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I roll my eyes. “Of course there’s a condition.”
“I’d be a shit businessman if I hadn’t perfected the art of a strong negotiation, Kate.” He grins, rubbing my hand against his cheek. His stubble tickles, and it makes me fight a smile as he stares down at me. “I’ll be abstinent for a month,ifyou promise that, even if you leave between now and then, when our time’s up...” He brushes my knuckles against his lips, staring at me. “You’ll come back.”
The way Christopher looks at me makes me realize, maybe I’m not the only one with fears. For the first time I consider how it might have felt to want me the way I’ve wanted him, never knowing where I was going or when I’d be back.
My heart kicks against my ribs. “Of course I’d come back. I promise.”
A sigh leaves him, slow and relieved. “Then you have yourself a bargain, Katerina.”
He reaches past me and turns the key in the lock, gently pushing open my door. I smile up at him, a rush of happiness running through me. He’ll wait for me.
Christopher smiles, too, though it’s tinged with a groan. Bending, he presses a kiss to my forehead, hard and warm, breathing in. “Stop looking at me like that.”
A flush of heat crawls up my chest to my throat, spilling into my cheeks. “Like what?”
“You know what.” He presses a gentle kiss to the corner of my mouth, teasing and sweet all at once. “Keep your phone on you, Katerina. I’ll be counting on it.”
“What does that—”
I’m nudged across the threshold, the door shut behind me, before I can ask what he meant. Not even a minute goes by as I slowly tug off my jacket and hang it up, before my phone buzzes in my messenger bag.
Digging around, I finally find it.
A calendar invite for tomorrow night, 6 to 8 p.m., lights up my screen:
Event: Dinner with Christopher
Location: Kate’s apartment
My phone buzzes again, this time with an email notification. I bite my lip, fighting a smile when I see who it’s from, before I tap to read it:
Dear Ms. Wilmot,
Thank you for your prompt delivery of the team’s headshots. I can’t say they’re everything I’d hoped for—they far exceed it. A direct transfer to your account paying the balance you were owed for services rendered has been completed.
And now, please consider this a formal termination of our professional relationship.
(I don’t date people I work with.)
Yours,
Christopher Petruchio
•THIRTY•
Christopher
“You’re sure?” Kate asks. “You trust me not to mess it up?”
She’s got a streak of flour on her cheek. A long tendril of hair has slipped out of the knot piled high on her head. Stepping up behind her, I lift that rogue strand away from her face and tuck it back into the hair tie. It takes the kind of self-denial I’ve never asked of myself before the past two weeks, touching her without coming on to her, wanting her so badly, my skin practically vibrates when I’m near her, yet never acting on it.
I brush the flour from her cheek and somehow manage not to kiss it. “I’m sure.”
Kate bites the inside of her cheek as she examines the sheet of pasta dough ready to be draped across the ravioli filling and pasta sheet beneath it, idly twirling the mini cutter wheel in her hand. “I don’t know.”
“Hey now,” I tell her. “You wrestled an alligator into submission. No getting timid in the home stretch of making ravioli.”
One of those pretty blushes turns her cheeks pink. “It was an adolescent alligator.”
