Undercover in the CEO's Bed(2)

“Why don’t we meet for lunch tomorrow?” Lex said.

She stared. What was going on here? He didn’t care about her date with another man, then, which must mean...he wasn’t pining for her. He didn’t want to get back together with her. Her stomach lurched. How silly of her to hope Lex might miss her. Of course he didn’t. Just look at him, how virile and confident he was. Why had she imagined he might still carry a torch for her?

“I’m busy tomorrow.” She glared at him. “Why don’t you just tell me right here what it is you want and get it over with?”

“Fine.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and laced his fingers together. “I have a business proposition for you.”

Business. She should have known. “Then why all the prying about my date?”

“I wasn’t prying. Your dating situation is integral to my proposition.” His gaze grew more pointed. “This guy you’re seeing, I assume you’re not involved with him yet?”

“Involved?”

“Have you slept with him?”

Her cheeks burned. “That’s none of your damned business.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

“I don’t care how you take it.”

His lips thinned. “Let me explain. My business proposition is a highly confidential one. I need you to find a security leak inside my company.”

“Call my office and make an appointment. Cyber Security. We’re on the internet. Now, if you’ll excuse—”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’ve hired you. No one at all.”

The expression on Lex’s face stopped her in her tracks. He looked so grim, so forbidding, like there was a rage boiling behind an iron wall of self-control. When they’d broken up, he’d done plenty of snapping and snarling, but this was the first time she’d sensed such a seismic volcano simmering beneath his surface. The first time she’d detected a hint of vulnerability in him too.

“No one?” she echoed.

“You can’t even say we’ve had this meeting.”

Jacinta shifted uneasily in her seat. “What’s with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? I’m not a spy.”

She was an IT security consultant. She analyzed a company’s systems, their information flows, their checks and balances, and she advised them on any real or potential risks. She was good at her job, but there wasn’t anything remotely covert about her role.

Lex kneaded one fisted hand with the other, a furrow etched between his eyebrows. “Like I said, it’s extremely sensitive. That’s why I need complete confidentiality.”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, “I’d have to tell my boss at least.”

He was silent for a few moments. “Okay, but that’s all. Agreed?”

“I haven’t agreed to anything.”

“I’m prepared to reward you very generously for both your expertise and your discretion.”

He sounded like he was at the negotiating table. Guarded, impassive, cold-blooded. That was how he really was. The man she’d thought he was had just been a figment of her imagination. Sudden tears clogged her throat.

“Dammit, Lex. What are you trying to do here?” She curled her hands and dug her fingernails into her palms as she strove to control her voice. “We’re through. I haven’t heard from you in ten months. We’re nothing to each other now. After everything we’ve been through, why on earth would you want to hire me?”

For the first time, she noticed the faint lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there ten months before. The lines intensified as the planes of his face hardened. She sensed him withdrawing even further behind his barriers.

“Because I want people to think we’re back together.”

“You want...” She hauled in a shaky breath. “That’s just plain crazy.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “If we pretend we’re a couple again, no one will suspect I’ve hired you. You can come into my office or my home as my girlfriend, and no one would be the wiser. It’s the perfect disguise.”

“Your girlfriend?” She felt as though her eyeballs would pop out. “No one would ever believe that.”

“Why not? Everyone believed it ten months ago. I can make them believe it again.”

A glimmer flared in his eyes. His gaze flicked over her neck, moved lower to her shirt, and lingered on the buttons. The unnerving intimacy of his examination sped up her heart rate. Beneath her bra, her nipples began to tingle as if he’d touched them. No, no. She wouldn’t let her breasts get the better of her.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I couldn’t disguise my aversion to you, no matter how much you paid me.”

“You sure about that?”

“What you did to Kevin was unforgivable.” Her body was shaking again. She hugged herself closer.

“What I did to Kevin? He brought it on himself.”

“He made a mistake, yes, but you crucified him—”

“That’s overdramatic. I treated him the way I’d treat any employee who stepped out of line.”

