He stalks over and grabs the bottle as easily as if it were empty, his biceps barely bothering to bulge as he flips it over and plugs it into the opening, where it gurgles loudly into place.
I’m too embarrassed—and, yeah, maybe annoyed at the way he just talked to me—to fully appreciate the way his thighs flex.
Also, I’m not supposed to be looking.
“Thanks.” I swipe an arm across my sweat-slick face.
He grunts something.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t be doing that kind of work. Dammit, Sunny, it’s not just Dorothy you say yes to all the time, is it?” He seems pissed, which I’m not sure I understand.
“Excuse me?”
“You say yes to everyone. Every single ridiculous request.”
“I do my job.”
“This isn’t your job. You are the HR manager for a tech start-up. Human resources. Not bottle-wrestler. Girl Scout cookies aren’t your job. Blowing employees’ noses isn’t your job.”
“Well, someone’s got to—”
“Where’s your sweater?”
“My sweater?” I focus fully on his eyes, blazing dark with something else now, something that makes every muscle in my body go tight. “I don’t know where I—”
“You were wearing a sweater. Brown with…” He pulls at his own unbuttoned collar, I guess referring to my turtleneck, although all it does is draw my eyes to his Adam’s apple, already stippled with a day’s dark growth, the tendons wrapping the sides of his strong-looking throat, that dip in the V of his collarbone. He’s removed his tie and undone the top button, and now that I’ve given my starving eyes free rein to look, I can’t pull them back in again.
The man is ridiculously attractive and not in a lighthot on socialsway, but like, parts of my body have literally gone rogue. And that’s from that one vein on his neck. The curl of body hair below it? Might as well stick my nipples into sockets.
In a last-ditch effort to drag my mind back, I say, “You noticed my sweater?”
“Of course I noticed it. Have you seen the way you fill—”
The abruptness with which he stops talking, along with the lowering of his gaze and the now almost-familiar expression of annoyed consternation, finally registers. Puzzled, I look down at myself.
Down to where my rock-hard nipples are indeed doing some of their very best work, trying to bust their way out of my now fully transparent lace bra and top with the gleeful enthusiasm of a high school production ofA Chorus Line.
“Oh shit.” I might as well not be wearing a shirt for all the coverage I’m getting. In a pointless attempt at modesty, I frantically grab the soaking-wet white fabric clinging to my middle and pull it away from my skin. “Crap, crap, craphole.”
“The shirt is soaked, Sunny,” he bites out in a low, angry voice that zaps every nerve in my body. “Take it off.”
My nipples go impossibly harder as I stand here, frozen, my brain glitching, unable to tear my eyes from stern Office Grant.
No, actually. This isn’t Office Grant, all stiff and polite and eternally irritable. This is Club Grant—this is the General—and every instinct screams at me to obey.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Grant
“YOUR TOP IS WET,” I repeat, slowly and clearly.
Rae’s big eyes stare at me, the limpid green-blue of her irises much brighter than they’d appeared in the darkness of the club. Her hair is lighter too, the exact color of the leaves on the big maple out in front of my house. Her roots have gone dark where sweat sheens her temples, which leads my gaze inexorably back to the lazy river of droplets easing its way into the intriguingly deep valley of her cleavage.
What does she taste like there? Salt? Perfume? Just how much of that warm, bright scent wafting over her desk to mine would I be able to nuzzle from that sweet-looking hollow? Hell, if she’ll just remove the damn shirt, I can taste her skin and—
“Well, hell-o.” Klaus walks in, large and red-bearded. He’s a developer. One of Dorothy’s very first hires. She’dtrust him with her life, she told me, although after the fourth or fifth employee, the phrase lost its impact.
