Chapter Twelve
Becky didn’t like being in the office so late. She almost never was. Once every other year or so, some crazy emergency request would come through for a gigantic client, but that kind of stuff hardly happened in firms like P&G.
Of course she wasn’t working now. No, she was looking for her cell phone. It wasn’t in the bottom of her purse, where all her other possessions went to die, and it wasn’t anywhere in her car. She knew this because Dakota had driven to her house, pissed that she wasn’t responding to her texts, and made Becky look for it there.
She knew she’d had it earlier in the day, so the only other place it could be was at work. But she never left her phone at work.
Of course she didn’t usually run out of the office when she heard a lawyer speaking to Anne out at the reference desk. But these were special circumstances. The voice had belonged to Foster, and she’d already wasted too much of her day waiting to see if he’d throw her some kind of flirty bone. She had some pride, dammit.
And she had a phone. Right there on her desk. And there were six messages from Dakota with varying degrees of annoyance at her flaking out on their dinner plans. She sent her a reply now, proving that she wasn’t, in fact, ignoring her, and that she’d demonstrated it by showing up at the office at ten at night in her yoga pants and at-home hair. Why hadn’t she just remembered that she was all flustered when she left because she’d heard Foster talking to Anne and she hadn’t wanted to see him so she’d snuck out as fast as she could?
Why she didn’t want to see him, she didn’t know. She’d just heard his voice and run.
Leaving her phone behind.
Well, as far as the end of the world went, this probably wasn’t going to contribute too much to the apocalypse. Although she did owe Dakota an apology.
Found my phone. You are forgiven.
Is that an apology?
Yes.
You’re spending way too much time with lawyers.
Ha ha, she thought, and slipped the phone into her bag. She had to get out of there. She didn’t like being at the office with no one else there. Sure there were security guards and cleaners, but when the library was empty like this, with nothing but shelves offering plenty of places for serial killers to hide . . .
She froze at the door to her office. There it was again. A noise. Coming from the stacks.
She should call 911. She should call downstairs for the security guard. She should get the hell out of here because there was clearly a serial killer . . . singing?
She cocked her head, listening. The singing went from mumbled humming to practically shouting the words. She recognized the words—she’d sung that emo hit many times in the car with her friends back in high school. That wasn’t the tune she’d sung, on account of it being totally not the way the song was meant to sound. But, well, when you feel it, you feel it.
She was biologically incapable of passing up an opportunity to razz someone on their embarrassing behavior—even if it meant razzing a serial killer—so she walked toward the back of the library, prepared to sneak up on the cleaning guy and high-five him for his attempt to hit those high notes.
But as she got nearer, she saw it wasn’t the cleaning guy. It was a guy working at the table squirreled away back there, the one she used when she had to hide from people and get stuff done. The table was covered in papers and there, with his back to her, singing his heart out . . .
It was Foster.
Foster wasn’t a good singer.
She fumbled for her phone because she was a jerk and started to take a video. She didn’t plan on doing anything with the video, except just maybe look at it sometimes when she felt the world was against her. She could imagine the comfort she would take from watching this legal genius, one of the finest minds in his field, bellowing—there was no other word for it—about anger and heartache.
So much comfort.
God, he was a terrible singer.
And he was really into it. Head tilted back to reach the high notes—which he didn’t, bless his heart—eyes squeezed shut against the pain. He was really feeling it. And then he started feeling the drum solo, which had him banging his pencil against the desk. His gusto, though, got him tangled in his earbuds, and one slipped out.
Becky should have taken that moment to slip into the stacks, to sneak out without Foster noticing. She really should have. But as he turned to retrieve his lost headphones, he saw her.
And he froze.
She smiled weakly, holding back her laughter.
“Hi,” he said over the tinny refrain of the heartbroken singer. He fumbled for his phone and turned the music off. He cleared his throat and turned back to her. “Uh, I don’t suppose you got here just this second?”
“Nope.”
“So . . . you saw that?”
“I saw it. And I heard it.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yup, of course you did.”
“And I recorded it.”
“I’ll give you twelve million dollars to destroy that recording.”
“You’re not a very good singer, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I turn the music up, to drown out the sound of my own terrible voice. What are you doing here anyway?”
She held up her phone. “Left it on my desk. What are you doing here?”
“Document review.”
“No, I mean, what are you doing in the library?”
“Couldn’t concentrate in my office. It’s too quiet.”
