Chapter Seven
Michelle
It had to be the alcohol. There was no other reason for it in her mind. She shouldn’t have turned her opinion around so quickly.
They were almost back at the lab now, and her ears were still burning at some of the things Kase had just told her he’d dreamt of doing to her. Most of it was a little too rough for her, but the one about the hood of his truck under the Northern Lights in the middle of a field had started a reaction in her body that she couldn’t ignore. It had been a long time, and alcohol wasn’t helping the situation one bit.
“Where is everyone?” Kase asked when they entered the lab.
“On lunch. We all usually go together,” she explained. “They’ll be back in twenty-five, thirty minutes maybe.” She winked at him, suddenly feeling flirtatious.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. If playing along could help secure the investment in the lab, then she wouldn’t mind. More money meant they could progress faster, and she could cure her father before it was too late.
If they ever found a working solution in time. With every passing day, that seemed more and more unlikely, but who knew what they could do with Kase’s donation, depending on how big it was. It would have to be sizeable for the board to allow him to come visit the lab, she knew that much. He was the only potential investor who had come by since it opened. That was telling in itself.
The question that remained—could she live with herself, knowing she’d gone along with his advances just to secure money for the lab? It reeked of selling her body. With her size and shape, that was something Michelle had never thought of. It simply had never occurred to her, but now that it did, she felt faint revulsion at the idea, despite her reasons for doing so. No, there were some limits she wasn’t willing to cross.
“What do you suggest we do to fill the downtime?” Kase rumbled, leaning back onto a desk, showing off his thick arm muscles as he supported his upper body with them. It was quite a lovely display.
“I could catch up on the work you pulled me away from earlier,” she suggested, trying to maintain her cool.
He’s so hot. What if I just do it for me? Just use him to get what I want. Is that such a bad thing? If the lab happens to benefit at the same time, great, but man, what a score sleeping with him would be.
The idea of doing this for herself, simply to say she had, and maybe, just maybe, to throw a bit of his medicine back at him later on, appealed to her much more. After all, she could stop flirting with him any time she wanted. It would be easy to cut Kase back out of her life.
“Work sounds so boring. There’s got to be something else to do around here. There are no security cameras; we could definitely have all kinds of fun.” He paused, letting the intent behind his words sink in fully before continuing. “Like a prank. We could prank someone.”
They both knew damn well that pranking someone wasn’t what he had in mind. But it was a good idea, and Michelle decided to run with it. “Yeah. Let’s prank Jacob.” She remembered his comment from earlier about “enjoying” her lunch with Kase. Yes, this would be the perfect revenge.
“Okay, what do you have around here that we can use to prank him with?” Kase pushed off the desk, his shirt pulling tight across his core as he stood upright, momentarily distracting her from her evil plans as he came close.
“Uh.” She stumbled. This was the hard part of pranking someone. Actually coming up with it. “I don’t really know. This isn’t my strong suit, you know. I’m not much of a practical joker.”
“Me neither,” Kase admitted.
“But he deserves it.”
“Why?”
“For teasing me earlier. Didn’t you hear him?”
Her cheeks grew heated at the bluntness of his statement. “Yeah, that.”
“I don’t have any ideas with such short preparation,” Kase said after thinking it over. “But I’m sure between the two of us we can come up with some sort of prank to get him with, don’t you?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. We should dream up something a little more complicated.
“Right. Totally.” Kase sat back against the edge of her desk, no more than a foot away from her. “But that still leaves us with what to do in the meantime, you know? There’s nobody else here for me to talk to besides you, and I’ve already taken my opinion of you.”
“You’re not really going to talk to everyone else, are you?” she asked.
“You bet I am. Have to make sure that the people working here are all good people.”
“They are,” she said defensively. “I hired them all myself. I vouch for them.”
Kase studied her for a moment. “Good enough for me. Come on.” He grabbed her hand and, for the second time that day, hauled her along after him while ignoring her protests.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t reply, just led her along through the desks and into the row of labs at the back of the building.
“What’s back here?” she asked.
“Privacy from your coworkers walking in on us,” he said, turning and pulling her in close.
Michelle’s lungs worked overtime to keep up as blood surged through her body. The sudden proximity to Kase had her heart beating frantically, a dull roar in her ears. What was she doing letting him get this close to her? Only yesterday morning he’d been a piece of her past, and now he was about to kiss her.
