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“Dane.”
“Though I don’t really need to be a student, do I? Since I’ve already aced the topic.”
She rolled her eyes, and for a second I saw her—the real Ava. “Okay, fine. You’re a sex god. Is that enough to feed your ego? Still, you have an unfair advantage.”
“The advantage that I’m a natural genius at sex?”
“No, the advantage that you know me a lot better than those guys did. We taught each other a lot, back in the old days. Which means,” she poked my chest with one finger, “I also have an unfair advantage with you.”
She’d always had an unfair advantage with me, ever since the first night she got into my bed. But I said, “I’d like to see you prove it.”
“No way. I just said it’s a bad idea. Besides, I don’t need to prove anything. I know I could drive you crazy if I wanted to.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
I’d lifted her mood, just a little. Enough to make the edges of her mouth smile. Enough that there was a quick, dirty sparkle in her eyes before she pretended it wasn’t there. I felt like I’d climbed Mount Everest. “Let’s go out,” I said.
“Out where?”
“Out of here. Away from the company and these fucking assignments. We used to do fun things, remember?” I stood up. “Put on your mules, woman. Let’s go.”
Ava gasped. “Dane Scotland. You just referred to my shoes as mules. Correctly.”
“That’s because I’m a genius,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Fifteen
Ava
* * *
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.
Dane’s voice was a growl in my ear. “Yes, we should.”
“I promised myself I’d be good,” I said. “What if my brother finds out?”
“He won’t find out.”
“You don’t know that.” I looked around. “He could have someone watching us do this. Right now.”
“That would be weird,” Dane said. “Aidan has always been intense, but he’s never been weird.”
I sighed and leaned back, tilting my head back and pushing my sunglasses up on my nose. The sun had passed its zenith and was starting to wane as the afternoon went on, but it was still warm. I felt it like a touch on my bare skin. “This is very, very bad,” I said.
There was a soft splash, and then Dane was there, his big, bare presence right next to me. His hair was tied back in its usual knot, and he had sunglasses on. He was floating on an inflated mat like mine, but because he was so big and muscled, he had sunk closer to the water. The light refracted on the surface of the pool, making patterns on his gorgeous chest.
“Ava,” he said, “you need to relax.”
I felt briefly bad, but then I was transfixed by his chest again, and I was too distracted to feel guilty. “I’m supposed to be working,” I said, still looking at his chest from behind my sunglasses and trying to remind myself. “Aidan is paying me. Tower VC is paying me. I’m on company time.”
“And I own a quarter of Tower VC,” Dane said. “Which means you work for me.”
“I do not work for you,” I said, because I couldn’t let his ego get away with that.
“Fine. You work for me twenty-five percent of the time of this assignment. I’m counting today in my twenty-five percent.”
I pressed my lips together. Damn, it was hard to work for a bona fide genius. “So in your twenty-five percent, you wanted me to go shopping and then lounge in your pool?”
“Yes.” He scratched his chin, looking up at the sky. “Though when I offered to take you bathing suit shopping, I didn’t think you’d pick Target.”
