No strings attached (9 page)

She gave a start when he spoke, pulling in a gulp of air and shaking off the surprise before turning calmly from the window and offering him her usual chop-busting smile. “Anything you want to hear, sugar.”

Facing him now, she wrapped her fingers over the waist-high headrest of her funky mesh ergonomic chair. It was a telling sort of movement in that she deliberately kept the chair between them instead of moving to the door to link her arm through his and join the reception in the lobby.

“What help am I going to be to your reputation if you hide out in your office instead of mingling and giving the press the sound bites they’re here for?” He stayed where he was, his pride preferring she make the choice to come to him.

She didn’t move except to tilt her head slightly to the right. The curved ends of her white-blond pageboy brushed her shoulder. “Actually, I was trying to decide if staying in here wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do. Especially since any best foot I might put forward is still recovering from yesterday’s sandblasting.”

“A tough cookie like you? Done in by a little sand?” Eric gave a snort. “I don’t believe it.”

Chloe narrowed her eyes until the barest sliver of violet peeked through the slits of lashes and lids. “I am not a tough cookie.”

“Princess, you are the toughest cookie I know. You don’t take crap from anyone. You know what you want and you go for it.” He paused, struck anew by the thought that she’d certainly gone for what she wanted in his kitchen. “Besides, you spike a hell of a volleyball. And that can’t be said of a marshmallow.”

“That spike was pure luck and you know it.” Her mouth twisted into a cute but still only halfhearted grin.

He wanted to see her smile. The way she’d smiled yesterday on the volleyball court, full of more life than he thought he’d ever seen…even more than he’d seen when she’d been in his kitchen.

A particular truth he could’ve done without. So much for making a big first impression. “Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I do know is that you don’t hate sports quite as much as you’ve been trying to convince me you do.”

“Don’t be so sure.” She swiveled her chair back and forth, back and forth. “But don’t think the way I feel means I don’t know how to play.”

“I know you know how to play. I was there, remember?” And Eric still wanted to take a bat to whoever it was who had burned this girl so badly. “So, do you want to join my team?”

“Permanently?”

“Why not? We’re a sort of self-contained league. Sports bars. Restaurants. Friendly competition that has nothing to do with business. We bowl, play volleyball, softball. All in the name of fun, and the losers buy the beer.”

“Ouch. A double whammy.”

Eric shrugged. He was still having trouble reconciling Chloe with “permanently.” “Whaddaya say?”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she said, and then she frowned and asked, “Don’t the members of your team have to have a connection to Haydon’s? How did you manage to sneak me past the officials yesterday?”

“I told them we were lovers.”

Chloe’s chair came to a total stop. “You told them what?”

Eric moved into the office, closing the door most of the way with one hand, but with a gentle shove so Chloe wouldn’t feel physically trapped. Like it or not, it was time for that conversation she’d run out on yesterday. “Actually, I said you and I were seeing each other, which is the truth. Especially now with the way things have changed…”

Reaching her desk, he let the thought trail off and waited for her ball-busting denial that their relationship
had
changed. What he got instead was a thoughtful silence and a lazy consideration from eyes boldly enhanced by eye shadow in shades of dark blue and pink.

Her irises were deep violet and her pupils flashed with what instinct told him was the memory of holding him inside her mouth. Eric stirred at the thought. He’d stirred every time he’d thought of her the past twenty-four hours.

But even before she’d wrapped her lips around his dick and made him come, he’d reacted much the same way. Yesterday’s blow job had just put a new twist on an already tightly wound tension between them.

She rolled her chair beneath her desk, walked around the far end and propped a hip on the corner.
Arms crossed, she swung that one dangling foot, her skirt hiked halfway up her thigh…which wasn’t doing much to keep Eric’s mind on the here and now. He lifted his chin, kept his gaze locked on hers.

“In what sort of way have things changed?” She asked the question with all sincerity, or with such well-veiled sarcasm she had him fooled dead to rights.

Either way, she was toying with him rather than giving him a straight answer. She wanted to play? Fine. He’d play her until she begged him to stop.

