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Iwas reeling the whole way back to my apartment, laid out in the backseat of the car. My skin was on fire from all those touches and glances from Jordan Ashford. My teenage lust for him was still just as capable of consuming me as it had been all those years before. I had thought I’d be more immune to it now—but apparently not.
It was more than just how good he looked. There was a chemistry that sparked between us that made my stomach flutter with butterflies like I was fifteen all over again. Only this time around, my Dad hadn’t been watching us, stifling all of my true thoughts and desires.
The closer we got back to my place, the harder I worked to get myself under control. I couldn’t go back to Drew while my mind was still being ruled by Jordan…my mind and my libido, at that.
I sucked in deep breaths…inhale, exhale. Pulled out my mirror and put on some lip gloss, fanning myself to try and get rid of the obvious blush that had spread across my cheeks and chest. Even after trying to fix myself up and lingering in the door of the car to calm down, I struggled to force myself out onto the sidewalk and into the lobby.
Thankfully, the elevator provided one final buffer to push all of those wicked, dirty thoughts down. But that did nothing to erase the awkward smile on my face when I walked in.
“Hey, babe,” Drew called out casually from the kitchen as he ate takeout and read stock updates on his phone, leaning against the kitchen counter.
“Heeeeyyyy!” I called right back, sounding way too eager.
I winced, knowing I had blown it.
His face wrinkled as he shot me a strange grin. “What’s gotten into you?”
“It’s raining outside,” I blurted. Maybe my flustered state could pass as me just being cold. Even though I really had the opposite problem. I was blazing with heat from my core out to every limb, right down to the tips of my fingers.
“You poor thing,” he offered. He went into the hallway closet and pulled out a towel to wrap me in. “You must be freezing.”
“I just…I need a hot bath, I think.” That’s it. That was the solution. Another quick escape. One where I could be naked and alone with my thoughts.
“I ordered your favorite,” he pointed towards the extra boxes on the table.
“Oh, thanks, but I already ate.”
“I thought you had lunch after your meeting today,” he questioned. “Did you have a dinner meeting I didn’t know about?”
“Uh…it turned into a dinner meeting,” I stammered. “You know how my dad gets when he starts rambling on about an exciting new deal.”
His face melted in understanding, because he really did know how my dad was. Which only made me feel more guilty.
All the more reason to quickly slink off into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind me. Drew was all too happy to be free to go back to his stocks and financial news updates.
I was feeling somewhat better a couple of hours later—once I was freshly bathed, relaxed, cuddled up in bed in my sweats. I flipped through a book that had been on my nightstand for weeks, even though I could barely take my mind off work long enough to focus on actually reading. Of course that night it was somewhat of a relief to have something else fighting for my mental energy.
Drew was flipping through a book of his own, but with a pen in hand. In the evenings, he scribbled down all the notes he could from that evening’s latest financial news—anything that would be relevant to his clients that he wanted to remember the next morning.
My own phone was resting in between us in the sheets—an ordinary occurrence that I didn’t give much thought to until it dinged with a message from him.
The moment Jordan Ashford’s name flashed across the screen, my hand lurched for the phone, and it was hardly subtle.
“Who’s that?” Drew smirked with the same curious baffled expression he shot me when I first came in and fumbled through explaining my lunch-turned-dinner.
“My dad’s partner,” I blurted, shielding the screen from his view as I read the text.
Jordan: Tomorrow at noon. My office. Lawyers and paperwork. Should be exciting.
I felt a warm, gooey feeling rise up in my chest and spread across my lips in a smile. The sensation was brought on for a number of reasons. One—Jordan now had a reason to message me regularly, and would be doing so for the foreseeable future. Two—the idea that I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not melted me inside. No one appreciated a good dose of sarcasm more than me. But if he really did get a thrill from drawing up the initial paperwork for our deal, no matter how dull and tedious it was sure to be, then we had far more in common than I realized.
“Jordan Ashford,” Drew groaned, practically rolling his eyes.
I snapped my eyes over to him with daggers. “What? Why do you say it like that?”
“You forget what you drunkenly confessed to at my friend Jordy’s dinner party,” he replied dryly. “We played that stupid game of truth or dare after we ate, and you admitted to having a huge crush on him when you were a teenager.”
