“Throw them out. And Mark?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you’re being...”
She didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence and he felt a surge of victorious pleasure. “What, Haven?”
“Discreet in your affairs,” she said.
“Discreet in my affairs,” he repeated, mocking. “Like, what are we talking about here? No fingering women against the doors of their offices while their assistants are just outside?”
She crossed her arms and looked away. That gave him pleasure, too. Unsettling Haven Hoyt seemed to have become his new sport.
Of course, now that he knew how to really unsettle her, how to make her whimper and moan, none of this was nearly as satisfying as it should have been.
“For the time being, in the short term, you should be...”
“Celibate?”
“Careful.”
He had to swallow a smart-ass comment about how she knew from personal experience how quiet he could be. “In short, celibate,” he said. “Are you sure this warning comes from professional motives?”
“Jesus, Mark.”
“Just curious. Are you telling me this because it’s important for my image, or because now that you know what you’re missing, you don’t want anyone else to—”
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“That’s what they say,” he said airily, but he didn’t feel as blithe about it as he sounded. He was beginning to believe that if he hung out with Haven long enough, she’d turn him into who she wanted him to be.
And he wouldn’t hate that, as he’d once thought.
He loved being around her, enjoying not just their sharp chemistry constantly tickling his senses, but how smart she was, how funny, how expressive, how intuitively she seemed to get him.
He loved who he was around her. She made him feel more like himself than he had since—
Well, certainly since he’d quit giving music lessons. And maybe than he had since he’d signed his name on the Sliding Up contract’s dotted line.
He had resisted, so hard, the idea of being remade, only to discover that she had somehow remade him into himself.
“Mark?”
She ran her slim fingers down the length of a brown leather dress belt. His brain ran riot with fantasies. Her fingers along the length of him. That belt, around her wrists, around his bedpost, her curvy body laid out for him like a gift on his bed. He could imagine her huge eyes as he crawled across the sheets toward her, her body arching in anticipation, working against the restraints.
His balls drew up, his cock hardening fast. He was so screwed.
“Mark?”
For a second he was still inside the fantasy and his name on her lips was a plea. Then he snapped to his senses and clutched the pile of plastic-wrapped boxer briefs before they could slide to the floor.
“Yeah?”