CHAPTER THREE
Lori
Tall, dark, and lethally good-looking with an air of power. That’s this man, who’s now set his sights on me. I watch him close the space between us, his stride long and calculated. A panther on the prowl, hunting and I’m the prey. I am not sure there is a woman on this planet that wouldn’t want this man’s attention, even if she felt obligated to decline, for whatever reason. Until this moment, here, now, somehow coming together with him two times in a span of twelve hours, I would have thought I was one of those women. But something has shifted in the air today. Something has changed in me, in my future. I feel it.
He stops at the table and he doesn’t ask if he can sit. He just does. He claims the chair across from me, and the heat in his eyes tells me he plans to claim me with it. “Cole,” he says, and his voice still rough, deep, masculine perfection. And if anything, the charge between us is more powerful than this morning.
“Lori,” I say.
“I thought you couldn’t do drinks tonight, Lori?”
“Maybe I just didn’t want to do drinks with you.”
His lips, which are full, beautiful lips that I shouldn’t be looking at, quirk at the sides. “Is that how it is?” he asks, amusement in his blue eyes.
“I haven’t decided,” I say, because he’s a man who consumes a woman, and I can’t afford to be consumed.
“Then I consider that a win.”
“How is that?” I query.
“This morning you said no,” he points out. “Now you’re not sure.”
“How are you even here?” I ask. “People don’t run into each other two times in a day. Are you stalking me?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“That’s not an answer,” I point out.
“I have business in the area, and my days tend to turn into nights.”
“What type of law do you practice?” I ask.
“Am I that readable or do you just know the area of town and assume I’m a lawyer?”
“Both.”
He arches a dark brow. “Really? I’m that readable.”
“Really.”
“Then tell me what you see,” he orders, lifting my glass and drinking before offering it back to me.
The question, and the offer of my own drink, that he’s intimately taken it upon himself to share, represents his challenges to me: 1) Am I really as good at reading him, and people, as I’ve indicated, and 2) Am I willing to entertain where this might be leading?
And the thing about a challenge is I like it. I miss it. I haven’t felt it, beyond the drive to just survive, since leaving Stanford. I haven’t let myself feel a lot of things in a very long time. Reading people really is my thing. I take my glass from him, our fingers brushing, heat sparking between us so sharp it’s like a bittersweet blade that cuts, and you somehow want it to keep cutting.
I lean back and drink, assessing him like I would an opponent in a courtroom, like he does his opponents in a courtroom. He settles against the leather back of his chair, waiting, his expression is unreadable. “You’re thirty-five,” I say, setting my glass down. “Criminal lawyer. Ivy League school. Trial experience with a high win ratio. Mid-size firm. Partner. Successful.”
He leans forward. “Do you know who I am?”
“Should I?”
“You tell me,” he presses, a sharpness to him that wasn’t there seconds before.
“Let’s revisit that list of what I know of you. I’ve now decided that you’re more successful than I thought and arrogant enough about that success to believe that everyone, including a random stranger, knows about that success. I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are. I didn’t come here for you.”
“But you’re staying for me?”
“No. I’m staying for me.” But the truth is, if he’s someone I don’t know but should, this could be a mistake. I’ve worked where I worked, and avoided mainstream legal affairs to preserve my image. To ensure when I put my best foot forward, I put it forward right and solid. I should leave, yet I’m still sitting here, letting him study me, assess me, touch me without touching me, because that’s how intense the pull is between us.
He stares at me for a few beats and instead of confirming anything I’ve said about him, he assesses me, “You’re twenty-seven. Ivy League. Fresh out of law school and think you can rule the world.”
Somehow, he sees the person I was, that I want to be again, but I’m not that person. If I go home with him, to a hotel or a home, or whatever, I’m not the person he thinks he’s sleeping with. I’m not this person. I don’t want to pretend to be her. I want to be her and until I can, I won’t. “Don’t you have a flight or something in the morning?”
“Yes,” he says, watching me closely. “Which means we better make tonight count, don’t you think?”
He doesn’t live here. He can’t become a complication. He can’t hurt me and yet I’m still not the person he thinks I am. It shouldn’t matter. It won’t matter when we’re naked, but tomorrow it will. I know it will.
“I should let you rest.” I stand up, grab my briefcase, where I’ve also stuffed my purse, and I don’t wait on him. I dart away and damn it, I can smell him; that same evergreen, musky male scent, that just makes me want to roll around in it and get lost. I exit to the lobby, and dart right when I would normally go left.
I’ve just turned the corner to a quiet, deserted street to cut back to the subway when a hand catches my wrist and I whirl around to find myself facing Cole. “What just happened?”
“Now I think you really are stalking me,” I accuse, while the heat where he grips me rides up my arm and over my chest.
“Call it what you want,” he says, “but I’m not letting you run again when we clearly want each other.”
“You really are arrogant.”
“Yes. I am. But I’m also not wrong. I’ll be back next week.”
“I don’t want to know that,” I say. “I don’t want to know you.”
He arches a dark brow, the moonlight catching on the renewed challenge in his eyes. “No?”
“No,” I say, but even to my own ears, I do not sound convincing. I do want to know him. It’s just the wrong time. The wrong place.
Suddenly though, his hand is at the back of my head, and he’s stepping into me, his big body framing my body, and then this stranger’s mouth, this gorgeous stranger’s mouth, is now on my mouth. His lips are firm, demanding, and yet somehow a gentle seduction. He’s kissing me, tongue licking into my mouth in a deep, drugging stroke, followed by another. I moan softly, and any will I had to resist is gone. I sink into the taste of him, drinking him in, and he tastes like cream and whiskey, and sin and satisfaction. I melt into the hard wall of his body, and he is so damn hard everywhere, and yet, this is the easiest thing I’ve done in months. The smell of him, that evergreen, musk, and man scent consuming me, drugging me. I don’t want it to end, and my fingers close around his tie, and for these moments, nothing matters but him, this, now.
He rotates me and presses me against the wall, and I swear I want him here on the street, when that’s ridiculous. I don’t want time to think. I don’t want time to find logic again, but that won’t be easy to do anyway. His lips have left mine but he’s caging me. His powerful thighs framing mine. His fists on the wall on either side of me. “I’m going to take you home and then you’re going to give me your number so that we can arrange part two of that kiss.”
Reality. Now he’s trying to bring me back to reality. I don’t want to go there and while I’m not a shy person, I go far bolder than is my norm. “I don’t need to be seen home,” I say, “and if you want to fuck me, why wait?”
“Never rush anything that feels good and different.”
“I’m not different.”
“And yet, you are. And I don’t do different. I just fuck and move on, yet, I can’t seem to want that to be this. I can’t not do this.”
“You don’t know me enough to say that.”
“I want to know you.” He says those words low, almost guttural.
“Why?”
“There’s the question I need answered. Do you want to know me?”
“No,” I lie, despite hating lies.
He leans in close, his hand back at my waist, scorching me, branding me, his cheek against my cheek. “Liar,” he whispers by my ear, and that whisper, his warm breath on my neck and ear, shivers a path through every inch of me.
My hand goes to his chest, and I can feel his heart thundering beneath my palm, radiating up my arm. I don’t remember ever responding like this to any man, ever, in my life. Certainly not the one I’d once thought I’d love. But this isn’t love. This is just plain lust. “This isn’t about knowing you.”
He pulls back and looks at me. “And yet it is. Where do you live?”
“I’m not telling you.”
He studies me several intense beats, and then takes my hand. “Come with me.” But he doesn’t move. He waits for me to agree.
“Where?”
“To fuck. Isn’t that what you want?”