Because the version of him I’d been hired to construct for the public wasn’t a construction. Because I’d walked into this building expecting to find the gap between the man and the image, and there wasn’t one. Because my hands were trembling against my portfolio and the professional line I’d drawn was getting thinner by the hour.
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I said.
He held my gaze. Didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. The afternoon sun through his office windows was catching the edges of his tattoos, ink and warm skin, and my breath was doing something I couldn’t control.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something else.”
The game room was on the eighth floor. Pool table, foosball, a row of arcade cabinets, a wall-mounted TV, couches in a semicircle around a low table scattered with playing cards and half-finished puzzles. The room was empty—late enough on a Wednesday that most employees had cleared out.
“Company perk,” he said. “Open twenty-four hours. Engineers practically live in here during crunch weeks.”
“You’re showing me this for the sizzle reel.”
“I’m showing you this because you’ve been holding that portfolio against your chest for two hours, and I thought you could use a break.”
He pulled two cue sticks from the wall rack and rolled one across the felt toward me. I set the portfolio down on the nearest couch. My fingers had left damp prints on the leather.
“Eight-ball,” he said. “I’ll rack.”
“Stakes?”
He looked up from racking the balls. “You want to play for stakes?”
“I don’t play without them.”
His eyes moved over my face. Slow. Deliberate. The room was too warm and too quiet and the fluorescent lights above the pool table were buzzing at a frequency I could feel in my teeth.
“What did you have in mind?” he said.
My heart was hammering. Every professional instinct I had was screaming at me to pick up the portfolio, thank him for his time, and walk out of this building before I did something that couldn’t be undone.
Tasha’s face flashed through my mind. The Juniper account. The first real opportunity I’d been given, and I was about to?—
“Strip pool,” I said.
His hands went still on the rack. His eyes came back to mine. Dark, steady, burning.
“Your break,” he said.
4
MADDOX
The cue ball cracked against the rack with a sound that echoed too loudly in the empty game room.
I’d already lost my shirt, my shoes, my socks, my belt, and my pants. Saylor’s eyes had been tracking every move I made like she was trying to memorize the ink on my skin.
She wasn’t doing much better—her heels, her blouse, and her skirt were long gone, leaving her in a pale pink bra and matching bikini briefs that made my mouth go dry every time she bent over the table.
I lost the next game on a stupid scratch. Deliberate? Maybe. The tension between us had been tightening for days, and I was done pretending I didn’t want her.
I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my boxer briefs, held her gaze, and pushed them down. My cock sprang free, already hard and heavy. Her lips parted, a soft exhale escaping as her eyes dropped.
“Now what?” she whispered, voice husky.
I stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her skin. “We can call it here. Declare a winner.” My hand brushed her hip. “Or we up the stakes. You name the shot.If you make it, I put you up on that pool table and lick you until you come.”
A tiny whimper slipped out of her. The sound went straight to my dick.
