Chapter Two
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Her gaze wanted to look at his fly, to see evidence that he still felt something for her even if it was only desire. Coming here had been a bad idea. She had just been so mad. He had let her walk away, hadn’t called, hadn’t acted like he’d even noticed her departure, then he snuck up and did this? When she was at her rock-bottom lowest?
And taunted her to try squeezing some kind of leniency out of him with sex?
“Sex with me didn’t mean anything to you eight months ago.” She hid her devastation by reaching for her bag. It only held her wallet and phone, keys and a lipstick, but it felt as though it weighed a million pounds. Standing took nearly everything out of her. “I’m quite sure it won’t be enough to stop you doing whatever the hell you want now.”
She lifted her gaze in time to see something flare behind his own. Something hard and metallic that flashed like sunlight off a slashing sword.
“She kissed me,” he said with a flinty smile. “It lasted all of three seconds. You saw the whole thing. Does the good doctor know you’re still nursing jealousy over that?”
She snorted, looking out his floor to ceiling windows, across the tops of lesser skyscrapers under the gray skies of Chicago. Jealousy didn’t come close to how much she wanted to murder all women with bronze lipstick and catty eyeliner who wore knowing smirks and tennis bracelets gifted to them by the man before her.
“You let it happen even though you knew I was watching,” she said, working to keep her voice flat. “To demonstrate that I had no claim on you.” She had to lift her chin to look down her nose at him, which spoiled the effect, but she gave it her best. “You wanted me to know I had no real influence over you or your actions. So what would be the point in trying to exert any today?”
He didn’t contradict her.
A barely acknowledged flame of hope—maybe that he’d been trying to make her jealous—gutted and doused.
“Is that the real reason you left?” He wasn’t an easy man to read, but she’d made a study of it in the time she had worked for him. When he was very still like that, it meant she had his full attention. That was always a little unnerving. “Because I did try to persuade you to stay.”
Her heart was aching like an overworked muscle. It jammed in her chest as a choked-back laugh. He had offered her money, not something worth staying for.
“I left because it was a good career move.” One that also protected her father’s political career. “You just made it easy to leave.”
“Not a mistake I’ll make again,” he vowed.
She had to remind herself he wasn’t talking about her or them and made herself break the eye contact, ignoring that her face warmed.
“Look.” She shouldered her purse strap. “I just came to tell you that I’m onto you. I’ve put the rest of the stockholders on alert. I have learned and I will not make this easy for you.”
“I would be disappointed if you did. No, no,” he added, catching at her arm as she started to turn away. “Allow me to demonstrate that I’m a quick study.”
“You’re not going to make it easy for me to leave?” she guessed, delicately removing her arm from his light hold, trying not to reveal that he’d sent tingles of awareness all the way up her shoulder and into her breast. “That’s called unlawful confinement.”
“Only if you don’t want to be here.” His gaze came up as though he’d followed that streak of sensation all the way to her tightened nipple. “I’m going to make it easy for you to stay. Come back, all the way back, and we’ll talk about what will happen to Cutting Edge.”
“‘All the way,’” she quoted. “Into your bed? It’s crowded there.”
“Come on. You know your wild enthusiasm never left room for anyone else.” He smiled like a shark. “Not many women match my appetite. I always liked that about you.”
Her strained veins rang with the staccato beat of her treacherous pulse.
She had always thought her insatiable hunger for him was a little vulgar, but he never stopped praising it—maybe because he knew what an advantage it gave him over her.
Because she was tempted, barely managing to sound disparaging as she said, “Please tell me you’re not threatening to destroy a much needed medical start-up so you can get laid. You’re not that hard up.”
“True,” he allowed with a shrug. “But I’m going to acquire it either way. We might as well enjoy ourselves while we hammer out the fine points.”
So much for the hope that he was targeting Cutting Edge to manipulate her back into an affair. Of course he wasn’t. Griffen didn’t have to go to these lengths to get a woman. Usually he just snapped his fingers. That was why she’d been so devastated when he’d let her go. It wouldn’t have taken much effort on his part to keep her, but he hadn’t put himself out at all.
He sure as hell wouldn’t go to this trouble to get her back.
“How did Cutting Edge even wind up on your radar?” She hadn’t told him where she was going. On purpose. There was too much at stake.
He adopted his poker face. “I was curious.” He glanced down to move the water bottle away from its position near his hip. “You’re smart and so am I. I knew that whatever you were doing would be a growth situation, somewhere that you knew you could have an impact. It is and you have. You’ve tended it into a nice, plump piece of fruit. How could I resist picking and eating it?”
