Fair Game (26 page)

“Take your hands away,” he ordered.

She did. He surged, filled her, fucked her mouth. She took all she could, everything, closed her eyes to let his scent surround her. Grabbing her head, he shouted, thrust one last time, and unloaded hard, so much she could barely contain him.

Finally, there was nothing but his harsh breathing. She soothed him with light licks, fingers stroking his thighs, her tongue cleaning up the tip of his cock.

“Come here.” His voice was a guttural rasp as he pulled her up by the arm. “Kiss me.”

His lids rested at half-mast, his head back, a deep breath expanding his chest. She smoothed a hand down the white fabric of his shirt and leaned in to lightly brush his lips with hers.

“More,” he whispered.

She opened her mouth, stroked him with her tongue, let him taste himself. It was unique, erotic, beautiful, frightening. He folded his arms around her until the kiss ended, and she rested against his chest.

“Either you recharge fast or she really didn’t blow you.”

When she tried to look up, he held her head to his chest. “She wouldn’t,” he murmured. “She was a tease, nothing more.”

Nothing.
It was scary to realize she wanted him to mean that Little Miss Fucking Snowflake was nothing special to him.

He slid his hand down her back, stroked along the crease of her butt, then rounded her thigh and tunneled between her legs. The jeans didn’t let him in. When he went for the zipper, she pushed his hand away. “Not now.”

She wanted to savor his come, his kiss. Her own orgasm was secondary to the power she got from a man flying apart in her mouth. Especially Kyle; maybe
only
Kyle. Like the night he tied her up in the hotel room, or at the hot tubs. Everything seemed to be about
him
. What did that mean? She shoved the question aside. It was too unsettling to think about.

Tipping her chin, he kissed her, lightly, ending it with a swipe of his tongue across her lips. “I’ll let you get away with that this time. But you owe me an orgasm.”

“Sure.”

She’d planned on teaching him a lesson, that sex between them was casual. She wanted to believe she knew that, too. Yet lying against him, his arms around her, his scent filling her, his taste lingering on her tongue, she realized she’d learned something else altogether.

Kyle might be her boss, but he was a man first. And it was the man she wanted. She closed her eyes and admitted the worst. Not only did she want him, she needed him.

Suddenly, he held the power. She could no longer walk away from this thing between them no matter what happened at work.

 

 

 

KYLE drove her back to her car in the airport hotel lot. “Spend the night with me.”

She hovered in her corner of the car. “No.”

Fuck. He knew she’d say that so why bother asking? She was willing to give him to another woman, what the fuck did she care about spending the night with him? He’d had a great orgasm, a few moments of bliss as she kissed him, but she’d withdrawn, and his anger boiled to the surface.

“Tomorrow night.” He was a glutton for punishment.

She just looked at him. Far away from a parking light, her eyes lay in shadow, unreadable.

“All right,” he said, “then I’ll see you on Tuesday.”

“Yeah. Fine.”

He wondered if that was better than,
Fine, whatever.
With Josie, he couldn’t tell a thing.

Kisa was so much more transparent. He’d walked her to her car, she’d tried to kiss him, he extricated himself quickly. Leaning against the driver’s door of her car, she’d told him how she’d dreamed of sucking his dick for months. He’d had a hard-on, but it was all about Josie, the avid way she’d watched, the tense lines of her body. Josie was jealous; he knew it in his gut. Kisa’s voice had droned on at him. She wanted to touch him, taste him, take his come down her throat.

What he’d wanted was Josie taking his cock in her mouth, swallowing him whole. He’d gotten rid of Kisa, sat in his car for fifteen minutes, then went to the men’s room to gauge what Josie would read on his face and body. He quite clearly remembered saying “You’re pathetic” to the reflection. Unlike Snow White’s mirror, it hadn’t answered him back.

“My challenge next,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“But she didn’t do it.”

“I had no control over what she would or wouldn’t do. But
I
did what you wanted.” He angled up against the door. “In fact, you owe me big time to make up for my ultimate humiliation.” He might as well play it up for what it was worth.

Josie gazed at him with those unreadable eyes. “All right. Your challenge.”

