“Tell your old man you need more time to get rid of these drug charges against me.”
“I can’t do that. I have to account for every six minutes of my time. Literally.”
“So make shit up.”
He rolls his eyes, but then he looks past me, thinking. “There’s someone who might pick up some of my grunt work. But I’d still have to bill the Morellis while we’re out doing this. I can’t justnotbill hours.”
“So bill us. I’ll sign off on it from our end. We need to sort this shit out ASAP.”
His eyes darken again, but not from lust this time, and not from anger. “You’re right,” he says flatly. “There’s more risk letting it drag on. I’ll hand over some of my files to Miranda and we can…figure it out. So? I’m on tenterhooks.” He shuffles away from me a little, crosses his arms over his pecs, and his mouth quirks up at one corner. “What amazing plan have you come up with? That was the whole point of this interlude, right?”
Snarky little bitch. “We go down the list and check ’em off.”
“What list?”
“The list of people who’d be crazy enough to try and blackmailme.” Carlo gives a little shiver and I put my arm around him again. He doesn’t push it away.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “Theymustbe crazy.” After a moment, he adds: “Or desperate.”
“Stay for dinner.”
“Aw, like a real date,” he jokes, but he shrugs and adds, “Sure. Why not.”
I don’t point out that we’ve never had dinner before. He’s never even been in my apartment before. We came close once or twice to sharing a meal, but he always got jittery when he stayed away from work too long.
Not today, though.
He calls down to his driver, finally, and tells him it’s taking longer than he thought, and that he’ll find his own way back.
“We should probably cut this out,” he says over Chinese.
“Dinner?”
“The whole thing. You said yourself we should stay the hell away from each other.”
“Yeah. I did say that.” I poke at a cooling wonton.
Carlo twirls a fork in his noodles. “Problem is,” he says casually, “when I get stressed, I need to let off steam. You know what I mean?”
I swallow down a burp. Who the fuck have I become, pretending I have manners? Just because Bianchi’s some Harvard son of a bitch. But I wait until I’m not going to belch in his face before I say, “You saying you want to keep up the side benefits while we do this?”
“I’m saying when I get stressed, I get careless. We can’t afford to be careless. So, for the sake of our mission, I’ll need stress relief.”
I snort. “So it’s actuallyimperativethat we bone, huh?”
That grin of his is getting too familiar.
Chapter Seventeen
Carlo
Miranda Winter is still at the office when I get back late in the evening, like I knew she would be. All the partners work long hours, but Miranda and I frequently find ourselves the last in the office. When I appear in her doorway she wrinkles her nose at me and looks me up and down. I had a shower and my clothes are fine, no more wear than you’d expect from a long day, so I don’t know what her problem is.
“Where were you all afternoon?” she asks, looking back down at her work. It’s my notes on the Sardinian contract negotiation, I’m glad to see. At leastthat’sbeen progressed while I’ve been deep-throating someone I definitely shouldn’t be.
“That Fontana problem isn’t as open and shut as I thought it would be,” I tell her. “I’ll work from home tomorrow so there are fewer distractions. It’s gonna take some time to sort out, though. Like a week.”
She looks up at me and lifts an eyebrow. “Aweek?”