“So I led you there. And then you”—she waved at the offending water bottle—“sent in a spy and acted while the guard was asleep.” Only Drake and her assistant knew she’d been in the hospital. Everyone else had been told she was on vacation and working online, hoping to ward off a stealth move like this. Drake had promised to monitor the stocks, but he was hopeless once he was in the testing phase at work. “Damn you, Griffen.”
Now she felt like this was her fault, not because Griffen wanted her, or even Cutting Edge. He was Griffen, genetically programmed to want and to get. She had left tracks to the treasure and now he was plundering.
“Don’t feel too guilty,” he chided, reaching across to tuck two fingertips beneath the narrow strap of her purse, easing it off her shoulder. “If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. At least you know this devil. Come here. Get reacquainted with him.”
Damn. Oh, damn. She knew she should tell him to go to hell, but she just wanted one taste. It had been so long. If she was honest with herself, she’d admit that was why she was here, not on the end of a phone. She had wanted to see him, see if the reaction was still there. No one made her feel the way Griffen did. She hadn’t even bothered finding someone to try.
*
Griffen remembered every little signal of desire she had ever projected. He had injected them like heroin—all those parted lips and panting breaths and quivering lashes. The pebbled nipples and soft swallows. The dampness he would bet every last cent he owned was showing on her French lingerie under her skirt.
Her posture made tiny adjustments, shoulders softening, neck exposing a fraction more, pheromones releasing between them so they started to feel drunk. He wasn’t imagining it. She was staring at his mouth like it was her last chance at salvation.
He didn’t even have to touch her. He started to lean in and she met him, releasing a little sobbing noise as she stepped forward and dug fingertips into his shoulders, came up on tiptoes and crushed her mouth under his.
These plump, bee-stung lips of hers haunted his dreams. He claimed them without reservation, hooking a hand behind her neck and feasting.
Then, as he felt her surrender, he straightened off the desk and pulled her into his body, relishing the press of her full breasts, the soft give of her stomach against his wood, the way she leaned in as though too weak to stand.
He didn’t know what it was about this woman that drew him so inexorably. Her fastidious demeanor, her cool intelligence, her sharp wit? The way she was wound up tight most of the time, but brought all that same passion to bed? All of it made for a heady package. And this—the way she shivered under the stroke of his hands like he gave her untold pleasure. She made him feel like a god.
It had been way too long.
He was a pillar of want, ready to turn and push her back onto his desk the way he had dozens of times before. The return to the familiar fostered both a laugh of triumph and a kick of danger.
He had made it easy for her to leave. He had been feeling stifled by that search in her eyes for something deeper, something he wasn’t capable of, so he’d sent a message that she needed to adjust her expectations.
Her quitting had blindsided him.
He had told himself it didn’t matter. Sex was available anywhere with anyone. It didn’t have to be her.
But he hadn’t found another woman who did this to him. She licked at his tongue and moaned and rubbed her pelvis into his with invitation, making the world recede so all he wanted was to penetrate.
Unless this was manipulation.
Ah, hell, he was forgetting this wasn’t a social visit. He had gone after Cutting Edge; confident she would show up and offer herself. Here she was and here they were.
But he wasn’t a man who borrowed or shared. He took. Owned.
She really should have remembered that about him.
Pulling back was an effort, but he did it. His nostrils flared to take in as much of her scent as he could. Better than perfume. Spring wind and tropical shampoo and her. All pressed up against him like she’d been ironed onto his shirt front.
She fluttered her eyes open, lips parted and shiny as she panted to catch her breath. He loved that look. She wore it when she was coming back from orgasm.
Confusion dimmed her golden-brown eyes. Recognition.
Regret?
She started to pull away, but he tightened his arms, keeping her exactly where he wanted her.
“Call him.” He sounded like a barbarian, voice guttural. “Tell him it’s over. Then we’ll get back to ‘negotiating.’”
“Let go,” she insisted, and pushed with more determination, but in a weak way that was a mixed signal.
He reluctantly loosened his grip and she staggered against the edge of the desk, leaning there, head hanging, forehead in her palm.
“Forgot about him, did you?” He was trying for mockery, but he listened intently for confirmation.
He had to fight the urge to yank her back, feeling barely this side of civilized as he wondered whether the good doctor provoked that same incendiary reaction in her.
