Project Virgin (2 page)

Knowing my mother, she’d blame it on my father and then use the call as an opportunity to complain about their divorce. Again. All these years later.

“That’s a ridiculous, incredibly unserious name.”

“Because
Damon
is so run-of-the-mill and staid? The John Smith of our time?”

He grinned and I felt it like a brilliant
punch between my legs, even as I registered that yet again, I was talking to him disrespectfully—and this time I was so much
closer
to him while I did it. His hand on my elbow kept me
right there
next to that stunning body of his that was clearly put on this earth to stop people around him, to make them all gape and sigh and perform exaggerated double takes as he strode across the lobby of our
building. None of which he appeared to notice.

He was like something out of a fairy tale, glimmering and glorious, and I was on a fast track to getting myself fired. Somehow, while he was touching me, that didn’t seem to matter as much as it should.

“I like spirit, Scottie,” he said, sounding hot and lazy and the kind of amused that made my breasts feel much too tight against the bra I wore.
I would have sworn he knew it. There was something dark in his gaze, something predatory and much too pleased. “I reward it.”

I didn’t dare ask how.

*

Damon took to
his phone on the car ride out of the city, barking out orders and conferring with his co-counsel on other cases. I surreptitiously checked mine, not surprised that I had to scroll through a series
of texts from Alexander, begging me to change my mind the way I always had before. I deleted them, wishing I could delete him and our pointless history with the same ease.

Threw him out AT LAST
, I texted Holly. As my best friend, she’d been agitating for exactly this outcome since approximately my third, sexless date with Alexander back in college.
Have celebrated by making an ass of myself in
front of Damon Patrick.

HALLELUJAH!!
she texted back almost immediately.
Screw Alexander.

Then, before I could reply with the obvious answer, that I’d been attempting to do that for six years to no avail because he liked to give long speeches about “romantically saving ourselves” while banging everything that moved, she texted again.

Do you mean hot Damon Patrick, subject of a million fantasies,
including many of mine? Including the one with the wild horses and the barbarian throne?

I was careful not to laugh out loud and draw Damon’s attention back to me. A quick glance assured me that he was making a series of assenting noises into his phone and frowning out his window from the seat beside me, so I thought it was safe to text back.

The very same.

Fuck HIM,
she ordered me.
I mean
that literally.

Sure,
I wrote.
I’ll get right on that.

I’m serious.
I could see Holly’s face as if she was sitting in the car with me, frowning at me because I never took her advice and she thought my entire life would turn into nothing but rainbows and cartwheels if just once, I did. Trouble was, her version of advice was always completely insane.
Could there be a better rebound in all the
land?

Right,
I texted back, rolling my eyes as I did it.
Because nothing would make up for wasting YEARS OF MY LIFE on a lying, cheating douchebag more than handing over MY VIRGINITY to the hottest, supposedly dirtiest man in San Francisco, who also happens to be MY BOSS!

“I don’t know that it would make up for anything,” Damon murmured silkily from beside me, making my blood run cold and then
burst into bright, hot flame that I thought might kill me where I sat. “But it would be fun.”

‡

I
had two
options at that point. I could faint and die right there where I sat too close to him on the smooth leather back seat, or I could brazen it out.

I went with the one that involved breathing, however labored.

“That would be awkward,” I said primly, tucking my phone away as if that would erase what he’d read.
What he’d said.

What was echoing around inside of me, glaring and neon, like an invitation.

“Unlikely,” he said, and I was sure that was laughter in his voice, mixed in with that stark sexual confidence he wore with such ease it seemed as much a part of him as his broad shoulders, his hard thighs.

It was like a blaze of fire in me.

“And completely inappropriate,” I said quickly, nervously,
feeling more like a mouse in the presence of a very large cat than I ever had before. I actually didn’t think I’d
ever
felt like that before.

“That is sadly true,” he agreed, but in the same amused tone.

This couldn’t possibly be happening. But I fought to pull myself together, reminding myself that I wasn’t some brainless twit fluttering through my life no matter what my behavior today might
have suggested to the contrary. I’d fought long and hard for what I had: my law degree, my place at Granger & Knox. Even a place at this deposition with a lawyer of Damon’s caliber.

Alexander had taken enough from me. Or, worse, I’d given it all to him. I wouldn’t give him this, too.

“Mr. Patrick,” I began, calling on everything I had to sound cool and calm. The dedicated student who had clawed
her way from Billings, Montana into the life she’d dreamed of, one straight A at a time. The efficient lawyer I was supposed to be now. “I’m horrified that you saw that text. I have no excuse for it and I’ll understand completely if you don’t want me to work with you again. My behavior today has been completely unprofessional.”

