Chapter Three
Iris
“You can’t be serious, can you?” Allison said.
The surprise was clear in her voice as she raked her fingers through her dark pixie cut. She’d had her hair in dreadlocks for the last year at school but had gone drastic with her new ‘do. I liked it; the shorter look definitely screamed out about Allison’s quirky nature. She was a great friend, but sometimes I had to admit that she seemed more like she should be in the journalism program at Trinity University than the business school. She was as intense as they came, and she never seemed to settle for half-truths or hidden details. It was good to have someone that honest in your life.
Usually.
Maybe not when you were exhausted from the biggest blooper of your life and also trying to figure out the weird vibes with your boss. I had no idea what had happened today. I was glad that I hadn’t gotten fired and that, as far as I could tell, Mr. O’Brien hadn’t placed a disappointed call home to my father. Oh, trust me, if someone had brought shame onto Seth Kilshimer, they’d hear about it. God knew I spent enough time being lectured on how I had to be perfect in business school here so I’d be ready to take over the family real estate ventures back home. It was all I really felt most of the time, that pressure from my parents. Well, mostly from my dad.
Still, everything had felt so weird.
Mr. O’Brien had been angry at first and then just not…
He’d been downright sweet, offering to walk me to the nurses’ room himself and letting me get lunch on him. In the end, I’d been too nervous it was some kind of trick, so I’d just opted for a salad. However, I couldn’t explain any of it, not the one-eighty in his attitude and certainly not the tender way he’d stroked my cheek. I was his intern, nothing more. It just hadn’t felt like it in his office.
That’s what a stupid girl thinks, someone who loses her head and sees something not actually there.
I swallowed, pushed all those thoughts away, and took a deep sip of my cosmo.
“Seriously,” Allison pressed even as the club’s laser lights made her dark skin seem almost black. “You fell on your butt?”
“I fell to my knees,” I corrected. Then I thought better of it. “Okay, not that it’s much better. I might have been a complete mess.”
“No, go back to the bit where he’s cleaning off your knee and stroking your cheek like some total Romeo and Juliet shite,” she said.
“It’s not Romeo anything. Mr. O’Brien isn’t that much younger than my dad. I mean, they went to an MBA program at Harvard together.”
“But a connection!” Allison chimed back, spinning that little pink umbrella from her tropical drink in her hand. “That’s the craziest thing, right? You have this electric moment in a room, this Earth-shaking moment.”
“I did not use the phrase ‘Earth-shaking.’”
“But you did say you felt like you were gonna fall over. That’s swooning. You totally were swooning for him, but it’s not meant to be because of who your families are. If that isn’t Romeo and Juliet in a nutshell, then I don’t know what is.”
“And they got poisoned and stabbed by the end of the play.” I fished a maraschino cherry from my drink and popped it into my mouth. “It’s stupid. I had to be reading more into what happened than, you know, what was actually going on. It was a crazy moment of gratitude not to be fired. Anything else sounds like I’m some sad little girl wishing for more.”
“First of all, you’re a shrewd businesswoman already and a good judge of character. If you think there was a moment, Iris, then there was a moment. Second, maybe there was another reason besides a favor to your dad that Mr. O’Brien let you on at the company.”
I blew a long, black section of hair out of my eyes. “Maybe, but I already have one strike against me because everyone sees my last name and knows who my dad is, even across the pond. I want people to take me seriously. Okay, so nepotism helps get me in the door, but I want to prove myself. Even if there’s some fleeting attraction thing with Mr. O’Brien, well, no one is ever going to take me seriously if I’m just Callum O’Brien’s newest plaything. You have to agree with me there.”
Allison shrugged. “If I’m supposed to be your cheerleader for all things reasonable and sane, girlie, then you are in trouble. I’m more about following your old ticker, and your heart is definitely going pitter pat for a certain CEO we both barely know and are semi-charged with getting coffee for.”
I gulped. “You wouldn’t tell anyone else what happened today, would you?”
“No, never!” She put an arm around my shoulders. “I’ve been taking care of you since you were a scared freshman on the other side of the room three years ago. No way I’m letting that magic moment—”
“I had to be imagining it.”
“That magic moment,” she insisted. “Between you and Mr. O’Brien become nothing more than watercooler bullshit. You need to see where this leads.”
“To my dad murdering him and sending me to a convent? That’s the good possibility.”
Allison finished her drink and smiled as a tall Goth type made his way over to our table in the noisy club. That never failed to surprise me either. Allison was always the type to grab life by the horns and never let go. One day, she preferred the rugged footballers of the city, the next it was the intellectuals on campus. Currently, she was going through a Goth guy phase. She said emo types had the best mopey sex, which, who knew that was a thing? Anyway, as Allison sauntered out onto the dance floor with a guy who was clearly not aware The Cure was no longer popular, I figured my night was pretty much done. She’d find her way over to that dude’s apartment, and I’d call a cab and get a good bit of sleep before work tomorrow.