Going after Cutting Edge was supposed to be a lark. Griffen was asserting his dominance for the simple reason that he hated to lose to anyone. Aubrey had taken her talents elsewhere, both in bed and out, and he still hadn’t found suitable replacements. That was annoying so he had arrogantly set out to prove he could get her back, both professionally and personally. He hadn’t counted on how much it would mean to him.
“Why—” She lifted her head to glare at him like their sexual explosion had surprised her.
How could it? It had always been like this.
“Why do I react to you like that?”
“Why do you resent it?” Then, because the idea pleased him so much, he asked, “Am I correct in assuming he doesn’t make you feel the same?”
Her expression blanked and he almost thought she was going to say, Who?
He was about to leap on that, but she winced and her hand went to her brow again. She struggled, expression growing distressed.
He felt a tug on his conscience, but made himself ignore it. “Call him.”
“I can’t do this, Griffen.” Her voice was so faint he barely heard her.
“Break up with him? Why the hell not?” He unconsciously shifted his weight into a balanced battle stance, mind fracturing with responses to whatever reply she gave.
“I can’t—” Her voice hit a wall and her gaze lost focus. Her hand fell like it was an object she discarded. She blinked, white lips parting, trying to say something while her face drained of what little color had been there, eyelids fluttering—
She was passing out.
He swore, leaping forward to catch her.
In the ring, where he’d seen men knocked unconscious, they fell like redwoods. Not Aubrey. She was vapor thin, light and insubstantial, crumpling into a limp, ashen pile that he gathered in his arms then eased to the floor.
The slamming feeling in his chest was his heart, he noted distantly. His limbs burned with adrenaline. He couldn’t remember ever being scared like this. Scared for someone else, not himself.
He forced himself to take measured breaths as he gently adjusted her so she was supine, then he blindly reached to his desktop, feeling for his cell, unable to tear his gaze from her grey complexion. He felt sick. Clammy and sick. What was wrong? Had he done something? Come back, Aubrey.
Against the sound of his hissing breaths, he heard the muted buzz of her phone and quickly dumped her purse, snatching up the device to see the too handsome face of Dr. Drake Yarrow, her lover, staring back at him.
It was an unexpected heart punch accompanied by the stab of something so unthinkable, he only let the thought fully form when he spoke it aloud after swiping to accept the call.
“Is she pregnant?” His chest was in a vice, his belly full of cement.
“Who is this?” Yarrow demanded.
“Woodlock. Aubrey just fainted in my office. Do I call an ambulance?”
“I told her to go home. No, she’s not pregnant. That would have come up while she was in the hospital. It’s probably overexertion. She’s supposed to be in bed. Did she hit her head?”
“No.” Griffen reeled under the onslaught of information, latching onto hospital. “What the hell happened? Was she in an accident?” Why hadn’t anyone told him?
“Pneumonia. Let’s do a quick assessment.”
Griffen followed Yarrow’s coolheaded instructions for checking her vitals and Aubrey started to come around as he pulled back her eyelid.
“Don’t,” she muttered, pulling away. She covered her eyes with her hand as she recognized him. “Did I faint?”
“She’s awake,” he told Yarrow.
“Who are you talking to?” She held out her hand when he told her. “Give.” She took the phone and lied, “I’m fine.”
Griffen knew it was a lie because her lips were still white, her eyelids falling closed like she couldn’t keep them open.
Distantly, he heard Yarrow say, “Clearly,” with dripping sarcasm. “I’ll text Michael to go back for you and take you home this time.”
“I took a taxi. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll take you home.” Griffen took the phone from her, repeating, “I’ll make sure she gets home.” He expected an offer from Yarrow to come get her, or a reassurance that Yarrow would meet them.
What he got was, “Good. I’m in the middle of some tests. Tell her I’ll call later. I had some questions for her, but they can wait.”
Yarrow ended the call and Griffen found himself thinking, Wow. I thought I was a heartless prick.
*
“Pneumonia?” Griffen said, sounding grim.
She was pretty disturbed herself. Fainting was disorienting.
She lifted her forearm off her eyes and blinked at the brightness. “I’m okay,” she insisted for about the millionth time since she had gone into the hospital a week ago. Denial wasn’t just a river in Egypt.
“That was the vapors I just kissed you into, then?”
She would plead the fifth on that one. When her parents had driven her to the hospital after she fainted in their kitchen, she’d thought they were overreacting. Then a few days went missing and she had woken to her mother’s anxious tears. She still wasn’t prepared to face what a close call she’d had, but her thoughts had barely shifted from Griffen from the moment she woke. If the stock purchase hadn’t brought her here today, she suspected she would have found another reason to see him. If she had died without seeing him one more time, without kissing him once more…
Awash in a surge of distraught emotion, she tried to sit up.