“Relax, Scottie,” he said, and the way he said my name seemed to
dance along my skin like a flicker of candlelight. “And call me Damon, by all means. After all, we’re practically best friends now. I even know you’re a virgin.”

I could have laughed then. I could see that he wanted me to laugh, to play it off the way I usually did. Because who’d ever heard of a twenty-six year old virgin? Unicorns were more likely to start cantering over the Golden Gate Bridge
and into downtown San Francisco, perhaps in matching tutus and tiaras to better blend into the Castro. My virginity had been my secret shame for years. I’d been embarrassed about it when I was still a junior in college and hadn’t quite managed to lose it the way everyone else had in high school—and then I’d met Alexander, who’d claimed he thought it was
romantic
to wait.

I’d convinced myself
I thought so too, as I’d read increasingly hotter books of erotica in the dark while he was out at night, supposedly “searching his soul.” I’d convinced myself it was
worth it
even though I still felt empty no matter what I read, no matter what toys I used or how often I used them. I’d convinced myself waiting
meant something.

But the truth was, I was still a virgin, I didn’t want to be, and
now the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on knew it. It wasn’t as if things could get any worse, could they? I mean, aside from it all snowballing, year after year, and me ending up like Steve Carrell in that movie, forty years old and counting and still
completely
untouched.

I didn’t care what Damon Patrick, who had probably had sex more times
today
than I would in my
entire life,
thought, I told
myself. I hated
everyone
who wasn’t pathetically untouched and unfulfilled, like me.

“Does that bother you?” I asked him, tilting my chin up as if I wanted to throw down and get in a fistfight. His blue eyes gleamed in a kind of sharp delight. “Because I know it scares some men. Makes them all wiggy and weird.”

“I can assure you I have never been
wiggy
or
weird
in my entire life.” He paused,
and that was when I realized that he’d turned toward me, his suit jacket open so I could see the blue of the shirt beneath. It made his eyes seem unholy and fierce and clung to every mouthwatering plane of his absolutely perfect torso. “How old are you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin.”

He only waited, a certain hot patience in that gaze.

“I turned twenty-six a few months ago,”
I gritted out.

“And yet you were engaged,” he said after a long pause, during which I debated flinging myself out of the car window and into a blessed death by the side of the freeway, which had to be less painful than being the focus of all his dark blue attention. “To a Catholic priest?”

“Actually, he was just a liar.”

“Daddy issues, then?”

“Are you asking if my ex had them or if I do?”

“It wasn’t really a question.”

I thought about my father, the self-proclaimed sporting goods king of eastern Montana who was also a grown man who preferred to be called
Billy,
as if that
y
kept him young. That or the fact he was constitutionally incapable of remaining faithful to any of the women he’d married, most notably my still-embittered mother. To say nothing of his current wife—the woman
Dad had met at Christmas one year when she’d been my older brother Jesse’s girlfriend. “Awkward” didn’t begin to cover it.

“Fair point,” I muttered.

“It’s not unheard of to save yourself for marriage, even in San Francisco,” he said, and it stunned me that his voice was soft then, completely devoid of his usual smirkiness and edge. That was worse. Much worse. It seemed to curl around something
deep inside of me, then pull taut. “Some might even call it romantic.”

I hated that word.

“Sure. If both parties are saving themselves for marriage, instead of one blind idiot leaving herself on a shelf while the other goes on an extended tour of all things sexual, all over the place, with literally anyone who would have him.”

Not that I was bitter, like my mother. My only solace was that I’d
found all those pictures the dumbass had uploaded to our shared file server and had thus saved myself from actually marrying Alexander and having children with him the way Mom had done with Dad, binding herself to a worthless man forever.

It was a small and arid solace, sure. But it would do.

Meanwhile, I thought was my imagination that Damon had moved closer. That his gaze seemed more intent
on mine—sharper somehow. My breathing went shallow and the last thing in the world I wanted to think about was Alexander.

This is insane,
some still-lucid part of me exclaimed in my head.
This isn’t a stranger in a bar—this is
Damon
freaking
Patrick.
Why are you talking about this with him?

“But no worries,” I said brightly. “My engagement is over and soon my years in virgin prison will be,
too. Problem solved.”

An expression I couldn’t read moved over his face then, and for some reason I braced myself—but his phone rang into the tension between us, insistent and shrill.

He held my gaze for one sharp ring, then another.

“Hold that thought,” he told me, and then he answered the call.

Leaving me feeling restless and unsatisfied. As if I’d dodged a bullet.

And while I knew I should
feel relieved, I didn’t.

*