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That, you are, I secretly quip to myself before lowering the toy and giving it another tossing in my hand. “He’s gonna love it.” I give it a second thought. “Well, I mean, I hope he does. He doesn’t have any toys.”
“Really?” Trevor holds the rose with both his hands, fidgeting with it. “Why not?”
“He’s not exactly the playful type.”
“Oh.”
“But I’ll give it to him. He does have his moments. Like when I come home after a long day, for instance.”
“When you come home alone,” Trevor amends, not blind to the fact that Lance is nowhere to be found. He gives the rose a tiny wiggle. “Bud vase?”
“Bud vase,” I agree, smiling tightly.
Twenty minutes later, the single rose stands proudly in a tall, crystalline bud vase at the center of my dining room table. The food has also arrived—another succulent option from Da Lena Cucina E Vino—and we’re eating together once again.
He looks so damned irresistible, chewing like he’s got heaven caught in his mouth. Unable to contain myself, I tap his foot under the table, then gaze away and play it off when he looks up. I see Trevor grinning in my peripheral, and then he starts gaining a bit of courage, bumping my foot back. I fight a smile, spear a bite of broccoli, then slowly let my foot trail up his leg. He stops eating and closes his eyes, feeling my toe as it gently trails up his shin, slides over his knee, then slowly moves to his inner thigh.
It’s right about then that my phone emits a glassy noise—a very particular glassy noise that denotes an emergency: Jazz.
Trevor lifts his eyebrows. “Ooh, I like that sound,” he moans lightly, as if he doesn’t have my foot halfway to his crotch.
“I don’t.” I pick up my phone and read the message. It’s not good. I bring my foot back down to the floor. “Ugh. Fuck me.”
Trevor sets his fork down with a clang. “Something wrong?”
“Yeah. Work.” I bite my lip, unsure how to respond. I stare at Jazz’s message, my thumb fidgeting on the screen. It’s urgent enough to send Trevor home and cancel this night I planned.
“You need to run to the office? Or …?”
“Not the office. But I do have to leave and … do something. Or someone,” I amend, wishing like hell I meant the words sexually—and about Trevor—but my real meaning couldn’t be farther from anything remotely sexy or related to him.
Disappointment pulls on Trevor’s features. I’m sure he had his own vision of how tonight might go, and it wasn’t like this.
Then, in a flash, he wipes away his frown and meets my eyes. “I could just hang here, if that’s safest. Or … Or if you need me to go home … then I … I could do that, too,” he reluctantly suggests, clearly not liking his own second option.
That’s when, at once, I think of a third. The corner of my mouth pulls up, inspired suddenly. “Or …”
“Or?”
“Come with me.” My smirk turns into a full-on grin from the sight of his stunned eyes. “You’re my intern, after all. I can take you as my assistant. You up for a little fieldtrip?”
22
Benjamin works well with others.
The answer is yes, Trevor is up for a little fieldtrip.
What at first was fear has quickly converted into excitement. “Where’re we going?” he asks impatiently from the passenger seat before we’ve even made it two blocks.
“I have a high-profile client prone to drama,” I explain as I drive, “and her sweet teenage daughter has created one of her own involving an ex named Lukas who wants to sell vids of her chocolate-syrup-glazed lady cavern for a shit ton of green.”
Trevor snorts. “I, um … wow.”
“Thankfully, I have a secret contact who was able to thwart all of the ex-boyfriend’s attempts at being paid online for these vids by anyone. She also locked the content so it can’t be transferred or copied off of his phone.”
“A secret contact? Like … a hacker? Ooh, fun!”
“Something like that.” I smirk; Jazz has never liked the word “hacker”, as if such a term of endearment is far beneath her, even offensive. “Sadly for us, this ex-boyfriend is more persistent than we counted on. He’s befriended a tech-savvy buyer willing to pay a lot of money—in cash, and in person—to purchase the phone itself. For all we know, the man can and will find a way to unlock the videos and make all his money back and then some.”
“So … what are we supposed to do about it?”
“Easy. Intercept the transaction.”
“Intercept? A-Are you serious?”
“My contact has already spooked the buyer into not showing up, but sent the ex-boyfriend a confirmation that he will. It isn’t a tech-savvy pervert our troublemaking Lukas is meeting anymore. It’s me. I’m the buyer now.”
