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She exhaled a soft little sigh and ran her fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. Could have been exhaustion.
Could have been desire.
He wanted it to be desire.
Rules, he reminded himself as he punched the button to call the elevator. His father had always said rules were not arbitrary but there for a reason. The older Jack got, the more he thought that might have been the one thing his father got right. Even as he chided himself, he strained to make out the sound of Cassie’s tights swishing against each other as she walked. The tights that hugged her thighs. The thighs he had lost himself between a few short days ago. It seemed criminal, all of a sudden, that she would cover up those thighs, that she would conceal from him what he had so gluttonously and freely enjoyed.
“I’m hungry, too,” he said, trying to revive the conversation that had been carried away on a current of static-charged air. The elevator arrived, and he held the door for her. When she stepped from the corridor to the marble floor of the elevator, her heels clicked, echoing as the blood pounded in his ears.
The back wall of the elevator was a mirror. Instead of turning and facing the front like most people did, she stepped in and stayed put, looking at her reflection in the glass. He stepped up behind her, hand still on her lower back. She hadn’t done up her coat, so that damned red dress was still visible, and her gorgeous hair was messy and tangled—he’d noticed her habit of raking her hands through it when she was concentrating. She looked like a cherry against his staid dark jeans and brown blazer. A messy, gooey chocolate covered cherry.
He found her eyes in the mirror. “You want to go somewhere or get takeout? Thai maybe? Pizza? What do you want?”
Her eyes didn’t leave his as she smiled a slow, wicked Cheshire cat smile.
“I want you to fuck me.”
Chapter Seven
The only thing that suggested to Cassie she hadn’t made a huge error in judgment—again—was that Jack started pounding the “door close” button. Other than that, there was no indication he even heard her. He only broke with her gaze in the mirror long enough to find the button, and then his eyes were back, blank, betraying nothing.
She stared back—it was almost impossible not to drop her gaze in embarrassment, but since she’d blurted out her request so shamelessly, what could she do but hold her head high, keep meeting his eyes, and cross her fingers that his assault on the close button was a good sign?
When the endless ride down finally ended, Cassie nodded to the security guard as her heels clicked across the empty lobby. Jack did not acknowledge the man, just kept up the pressure of a hand to her lower back, picking up speed so she had to as well. Preceding her out of the building, he had a taxi hailed before she’d made it fully out of the revolving door.
There was the hand again, pressing her inside the car. He rattled off her address to the driver, his tone rough. He sounded angry. For the first time today, she was a little afraid. Not of him, but of the knowledge that she might have pushed him too far, might have jeopardized their deal. And if he was angry, didn’t he have every right to be? He’d told her outright—more than once—that there could be nothing between them. She had to be either an idiot or a slut—or both—to have kept throwing herself at him anyway.
They passed the ride in silence. The hand that had been on her back had moved to her knee. Her skin tingled beneath it, despite the layer of wool between them. But to him it must have been an absent, unselfconscious gesture, for the hand lay completely still while he looked out the window at the scenery as it changed from the steel and glass of downtown to the low-rise storefronts of Queen Street, and finally, to the houses and small apartment buildings of her neighborhood. When they arrived at her building, she turned, intending to bid him good night with as much dignity as possible, but he ignored her, paying the cabbie in stony silence and getting out behind her.
“Jack,” she began, once they were standing outside her building, “I’m sorry, I—”
“Keys,” he said, holding out his hand. When she hesitated a moment, his tone became more insistent. “Give me your keys.”
No sooner had she dropped the keys into his palm than they were in the vestibule. “Up,” he said, pushing her toward the stairs. As they climbed, her breath quickened. She was used to these stairs, so it wasn’t physical exertion making her pant. By the time they hit the third floor, she could hear his breath, too, and the pressure at the small of her back increased. He had the key ready when they reached her apartment. She didn’t bother asking how he knew which was the right one. She was beginning to understand that Jack Winter was the sort of man who just knew how to do things.
