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“You look terrified.” His wary expression shifted into a smirk. “Like you expected to find a cute little bunny waiting for you in the bus and instead found a rabid beaver who might tear you limb from limb. I thought it might help if I reassured you that I only bite if provoked.” He smiled slyly. “Or if asked really, really nicely.”
So many things were absurd about this statement—a rabid beaver?—I couldn’t decide where to begin. Most egregious first, I decided.
“Terrified? Of you? Hardly.” I tossed my coat and other belongings onto the sofa and casually slid into the booth opposite him to prove my point. “I’m pissed off.”
His mouth twisted. “So you weren’t about to run back into the building, Mr. Pennington?”
“Not at all,” I lied. I folded my hands together on the tabletop, knitting my fingers together against the urge to touch him. “I was just thinking you’re making quite a habit of turning up when I expect to find someone else, Mr. Wellbridge.”
His eyes widened in surprise, and for a brief moment, I felt like I’d scored a point in whatever strange game we were playing.
But then his voice, saccharine-sweet now, spoke again, evening the score. “Who, me? I just do as I’m told… sir. Like, if my boss’s assistant tells me to get on the bus, I get on the bus. And if a sexy stranger in a Roman mask tells me to come to his room and get naked, I?—”
“Stop. Talking.” I glared at him, my breath coming too quickly. With just a few words, he’d taken me back to last night. To the ballroom, and the dancers, and the moment I’d spotted a pair of pouty lips beneath what I’d wrongly assumed was a distinctive feathered mask and had pictured them wrapped around my dick. “That’s… inappropriate.”
Reagan leaned back against the padded bench, those changeable eyes sizing me up from beneath half-closed lids. “You know, I sort of expected to be fired by now,” he said too casually. “Isn’t fraternizing against the rules?”
“Pennington Industries rules? No.” I’d confirmed it earlier today, just to be sure. “My rules? Yes. But if you think I’d fire someone for a consensual… occurrence… like the one we had last night, you don’t know me very well. And hell, even if I did want to, and even if there was a policy you’d violated, I’d hardly fire you when you could turn around and make a sexual harassment claim that could sue my company out of existence.” I gave a humorless laugh. “Congratulations. No employee at Pennington has job security like you do at this moment, including me.” I ran a hand over my jaw and the day’s worth of stubble I hadn’t bothered to shave. At the moment, I deeply regretted shaving my beard in the first place. “Frankly, I was expecting to get an angry call from your father or paperwork from his attorney today?—”
“Ew.” Reagan’s lip curled. “If you think I’d tell my father… Jesus, literally anything ever, let alone the sordid details of our occurrence… then you don’t know me at all. I’m not planning to sue anyone. I just want to keep doing my job, even if it means embarking on the world’s least-scenic road trip as your boy Friday.”
The last bit was thrown out in challenge, like he assumed I was already mentally making plans to kick him off the bus.
He was absolutely right.
“Reagan, you must see that you can’t… we can’t, especially after…” I shook my head, annoyed at myself. “You’re not going,” I bit out. “There’s no way.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “You need a support person on this trip to coordinate with the PennCo PR team while you’re busy doing CEO stuff—or at least everyone seems to think you do—and I’m the most logical choice since I’m actually on the PennCo PR team, even if I happen to be at the very bottom of the food chain. If you pick someone from another subsidiary to replace me or, worse, say you’d rather go alone, people are going to wonder what’s wrong with me.” He lifted his chin. “They’re going to think I can’t do the work, which is bullshit because I absolutely can, or that you don’t like me, which is ridiculous because I’m a fucking delight. I want my Pennington employee file to show that I’m a dedicated employee and a team player, thank you very much.”
“Because you care that deeply about a low-level position in the PR department of a textile company.” I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it and shrugged. “Why not?”
Why not, indeed. I folded my arms and leaned back, too, mirroring his position, and we watched each other with the twitchy focus of a pair of Old West gunslingers at high noon. The bus lurched slightly as McGee pulled us out onto the street.
I wanted to think up a perfectly acceptable, work-appropriate reason why Reagan should not come on this trip—surely there were hundreds—but damned if I could think of a single one while he was watching me like that. I couldn’t imagine why he’d want to be here, but it seemed he did. Denying him the opportunity—and potentially damaging his reputation in the process—simply because we’d slept together was the very definition of not-okay.
So… it appeared I was stuck. This was not a condition I often found myself in these days, and I couldn’t say I enjoyed the feeling of powerlessness. But I was a grown man capable of resisting temptation even in forced proximity—I’d managed to get through an entire Honeybridge vacation last summer without laying a hand on Trent and Patricia’s son, after all. So I could handle this.
“Fine, then.” I clenched my back teeth together. “Stay.”
Reagan’s suspicious gaze scanned my face, looking for a catch. “Really.”
“Until Layla’s feeling better, yes. Truce?”
“Truce.” His lip twitched, and his eyes lit with humor. “Were we at war?”
“Weren’t we? You compared yourself to a feral beaver. That sounded rather aggressive.”
“A rabid beaver,” he corrected. “And you’re right. If you’d seen the colony of rabid beavers that took over Lake Wellbridge when I was twelve, you’d know just how aggressive they can be. I was petrified to swim for a whole summer, convinced they’d gnaw my dick off.”
I did not want to be thinking about Reagan’s dick or about the way he’d looked when he was swimming—back muscles rippling as he dove beneath the surface, face creased with joy when he emerged a moment later shaking rainbow droplets from his hair. “You seem to have gotten over that fear.”
“I was told I was over it,” he corrected. “Which is different. The beavers might’ve been part of a Honeycutt plot to take over the lake, you see, so Mother insisted JT and I swim daily. Show your enemies no fear, whether they’re beavers or Honeycutts.”
I snorted. “I know your mother’s competitive, but was she really willing to risk your… body parts… to make sure the Honeycutts didn’t win?” I only wished this were as unbelievable as it sounded.
Reagan’s grin appeared and disappeared, fast as lightning and just as breathtaking. “You have met Patricia Wellbridge, yes?”
