he was after, he rolled her nipple beneath his tongue, taking his time and working it over until it turned into a hard little pebble. His scrotum got so tight, his stomach ached with the pleasure of it. Then he sucked her into his mouth and he didn’t know which moan was louder, his or hers.
Her head fell back and she gave a sexy little “Ohhh. That feels good. Do that.” She squirmed against the front of his jeans and he about exploded in his pants. He kissed her other breast until her breathing got choppy and he knew there was no turning back. She would give him what he wanted. Let him do all the things he’d been thinking about doing to her.
He slid his mouth down her soft stomach to her belly button. He wanted to kiss her thighs and satisfy the hungry, clawing need that demanded release. A box of condoms lay in the drawer beneath Chelsea, just waiting for him to open them up and slide one on.
He pushed up her skirt as the first twinge of pain gripped his thigh. He stilled, hoping it would go away. “Goddamn!” It knotted his muscles, and he grasped the granite edge to keep from falling on his ass. “Shit!”
“What?”
The pain radiated up his hip and he couldn’t move.
“Are you okay?”
He hung his head and tightened his grasp on the stone. “No.” As carefully as possible, he lowered himself to the floor before he fell. He sat with his back against the island, one hand gripping his thigh. He pulled air in through his nose and breathed it out through his mouth. He didn’t know which was worse. The pain in his body, or the humiliation of his body giving out on him before he could satisfy himself and the half-naked woman on the counter. Probably the latter. The pain in his body would ease. The humiliation would be with him for a while.
“Mark.” Chelsea knelt beside him, her bra on and her shirt buttoned over her breasts. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.” He took another deep breath and gritted his teeth. “Just give me a few minutes.”
“Did I… did I do something to hurt you?”
Until that moment, he’d thought his humiliation was complete. “No.”
“What happened?”
His muscles began to relax, and he looked into her pretty face, her lips still swollen from his kiss. “Sometimes I forget my limitations. When I move too fast or just the wrong way, I get a cramp in my thigh.”
“Can I massage it for you?”
“No.”
“But if you’re in pain, I could rub your leg.”
He laughed as the pain receded from his hip. “My leg isn’t the only place I’m in pain. If you want to rub me, go ahead and massage my hard-on.”
She bit the side of her lip. “That’s not in my job description.”
“Honey, everything we were just doing wasn’t in your job description.”
She sat back on her heels. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into taking off my shirt.”
“There wasn’t a lot of talking.”
“I know.” Her cheeks flushed pink like the bottom of her hair. “Sometimes I have issues with impulse control, but I can’t have sex with you. It’s wrong.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.” She shook her head and pushed her hair behind her ears. “I work for you, and there are boundaries that I just can’t cross. Please don’t ask me to. I don’t want to lose this job.”
They were back to that. He took a deep breath and let it out. The last of the pain eased from his body, but he knew that one wrong move and it would return. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I told you that you won’t get fired.”
“I’d still have to leave. It would just be too weird after that. It would be like I got paid to come here and have sex with you. I know that after what just happened you might not believe this, but morally and ethically, I just can’t do that.”
Morally and ethically, he did not have a problem with having sex with his assistant. None at all, but he’d never been the type of guy to pressure a woman who didn’t want sex. Not even when he wanted it so bad his teeth hurt and his balls ached.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
He glanced over at her. Suddenly he felt tired. And old. Like he’d just gone two rounds with Darren McCarty in overtime. “You don’t have to say anything. I took a bunch of Vicodin just before you got here and lost my mind.”
She stood, and he looked up her bare legs. “Does it usually make you lose your mind?”
No, she made him lose his mind. “It makes me forgetful, and I forgot that I can’t have sex with you.” But he wouldn’t forget again. He had blue balls and she was about to walk out the door. Just like last time. She was cute and sexy and he liked her, but there were a lot of cute, sexy women that he liked. Cute, sexy women who wouldn’t let things like morals and ethics stand in the way of a hot, ra sy ounchy roll in the sheets.
If not for a leg cramp, Chelsea would have had sex with Mark. Right there on top of the granite island. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind about that. He hadn’t been the only one to lose his mind that afternoon in his kitchen. And just like there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she would have done him, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it would have been good.
Real good.
Scream at the top of her lungs, rock the gates of heaven, and beg him not to stop, good.
She didn’t know what it was about him, other than his good looks and hot body. Other than the heat of his brown eyes and the touch of his skilled hands and mouth, that made her forget everything. Forget her ethics and plans and who she was and what she wanted to do with her life.
She’d worked for fantastic-looking men before. Men who’d made it known in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they wanted to have sex with her. She’d never been tempted. To them she’d just been a woman they found attractive. A body. It hadn’t been personal.
Mark was different. There was just something in the way he looked at her sometimes. Not as if he wanted her, but as if he needed her. It surrounded him like some sort of hot magnetic force that drew her in and drained her brain. It made her all raw nerve endings and warm urges. It made her throw caution and good judgment to the wind, along with her clothes, and want to press her naked body against his. To touch him all over and feel him touch her.
I’ve only ever been good at two things. Hockey and sex, he’d said. My hockey career is over. So that only leaves me with one thing I’m good at.
She’d never seen him play hockey, but she imagined his approach to both was the same. She imagined he used the same thoughtful precision to score goals as he did to score with women. He stayed with it and took his time. Didn’t rush and did whatever it took to get the job done.
In the cooler section of Whole Foods, she’d wondered what the man did to make women scream; now she knew. And now that she knew, she worried that getting through the next few days, heck, the next three months, was going to be torture.
But she needn’t have worried. The next day at work, Mark returned to his previous pattern of behavior and ignored her. He ignored her the day after that too. In fact, over the course of the next few weeks, the only real time he spoke to her was when she took him to appointments or chauffeured him around to look at real estate. He looked at so many properties, she didn’t think he’d ever find anything. The property was either too big or too small. If he liked the floor plan, he didn’t like the area or vice versa. Either it was too secluded or the houses were too close. He was like the Goldilocks of house hunters and couldn’t find something that was just right.
Often his friends picked him up, or he spent time in the weight room upstairs or on the golf course just outside the backyard. On the rare occasions he did speak to her, he was so extremely polite, she wanted to hit him on the arm and tell him to knock it off. To send her on a stupid errand or insult her clothes and hair.
Instead, he asked about safe stuff, like her acti s ling. She told him about the background work she’d done for HBO. She’d been hired for a commercial shoot in a local coffee shop, and she’d tried out for the part of Elaine Harper in a local production of Arsenic and Old Lace. She didn’t get it, which was a little disappointing but okay. The play wasn’t set to open until September. She wasn’t sure how much longer she would be in Seattle after September.
Perversely, the less attention he paid her, the more attention she paid to him. The more he ignored her, the
