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But this wouldn’t be a relationship. It could be a fling. A really fun amazing fling when she was about to go on the run again and lose the few people she had in her world. She could give herself that, couldn’t she?
His mouth hovered over hers, breath mingling as she felt her heart kick up, seeming to trip over itself at the anticipation of his mouth on hers.
And then he stopped.
Whether the song inside his head was finished or he’d just come to his senses or whatever, she didn’t know.
But he pulled back and cleared his throat. “Thank you for the dance, Joy.”
Well, at least he hadn’t called her Ms. Wilson. That was something.
Chapter 12
What happened the night before with Joy shocked the hell out of Kaeden. Asking her to dance hadn’t been something he planned. The idea had come into his head at the same time the words had come out of his mouth. And then he’d had her in his arms and the feel of her had stripped his defenses.
When she tipped her head back and looked up at him, all the walls he’d built so carefully in the past few years began to crack.
And it had been all he could do to plaster over those fucking cracks and step away from her without kissing the gorgeous curve of her bottom lip. The way she always looked like she was trying to hold everything together and keep people at arm’s length, he wanted to see if he could make her fall apart in his arms.
Christ, he had to think of something else. Standing in line for the buffet breakfast at the lodge with all of his coworkers wasn’t the place to get a hard-on.
He was all too aware of Joy as she replaced a nearly empty plate of bacon with one piled high with the perfectly cooked, extra crispy stuff that would probably kill him.
Jack and Andrew were busy adding eggs and pastries to their plates while they talked about a company that might be worth looking into when they got back to the office. They had a rule in place that business could only be discussed at breakfast each day.
“We’ll need to see if Commfarm is willing to hold off on phasing out their software department. We’d need that to remain in place for what we have planned,” Andrew said.
Kaeden was about to open his mouth to say he had a friend who worked at the tech company that they might reach out to, but Joy spoke first.
“Too late. They began phasing out software three years ago and it will be gone completely in another six months when they sell the last of their chips to CommNet.” She wasn’t even looking up as she said it. She spoke as she wiped up crumbs from the buffet table and he saw her freeze as she realized she’d said the words.
Jack was the one to ask a question. “You know Commfarm?”
She shrugged and tossed the napkin she’d used onto the empty bacon plate in her hand. “Not really. I just remember reading something about them.”
That was bullshit if Kaeden ever heard it but she hurried back to the kitchen before he could question her. Jack and Andrew didn’t bat an eye as they sat down, talking about their plans.
Kaeden watched the door she’d disappeared through. How was he the only one who thought it was odd that a random woman who worked in a lodge in Colorado was reading articles about a tech company in Connecticut?
He pulled out his phone and texted his friend to see if he knew a woman named Joy Wilson. If she was that aware of the details of the company’s plans to sell off its software products, she was more connected to it than she was letting on.
It wasn’t the first time he’d thought there was more to Joy Wilson than she was letting on. Following his gut, he added a description of her to the text and asked his friend if she sounded familiar at all.
Then he joined the rest of the company at the long table in the lodge’s dining room. Since they had taken over the entire lodge for the time they were here, there was no one else in the dining room.
Jennie was trying to convince her daughter to eat something other than the pastries the lodge’s owner made fresh each day.
“You can’t blame her,” Kelly said to her sister. “These things are amazing.” She pulled apart a croissant and reached for the strawberry butter in the center of the table.
“I really can’t,” Jennie said, grinning as she gave up. “Jack, we should come back here in the winter for another retreat. We can bond over skiing.”
Joy walked back into the room and Jack shook his head laughing.
“Joy, it looks like we might see you guys again in the winter. The retreat is a success.”
Kaeden was probably the only one who thought her smile was stiff. But he knew she was faking her way through interactions with people a lot of the time.
He knew the tactic when he saw it. Was an expert in it from using it himself and this was one of those times. She was faking her way through it here.
