Notyou look nice.Notgood evening.Just —you ready.
"Uh. Yes, rip, roaring and ready, Freddy."
Fucking hell, woman.
Camille looks at me with raised eyebrows.
Fuck if I know, Cammy. Damnit.
I pick up my bag. Kiss Camille on the cheek and catch the look she gives me over my shoulder as I walk to the door, the one that sayscall me the second you get back.
I step into the hallway beside Bennet Sullivan, and the door clicks shut behind me, and for a moment neither of us movestoward the elevator. We just stand there in the corridor with a very particular stillness. We are just two people who have agreed to something and are now standing at the edge of it.
"Ground rules," I say.
He looks down at me with the expression he keeps on permanent rotation. "Already?"
"In public, we're convincing." I keep my voice even. "Whatever this is between us stays in the building. Out there, you like me and I like you. Genuinely enough that people believe it." I hold his gaze. "Can you do that?"
We stare at each other for a moment, and then his lips twitch.
“What?”
"I'm a very good liar, Mrs. Monroe," he says, and gestures a hand toward the elevator.
I fall into step next to him and think about the specific way he said that, and whether it's supposed to be reassuring or not, and decide I don't have an answer for that yet.
With his hand on my back, he leads me to the elevator and out into the building’s lobby, the whole time staying silent.
Right before leave the building to enter the waiting car, his hand finds mine.
He takes it without asking, fingers sliding between mine and interlacing with a confidence that suggests he does this all the time, which I know he doesn't, and the contact is so unexpected that I flinch before I can stop myself.
He looks down at me. "That's not the behavior of someone who likes me, Mrs. Monroe."
Then he brings my knuckles to his lips, eyes on mine over the back of my hand as he grazes them across my skin.
My mouth does not have a counterattack for that.
My vagina clearly does, clenching in response like it has opinions and intends to share them.
He escorts me across the lobby with my hand still in his and pushes the front door open, holding it open for me. A car is waiting at the curb, the driver already out and standing. Bennet opens the door himself before the driver can get there and gestures me in, waiting until I'm settled before he rounds the car and gets in on the other side.
The door closes, and the car pulls out into the city.
I become very aware that my hand is still warm where he held it, which is information I don't know what to do with, so I set it in my lap and look out the window and say nothing.
"We'll be at The War Keys in forty minutes, Mr. Sullivan." The driver's voice comes through before the partition rises and seals us in together.
Forty minutes.
I turn to him and reach for something neutral, something professional, something that might sand down whatever this dynamic is before we walk into a restaurant full of people who need to believe we chose each other.
"Maybe we can use the drive to learn a bit about each other? Where are you from originally?"
His jaw clenches first. Then his hands, fingers curling slowly into fists in his lap, like he's making a conscious decision about something.
"There’s not a single thing I want to know about you," he says, looking straight ahead, "and nothing you need to know about me. This isn't adate." He turns then, and the way he looks at me strips every professional pretense out of the car. "Your jobis to look fuckable on my arm and smile for the cameras. Stick to what you're good at.Blaire."