“Oh.” She walked toward the table and leaned against a corner. “And your headphones don’t work in your office?”
“They do, but the junior associates are in there.”
“More document review?”
“So much document review.”
“So you came up to the nice, quiet library so you could sing your heart out in peace.”
“It helps me concentrate.”
“You looked really focused on that document.”
“I am. I was. I was taking a break.”
“A song break.”
“Yes, and after the song’s over, I’ll be able to refocus.”
“Ah. So . . . I should let you get back to it.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t move, and he wasn’t giving her any signals that she should move. “So, uh, what have you been up to tonight?”
“I was supposed to meet Dakota for dinner and I was waiting for her to text me.”
“But she didn’t?”
“Oh, she did. But I didn’t get it because my phone was here. And I got all pissy with her because I thought she was blowing me off and it turned into kind of a thing.”
“You guys in a fight?”
She snorted. “No. We’re not children. I apologized.” Sort of. “But it’s too late for dinner.”
“Is it?” He looked at his watch. “Damn. No wonder I’m hungry. What did those damn juniors do with all the food? Did you eat?”
She shook her head. She shouldn’t have dinner with him. She should go home. She’d just come here to get her phone. She had some soup to reheat.
But her perch on the edge of the table had her thighs really close to his hands and that got her all confused. Soup was what her body needed, not his hands.
Soup.
His hand brushed her thigh.
Soup, dammit.
“I think I’ve done all I can for tonight,” he said. He didn’t touch her again, but the look in his eyes said that he very much wanted to.
She did a quick mental assessment:
1) He was a genius, and therefore not a good match for her.
2) She was looking for a good match and she had to focus on not wasting her time with bad matches.
3) But even if he wasn’t a good match, there was no reason why she couldn’t enjoy the parts of him that did match. The parts that weren’t his brain. The parts that were muscles. And. Other parts.
4) But if she kept giving in to her physical attraction, she was probably putting herself in danger of making another bad match.
5) But he was a genius and she was in no way in the market for a genius match. She could safely continue their physical-only relationship without the danger of falling in love.
6) But since it was only physical, it should be no big deal to be responsible and take her phone and go home and eat her soup.
That’s what decided her, in the end.
Nobody should give up sexual fulfillment for soup.
* * *
Becky sat back further on the desk, and it was all Foster could do to keep his hands from following her. Then she spread her legs so they were on either side of his.
If he hadn’t spent the last six hours painstakingly nitpicking the piles of paper on the table, he would have brushed them aside and ravished her right there.
“Hold on,” he said and stood up to make quick piles of his papers. Then he piled them neatly on the floor under the table, out of harm’s way.
“OK,” he said, standing up. “Sorry, I don’t want you to think I’m not interested, it’s just—”
“Oh, I understand that you’re interested.” She tugged him closer by the waist of his pants. Yeah, that thing probably gave him away.
“So I’m not giving out mixed signals?” he asked, planting his hands on either side of her hips.
“Nope,” she said, shaking her head so her lips rubbed gently across his.
“Good,” he whispered, and then it was on.
He crushed his mouth to hers and felt her arms go tight around his shoulders. He circled her waist with his arms and pulled her close to him, close enough to feel the evidence. She gasped and he said a prayer of thanks to the gods of thin yoga pants.
They kissed and necked and grabbed and squeezed until they were both panting. His shirt was half undone and hers halfway over her head. Jesus, he needed her.
“Do you have a—” she asked, but she got cut off because he put his hand down those yoga pants. She swore into his neck. “Please tell me you have a condom.”
He stopped moving.
She wiggled a little, then whimpered. “No condom?”
He shook his head.
“Not even, like, tucked away in a secret stash in your office?”
He rested his forehead against hers. “What kind of perv do you think I am?”
She kissed him. “A terrible one.”
“Terrible?” He kissed her back.
“A good perv would have a condom.”
He felt her smile against his lips and he took her head between his hands so he could kiss her deeper because he loved that sassy mouth.
“We should stop,” she whispered.
He sucked on her neck.
“Foster.”
He squeezed her breasts.
“Foster, please.”
He kissed a trail down her chest, down her stomach, down, down, taking her yoga pants and her panties with him.
“Foster, what are you doing?” She was totally breathless, but she figured it out soon enough. And as he tossed her legs over his shoulders, he heard her muffled gasps and showed her that he was a damn good perv.