Griffen had to help her, which made her tremble all the more.
He propped her against the front of his desk then retrieved his phone. He sat beside her on the floor as he texted his driver an exclamation mark, which she knew meant, Front doors, now. He had a whole coding system so he rarely needed more than a couple of characters to get the result he wanted.
“Are you contagious?” he asked pointedly.
She managed a faint smirk. “If only. Alas, I have not given you the kiss of death. My lungs are clear, blood work is good, but I’m still getting my strength back after eating through an IV for a week. I didn’t have much appetite this morning. Something distracted me.” She gave him a stony look.
“A week. How did you get so sick?”
“Flu.” She wrinkled her nose with distaste. “I was visiting a hospital to discuss our protocols on testing proprietary equipment. They had an outbreak of a particularly bad virus. I told myself it was just a bad cold, kept working.”
And working. Drake had some really exciting innovations coming along. Griffen wasn’t lying when he said the company was a ripe, juicy fruit for any raider.
“Burning the candle,” he said with something that might have been disapproval, but he was as guilty of it as she had ever been. That was where their affair had mostly happened—both of them hanging around the office before and after hours.
The truth was, she had stayed late on purpose, trolling for his attention. She’d told herself she was only trying to impress the boss, trying to learn, but it had been more than that. She’d been intrigued. Attracted. Making herself available.
“Yarrow’s a doctor. Why didn’t he notice how sick you were?”
“He’s more of a scientist.” She leaned to gather her things back into her purse. “And I didn’t realize I was so sick. I thought I was just run down, but it was walking pneumonia. I was at my parents’ when it turned into the falling down kind. They drove me to emergency. As vacation resorts go, hospitals leave a lot to be desired. I would have noticed what you were up to if I hadn’t been unconscious.”
“Are you serious?”
“That hospitals don’t put umbrellas in your drink. Totally.”
“That you were unconscious.”
“They said I almost died.” She tried to be offhand about it because she didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. “On the upside, the oxygen delivery system Drake test-drove on me worked when the standard one didn’t. So, as I keep telling you, Cutting Edge has its uses.” She gave him a cheerful smile.
The very last thing she expected from him was a sign that he gave a shit, but she thought his color was down. He was drilling into her with his gaze.
She cleared the emotion from her throat and braced a hand on the floor, trying to get her feet under her.
Griffen helped her stand then held her as she waited for her equilibrium to level.
His usual air of superiority was absent and his expression very grave. For a moment they stood there, his hands on her arms, hers on his chest. It was an odd, loose embrace that lacked their patented sexual heat, yet still felt like an intimate connection. Tender?
No. That was her imagination yearning for all the things he had never—and would never—give her.
“Not that I expect hearing that will keep you from doing whatever the hell you want,” she said with a tough-girl smile, even though he always, always made her vulnerable. “Do take care, Griffen. It’s been lovely catching up.”
She brushed free of him and started toward the door, adding, “Tell your driver to stand down. I’ll call a taxi.”
*
Griffen was a world-class dick when he wanted to be and he owned it. He’d spent enough time getting knocked around by people who lacked a conscience he didn’t let his own get in the way of taking what he wanted. But he didn’t steal from the homeless. He didn’t trip cancer patients down the stairs so he could climb them. He didn’t let women he slept with nearly die before he noticed they had a bad cough.
That news kept impacting him, like waves of cold that penetrated deeper and deeper, tightening his muscles in resistance, making his blood congeal in his arteries.
He didn’t let Aubrey get herself home in a freaking taxi, either.
He took her arm and walked her downstairs, then climbed into the back of his SUV beside her. The fact she didn’t argue with him, and let her head fall back against the headrest, told him exactly how much fight she had left in her.
His fingers itched to rest on her pulse while they drove. He couldn’t stop thinking about her working late. She was smart and dedicated. He liked that about her and hated thinking that fire in her was the reason she had become so sick. He hated thinking she’d been so obsessed by concerns over marauders like him she’d put herself in the hospital.
She was dozing when they pulled up in front of a helluva nice restored Queen Anne.
“This Yarrow’s place?” he asked as he helped her out of the car.
The wet spring wind was cutting down the street like a knife, carving away at the last of the snow piles.
“So sexist. It’s mine.” She pulled her keys from her purse. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Yours.” He took her keys and jerked his head at his driver, silently telling him to find parking and wait. “Cutting Edge is doing better than I realized.”
