Her head tips forward on a heaved breath. “I followed you, okay? I-I…you looked so miserable and alone watching everyone from the darkness…and you never came back to the party. So I followed, because I was worried. Which is crazy, because I don’t even know you.” After a small hesitation, her hands slide through my hair, screwing it up the way no one else would dare, little sobs breaking past her lips. All the while, I’m dying a slow death. She followed me. She saw me and gave a shit. “I didn’t know I would find you on the l-ledge, so I thought maybe if I danced, you would have a reason to laugh—”
My mouth throws a roadblock down in front of wherever she was going because I can’t take it. I can’t. I’m going to rip my skin off because she’s saying those words when I haven’t secured her as mine yet. I’m a businessman and logistics are discussed before promises are made or everything can get blown to hell. So I murder her mouth with mine and she molds herself to me like warm clay, rubbing and rocking against me in all the right places.
“I’ve never kissed with my feet dangling in the air,” she murmurs haltingly, when we break for air.
I press our heads together, struggling to regain some control. “Get used to doing things you’ve never done before.”
She nods slowly, her breath catching when my finger slides just inside the valley of her bare backside.
“What is your name?”
“Alaveda Rose. Veda for short.” I pronounce the word in my head over and over. Vay-da. I have a sudden wish to see her name on the building, instead of mine. “What’s yours?” She asks, her fingers playing with the ends of my hair.
“You don’t know the name of your father’s boss?”
Veda sighs, as if already exasperated by my arrogance, and I fall a little deeper into the hole she has dug for me. “I know the name of his boss. And that boss’s boss.” Her ankles cinch tighter at my back and I groan, even though she clearly isn’t trying to be seductive, but simply hanging on. “I know he works for Beckett Limited, but I still don’t know your name.”
“Ramsey.” It seems so grandiose compared to the lightness of Veda. “Ramsey Beckett.”
She tilts her head to the side and looks right into my soul. “Why are you so sad, Ramsey Beckett of Beckett Limited?”
I open my mouth with no idea of what I’m going to say. Something I’ve never done in my life. I always have a strategy. Plan, execute, cut them off at the knees. Those lessons were ingrained in me. Looking at Veda, I’m beginning to wonder what kind of life exists outside of those harsh lessons…and if maybe it’s not too late for me to find out. But before I can spill whatever unknowns are lurking in my head, a voice joins us on the roof.
“V?”
Everything inside me rebels against the interruption, especially because she gasps, her legs unhooking and dropping, her hands pushing at my chest. It’s a battle not to yank her back close, tip up her chin and remind her we aren’t finished. The fact that it’s a man—her father or not—that has come looking for her is like a hot knife in my gut. I don’t have time to examine if that reaction is irrational, although, it probably isn’t. Nothing about me has been sane since she danced out onto the roof.
Veda examines her dress, hands shaking as she pats and smoothes the material back into place. “I’m here, dad.”
I close my eyes and breathe through my nose, attempting to rein in the possessiveness and focus. After all, I’m about to come face to face with a man, while my dick is still hard for his little girl. Something that definitely doesn’t happen every day, especially not to me.
When Veda floats past me, she trails her fingers over the sleeve of my tuxedo jacket and the storm inside me calms. Settles right down. I can breathe again. And if I wasn’t sure already she would be mine, that would have done it. She’s indispensable.
“I thought you were going to the bathroom,” her father says to my left, his voice wary in a way that makes it clear he sees me standing there. So I turn and watch Veda approach her father, accepting his arm as it settles across her shoulders.
“I just needed some air.” She turns and sends me a secret smile, appeasing me. I get the sense she likes appeasing me and goddamn, it goes both ways. I’d love the chance to appease her and I will have it. “Dad, this is Ramsey Beckett.”
“I know who he is.” A polite, but stilted nod. “Mr. Beckett.”
“Mr. Rose.”
He’s visibly startled that I’ve been talking to Veda long enough to learn his last name. If I had room to feel sympathy around everything Veda has woken up inside me, I would have felt it for the other man in that moment, because the situation is about to get much more difficult for him.