One-Off (33 page)

I skimmed my hand from her hip to her belly and stroked lightly. Her hips bucked back against me, trying to get my hand where she needed it most. I wanted to tease her. I wanted to make her beg as much as I wanted to give her everything she’d ever need. My fingers darted down and found her slick, swollen clit. It twitched and swelled even more with each flick of my fingers.

“You’re going to make me come,” she moaned. “Yes, oh, yes, darling.” Her head bowed as her body stiffened. Slick, tight muscles fluttered before clutching at me rhythmically. The contractions lasted more than a minute then her legs finally failed her. She collapsed to the bed and I fell with her.

“Ainsley,” I whispered, pushing her hair to the side and kissing her neck. I wanted to say so much more but didn’t know how to express all that I felt.

We stayed like that for a few minutes before her shoulders twisted. I lifted up onto my arms and let her flop onto her back. Her hands came up to brush my hair behind my ears. I read what I hoped was a mirror of my feelings in her eyes.

“I knew it would be like that,” she said softly. She raised her head and kissed me just as softly.

“Better than any fantasy,” I confirmed and slid to the side of her but never losing any contact. I felt exhausted and raw but whole for the first time in my life. We’d have to talk about that tomorrow. Right now, I needed a nap. Just long enough to get the energy to have her again. And I would have her again. As many times as she’d let me.

Forty-Three

A hand shook me awake. My eyes blinked open in the morning light. The other side of the bed was empty. My heart thumped hard until I remembered what had woken me up. I rolled over and saw her. That hair that had spilled out around her head in untamable tumbling waves as we made love for most of the night was wet and pulled back into another braid.

“Good morning,” I greeted, stupidly happy to be able to say that to her.

“Hello, darling.” Her voice had already worked through the morning gruff. I hope I hadn’t missed her singing in the shower or something equally charming.

My eyes searched out the clock. It was eight, a full hour later than I normally got up on Saturdays. I tried not to do the math on the time we had left. I reached out to grip her hips, pushing one hand inside her borrowed robe. Her skin was hot to the touch.

“You must get up.” She reached to stop my exploring hand.

“You must come back to bed.”

She leaned down and kissed me, slow and thorough. I moaned and brought both hands around her. I maneuvered her on top of me, my hand sliding down and over her naked rear. She ground her hips against me. Her mouth let go of mine and inched down my neck and onto my chest. Her tongue swiped once at my nipple before her mouth closed around it and sucked hard. I groaned and pulled her hips harder against me, feeling her swollen wetness slide against mine. She was going to wring another orgasm out of me if she kept this up, even after the four she’d already given me last night.

I groaned and moved to flip her over because I hadn’t gotten enough of her under me. Hadn’t gotten enough of her taste and feel and touch. Hadn’t gotten enough of her.

She rose up, her eyes clearing as she scrambled to sit up. “We haven’t enough time.”

I lifted up, attaching my mouth to her neck. “We have a little time.” My mouth drifted lower and lower. Her body wobbled as my lips surrounded one of her nipples. I slid my tongue in a semi-circular tease then closed my lips on the stiff bud.

“Ah, Skye,” she moaned and gripped my head. “Don’t do this to me.” She let out an expletive as she pulled back out of my mouth. “I need to pack.”

My hands dropped from the backs of her thighs. I really didn’t need that reminder. I sat up fully. Ainsley’s eyes raked over my naked chest. She tore her gaze away and kicked her leg up and over me to stand beside the bed.

“I planned to finish last night.” She reached out to touch my shoulder and glided her hand down to cup my breast. “But someone distracted me.”

“You were the distraction, my beauty.”

She snatched her hand back. “I’ll get some eggs started. You get your shower.” She hurried from the room as if she couldn’t get away fast enough.

It took a few minutes until my racing heart and sizzling lust simmered down enough to get out of bed. The shower would have been long and ultimately satisfying if staying in it wouldn’t have kept me from her longer. Stepping into jeans and a t-shirt, I went to find her in the kitchen where she was spooning eggs onto plates. I leaned in and kissed her because I couldn’t not.

