Saving the CEO (49th Floor #1)(7)

"Oh!" She came apart on him, and it was only two more strokes before he followed her.

They both froze for a moment, he on his knees with his dick in his hand  and she splayed against the brick wall in her pink winter coat, but with  her skirt hiked up and her underwear around her knees. Jesus, what a  picture they must make. He had a belated thought that he hoped there  weren't any security cameras around. Or, hell, maybe he hoped there  were. Probably, the resulting tape would be scorching.                       
       
           



       

When she wobbled a little and started to slide down the wall, it  galvanized him. He tucked himself back into his pants and stood,  hoisting her up with him.

Her cheeks were red. The uninhibited goddess had gone, and Cassie the  sweet bartender was embarrassed now. She gave him a lopsided smile as  she blushed. "I guess it's your turn now," she whispered.

Oh, the very idea of what she was suggesting-it was almost enough to get  him hard again. He muttered a curse under his breath. It was one thing  for him to fall to his knees in the dirty snow of a dark alley, but  damned if he was going to let her do it. "Don't worry about it,  sweetheart. I took care of it."

"Holy macaroni," she whispered.

Holy macaroni indeed.





Chapter Four

"Are you sure?"

Cassie smiled into the phone as she sat on the edge of her bed putting  the final touches on her toenails-electric blue background with hot pink  polka dots. She had to keep her fingernails plain to work in the  restaurant, so she overcompensated with wild toes.

"Are you sure sure?" This was Danny's eloquent closing argument in his  campaign to try to get her to come to the farm with him for Christmas.  The "farm" was the rural property Danny's hippie mother had recently  acquired, but since the land was mostly limestone, she wasn't having a  lot of luck planting. That, and the part where she didn't know squat  about agriculture. This past summer, as they stood and inspected an acre  of dead corn, Cassie had to tell her that sometimes farmers have to  irrigate.

"Irritate? What are you saying, Cassie dear?"

"Irrigate. Like, water?"

"Oh, no, Mother Nature provides. That's the beauty of farming."

"Huh," Cassie had said, surveying Mother Nature's bounty, which, this season apparently fell under the heading "scorched earth."

"You know I love you. I even love your mother. Sort of." Danny's mother  did things like pat Cassie's shoulder, and feed her gluten-free, vegan,  stevia-sweetened cookies that tasted like bricks, but that was more than  Cassie's own mother ever did. Danny didn't appreciate his weirdo mom  enough.

"I think my mother is having a midlife crisis."

"Hippies are allowed to have midlife crises." She admired her toes.

"So if you love her so much, why won't you come with me?" Then he  shifted into his generic theatrical voice. "Help me Obi-Wan, you're my  only hope!"

Cassie thought back to last Christmas. "I love your mother, but I love  my apartment building's very functional boiler more." Oh, the cold. She  was nearly having PTSD-style flashbacks just thinking about it. "And  then there was the part where she decided running water was a bourgeois  luxury we didn't need. Also-television. You know I don't get to watch TV  during the school year." She wasn't proud of it, but one of Cassie's  great joys in life was to cram entire seasons of TV into the few short  weeks she had between the end of the fall semester and the beginning of  spring. Once she was "only" working fifty hours a week, her life  suddenly opened up, and she filled the time with great greedy feasts of  Dancing with the Stars, Doctor Who, and Glee. She wasn't proud of her  taste, but if a girl's only guilty pleasure was watching a bunch of  middle-aged "teenagers" improbably break into Madonna songs as they went  about their plucky, underdog lives, really, what was the harm?

"She's let up on the plumbing thing," Danny offered weakly.

"Nope!" said Cassie brightly, flipping onto her back and waving her feet in the air to speed the drying process.

"Cass," said Danny, his tone growing uncharacteristically serious, "you can't be alone on Christmas."

