“The flirting, for two. You let me watch you with all those guys, knowing you’d torture me until you got me alone. You’re evil like that, kitten.”
Gently biting at her folds, I twisted my wrist and increased the rhythm.
“The drink, for three. You knew I’d want to know what and why. And finally—”
My tongue circled her clit, and I felt her pulsing against me.
“You wanted me staring. You like keeping this dirty little secret from them.” I smiled against her wet center. My tongue swirled over her clit again and I was rewarded with a shuddering moan. “But what you really want is me taking you back to my place and tying you to the bed. You really want me fucking you all night.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she groaned, her hand pulling at my hair. I was on board with a bald spot if it meant feeling Andy come on my fingers. “Don’t stop, Patrick.”
I wanted to respond to her demand, and insist a flaming asteroid slamming through the building wasn’t stopping me, but her hand held me in place as the tremors rippled in her core. Latching onto her clit, I sucked greedily when the spasms rolled through her body and she chanted unintelligibly, mumbled pleas and curses mingling with my name. Andy’s fingers twisted in my hair when her release finally arrived, her inner walls surging and contracting for minutes while my tongue traced her clit and she panted my name.
I wanted to hear my name, just like that, for the rest of my life.
Andy’s knees threatened to give out, and I reluctantly pulled my fingers away. I stood, anchoring her to the wall. After half an hour of worshipping Andy, my belt was strangling my cock, and the rush of blood to my brain dulled my senses. A wide, lazy grin spread across her face when our eyes met, hers slightly unfocused and soft. Exactly as I wanted her.
Andy’s plump lips brushed against my neck and jaw, finally reaching my mouth for a slow kiss. I always knew she had a filthy side. I just needed to invite it out to play.
“That was…incredibly thorough,” she sighed against my mouth, and I was ready to respond with an offer to spend the night at my place but she shook her head, pressing a finger against my lips. “But we shouldn’t. This is such a bad idea. No more of this. Wehaveto stop.”
Her voice trailed off and I released her from my hold. It hit me while she was righting her jeans and fluffing her hair into place: she was politely dismissing me.
Drinking in one last look at Andy, the emptiness blindsided me. Her rejection, my day reliving family bullshit, my agonizing week. It all slammed into my chest, and I couldn’t get out of that bathroom quickly enough.
Chapter Twelve
ANDY
If bad wasspilling a piping hot latte over a laptop, subsequently frying thirty new designs without backing them up, and if very bad was ordering fifty grand’s worth of the wrong marble slabs, then very, very bad was letting my boss go down on me in his sister’s bathroom.
As much as I hated to admit it, the facts weren’t lying. Patrick gave me the best orgasm of my life. I’d be willing to argue it was the best orgasm known to womankind. If there was a contest for that sort of thing, I’d happily write up my entry.
His hands scrambled my thoughts, chasing rational decision-making out of town. He turned my body into a needy, achy ball of want, and with each passing hour, I wanted him twice as much as I did the previous. And he was myboss—the man I idolized from afar for years, the man in control of my future as an architect in the sustainable preservation field.
Facts. I hated every single one of them.
The only option was to keep it professional. I thought it was the right thing, the smart thing. But after a week, I was ready to make an offering to the gods in exchange for another stolen half hour in a bathroom with that same boss.
Very, very bad was quickly turning into worse.
Those ridiculous words were out of my mouth and Patrick out of the bathroom before I comprehended what I said. I wanted him—more than anything. I wanted to flirt with him over drinks, kiss him in bathrooms, let him tie me to his bed. I also wanted to learn and understand preservation from his perspective and grow under his guidance.
I didn’t see how I could admire the bite marks he left on my skin while being his apprentice, and I wasn’t good at navigating messy relationship waters.
If that didn’t bring me all the way to worse, he was avoiding me.
Initially I accepted his disappearance, and relative to my body’s all-consuming addiction to his tongue, a little breathing room wasn’t a bad thing. But the entire week? It was a giant signal that our flirtation stopped being harmless when I dragged him into the bathroom and my pants came off.
Not that I regretted dragging him into the bathroom, of course, but five days without Patrick left me feeling unsettled and a little lonely.
I was also hungry—my Mason jar salads were dreadfully bland in comparison to the eclectic mix of hidden gems Patrick picked for lunch.
He spent Monday and Tuesday out of the office with Shannon, and aside from a quick discussion of priorities after the partners’ meeting that morning, I didn’t see or hear from him. He spent Wednesday and Thursday with Matt and Riley as they handled issues at jobsites, and though I understood those issues to be serious, I knew Patrick didn’t spend his days micromanaging his siblings. He told them to “figure it out” and they always did.
He was inventing reasons to dodge me. No amount of hot yoga would untie the heavy knots of tension in my body—sexual and otherwise.
Patrick delegated walk-throughs without any overbearing, control-freakish backstory on each site or an insistence I apprise him of the progress. Regardless, I emailed him detailed notes from all of my visits and conversations with contractors, and attached extensive slideshows to keep him updated on our projects.
