I set the wooden spoon down and turned in his arms, linking my hands behind his neck. “I figured the least I could do is make you a homecooked meal, since you’ve been letting me freeload here all week.”
“No need to cook.” He pressed his mouth to mine and pulled back with the flesh of my lower lip between his teeth. “I’ll just take the rent from your body.”
“In that case, I might be paid up until the end of the month. I’ve been here for five days, and I think we’ve had sex ten times.”
“I can’t help it. I wake up hard thinking about you one floor down, and then I can’t stop thinking about coming home and having you again.” He slid a hand into the waistband of my yoga pants and palmed a handful ofmy ass. “I have to go out of town tomorrow afternoon for the night, so I may need to bank a few before then.”
“How about I feed you first?”
“Your pussy? Perfect.”
I laughed and gave his shoulder a nudge. “I’m serious. I made chicken piccata with gnocchi.”
He pouted. “I’d rather have you.”
“And you can.Afteryou eat dinner.”
Jagger had been slipping into bed with me each morning this week instead of going to the gym. We both worked all day, and in the evening, he stopped here before going upstairs and relieving the sitter. Last night I’d decided to go to bed wearing nothing but the choker he’d bought me for my birthday, and when he found me like that this morning, we’d both been a few minutes late getting to the office. I knew he had a million things going on at work, so the fact that he’d made this time for me meant a lot. Even though we were staying in two separate apartments, waking up to him and having him come home to me had settled us into a nice domestic routine that I loved. It allowed me to forget what happened last week and live in a fairy-tale-like bubble. But…it wasn’t really reality, and it would soon be time for me to go home.
I pressed a chaste kiss to Jagger’s lips and pointed. “Go sit. Dinner is just about ready.”
Surprisingly, he listened. Jagger took off his suit jacket while I plated two dishes and opened a bottle of wine. His phone rang just as I set dinner on the table, and I loved that he sent the call to voicemail and turned the screen facedown so he couldn’t see notifications coming through. We’d come such a long way together in a relatively short time.
“This is delicious.” He forked chicken into his mouth. “Though if I keep skipping the gym in the morning and youkeep cooking like this, you might not like my body so much anymore.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not possible.” Jagger had an incredible physique, but I was turned on more by who he was than his rippling muscles. There was something in the way he spoke to me, the way he looked at me, that made me feel like I was precious to him. This morning, he’d stared into my eyes while he pumped in and out of me and growled the wordmine. I’d spent half the day hot and bothered just thinking about it. Even now, I felt my cheeks flush. So I lifted the chilled wine to my lips, hoping to cool off. Otherwise, the dinner I’d spent an hour making would be tomorrow’s leftovers. I cleared my throat. “Where are you heading tomorrow?”
“I have to go down to DC to meet with the DOJ again. We think we found a solution to their concerns that we can both live with.”
“You’re going to tweak your algorithm?”
Jagger shook his head. “No, but we’re going to propose a change in the information we feed into it. Right now, all of the big investment firms use data from the same group of sources—PitchBook, Bloomberg, etc. We plug their datasets and analytical tools into our proprietary algorithm to analyze the millions of different companies that exist in the world. It’s not really that surprising that what comes out might be similar when we’re all putting in the same thing. We’re going to propose that we start using only information that is proprietary to us.”
“You mean you’d do all the legwork to create the data in-house? Wouldn’t that be an enormous undertaking?”
“It would be if we didn’t buy an existing data and research platform. Tomorrow night I’m having dinner with the CEO of MSL—Market Search Link. They’re smallerthan the top three, but we’ve been using their data for a few years, and I think we can just add resources and bring it in-house fairly painlessly. If we can reach a tentative agreement, we’re going to present the idea to the DOJ.”
“Oh wow. And MSL is willing to sell?”
“It’ll cost a small fortune—they realize we need them more than they need us right now—but it will give us more control in the end.”
We spent the rest of dinner talking business, and then Jagger insisted I stay seated while he cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. I did, though I moved to the stool on the other side of the counter to watch him. The man somehow managed to be sexy rinsing dishes and wiping counters.
“I spoke to Detective Wallace today,” Jagger said.
The announcement was akin to throwing a bucket of water over me. I sat up stick-straight. “Oh?”
“They were able to get traces of DNA off the envelope. But it didn’t match anyone in their systems.”
The smile that had been on my face while watching the domestic side of Jagger faded. “What about the video?”
“The envelope was delivered by a courier who regularly works this route. The card was dropped off at their office, which is a shithole uptown, and they don’t have any security cameras.”
“So they have nothing? Again they hit a brick wall?”
He nodded. “But it doesn’t mean that’s what’ll happen to me. They won’t hand over the DNA profile they created from the envelope sample, but I asked if my security team can have the envelope to do our own search. My hands aren’t tied by the law like theirs are. Of course, Wallace got pissed off and said no. But I went over his head, and I’m waiting to hear back. I think we’ll get to do our own testing.”
“I was really hoping they’d come up withsomethingthis time.” I shook my head and looked down. “I’ve lived in fear for too long, and I can’t let it rule my life anymore.”