She smiled. She was a lucky girl. "I'll go to Edward's." Maybe. Probably  not. Her boss, who was also her late father's best friend, was always  on her case to visit more, and he always tried to lure her over for  holidays. Christmas at Edward's, though, with his funny, sweet wife and  their daughter Alana and her little sister Chloe-it was too big a dose  of heartbreak. But Danny didn't need to know that. Still, she was lucky.  Not everyone had people fighting over them for Christmas.

"You promise you'll go to Edward's?"

"Yes!"

"Do you swear on the grave of your father?"

She jumped then, when the unnaturally loud buzzer her landlord had  recently installed guillotined into her brain. Saved by the buzzer.

"I gotta go. There's someone here."                       
       
           



       

"Oh my God, maybe your mother's been sprung from rehab! Do you think she wants to come to the farm?"

"It's not Laura. And if she's out of rehab this soon, it's because she sprang herself, in which case I'm not talking to her."

"Maybe rehab has a punch card system going. Like at coffee shops. Each  stint gets you a punch, and then when you have a whole row punched you  get to go home early. I bet she would want to come to the farm. Isn't  physical labor, like, one of the steps-"

"Gotta go! Call you later!" Cassie threw the phone on her bed and  vaulted across the room to the intercom. She did kind of wonder who it  was. Danny was the only person who ever came to her place. Maybe someone  had sent her an early Christmas present, and it was the FedEx guy. As  soon as she had the fleeting, hopeful thought, she quashed it. Hello,  was she ten years old? And who would send her a present anyway? She  punched the talk button. "Yes?"

"It's Jack Winter."

Ack! She wasn't wearing any pants! Lunging for a pair of jeans, she  jammed her legs into them without thinking. She'd grabbed a skinny pair,  so all ten wet toes came out the other end looking like she'd sent them  to a Jackson Pollack appreciation class. "Awww!"

"Ahh!" There was that unholy buzzer again. "Yes?"

"Can I come up?"

"Oh! Yes, sorry! 5A." Nice move, Rico Suave. She turned in place, trying  to look at her apartment through his eyes. His eyes were probably used  to a ginormous penthouse. She, on the other hand, lived in what was  basically one room. The landlord had tried to sell it as an  "efficiency-plus"-and it was large. Largish. But it was still one big  room with an alcove that just fit her double bed, affording the illusion  of a separate space for sleeping.

Well, it was what it was. Mr. CEO Dude would just have to deal. At least  it was cute. She was rather proud of all the work she'd done to trick  it out. If her version of shabby chic was a little heavy on the shabby,  well, the lights were dim. She eyed the antique chandelier she'd hung  just last week-and they were pretty good-looking lights, too.

By the time he rapped on her door, her vagina was panting. There was no  other way to describe it. He was Pavlov; her vagina was the dog. Okay,  not the best metaphor maybe, but she hadn't even laid eyes on him yet  and things were … happening.

She swung open the door. He was leaning against the jamb looking down, and he was actually panting. "No elevator?"

She shrugged. "The rent is cheap. The neighborhood is fun."

He pushed off the doorframe and must have spied her feet before he lifted his eyes because he said, "Nice toes."

"I wasn't wearing any pants."

He lifted an eyebrow.

Yeah, nice job-why didn't she just say, "Woof, woof?"

"What I mean is, I was painting my toenails, and I wasn't wearing pants.  Then you buzzed. So I had to put pants on, and I ruined my toes." Woof  woof.

A beat of silence, then his voice like scratchy molasses. "Shoot, don't get dressed on my account."

Was this a booty call? A booty visit? Because she wasn't actually sure  how she felt about that, Pavlov aside. It was one thing to do some ah,  stuff, outside Edward's. Quite another for him to show up at her home.  Yeah, this was not good. She didn't actually know anything about this  guy. "How did you know where I live?"

"I got it out of that hostess at Edward's." Before she could protest, he  continued. "I've come with a proposition. Can I come in?"

"Uh … " What was she supposed to say to that? It was fine in the alley, but I'm not so sure about the comfort of my own bed?