I clapped my hands over my mouth without realizing it, and people in the hallway are starting to take notice.
Kirk sidesteps me with a gaggle of assistants and does a double-take at my face, which must be a sickly shade of white.
“Cate?” he says, reaching out for my arm. “Are you feeling all right?”
Instantly I pull my hands away from my mouth and smile at him. Over the past year, I’ve become a master of deception. If I’m tired or irritated, I don’t let it show. I’m certainly not going to let this slip to Kirk, not in the middle of the hallway, probably not ever. “Thanks, Kirk,” I say, brushing his arm away as kindly as I can. “I just had an idea come at me from a new angle. Does that ever happen to you?”
He considers me, his eyes filled with concern, and his jaw works like he’s trying to think of the right thing to say. “Of course it does,” he agrees, and then, with his assistants shifting uneasily around him, he says, “Take it easy, all right?”
“Will do!” I call brightly after his retreating back.
Enough of this.
It’s time to get my shit together. I can’t afford to slip up like this.
That night, I stay at Basiqué until ten o’clock. It’s dark when I call down to Mark to bring around the car.
Every time my attention wandered away from my computer screen, it led me straight to images of my dad’s face when he told my sister and me that his job as a schoolteacher was finished. We’d both been surprised. He loved teaching. His favorite joke was that he’d work until he was 80, and then he’d volunteer in the school library.
Sitting in his recliner across the living room from us, his face had crumpled, and he’d wiped tears away from the corners of his eyes. “After thirty years, they decided I wasn’t working hard enough.”
His words still ring in my ears.
Which is why I can’t believe I agreed to such depraved hanky-panky with the billionaire who is ultimately my boss without a second thought. There are other ways to relax.
Yes. More sessions with Carl are in order. The only way out of this is to put in more effort on every front. If I do that, I won’t have the time or energy to think of Jax, much less meet him for illicit office sex for the next four weeks.
I pull out my phone and send my trainer a text begging him for four days a week instead of three—Fridays off. His reply comes in quickly.
You’re joking! :)
No, completely serious. Are you available?
You sure you can handle that many sessions a week? You seem spread pretty thin already.
His choice of words makes me bite my lip, color rushing to my cheeks. Spread out for Jax, more like it. How I must have looked in that position…it’s embarrassing. And I will never, ever admit how wet it made me, how much I already want more.
I can’t. I won’t. It’s not an option.
God. I am terrible.
I can handle it. Are you telling me you can’t?
It feels good to slip into easy banter with Carl.
His next reply:
See you tomorrow morning. Be ready!
Chapter Nineteen
Jax
Five o’clock on Tuesday comes and goes, the minutes dragging by.
There is no knock on my door.
I pull out a portfolio and flip it open to some contracts I need to sign.
It’s worthless. Inside of a minute, my eyes are sliding off the words on the page and back to the door.
Where the hell is she?
By 5:15, I’m done. Done.
Closing my portfolio with a snap that echoes in the space where Cate is supposed to be, I stand up from behind my desk and pace over to the windows, looking out at the city below. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Control.
Remaining in control is how I built my fortune from the ground up, no thanks to my worthless father. And I don’t mean the fact that I will never get an inheritance from him—I couldn’t care less about his money. He was a piss-poor example of what it meant to be a man who fulfilled his fucking responsibilities the way he should have.
If Cate wanted to back out—and she gave me no sign of wanting to do that yesterday, after I made her come all over my hand, bent over the desk like a high-fashion sex slave—it’s not like she doesn’t know where to find me. She has two phone numbers she can reach me at.
I keep an office in this building just to be near her, for fuck’s sake.
And she has hers.
That’s the first place I need to look.
At first it means nothing to me that there’s no one in the hallway. It is 5:00, and business hours are, by most conventions, over.
Everything makes sense when I reach the double glass doors.
The doors are locked up tight, and all the lights inside Sarzó’s office suite are off.
They’re both gone, and I’m guessing it’s not because Sarzó took the evening off and sent Cate home.