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I shake my head and release my hold, falling back into the chair, breathing heavily.
I moan, feeling relieved for the moment, though I know it won’t last long.
Leaning back, I finish my whiskey—a weak compromise for what could’ve been a perfect nightcap—and I promise myself that there will be a next time with Elsa.
I will take what I want—and I want her.
Chapter 11
Elsa
I still can’t believe Tanner left me standing at the door like that. Rejection is really off-brand for me. But when I get to the office, I’m wanted again. Sort of. My unread emails are blinking on my screen, my cell is buzzing with unanswered messages, and my mail has piled up in my inbox.
“You want me bad, don’t you?” I whisper to my work correspondence.
“Oh, you know I can’t get enough, but I think you should see these reports first. They’ve been begging to see you all morning.” Monique, my assistant, has burst through my office door and plopped a big stack of manila folders on my desk.
I lift the first one off the stack and gasp. Underneath, there’s a copy of the Capitalist Chronicle, which Monique has carefully folded so I’d see the words lingerie and romance right in the middle of the headline. Apparently, Lis Langley has taken the bait.
“Monique, I could kiss you!”
“Maybe later.”
“You read this, right? She says our stocks are up!” The weird thing about stock prices is that any sort of press, however speculative it may be, can send stocks soaring or tumbling. It’s human nature to want what’s hot and on the rise—like Tanner in the park yesterday, but I digress.
Monique shakes her head at me. “She also says this whole thing looks like a publicity stunt.”
“Well, that’s exactly what it is.”
“Is it, though?” Monique taps her long glittery nails on my desk, a move I’ve seen her use countless times on the postal delivery guy when he lingers too long in the lobby, hoping to get an eyeful of the models.
“What are you saying?”
“This requires coffee.” Monique disappears into the kitchen. When she returns with two steaming mugs, I offer her the chair in front of my desk, and she sits across from me.
She continues to eyeball me as I grab my cup and take a sip. I stare back. “What?”
“A little handholding, a peck on the lips, a bouquet of flowers—that would’ve been enough to make that reporter’s pen move. But you two went ahead and got dirty like a pair of poodles in a dog park. Why?”
“New Yorkers are jaded. Tanner said—Tanner and I agreed—that we’d need to put on a real show to get their attention.”
“You are lying to me right now like the clients have just showed up at our booth at the Javits Center and you have no idea who they are and what line we’re supposed to be showing them.”
“I…uh…”
“Are you falling for him again?”
“No! Of course not.”
“Because you remember what happened last time, don’t you?”
How could I forget? Tanner stole more than my heart—he stole my idea for a lingerie collection, and now Pretty Little Vixen has made a pretty little mess of my company, my self-esteem, and if I’m not careful, my whole life. He’s already got my best models. What could he be up to next?
“I know the board members are going to shit themselves when they see this article, but they don’t know you like I do. You wouldn’t be getting all PDA with a guy like Tanner unless you really liked him, especially not for some click-bait article. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
In that moment, I’m grateful that my personal assistant is also one of my best friends. Because she’s right. Maybe it’s time to put on my big-girl pants and tell Tanner to take it down a notch before things go too far. But I can’t let her know that. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“Ha! You’re too much.” Monique chuckles. “You want to pick out some new models for us then? There are a whole bunch of headshots in that stack of folders I just gave you. The models should be here any minute to try on some lingerie.”