“I love your mouth,” she breathed out when we broke apart.

I loved hers, too. And her hands and her eyes, hair, face, pretty much everything about her. What to do about it was the issue of the morning.

“Do you have to leave?” The question was out in the open before I could stop it. My mouth was talking on its own again, adding undo pressure before we’d even had breakfast.

She stepped back and looked away, busying herself with setting the plates on the breakfast bar. “Term starts soon.”

I knew that. I also knew she had the opportunity to stay on for the fall term here at what seemed like her choice of universities. I wanted to ask her if Georgetown wasn’t good enough. Why she couldn’t give it a try. I wanted to ask her if she’d stay for me, for us. But I had her answer. Her cousin had already asked and she said no. When I asked her if she had to go, she insisted on returning home.

“You could come to Scotland,” she whispered. Her eyes met mine, flicking back and forth between them.

Was she asking me to visit or something more? “To visit?” I couldn’t believe that I wanted her to say something else. Never in my life had I wanted something like this. Wanted her to ask me to go with her. Wanted her to want to stay.

She blinked away the moisture that built in her eyes. “If you want.”

To visit, yeah, I wanted. Would it ease this ache I now felt in my chest? No. It would only make it worse. I’d put my heart out for her to see and asked her if she had to go. Her response was to ask me to visit. Or was it me asking to visit? I was so confused. No one made me feel this jumbled up. For the first time I wasn’t thinking my way through how I felt. I was just feeling.

Glumly, I started eating the eggs she’d cooked for me. They tasted like nothing. She prepared them correctly and they would have tasted great if I didn’t feel so numb. She didn’t seem to be enjoying hers any more than I was.

“We should get over to Colin’s if you’re going to be ready in time.” I screamed at my mind to stop wishing she’d say she wanted to stay. That it didn’t matter if we got her packed or back to Colin’s. That last night should have changed her mind about where she wanted to be for the fall term.

She didn’t say any of those things. She just nodded and stood. In the next second her arms were around me, pulling me close, hugging me tight. Her lips placing tender kisses on my mouth. “This is so hard.”

I clutched her back, my desperation apparent in how tightly I held her. If I could make her stay without being charged with kidnapping, I’d give it a try.

“We should go.” My voice was rough. I knew if I said anything more my throat would swell up and I’d start to cry.

The drive to Colin’s was silent. I didn’t want to embarrass us both by begging her to stay. It wouldn’t be fair to her. Or me when she told me again she had to get back. I pulled into the building garage and shut off the car. She faced me, reaching a hand out to lace her fingers with mine.

“I should have kissed you sooner,” she said, her voice so tender it made my heart ache more. “At the wedding, the next morning, when you were spending your free time making sure my mum enjoyed her visit. When I saw those photos of us on the steps when I couldn’t look away from you. Of us dancing when you felt so good in my arms.” Her eyes welled up. “I should have kissed you always.”

I blinked back my own tears.

“Don’t come to the airport. It’s already too hard.” She leaned over and pressed her lips to mine, pulling my bottom lip in for a nip before soothing it with her tongue and kissing me fully. A kiss that carved its way into my psyche. Unforgettable and expressive. A kiss that said goodbye.

Then she was out the door and into the elevator. Gone.

Forty-Four

If my boss were twirling his mustache, he couldn’t have looked more appropriate delivering this news. I sat across from him in his lavish office with views of the National Monument and the Jefferson Memorial in the distance. My view looked the other way at hotels and office buildings from only one window, not three on each wall. If I had this office, I’d probably stare out the windows all day.

“What do you say, Skye?”

My eyes jerked back to his and dropped to the scruff on his top lip. Not long enough to twirl. Men generally had facial hair so they wouldn’t have to shave or because they thought it flattered their faces. He had to trim this as often as he’d shave. Plus it was short enough to be prickly when his wife kissed him. In my opinion it only highlighted the fact that his chin was about half the size it should be.

