The taste of his lips ghosted across my tongue and the pressure of his mouth still pressed against mine in my head.I wanted to stop existing.Freeze everything.Only then would the sensation never fade away.
But it had to fade away.
And I found myself breaking my own resolve to do nothing but work when it did.
“Keaton,” I said.
He looked up.He was mid-type: his fingers poised above the keyboard.He looked like a startled rabbit.“Yes?”
“You must have questions for me.”
Keaton stared at me with that same expression for another beat before dropping his hands to the desk and smiling.He had a crafty look to him now.“What you mean by that is, you have questions for me.”
I hung my head a second before I could look at him again.I knew this was going to be a problem.I just had to figure out how to navigate it.
“There’s a lot to figure out about how we’re going to do this.”
“Well,” Keaton said and leaned forward on one of his hands.His tone turned conspiratorial.“You may not have done this for a while, so let me remind you.First, we need something to lubricate the whole procedure, and then -”
I could feel my face heating as I waved a hand to stop him.I wasn’t a prude.I just couldn’t handle that kind of talk in this office if we weren’t going to be acting on it right away.“You know what I meant.”
Keaton’s face sobered.“Has it?Been a while for you, I mean.”
I considered the timeline of my life.“Yes.Out of choice.I’m not a man with a lot of free time.”
“I guess that’s the good thing about me being right here with you in the space where you spend most of your time,” Keaton said.His grin was impish.
“Or the bad thing,” I groaned.“We’re supposed to be working.”
“We still can.”
There might as well have been a vast ocean of space between us.We couldn’t touch from here.I might be able to hit him with a balled-up piece of paper at best.But even so…
Keaton Dunbar was controlling me like a puppet on a string.
He knew as well as I did that there was no going back to work until this conversation was done.
“I’ve not been a monk for my whole life,” I clarified.“There were others.Before.”
“Why did they end?”Keaton asked.
I liked how direct he was being.His eyes were like magnets constantly drawing me in.I wanted to tell him the truth about everything.I couldn’t be anything but honest.That was what scared me.
“I wasn’t out,” I said.
There.My cards were on the table.The one thing I knew that could derail this faster than it had begun.
Keaton had already told me the one thing that truly mattered to him.The one thing that would stop him from getting into a relationship again.
It also just so happened to be the only boundary I wasn’t willing to cross yet.
Keaton looked down at the space between us for a long time.I resisted the urge to dive over my desk and sprawl on the floor into his eyeline.I prayed for him to look at me until he did and I wanted to hide.
“It’s different for you,” he said.Not a question: a statement.“You’re in the public eye.It’s rare for an agent to be well-known like you, but thanks to the fact that you and Coleman were both players, and your rivalry… it’s different.”
I frowned lightly.“Different how?I’m sure your ex had a reason for not wanting to come out.”I wouldn’t say his name.
“Jordan was…” I fought back a flinch at hearing it.I hated the sound of it on Keaton’s tongue.The sound of his ex-lover’s name.There was a tinge to it that he would never use for anyone else.Primal jealousy roared like a beast inside of me.“He had his reasons, yes.But they were selfish reasons.For you, I see it differently.”