He took a step forward, trailing his index finger along the edge of her desk. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

“That depends, sugar.” Her voice was low, both in tone and in volume, a husky, seductive whisper complementing the low sweep of her lashes. “Do you think you have an answer?”

Oscar-caliber performance aside, her shy act was still an act. And he was not about to let her get away with ignoring what they’d done. “An answer other than the obvious? I mean, it’s not like every woman who comes into my kitchen gets fed my strawberry shortcake.”

She didn’t even bat an eye. “Now that I find hard to believe.”

“Why? You think because I’m a man I can’t say no to a woman?” Not that he ever had, but he could. Though he wasn’t sure how he’d feel about saying no to this one.

“You’re a man. You’re predisposed to say yes.” Her arms remained crossed. Her foot continued to swing.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing, the workings of this
woman’s mind. “Believe it or not, Chloe, not all men are ruled by the head of their dick.”

“Oh, I know that.” She swept her hair from her face with her fingers, then waved her hand to make her point. “Sure, you use the head on your shoulders. Then, with a little luck and enough votes to win the election, you turn the program back over to the head in your pants. Face it, sugar. From D.C. to Hollywood to Houston, Texas. Men will be men.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” He crossed his arms and stared. “You really don’t think a man has any control over his baser instincts.”

“Not as much control as a woman has.”

“Over his or over hers?”

She lifted both brows. “Both.”

“You think it’s easier for a woman to seduce a man than for a man to seduce a woman?” When she looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, he said, “Scratch that. What I mean is, do you really think a man can’t break a woman’s self-control as easily as a woman can break a man’s?”

She laughed. “Oh, sugar. Don’t make me laugh, using self-control and man in the same sentence like that. I have never met a man I couldn’t bring to his knees.”

Eric wasn’t going to debate that very real possibility. “But you are rarely brought to yours.”

She straightened her swinging leg, examined the skin of her kneecap. “Nope. Not a single carpet burn.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” He pointed to a freckle, keeping his finger there on her skin. “If that’s not carpet, then it’s got to be from the tile on my kitchen floor.”

Chloe pressed her lips together, taking a moment before lifting her gaze from her leg to his face. “I might have been the one on my knees, but I was also the one in control.”

Well, she had him there. He had certainly demonstrated a total loss. He circled his fingertip over her kneecap. “Tell me something else, Chloe.”

Chloe didn’t say a word, though she did look back down to the skin-to-skin point of contact. Eric took that as permission granted to move his hand farther up her bare leg. “About that blow job in the kitchen. Why the rules about no sexual contact if you didn’t intend to hold up your end of the bargain?”

For a moment, she hesitated, then her chin came up sharply. “My end of the bargain was agreeing to grant you three nonsexual favors. As in, you ask me for them first. You never asked me to sample your…strawberry shortcake. That wasn’t part of our deal.”

As explanations went, her logic was weak, but Eric couldn’t be bothered with more questions. He was too busy taking great pleasure in hearing her voice catch, listening to her breathing grow choppy and shallow.

Control, my ass,
he thought, and continued the trip he’d begun at her knee. She had no idea who she was dealing with. Not if she thought she could deliver a fast ball and catch him looking when he was ready to swing.

Reaching the loose hem of her dress, he walked his fingers beneath the edge of the material and up the smooth skin of her thigh. His hand lingered, and when she didn’t move a muscle, when she didn’t say a word, when she didn’t let go of the breath he’d heard her pull in, he took a bold step into her space.

He moved his hand in a slow caress up her thigh to her hip, watching her pupils widen, her lips softly part to draw air into her lungs as he approached the strip of elastic that served as the waistband of her thong.

Touching her skin was like feeling that slide of whipped cream and chocolate all over again. A sensation of exploring the forbidden, sharing the rush of blood and the rise between his legs with the very woman making him ache.

His palm skimmed over her belly and she adjusted her perch on the edge of the desk, spreading her legs a bit wider, her weight balanced between the one foot she had on the floor and the hand she’d braced flat on the desk at her side.

