Executive Perks (5 page)

Virginia felt her face go hot. She hadn’t expected such a frontal attack, and quickly stammered, “It’s forgotten, really.”

“Not quite, Virginia, not by me anyway.” His long fingers caressed the stem of his wine glass. “As I’m sure you know, I’m pretty aggressive in my business dealings and I’m sorry to say I let that aggressiveness spill over into the personal the last time we met. I don’t usually do that.”

Unbidden, his comment that he didn’t come on to the CEOs of the companies he raided flashed through her head. She kept an appropriately solemn expression anyway.

“We both got a little heated last time.”

“Yes and I hope the standstill went some way toward reassuring you.”

“Yes, thank you. Not as far as selling me the stock back would have of course, but I guess we can consider this a time out.” She tried a smile, but it came out pretty weak.

“And while we’re taking this time out, I’d like to say that some of my reaction to you was so exaggerated because I’m interested in you.”

Virginia stuck out her chin and straightened even more her usually rigid posture. The large dark picture windows of the restaurant reflected the movement.

“Yes, I remember. You offered to sleep with me while I made up my mind about you taking over my company.”

Aaron felt a swift twinge of irritation. This wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought. He should have suspected as much from her stonewalling tactic in ignoring his phone calls. He’d tried to put her out of his mind, but had been unsuccessful and had finally resorted to having Rye intercede. He felt childish about the whole thing anyway, like telling the teacher on her. And she wasn’t exactly extending an olive branch here.

“I was way off base with that.”

“Yes, you were,” Virginia pointed out expressionlessly, ignoring the tuxedo-clad waiter who arrived to take their order and then silently disappeared at a curt nod from him. “So when you say you’re interested in me now, I’m wondering how this approach is any different. Interested in me how, exactly?”

Aaron smiled. Why did this cool, self-possessed woman drive him to such bluntness? “How are men usually interested in you, Virginia?”

“I see. So that’s why you bought a multi-million-dollar stake in my company—in order to date me.”

What a bitch, he mused, even as he admired her graceful posture and the thrust of her breasts against her white silk shirt. Her lashes were incongruously dark against her pale cheeks as she looked demurely down at a menu. Aaron leaned back into the cushy yellow velvet of his chair, willing himself to relax. He wanted her. He could put up with a little sarcasm. “Naturally, my plans for your company were a little different before I met you,” he lied smoothly.

“Really? Well, what are your plans for my company, now?”

“Frankly, I haven’t given your company a second thought since I laid eyes on you,” Aaron said. That much was true. He wanted to get her into bed first. Then he’d deal with her company once he got it out of his system.

He coolly poured her another glass of wine and waited for her response. What he had hoped would be a seduction was rapidly turning into an interrogation instead. He wondered if the irreproachable Miss Beckett was as frosty in bed as she was at the dinner table.

Virginia took a sip of wine. The waiter approached again, and he was on the verge of waving him away again, but decided instead that they should order. This whole process needed to slow down before one of them blew their top again.

Virginia ordered fish, no appetizer, and he opted for the beef.

When the waiter left, he found himself fiddling with his silverware, uncharacteristically unsure as to how to proceed. He tried smiling at her as she took a bite out of one of the soft, warm rolls in the basket at the center of the white-linen-covered table.

“You must have a very inflated opinion of your charms if you believe that I would in any way risk my company in order to enjoy them,” she offered conversationally.

He stared at her lovely face as she chewed her roll.

“I’m not asking you to risk your company. Let’s put that aside for now. This isn’t some elaborate plan to trick you out of control or make you fall in love with me and hand over your stock.”

“As if,” she snorted.

Something about that rubbed him the wrong way. “I realize I didn’t make the social register, but I don’t see what you could object to in terms of dating me.”

“Other than the fact that you’re trying to take over my company?”

“
Your
company.
Your
company. Why do you keep harping on that? Possessions are made to be bought and sold. They’re not people.”

“Sold when the seller
wants
to sell them.”

“Your aunt wanted to sell me her stock. Somebody else will too. I guarantee it. Maybe even you at some point.”

“Do you plan to wear me down by continually asking me out?”

“Are you gay?”The thought had just occurred to him.

“Oh please! Do you honestly believe that’s the only type of woman who could bear to turn you down?”

“I know you’re not married,” he persisted. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Maybe he was just trying to bug her now. He couldn’t tell anymore. And he’d never been very good at charming a woman into bed. He’d never had to be. They just came to him. When he was younger, it was apparently his looks. Now it was the money undoubtedly. He didn’t care either way, but neither seemed to matter much to Virginia Beckett.

He tried another tactic. Honesty.

“I find you extremely attractive.”

“I bet!”

That one did surprise him. Surely she knew how beautiful and sexy she was. Maybe, like all women apparently, she wanted to be complimented. Fine, he could get behind that if it served his purpose. “Really, you’re so gorgeous, I was a little stunned when I met you.”

“So it’s not CEOs you routinely offer to sleep with when you first meet them, it’s just ‘gorgeous’ women.”

“I said I was sorry about that.”

“That makes it all better, then.”

“Can you honestly say you don’t feel something between us that would be worth exploring, ah, in bed?”

For a minute, she seemed at a loss for words.

Unfortunately, she then found them. “You might just be the most egotistical man I’ve ever met. You’re trying to take over my company. All I’m feeling is hatred. Do you think I’m admiring your deep blue eyes or your hot body? Christ, why is it always about sex with men like you?”

“And money,” he muttered, knowing he was hurting his case but starting to feel he might have lost it anyway already.

“Isn’t one woman’s body much the same as the next to you, Mr. Winston? Why so obsessed with mine?”