She’d agreed too easily, but he refused to let the new game backfire on him. He’d figure out the perfect challenge to show her she was his. No more Kisa, no more fuck buddies. Josie loved to have control, but from now on, he was going to be in charge.

He wasn’t about to let another man touch her, not for a long, long time. If ever.

 

 

SHE’D had an awful weekend. How many times had she picked up her cell phone to tell Kyle she’d changed her mind and wanted that orgasm badly? Way too many to count. Even a hot masturbation session with her vibrator on Saturday night hadn’t relieved her tension. Rick, one of her buddies, had called; she’d turned him down. Only Kyle would do. Gee, wasn’t that a terrifying thought? For God’s sake, he was her boss. How was she supposed to separate business from pleasure?

Since Monday had been the Labor Day holiday, on Tuesday morning Josie and her staff gathered in the conference room for the weekly update meeting. Walker and Ronson were back in the office and Chuck had flown out to Arkansas. Jenkins was out on-site for the second week in a row.

Josie sat at the head of the table, with Lydia to her right, pen poised for note-taking. When Lydia had arrived this morning—on time—Josie’d asked how she was doing, and Lydia said fine. That was all. If she’d made a decision, she wasn’t sharing it.

It was Kyle’s first day, along with Bertrice Denton’s. Bertrice sat next to Lydia, and Kyle, the last to arrive, ended up at the far end of the table, opposite Josie.

“You all know Kyle Perry.” She indicated him with a flip of her right hand. He wouldn’t attend the PM staff meeting on a regular basis, but he’d wanted to get up to speed on everything outstanding in all the departments.

Ronson and Walker had been on job sites, but she’d introduced them this morning. Kyle had laughed at something Walker said, and she’d thought of him laughing with Little Miss Snowflake on Friday. He shook Ronson’s hand, and she’d remembered how firm his grip was, yet how gently he could play her clitoris, how hard, fast, and orgasmic. She had a bad feeling she was going to have a naughty image of him every time he did or said anything. Working with him would be torture.

Especially when she realized that she hadn’t asked him if he’d see the Snowflake again. Just to prove he could have her after all.

God, her jealousy was like a cancer that permeated every nook and cranny of her life. That thought made her think of Ernie, and a guilty flush rose to her cheeks. How could she even
think
to compare her situation to Ernie’s?

“And our new program manager”—Josie put out her left hand—“is Bertrice Denton.” Though she wore a business suit, Josie still felt the woman dressed too sexy, the skirt too short and too many blouse buttons left undone. But whatever.

Josie had chosen a couple of new jobs coming down the pipeline from Marketing and planned to brief Bertrice on them after the meeting.

The whiteboard on the wall detailed the open projects with milestones and status. Josie pointed to the first on the list, Walker’s Washington job. “You should be near to closing this one out, right?”

Walker skimmed the flat of his hand over the spiked hair of his old-fashioned crew cut. He’d spent six years in the Air Force and kept the hairstyle. He was in his mid-thirties, and he’d called Castle home for three years. He flipped a page on his clipboard and ran down the list of remaining items with military precision. “Just mice nuts,” he said in conclusion. “I’ll have them closed out by Wednesday.” At the whiteboard, he ticked off his milestones in red marker.

“Go ahead and update us on the rest of your projects since you’re already up there.” Normally they would only discuss problem areas and roadblocks, but a full rundown would give Kyle a better feel for everything.

Walker was meticulous yet brief. Chuck was traveling and unavailable. Jenkins, on speaker, tended to concentrate on the minutiae and required prompting to keep him on track. Despite that, he did good work. Josie covered the particulars on the Coyote Ridge Sand Plant, her only open project since becoming manager. After the debacle over the dryer, things had settled down nicely, and the programming on the new ticketing system was actually ahead of schedule. Kyle asked a few questions throughout the discussions, but even when he merely listened, Josie was always aware of him. It wasn’t easy separating between boss and lover. She kept wondering what he thought of her management style: did she sound stupid or snippy or know-it-all?

Would she have felt that way with any new boss?