She lifted her chin. Her eyes drifted shut with the arousal that shuddered through her. Anyone peering into the office would see their heads close together in quiet conversation.

What no one could see were Eric’s fingertips scraping across the thong’s material, his knuckles brushing through the barest strip of hair hidden beneath.

He pulled the thong lower, his index finger dipping down to find her hidden bud and hovering there before sliding to the side of the tight swell and pressing hard.

Her eyes flew open and she looked over his shoulder, her lower lip caught by even white teeth as if to hold back sounds rolling from her belly to her throat.

He heard them all, and he wasn’t having any of this looking away business. His dick was throbbing, caught between his shorts and his stomach. But even that satisfaction mattered less than looking into Chloe’s eyes while making her come.

He kept his hand in her panties, but lifted his finger away. She squirmed and arched, seeking the return of
his touch. A smile drew up a corner of his mouth. He could hardly imagine the intensity of taking her to bed. And it would happen. But not now, not here, not in this room.

This, he thought, rubbing his finger down one ripely swollen lip of her sex and up over the other, taking what he needed of her juices spreading between to ease the friction of his way. This was all that he could think about now. This giving her pleasure like no pleasure she’d known.

Again he reached her clit. Again he stopped, teased with a single butterfly kiss of his finger to her flesh. The hand she wasn’t using to support her weight moved to his between her legs.

But he wasn’t having any of that, either. Not until he had more than her body’s attention. “Look at me, Chloe.”

She gave a tiny shake of her head. “I can’t.”

He made as if to pull his hand free from her hold and from her panties. But her fingers, so small, so cool, so insistent on his, made it hard to stick to his guns.

“Chloe. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll give you exactly what you want.” To make his point, he stepped closer, moved his lips to her ear and slid one long finger through her wet folds to the mouth of her sex, then deep inside.

She stifled a cry. His erection seized up; the ache became unbearable, the need for release a tension with a life of its own. His plan was going awry.

The sweet reality was she was responding to his touch,
his
touch, her juices flowing for him, her hand holding him and wanting the pleasure he could so eas
ily give. He wasn’t sure he wanted to make her wait as much as he wanted to make her come.

He fingered her again, this time slipping both his middle and his index fingers deep into her heat. He used his teeth lightly on her earlobe, bathed the nips with the stroke of his tongue.

“You like that?” His fingers eased in, pulled out. His thumb took care of her clit. “You want more?”

“I want you to make me come.” The words were breathed more than spoken.

He felt rather than heard her desperation. One finger pressed forward into the pillow of her G-spot. Her fist tightened over his hand and she shuddered from the inside out.

“Is that what you want? Or maybe this is more of what you need?” He circled his thumb around the hard knot of nerves jutting from between the folds of her sex and drawn as tight as his own erection.

When she whimpered in answer, he found the will to move away and make his demand again.

“Chloe, look at me. I want to see you come. I want to watch your eyes flash. I want to taste it on your skin.” Who was he kidding? “I want to bury my face between your legs and smell you. I want you on my tongue.”

At that, her gaze cut to his. “Some kind of sweet talker, aren’t you, sugar?”

But she kept the eye contact, not even looking away when he slowly started to stroke, moving his fingers to the rhythm of her short choppy breaths. Her eyes expressed everything she was feeling—the fire, the ache, the surprise that she was giving up so much of what he was making her feel.

Putting so much trust into his hands.

What he saw was almost enough to make him believe she was reaching for more than her own completion. That she was giving him a release from his cynicism that anything about this encounter was smart.

She pulled in a sharp breath. He felt it jerk her body away, and then he felt her climax. The walls of her sex clenched around the fingers he had buried deep inside. Moisture rushed down his hand to soak the triangle of her thong.

He vibrated the edge of his palm into the divide of her swollen sex, his fingers feeling her spasms fade even as he pressed his thumb down against her knot of tight nerves. Her own fingertips gouged the back of his hand as she held him still for her finish.