AllFreeNovel
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It’s intoxicating.
And so predictable. So pathetic.
It doesn’t take a team of psychoanalysts to understand why that would be wildly attractive to me, considering it’s been me alone for so long, looking after Carly on my own. Even back home, nobody was protecting us. Nobody was fighting for us.
Sometimes when we’re talking about the company I use the word we. As if I’m part of the Locke family. So cool that we’re opening an office in Raleigh. How are we doing on our stadium proposal? Wow, our development team is kicking the shit out of those assholes at Dartford & Sons!
I constantly have to remind myself I’m not in the family.
We ride around in elevators and limos and other enclosed spaces and it’s exciting. Sometimes our gazes lock and the earth seems to still.
My vibrator gets a workout at night.
I’m a week through the twenty-one-day cooling off period and I just want to touch him. Even just his arm. He’s irresistible as catnip. Irresistible as a super-charged magnet. Or maybe irresistible as a black hole, the kind that sucks in spaceships and girls who just want to be loved and trusted.
None of his affection is real, that’s the thing I need to remember. He’s had PIs on me, after all. He thinks I’m a scammer.
I’m something far worse. I’m Vonda O’Neil.
Again I remember that picture of me, smiling out at the world so hopefully, repeated a million times across Twitter and Facebook with captions like I’m a lying whore.
Sometimes, right before I go out the door in the morning to meet the car, I give myself a little pep talk. I remind myself that I don’t need team Locke.
I control a giant company and have access to all the money I could ever want. I ride around in limos with literally the sexiest man in New York, but somehow I’m still that hungry girl looking in from the outside, nose pressed to the bakery window, wanting just anything.
A crumb.
Henry is like the hottest and most charming vacuum cleaner salesman who ever came to your door. And you invite him in and you let him show you the vacuum, how well it cleans and how all of the attachments work. And you see that he loves this vacuum, and his love for the vacuum makes him insanely desirable. And you guys laugh and have fun cleaning the carpet. And it’s nice.
And you keep telling yourself it’s not about you—he just wants to sell you that vacuum cleaner. That is his only motive! Except it’s getting harder and harder to remember that.
Maybe sometimes, when he’s expertly changing that nozzle with his amazingly capable hands…or when he’s smiling at something you said, and you’re looking into his gorgeous blue eyes and getting that floaty feeling in your chest, those times you start to believe, that even though he came to sell you that thing, maybe he has started to like you.
Then you hate yourself for being gullible, because hello! He’s New York’s most eligible bastard and you’re not even in the top million bachelorettes.
In fact, you’re barely an eligible bachelorette for any bachelor, unless the bachelor in question is a poetry-scribbling parking lot attendant with self-esteem issues or a junior pastry chef with eight roommates and a video game obsession, or a cook/musician/student, not that that sums up my last three years of dating.
* * *
One of the hardest things about hanging out with Henry is how he has this knack for reaching into me and hauling the pure Vonda out of me. Sometimes provoking it out of me. Sometimes enchanting it out of me with his questions and his jokes and his endless interest in my opinions.
“I know what you’re doing,” I finally tell him at lunch after another afternoon of finding out about the awesomeness of Locke Worldwide, another afternoon of witnessing him play the part of the fierce protector, admired by all. We’ve left Smuckers behind today.
“Beyond the supposedly fake seduction?” He cracks a popadam in half and hands me the big piece, because it turns out we’re both heavy into popadams.
I take it, remembering what he said about his hands. So good between your legs. You’ll come to me. I’ll get you off. I’ll print every inch of your skin.
Needless to say, my vibrator has been getting quite the workout in recent days.
He studies my face, expression unreadable. He does that sometimes. Like he wants to know me. To figure me out. Again and again I tell myself it isn’t real, but it feels so good.
And I want to kiss him. I want to press GO on us. I want to stab that button so hard he flies to me. I want him to print every inch of my skin. I’m not sure what that means in his mind, but I want it.
“You know what I’m doing?” he asks. “What would that be?”
“You want me to love Locke like you do,” I continue in a breezy tone. “You can’t trick it out of my evil clutches, you can’t seduce me, so you’re doing the next best thing. Trying to humanize it.”
“Don’t count out the part where I seduce you. That’s still going to happen.”
