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My body reacts, raging for this man, and just plain defies the level head I’m trying to have right now. It remembers that orgasm. Remembers his hands. It wants more, but he’s trying to rattle me and I understand why. I know his past. I know why Gigi is the plague to him. I push off the desk. “I don’t think an orgasm, or two—since you had one as well, in case you’ve forgotten—influences you. I’m just asking that you hear me out.”
“For the record,” he says. “I remember both orgasms with crystal clarity. I also remember everything about Gigi.”
“I know, and I could have lied and told you I made this decision on my own, but I feel like I’m swimming in lies back at Kingston. I don’t want them with you, too. I know Gigi was horrible to your mother. She told me that. She has regrets over trying to deny her, and you, your rightful place in the company.”
“My place in the company? My mother was sick and we were living in a shithole of a trailer park we could barely afford. I’m pretty sure she didn’t give a shit about my place in the company. I damn sure don’t.” He inhales, seeming to rein himself in before he folds his arms in front of his broad, perfect chest, his tattoo sleeve partially exposed. The tattoos that I know tell a story that I am certain has a lot to do with Gigi and his mother. “That woman doesn’t have regrets,” he adds. “Saying she does is a lie.”
“She was horrible to me, too, but I was with her when she had a small heart attack a year ago. It changed her.”
“Nothing changes who we are at the core and if you really believe that, then you’re as naive as you were six years ago.”
“Naive?” I repeat, my voice low and calm when I really want to punch him right now. “I guess if I was naive, we can blame my decision to get naked with my stepbrother on me being young and stupid.” It’s out before I can stop the words that place our intimate past right here in this room.
His eyes darken and heat. “Why would we do that? It wasn’t a mistake.”
“It was a mistake,” I assure him, “for about ten different reasons I’m not going to list.”
“The mistake was me thinking you weren’t one of them,” he says dryly.
I feel those words like a punch, with guilt I shove away before he reads it and me. “I’m not one of them,” I say and I don’t have tocut my gaze as I’m certain he expects. I’ve never meant those words like I do now. “I told you why I’m with them. The company is a piece of my father, all I have left of him.”
“Six years is a long time to work with someone you’re not devoted to,” he muses. “And you’re trusted enough to be their spokesperson to me.”
“They don’t know I’m here,” I say, trying not to think of the hell that will follow if they find out or the many things about this past six years that he can never know.
“Gigi is them,” he says. “If she knows, they know.”
“She’s been shut out.”
“She’s the primary stockholder.”
“Who isn’t exactly in great health. Your father threatened to go to the board to get her removed as CEO.”
He rounds the desk and we turn to face each other and damn it, he smells just as earthy and perfect as I remember. And he’s so big and overwhelmingly male. He’s also had his tongue in all kinds of places and I need to not go there. “What are you thinking, Harper?”
“A lot of things,” I say, and avoiding the past we share, I hold out my hands. “You’ve done so much. You’re brilliant. They all know that. We need you.”
“We or Gigi?”
“Weneed you, but Gigi said to tell you she’s begging. This is her life’s work. She’s terrified of losing it.”
His brutal perfect mouth quirks. “I’d almost be willing to go there just to watch her beg like my mother did for help.”
His mother who killed herself. What was I thinking coming here? “This was a mistake. I should have just told her we’d find another way.” I try to turn away but he catches my elbow, heat radiating up my arm. My gaze rockets to his and that connection I’d felt to him six years ago is present and accounted for, thickening the air between us.
“If there’s another way,” he says, “why come to me?”
“People died, and you’re a genius,literally. You also have an understanding of the company, a connection, your family.”
“Family? Like being the stepbrother who gave you an orgasm?”
“Now you’re just being an asshole and you have a right. I get that, too, but I didn’t do any of the things they did to you. Like I said. This was a mistake. Forget I was here.” I jerk away from him and rush for the door, feeling as if my heart is going to explode in my chest on the way. I reach for the knob, escape only seconds away.
Eric is suddenly behind me, his hand on the door, his big body crowding mine, so close that I can almost feel his body heat. “Tell me why you’re really here.”
I rotate to face him and that’s a mistake. He’s overwhelmingly right here, in front of me. “Just let me leave.”
He studies me for several intense beats, that piercing stare so damn probing and too intelligent. “You had to know that I wasn’t going to help.”