That revelation brought her back to the present. He was about to kiss her. Fingers hooked under her jaw, lifting it. Her vision ran up his stomach, over his chest, across his jaw, and finally ended at his lips. Soft. Warm, and oh so deliciously manly.
She remembered their last kiss, outside her house. Memories of how her body reacted to him flowed swiftly through the currents of her system, opening veins and allowing parts of her to swell and grow heated.
“Kase.” She spoke softly, lest anyone hear them, even though she knew the office was empty. They were completely, utterly alone. Nobody would interrupt them. It would be up to her to stop this from happening, and it didn’t look like that was about to happen.
He bent low, all of it happening in slow motion. Michelle gasped, but instead of pulling away, she arched into him, pushing up onto her tiptoes in an attempt to close the distance faster.
With his eyes already half closed, Kase didn’t anticipate this, and her sudden upward momentum threw off his estimate of how far down he had to come, and their noses bashed together painfully.
“Ow,” she yelped at the same moment he hissed in a combination of anger, surprise, and perhaps pain.
“Are you okay?” he asked, stroking her head to remove stray hairs from her face.
“Physically? Sure,” she said, wrinkling her nose and giving it a pinch to try to reset it to normal. “Just a sting. I’m just horribly embarrassed,” she admitted, trying to look away.
Fingers like steel held her jaw tight, keeping it from moving anywhere but back to look at him. “Don’t think about it,” he ordered. “Just go with it.”
“With what?” she asked hoarsely.
Kase thankfully didn’t give her the trite ‘this’ answer, which would have been far too cheesy for her to handle. He did, however, demonstrate with action. Once more he dipped low, and she rose to meet him without thinking.
Their mouths crashed together, and moments later her hands flung around his neck as he grabbed her by the waist and pinned her against the glass wall of the nearest lab. She moaned into him, overcome by the raw power he’d just demonstrated. Michelle was no lightweight, but he held her aloft like a piece of paper.
Gripping the back of his head, she ran her hands over the short, almost buzz-cut-length hair, loving the way it felt sliding underneath her fingertips, sending tiny shivers down her arms. Kase liked it too, because his growl vibrated her entire face in the most wonderful way.
Their lips parted in unison, as if reading each other’s minds, her tongue playfully running over his, darting and dancing with abandon as she slowly gave up control while also giving in. It was just as good as she remembered from before. Being with him, like this, made her entire body burn, aching for more. She wanted him to touch her everywhere, not just her outer legs, where he held her aloft.
Time had no meaning in their embrace. She didn’t know how long had passed, nor did she care. All that mattered was Kase, and how he felt, how his lips tasted and how hard every muscle in his body was while pressed firmly against her.
Neither of them heard the snick of a shoe hitting the ground until it was too late. Someone coughed. They both turned to see Jacob standing nearby. “You two need some privacy,” he said with a masterful grin, and jabbed at a button on the wall.
Later she would argue that it was a yelp of surprise, while Jacob and Kase would argue that she screamed. It didn’t really matter, because Kase shouted as the wall behind them suddenly gave way. Turns out it was actually the door to the lab, and Jacob had opened it, spilling them into a room.
“Down,” she said, and Kase set her on the ground. Glancing at the clock, she winced. “How the hell did we just lose thirty-five minutes?” she complained. “That’s impossible. We were there for maybe five.”
Kase gave her a restrained smile. “Time flies when you’re having fun?” he offered, not being much help.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she moaned, running her hands back over her head, trying to wrangle any stray hairs back into her already unruly ponytail.
“I should go,” Kase said, tugging his shirt down and adjusting his pants to hide the erection she’d had pressed against her for the past thirty-five minutes.
“Okay, I’ll—”
But he was already out of the door to the lab and headed back through the offices before she could say any more.
“Bye?”
Jacob came and leaned on the doorframe. She snapped her fingers at him, stopping his mouth from opening any further. “Not. A. Word,” she snarled, and brushed past him.
Instead of heading back to her desk, she walked deeper into the building. She was such an idiot! Everything was now more complicated because she’d had to go and kiss him, more concerned with getting revenge on him for something that happened five years earlier than she was with ensuring the smooth-functioning of the lab and getting the funding from Kase.
Hopefully she hadn’t cost them too much.