at his party tonight? Maybe one of these nice gentlemen at the bar here will remove his clothes for us.”

Sam, who looked as if he were sporting a small bean-bag chair under his uniform tuxedo shirt, moved the car seat enough to put down Joss's martini and wiped his hands on his apron. “Anything else I can do for you?”

The vision of Sam in a sequined G-string popped into Joss's head. “No. Thank you.”

“Word to the wise,” Di said as Sam walked away. “Grab fun while you can. You never know when it's going to evaporate. The closest I've gotten to sex in the last four months is when David wiped baby vomit off my crotch.”

“I was actually having a little fun this morning,” Joss said, smiling into her drink. There was something about a crush that made you want to talk about it, even when you knew you probably shouldn't.

“Oh, really?”

“Have you ever used the tailor in that alley across the street from our offices?”

“Your idea of fun is going to a tailor? Wow, we really do have a lot of work to do here.”

“It wasn't the going to the tailor.” Joss flushed. “It was the tailor himself.”

Di looked at Joss over her glasses. “Murray, the white-haired tailor from the shtetl in Warsaw?”

“Uh, no. Must have been the son. His name was Tom. Tom James.” Her James certainly hadn't sounded like the son of a Murray from Warsaw.

“For heaven's sake, they're not really named James,” Di said. “That's just a name Murray picked. Sounded upper-crust, I guess. Or maybe he thought it fit the look of the building. It's one of the oldest buildings in downtown Pittsburgh, you know. But, in any case, I'm not sure how you had fun there. I mean, apart from the obvious fact it's a tailor shop, it's been closed since July when Murray retired to Punta Gorda.”

“It . . .” Joss was getting confused. First the sparks, then the dome and now his name clearly wasn't James. She cast a nervous glance in Di's direction. They were close friends—the closest—but she still didn't think she could share the really weird aspects of this encounter with her. She decided she'd stick with the crush. The martinis were definitely helping there. It was the only part she felt on firm footing about anyhow. “Okay, look. There was this guy there. I guess I just assumed his name was James. Thirtyish. British. Really cute, like Patrick Dempsey cute. And he was kind of flirting.”

Di put down her glass, and Joss felt the intensity of her gaze. So go the risks and rewards of sharing crush info. “I told him I was engaged.”

“Of course you did. And?”

Joss smiled. “He didn't stop.”

Di flung up her hand for a high five.

“It's not like flirting is some amazing new experience,” Joss said, meeting her slap. “I am engaged to a pretty sexy guy.”

“Yeah, but that was, like, business flirting.”

“
Business
flirting?”

“I mean, I know you met in a coffee shop then went out to dinner and it was love at first sight, and then your father meets him and they really hit it off. But c'mon, what are the odds of you falling in love with a guy with a GPS company that could bail out your father's business and then extend a helping hand to yours? Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting either you or Rogan did it for that reason. I'm suggesting you're so genetically tied into keeping the Brand O'Malley Map Company afloat that sniffing out a guy like that was programmed into your DNA. Your chromosomes were probably rubbing their hands together and laying out a merger strategy the instant you met him. I guess I'm just glad the guy with the biggest GPS company in the world didn't look like Murray—and, by the way, he really does have a big GPS. What the hell were you two doing in that office? Poor Peter's still asking questions.”