“Does that schedule meet with your approval?” His face dropped the usual cocksure look he always carried. If he were capable of worrying, he’d be sweating right now.

“The schedule that pushes my vacation back another month even though you approved it for two months ago?”

“Well, it’s not that, as I said, and you know how this business is.” He fumbled for the right words.

Before this summer I would have rushed to assure him that it was fine that he was messing with my sanity. That was how I classified this. If I didn’t get a break from work soon, I might go mad. It didn’t help that I couldn’t focus on work because of a certain yellow haired Scot. Pretty much every thought I had these days was about her and how I could have done things differently. How much of the summer we’d wasted if we hadn’t stubbornly clung to our ingrained adversarial roles and explored what all that antagonism could have been disguising. I could have known or been surer of what to do. I could have made a plan and presented the advantages of extending her stay. I might have been able to show her it would be worth it.

“Listen,” he began again. “I know it’s not what you wanted, but everyone else has more seniority.”

“And the other execs including you got to take vacation when they wanted.”

“Of course. What are we going to say, ‘Sorry, sir, I know you run this network, but you can’t take vacation this week because our newest director, Ginger, put in for it three months ago?’ Yeah, that would have gone over well.”

My teeth ground together. Sass wasn’t something I expected from a long-time television executive. And really, with the Ginger already? The president hadn’t even seen my changed hair color. He’d been too busy taking the entire summer off. I thought of a million responses, nearly all snarky. None would help the situation or ingratiate me further with my boss, so I held them in.

“The schedule’s fine.” It wasn’t, and of the things to happen to me this summer, this ranked right up near the top of crappy things. I wasn’t the only person to have her vacation pushed, but it didn’t feel better to know that.

I got up before he could decide to continue lecturing me about how inconvenient and put out I was making him feel. I hoped I didn’t make my direct reports feel this awful after every meeting with me.

“Oh, and Skye?” He stopped my exit. “I’ve been hearing that you haven’t been in the office as much over the past couple of months. Taking long lunches and leaving right at five and such.”

Long lunches? He meant the full hour that every single person in this building took except me and a handful of other execs trying to climb the ladder. Leaving at five? Five-thirty at the earliest and that was only on the days that I’d had planning appointments for the wedding and to spend some evenings with Elspeth or Ainsley. Even then, I was often the last person on my floor to go home.

“That kind of behavior isn’t why we promoted you. Don’t start resting on your laurels now.”

I nodded and gave him my most confident smile. “It was an unusual summer helping Dallas and Colin plan the wedding. It took more time than I expected, but it’s done now. No more issues.”

He rocked in his chair, a smile coming over his face. “That makes sense. Well, good, I’m glad we understand each other.”

Oh, I understood him. Work my ass off, screw well-earned vacations, and stop having any social life. I’d thought once I got to this level, worked so very hard to get to this level, that I could start to have interests outside of work. That I could have time for that. Instead, it seemed to be more work.

“Get your ass chewed by the boss?” Tori teased but lost her smile when I didn’t laugh. “Jeez, he didn’t, did he? You’re the only one working these past few months.”

“Vacation’s pushed again.”

She followed me into my office, a quarter the size of the one I’d just been in, and closed the door behind us. “You know I love working for you, Skye, but, man, are they loading the shit work on you. I’ve talked to some of the other EAs, and they said their bosses only had to put up with it for six months before they started getting the executive treatment. You’re at eight months and they’re still treating you like you’re an EP instead of the news content director.”

I knew that, but what was I supposed to do? Complain to my V.P. that he was making me work harder than any of the director level managers before? Based on the meeting I just had, he could fire me for even thinking that.

“I’m still learning the job. I can’t expect a cushy position right from the start.”

She gave me a disbelieving look. I’d been getting that look from a number of people lately. I was getting tired of that look. I didn’t need proof that I was convincing myself of things that weren’t true.

“After I get back from vacation, I’ll see if anything changes.”

“If not?” She looked ready to take up the fight for me.

“I’ll approach the boss with a plan to offload some of the crap work and get down to what we thought we’d be doing with this position.”