“No, you went out of your way to make an example of him.” She caught her breath, an acrid taste singeing the back of her mouth. She couldn’t hold herself together for much longer. Any moment now tears would leak out, and that would just prove she hadn’t gotten over Lex, not one bit.

She gathered her bags. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. Find someone else to fix your security hole. I’m sure there’s someone out there willing to pretend she’s your girlfriend. Just leave me out of it.” The streetcar was approaching her stop—thank God for that. She pushed to her feet, saying stiffly, “Excuse me.”

Lex rose to make way for her. “You know how deep my pockets are. Name your price.”

“Don’t you ever give up?”

The corner of his mouth lifted an inch. “You know me.”

A shiver ran down her spine at his confidence. “And you know me,” she retorted.

She moved into the aisle, and he stepped back to let her through, but not much. “If you change your mind,” he murmured as she squeezed past him, “give me a ring on my cell phone.”

“I deleted your number,” she lied.

“Here it is, then.”

Before she could move, he slipped a business card into her shopping bag. Maybe it was the sudden slowing of the streetcar, or maybe it was the brush of his fingers across her wrist, or maybe it was a combination of both that made her stumble forward and bump against him.

She thought he let out a soft hiss, but she could barely make out anything over the rapid thumping of blood in her ears. The sensation of Lex’s solid chest pressed up against hers scrambled her already fractured wits. All she could focus on was the warmth of his body radiating beneath the soft cotton of his shirt, and the responding tremor flowing through her muscles. She put out a hand, intent on pushing away from him, but when her palm brushed against his shirt and felt the wall of his chest, she stilled, transfixed by the lure of Lex’s overt masculinity.

Her mind and heart had fought so hard to distance him, but her body remembered him instinctively, and the heat he’d always triggered so easily in her leaped up, an instant conflagration. Her nose was inches away from his shirt. The urge to nuzzle and suck in the smell of him made her weak at the knees.

A firm finger slid under her chin as Lex lifted her face to his. She wobbled in disbelief. His head lowered, his mouth tantalizingly close to hers. Was he going to...? Surely she couldn’t let him... But she was paralyzed as his lips hovered an inch over hers.

“Jacinta?”

Almost drugged by his proximity, she raised her dazed eyes to his. “Yes?”

“Judging by how you’re looking at me right now, I’d say you’d make a pretty good pretend girlfriend.”

Reality snapped back. Dammit, she was practically drooling over him like he was a powdered doughnut. Without a word, she pushed past him and hurried away, not daring to look back in case she saw Lex smiling after her.

Pretend girlfriend. Her near swoon hadn’t been pretending at all, and they both knew it.

…

Lex looked on as Jacinta practically leaped from the streetcar in her rush to get away from him. Did she really hate him that much? Once upon a time she hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him, and the feeling had been mutual.

Had? It was still there, that urge to pull her into his arms and make her his. A second ago he’d been this close to kissing her. God, the temptation! He still hadn’t recovered. He stared after her as she hurried down the sidewalk. Her legs flashed, long and shapely, as she tossed back her thick, dark brown hair. She was more breathtaking than he’d remembered.

A guy turned to check her out, and Lex’s fingers curled into a fist. Jackass. He shook his head. Damn, was he jealous of Jacinta? What about the date she had tonight? Was it serious? A weird tightness formed in his chest. Swiping the back of his hand across his brow, he forced himself to sit back as the streetcar rumbled on.

He never rehashed old history, and Jacinta belonged in the past. When they’d broken up, he’d sworn never to contact her again. Only the unfolding crisis in his company had forced his hand. He’d identified the most efficient course of action, which meant contacting Jacinta again, and so he’d done it. But he’d underestimated the impact of old memories, and seeing her in person had punched the air from his lungs. Luckily, the overcrowded streetcar meant he’d had to wait a while before approaching her, but even then, the sight of her startled, toffee-brown eyes fixing on him had sent a subterranean jolt right through him.