Normally, I wouldn’t come out to a club, let alone one as ruckus as Hooligan’s, but I needed to think, to do anything to try and analyze the weird situation today. Getting a cosmo—okay, maybe three—with Allison was a desperate effort to clear my brain. The plan had been simple: go out, talk through how crazy my thoughts were, and get a bit trashed to help wash the day’s events out of my brain.
As I stood, wobbling a bit on my much shorter kitten heels, I started weaving through the dance floor and toward the exit. It was then that someone grabbed my wrist. Going stone still, I prepared to face some major creeper who was touching me without asking permission first. Sometimes, there were guys at the clubs who had to be told no a bit more forcefully before they wandered over to someone else on the dance floor. That was nothing new. What was?
I turned and found myself standing face-to-face—or, well, chest since he was so tall—with one Callum O’Brien.
The lights in the club played over his hair, having the same effect on his jet-black locks as they’d had across Allison’s skin. Sharp, perfectly chiseled cheekbones highlighted blue eyes the color of the Arctic Ocean, and it all led to a square jaw with just the hint of a dimple in his chin. I took in a sharp breath, and heat flared through me. Swallowing hard, I drew my legs closer together in an effort to steady them.
“Mr. O’Brien?”
His eyes were a bit unfocused, and it occurred to me then that I wasn’t the only one of us who’d been drinking. “It’s Callum, luv, just Callum.”
“But at work…”
He waved his free arm around the club. “We’re not bloody well at the office, are we?”
My voice came out huskier than I meant for it to as I replied, as if it were someone else’s. “No, I don’t think we are.”
My eyes trailed down to where his fingers, so long and thick, encircled my wrist. He wasn’t holding me tightly and, despite the hungry look in his eyes, I just knew he’d let me leave if I bolted then. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I did, this deep feeling in my bones. It was my choice whatever happened between me and Mr. O’Brien…between me and Callum. I only had to make the choice.
Rationally…
But before my brain could scream at me about how many reasons this was a crazy, terrible idea, I was leaning into his chest and wrapping my hand around his neck. My fingers traced over the hair at the nape of his neck and, God, it was so soft. He smelled of cinnamon, a spicy aftershave mixed with his natural musk. Callum leaned into me, and his erection was obvious between us. His length was pressing up against my stomach, hard and probably aching already.
He smirked at me, a look that should be outlawed in all fifty states and the entirety of Europe. It was definitely a look that could convince a person to commit all sorts of crimes. To be more than they dared. To be more than I dared.
He wrapped his other arm around the small of my back and leaned into me, his dick still hot and hard between us. I swayed with him to the rhythm of a slow pop song I couldn’t name. I’d never kept up with all the UK chart toppers. It didn’t matter. The only thing I wanted right then was to be in his arms. The heat was spreading through my belly and down to my core, making my clit throb too. The warmth of the cosmos was rocketing through my veins too, like liquid magma unleashed before erupting from a volcano. My heart thudded so heavily in my chest that I almost thought it would break my breastbone.
“I don’t think we should do this,” I said.
He leaned his mouth against my ear, his lips teasing the rim of my earlobe. “Don’t think, Iris, luv, just be.”
“That’s probably what you tell everyone.”
“It’s how I live my life,” he whispered back before pulling his head away from me.
I looked up into his eyes and was sure I had the right witty retort to jab back at him. Or I had been sure. When I stared into those Arctic depths, I was lost. Maybe a thousand women before me had felt the same way. No, definitely that many had. After I’d gotten home from work earlier today, I’d Googled him, and his reputation in every tabloid wasn’t hard to trace. He was everything I shouldn’t want—older, experienced when I was just a virgin, and of course, he was my father’s best friend. There was every reason not to fall for him.
And yet, the only thing that mattered was how badly my clit throbbed, how much I craved him like a heroin addict hunting for her next hit.
“I…”
Then he brought his head down again, his lips so close to mine. I could already taste the hint of scotch on his breath.
But before our lips touched, a drunk idiot from the university—some bulky dude I recognized from an old chem class I’d had to take—bumped into both of us, spilling his beer all over me. I squealed as the warm, frothy liquid soaked into my dress. The spell that Callum had woven over me was broken.
Blinking back at him, I shook my head. “God, I have to go.”
He reached for me. “Iris, wait. I can get you to my place. We’ll call for my personal dry cleaner. Your dress is going to be ruined with that porter soaking into it.”
I shook my head so hard that I had to look like one of those bobblehead dolls. “I have to leave.” Dashing out of there double-time, I tried to pretend that I didn’t hear him calling out my name. That idiot from my old class might have just saved me from making the most reckless mistake of my life.