Ronson was last, due only to the fact that his first job was fourth on the list. “VIM”—Venezuela International Mining—“is on target.” Ronson had returned from Venezuela on Saturday. “I’ll have to go back down at the end of the month, but probably for only a week.”

Josie prompted him with a couple of questions. He gave her sparse answers. Rather than pull it out of him now, since the meeting was already running over, she decided to go over the file with him later.

“What about Alta Vista?” It was a Mexican project she’d passed onto him after taking over from Ernie.

Fair-haired and fair-skinned, two bright spots of color rose in Ronson’s cheeks, punctuated by a gleam in his turquoise eyes. “The job’s a fucking mess.”

Josie glanced at Kyle. He was studying Ronson, his face a mask, expression indeterminate.

She didn’t bother to correct Ronson’s language. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t all used the word at one time or another.

“What seems to be the problem?” She remained rational, giving him the benefit of the doubt, yet something in the pit of her stomach started to rumble.

“Harvey didn’t know he needed to schedule in the training for the first week of October.” Harvey Toffer was head of Castle’s customer training department. “Now he’s got a conflict with Lurient Mining.”

“As I recall, Lurient was supposed to be the third week of October.”

“Well, you recall wrong. There’s a conflict.”

Her heart rate jumped up a notch. She didn’t like his tone, she didn’t like his attitude. Lurient
was
supposed to be the third week of October, but she wasn’t going to argue in front of Kyle. As it was, she felt his glance flick between the two of them. It had been Chuck and Lydia last week, now it was Ronson. Kyle would start wondering if she could handle her department.

Josie picked up her pencil and jotted a note on her pad. “All right. I’ll set up a meeting with Harvey and we’ll figure it out.”

Ronson’s nostrils flared. “It doesn’t take a fucking meeting.”

There was a breath of nervous silence. Kyle sat back in his chair, turning his pen around and around in his fingers. Next to Ronson, Bertrice, their newbie, pushed back slightly from the table as if afraid she’d get caught in the cross fire. Lydia stopped writing, glancing between Ronson and Josie.

“I said we’ll have a meeting with him, Andrew.” She tapped her pad. “Next issue.”

He shot her a sullen, narrow-eyed glance. Then his lip twitched in a snarl of a smile. “You’ve got the wrong boom length on the dragline system for Huntington.”

“I did not have the wrong boom.” In that moment, she hated him. He wanted to humiliate her in front of Kyle, make her look inept, stupid, and worthless.

“Oh yes, you fucking do,” Ronson shot back. “Want to see the spreadsheet
you
put together?”

“Stop being an asshole, Ronson.”

“At least I’m not a fucking idiot like you,” Ronson shot back.

“We will end this meeting now.” Kyle rose.

Good God, what must he think of her? Dammit, she
wasn’t
sure she was right and Ronson was wrong about the boom, but with a red haze in front of her eyes, she wanted to beat Ronson to a bloody pulp. Another part of her simply wanted to crawl beneath the table. She hated this overwhelming need to impress Kyle.

She hated more that Kyle had to come to her rescue in the middle of
her
staff meeting. God, she wanted to make Ronson pay. Damn him.

On the conference phone, Jenkins cleared his throat and brought her back to the moment. Ronson had stormed from the room; the others were filing out, except Kyle and Bertrice, who still wore a wide-eyed expression of horror. What a way to start.

Josie hit the speaker button and picked up the receiver. “Jenkins, we’ve got your updates. Unless there’s anything else, we’ll see you on Monday.” He was flying in late Friday night.

“Sure thing, Josie. You know he’s an asshole. Ignore him.”

She glanced at Kyle. He studied her with a steady, dark gaze. “Thanks, Jenkins. Have a good week. Talk to you later.”

Kyle would call her on the carpet now, tell her she’d handled the situation like a petulant child.

Instead, he flipped his wrist and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting in three minutes with Toffer. I’ll let him know about the Lurient issue.”

What did that mean? That he didn’t think she could handle the problem? Everything was a fucking mess. “Fine. Thanks. I’ll check with him later.”

She’d also check on the goddamn boom for Huntington. She crooked a finger. “Bertrice, let’s go over the projects I’m assigning. In my office.”

“Sure.”