“It was my grandmother’s. I’m fine,” she insisted as he took her arm, but she leaned her elbow into his grip, shaking as they climbed the stairs onto the wrap-around porch.
She sighed when they reached the top and waved at him to open the door for her.
The foyer was welcoming and he found himself thinking, of course, this was where Aubrey lived. It was imbued with her warmth and class. The house wasn’t fussy, like he’d half expected when she said it had been her grandmother’s. She had a few modern art pieces, had decorated with heritage colors and had some casual lived-in touches like a rumpled throw on the sofa in the living room.
Home, he thought, wondering when he’d last walked into a residence that wasn’t a status symbol or a showpiece. Even his own was more investment than refuge. He liked this. It was a retreat.
“Why was I never here before?” He brushed past her attempt to close the door on him.
“I don’t bring men here.” She yawned and dropped her purse on a table near the door, holding out her hand. “Look, I’m exhausted. Give me my keys and go. Don’t buy any more stock until I wake up.”
“I’ll help you into bed.” He toed off his shoes and left them beside hers.
“Nice try.”
“I’m not letting you climb those stairs without a spotter.”
She rolled her eyes, then trudged up to the second floor.
“Yarrow is allowed here,” he noted as he saw the snapshot of the two of them hanging alongside the family photos lining the wall up the staircase.
He hated her lover with ever growing depth. Any compunction he might have felt at taking over Yarrow’s start-up had evaporated with the news he’d let Aubrey get so sick she’d nearly disappeared from this earth.
He wouldn’t have known until she was gone. The thought was so unsettling, his hand was clammy on the rail of the stair. The idea that he would only have found out after the fact…
He couldn’t think about it. It made him sick. Quietly furious.
“Lock the door on your way out. Push the keys through the slot,” she said on another yawn as she walked into her bedroom. She picked up pink and yellow pajamas off the foot of her unmade bed and carried them into the adjoining bathroom.
The room told its own story of her morning, with her laptop open but sleeping on the pillow, blankets thrown back, a plate of cold toast and a nearly full cup of coffee on the nightstand. She must have logged in for the first time since coming home, saw what he was doing, and went straight in to work.
Where Yarrow had sent her home, but she had come to confront him instead.
Griffen frowned, trying to make sense of that.
“Why didn’t Yarrow come see me?” he asked when she emerged from the bathroom, pale and braless beneath the waffle-weave top, makeup washed off, eyes looking bruised. “You told him what I was doing, didn’t you?”
“He’s running tests.” She climbed into bed, head landing hard on the pillow.
“So he said.” He moved to smooth the blankets over her. “You should eat something if that’s why you fainted earlier.”
“I’ll make fresh toast when I wake up.” Her voice was already fading. “Will you please have the decency not to do anything until it’s a fair fight?”
“You know me better than that.” He couldn’t wait to financially castrate the man who had reduced her to this. He touched her forehead, not finding her feverish.
She brushed his hand away. “Get out, Griffen. I’m too tired for sex and if I die, this house goes to my mother. There’s nothing here for you.”
No? His chest felt funny. Like a coil of rope was unraveling within his ribcage, slithering and prickling, piling up as a pressure against his heart.
He stood watching her for a long few minutes, reassured by her steady breathing as she sank into sleep.
Eventually his feet took him out of the room and he started down the stairs where he paused at the photo of Aubrey with Yarrow. It made him furious that Yarrow held a place here on what was obviously a family wall. It spoke of permanence, which galled him. Yarrow didn’t deserve her.
You took what was mine then failed to take care of it, Griffen told the man as he mentally dismantled Cutting Edge. See how that feels?
Aubrey smiled back at him, a surprising playfulness in her expression. Yarrow wore a look of tolerant affection that was surprisingly lacking in anything like sexual attraction—
“Oh, you little bitch,” Griffen said under his breath as the resemblance hit him.
It was subtle. Aubrey took after her mother while Yarrow plainly took after their father. He scanned to the photo of the senator and all three had the same honey-freaking-ale colored eyes.
Why hadn’t she corrected him today? Told him that Yarrow was not her lover, but her brother—Wait. She’d told him once she was an only child…
Understanding dawned and Griffen tipped back his head in silent laughter.
Half brother. Different mother. And her father was in politics. Dr. Drake Yarrow was a family skeleton, one they were keeping in the closet.
Griffen held the rail in a firm grasp, but his knees were weak as he slowly walked down the stairs. So many shades of satisfaction rolled through him, he felt high.
Everything he wanted had just been handed to him like a piece of angel food cake.