The rap on the door came a couple of minutes later. Joe pushed himself up out of the oversoft embrace of the chair, adjusted his cock so the hard bulgeof it wasn’t obvious, and walked over to open the door.
“Whiskey?” he offered as he held out the glass.
Cal looked at the whiskey and then at him. “I don’t drink and drive.”
“No one is asking you to drive,” Joe said with a crooked smile and waited.
There was a pause, and then Cal took the whiskey from him. There were scars on the backs of his hands and calluses over his knuckles. He hadn’tclaimed a martial-arts qualification, but he obviously knew how to fight. His hands were messed up, but his face wasn’t.
The thought occurred to Joe that if he was wrong about that brief once-over, he could end up on the other end of that scarred fist. It strung the hot wire of lust tighter in Joe’s balls. He liked to be in control—in business, in bed—but there was something heady about the threatof being out of it.
“Sit down,” Joe suggested as he waved to one of the chairs. “If you’re going to work for me, I suppose I should know a little bit more about you.”
Cal gave him a sidelong look and then leaned against the post of the bed instead. That—Joe decided as he sat back down—actually worked better. He poured himself a whiskey and admired the view as Cal took a sip of his drink. Therewas nothing elegant about Cal’s body, no gym-sculpted muscle or narrow waist, just heavy muscle and long legs. His face looked like something you’d see carved in a museum, with heavy, broody bones and a lush, soft mouth.
“So what do you wanna know?” Cal asked.
Joe spread his hands. “Entertain me,” he said.
“I expected to get laid tonight.” Cal took a sip of whiskey and chased a stray drop overhis lower lip with his tongue. “I was on a date when my brother called me in.”
“You’re being paid well for the inconvenience,” Joe said. “I’m sure you can make it up to your… girlfriend?”
Cal smirked. “First date.”
“And you were going to get laid? It must have been going well.”
Cal glanced down at himself and then back up at Joe with a cocky tilt of his mouth. He gave a one-shouldered “well,come on” shrug that pulled his shirt tight over his chest.
“So, is that it?” Cal asked as he pushed himself off the bedpost. He walked over and bent down to put the barely touched whiskey at Joe’s elbow. “Or are you going to cut to the chase?”
He smelled of cologne and a hint of fresh sweat—a mixture of cedarwood, salt, and musk. The heavy bulk of his body was angled over Joe’s, one arm bracedon the arm of the chair.
“You have somewhere else to be?” Joe asked.
Cal kissed him with a rough, eager pass of soft lips and sharp teeth. The aftertaste of whiskey lingered on his tongue, a hand-me-down sting of liquor on Joe’s tongue. Cal chewed Joe’s surprised breath off his lips and then pushed himself back away from the chair.
“Bed,” he said as he stepped back and unbuttoned the collarof his shirt. The flash of ink and the tight lines of tendons in Cal’s throat quivered heat all the way down Joe’s nerve endings. He shifted in the chair and tried to will the tight bulge of his cock back under control. “Yours or mine. It’s no skin off my nose.”
Joe tilted his head back against the chair, wet hair cold against his scalp, and slowly ran his tongue over his lower lip as he triedto adjust his plans. He wasn’t often wrong-footed. His career as a troubleshooter might have been rooted in nepotism, but he’d kept it because he was good at it. If he hadn’t been, Harry would have given him a stipend and sent him to Monaco or somewhere to be decorative and useless. Even if they’d been close, which they had never quite pulled off, Harry was never a man who’d let sentimentality getin the way of money.
Cal had managed to do what dozens of real estate lawyers and site supervisors had never quite pulled off—throw Joe off script so abruptly that he hadn’t even seen it coming. The reality of not being entirely in control of an encounter, the reins yanked from your grip, was a lot less pleasant than the possibility of it.
“You know what they say about assumptions,” Joe saidas he watched Cal tug the tails of his shirt out of his trousers.
Cal shrugged and paused with his fingers on the buttons of his shirt. “You really the type of guy who gives a crap about his employees’ lives?” he asked. “I mean, if you’rerealinterested, I can tell you all about my hopes and dreams.”
“Which are?”
The grin wasn’t what Joe expected. It was wide and goofy and plastic to the pointof reshaping that brutally pretty face into something awkward and oddly charming.
“Get laid,” Cal said. “Drive fast. I’m a simple man.”
Joe put his tumbler down, close enough to Cal’s that the glasses clicked together. He tilted his head curiously to the side.
“Do all your customers get this sort of hands-on service?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Cal said. He undid the last button on his shirt and letit hang open as he tucked his hands into his pockets. “There’s a customer-satisfaction survey, and with an iTunes gift card on the line, I like to go the extra mile. Look, if you want to pretend you had to seduce me into this? We can pretend you’ve threatened my paycheck if I didn’t comply with your deviant desires.”