“Well, I haven’t gotten a good look at it, but what I can see I like.”

“No really, if it has nothing to do with my company, why are you so intent on getting me into bed?”

“Other than that I’m having wet dreams about you?”

She colored.

“The answer is I don’t know. I don’t usually pursue a woman so blatantly.”

“They all come to you, I suppose, as soon as you crook your finger.”

“No false modesty here, honey. Like you don’t have a pack of admirers waiting at the foot of your bed? And while we’re at it, why don’t you be honest about why you really don’t want to see me? You think I’m beneath you with your old money and lily white hands.”

“Well, there’s that,” she said easily.

At the look of fury on his face, the little witch laughed. Oddly, it relaxed him. He let out a deep breath. “I take it I’m not winning you over?”

“I can’t separate sex from—from everything else, Mr. Winston.”

“You won’t know unless you try.” He smiled at her, for the first time with some genuine warmth despite his defeat. It was kind of ridiculous.

“No thanks.” She stood up and dropped the napkin that had been on her lap onto the table. “I knew it was a mistake to come here. If you want to sell me your stock, fine, call Minlow. But otherwise, no more one-on-ones for both our sakes, okay?”

Aaron stood up and signaled for the check. “All right. Message received. Again, I didn’t mean to offend you by coming on to you. I apologize. Let me give you a lift home.”

“No, no need for you to leave. You can have my fish.”

“No thanks. I’m not hungry anymore.” He scribbled on the check the ever-present waiter brought him without asking why they were leaving before they’d eaten. The guy probably thought he was about to get lucky. Hilarious.

He walked Virginia out. A couple of passers-by had stopped to chatter noisily on the corner. Something about someone’s job being too tedious to endure.

“I think you’ll have a tough time getting a cab around here. There’s a lot of competition at this time of night. I can give you a lift. My driver’s right here.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Virginia conceded as Aaron ushered her into the waiting gray limousine. An opaque sheet of smoked glass separated them from the driver and they pulled out into the Manhattan traffic.

Aaron studied her aristocratic, lush profile. She was gorgeous. He would have loved to trace his finger along her delicate, shell-like ear and press his mouth against her long white neck. Needless to say, though, he certainly wasn’t going to do so with a woman who kept begging him not to come on to her. He was more irked than he’d like to admit at the thought.

“So, honestly, do you have a boyfriend or what? At least throw a sop to my enormous ego here.”

She darted a look at him.

The driver slammed down on the brakes and, failing to have belted themselves in, Virginia fell against him, practically into his lap actually. He caught her, surprised, as she steadied herself, palms on his legs, mere inches from his crotch. Her mouth fell open and their eyes met. Desire roared through him and he froze, afraid to move a muscle.

But he didn’t have to. The electricity between them was not one-sided. She leaned forward and ran her soft lips along his cheek. Her palms on his legs clenched, her fingers digging into the wool of his trousers and his body roared to life. He groaned and she covered his mouth with her own.

She felt his tongue in her mouth, tentative, questing in response to her own. She should have pulled away then and stopped at the one kiss, understandable given how they had been, quite literally, thrown together. Instead, she opened her mouth wider, distracted by the delicious, warm pleasure that coursed through her body at the touch of his lips. The rough feel of his mouth against hers, his hands beginning to move slowly over her shoulders, down her arms, made her shiver. Wow.

Acting thoughtlessly for once, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer to her, and was rewarded with the whole hard length of him suddenly pushing her back to lie beneath him on the leather seat, stretching her hands above her head. She arched her hips against him and registered the long, hard ridge of his penis as his mouth moved from her lips down her throat, one hand lingering tentatively around her rib cage as if not yet daring to move higher. She moaned and parted her legs beneath the skirt of her suit, lost in the pleasure she had not felt for quite some time, maybe never quite so keenly either and he pulled back a little, looking down, to slip his hand beneath her skirt.

Oh no, she better stop that right now. That was…
oh
…his fingers were skimming along her bare thighs and heading… It felt so
…
Oh no, that was so…
inappropriate
.

She’d said it out loud, hadn’t she?

But when she would have objected—she would have, really, assuming she could speak through the pleasure that was thundering through her veins—he covered her mouth with his own again, thrusting his tongue deep as his skillful fingers below slipped under the elastic of her underwear.

He swallowed the moan she let out as the base of her stomach jumped at his warm, sure touch and he dipped his thumb into what was undoubtedly a very wet vagina by now and then rubbed the moistened pad of it lightly against her clit.

Oh, Jesus—it was just the right amount of pressure. When he supplemented it by thrusting his middle finger up her, turning it some way she had never felt, her bottom arched up off of the leather seat.

She felt his smile against her lips as he paused in his kissing. “You like that, eh?”

He added a second finger, swirling it around in her. Oh God.

She clamped her thighs tighter against his hand and he bent his head, nudging her suit jacket out of the way and pressing his mouth to the silk of her blouse over her nipple. Her hands came round to the silky hair at the base of his neck and she pulled him closer to her breast until he latched on fiercely and sucked, the silk of her blouse and her bra no impediment to the sharp tug of pleasure he was inflicting.

Her breast underneath the silk was full and soft as he sucked it, dampening the material. Very nice. With one hand buried in her wet pussy, learning the feel of her, his other hand was free to wander and, surprising himself, he thrust it into the silky strands of her long hair. Every X-rated zone of the cool Miss Beckett’s body was suddenly, magically open to him—he could fondle that plush ass or unbutton her shirt to check out the color of her nipples poking against his tongue or even lead her own long fingers to his aching cock—but he did none of those things. Instead, he ran his fingers through her fucking hair, like some besotted teenager. Dry-humping her at the same time, of course, but still…