And with that, she turned and disappeared around the corner, leaving Wes with the distinct impression that, despite the square footage, there was no space in her house for anyone else.
CHAPTER FIVE
AND PURSUANT TO these charges, legalese, legalese, blah, blah, blah.
With a silent scream of frustration, Vivienne braced her elbows on her desk and dropped her head into her hands. Her legendary ability to plow through piles of legal documents had abandoned her, as though her tireless obsession with Wes’s case had fallen victim to her less welcome preoccupation with the man himself.
He took up space. In her house. In her mind. And because he didn’t fit there anymore, it was distractingly noticeable. She’d been at this for hours, trying to figure out how to get the charges dropped, but she couldn’t focus. Couldn’t forget that there was only a wall between her and the defendant.
Well, a wall and six years of growing in opposite directions.
With a sigh, she glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of her screen. It was just past midnight.
Shutting everything down, she undocked her laptop and stuffed it into its padded case. Wes’s release was contingent on her not giving him access to any electronics, although the precaution of hiding her computer felt like too little too late, considering that he’d already bypassed an elevator...not to mention her newest lingerie.
Vivienne squeezed her thighs together at the inconvenient flutter low in her belly and shoved the dirtier bent of her thoughts aside. Great sex might have been enough to sustain a relationship when she was twenty-two, but it wasn’t enough for her now. And there was too much history between them to entertain the notion of the strictly carnal, no-emotions-allowed fling that her hormones were currently begging her to consider. Best to forget their lapse in judgment altogether.
Reaching beneath her desk, Viv fished her Louboutins out from under her desk, where she’d kicked them off earlier, and got to her feet.
She wasn’t proud of the tentative way she opened the door. The exhale of relief when the living room was dark and silent.
Wanting her visitor to get some sleep was just being a good hostess, she assured herself. It certainly had nothing to do with avoiding any further run-ins with her big, sexy houseguest.
And she repeated that lie to herself over and over as she crept silently down the hallway, with her laptop under one arm and her shoes in the other hand.
Only after she’d pushed her bedroom door closed behind her with the softest click she could manage, did she allow herself a full breath. It had been a hell of a day.
Vivienne padded across the plush beige carpeting and into her walk-in closet. She placed the nude pumps back into their designated spot—third from the left on the rack allocated for work-appropriate shoes with heels three inches or higher—before crossing to a rainbow collection of handbags. Although she was alone, guilt lent a furtiveness to her actions as she reached up to pull her blush Chanel 2.55 handbag down from the shelf so she could hide her laptop behind it. The chain caught on something, and a black shoebox came crashing down, spilling its contents beside her feet.
She froze, heart pummeling her ribs as she tried to listen for Wes over the sound of her racing pulse. After a long, tense moment of silence that assured her that the noise hadn’t disturbed him, she lowered herself to the floor.
And came face-to-face with her and Wes’s past. Various sundries littered the carpet, including a pressed tiger lily from their official first date, a Señor Taco’s matchbook from their unofficial first date, a bunch of silly photos of them and their friends that she’d removed from frames years ago, and the reason she was mired in this court-mandated Greek tragedy in the first place—a hospital bracelet with her name on it.
Ghosts of a future that wasn’t to be.
Vivienne stuffed the offending mementos into the box and put it back on the shelf, next to her laptop. She didn’t need to linger over them to know that she’d made a lot of mistakes in her life. But getting Wes’s bogus charges dropped would make everything okay. Even the score between them. Her lie had gotten him into this mess. Her skill would get him out. And then she could cram all these unwanted feelings back in that damn shoebox with the rest of the things she couldn’t bring herself to let go of and get back to her normal life.
With a nod, she shoved her designer handbag up on the shelf, blocking the memories and her computer from view.
Vivienne reached behind her, tugging on her zipper as she walked back into her room. She stopped in front of the ornate cheval mirror in the corner and stepped out of her dress. But even as she tossed it over the nearby antique chair, her gaze remained fixed on the mirror.
Her body looked different to her, tonight. Softer somehow. In addition to the whisker burn along her jaw, Wes had left his mark on her right breast. She lifted her hand and ran the pad of her finger across it, wondering if she’d left traces of herself on him, too.
It had always been like that between them—incendiary—even that first night.
She’d had sex only with her high school boyfriend before Wes—and while Rob had been sweet and kind and she had no regrets, they’d mostly fumbled around in the dark, equal parts nerves and hormones. Too young, she thought in retrospect, and not equipped to deal with the emotional ramifications of what they’d done. But Wes...
Vivienne let her finger drift along the curve of her cleavage.
Wes had been a different level all together. While she hadn’t fully felt like a woman that night, he’d seemed all man to her. Their frantic fuck in the taqueria bathroom had been hot and sexy and panty-meltingly good, but it was later, back at her dorm room, when they’d had
