Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (15 page)

Aw, so apparently, he wasn’t a sexist creep of a boss.  Just a slightly chauvinistic one that looked a hundred percent genuine about wanting her to have a safe work environment.

“My door is always open so give me a buzz if you have any other concerns or questions.”  He gave her one final shoulder thump and a warm smile.  “Welcome aboard, my dear.  I’ll leave you to get settled for a bit before you head home.”  As he and his secretary headed to the elevator, he called back over his shoulder, “And good luck with your training with Jackson tomorrow.  He can be a little quiet and intense, especially when he’s filling your ear with all those football stats he loves.”

Oy, just when she’d managed to stop panting when she thought about the man…

CHAPTER TWO

She had a boyfriend.

The news of Leila having a boyfriend had swept through the station quickly enough.  Jackson had just walked into the big break room on the main floor next to the recording studios that covered the morning shows—they had the best bagels—only to find his appetite killed when a group of supremely disappointed men had begun discussing it like it was front page morning news.

Not that he blamed them for wanting to be in the know.  Jackson was guilty of checking her relationship status on Facebook the second he’d gotten home from the charity dinner.

Though he hadn’t been able to ascertain her ‘in a relationship’ status from her profile, he had discovered something nearly as unsettling.

The woman didn’t have a single female Facebook friend. 

None. 

Three hundred some odd friends. 

All male.

And of those male friends, he’d actually recognized one.  A freaking NFL assistant coach—Nick Torres, the defensive coordinator of the Reno Outlaws.

Thankfully, that jealousy-inspiring information quickly took a backseat to the content of the woman’s public Facebook posts.  It took him only a quick skim to realize that Leila didn’t just know football, she
really
knew football. 

Hell, nearly all of her posts were football-related commentaries.  That were dead-on.  Not to mention insightful, and always respectful. 

She wasn’t a fan, she was a connoisseur.

And after spending a few minutes googling her, he made a few more key discoveries.  Via her professional profile on LinkedIn, he found that she’d just finished her MBA the year prior.  Impressive.  And via the fifty or so other articles linked to her name, apparently, she was the daughter of a longtime conservative Utah politician.  Surprising.

The woman just kept getting more and more interesting.

Seeing her walking around and waving at folks a few minutes later, looking polished and perfectly put-together—and ready for another round of lying—as she made her way across the break room over to him, Jackson couldn’t tamp down the sudden urge to ruffle her up a bit. 

And he had a good idea of how he could accomplish that.

When she gave him that perfected-for-Lloyd smile he’d known was coming, Jackson bid her good morning and launched right into his attack, completely straight-faced. “So, sunshine, why don’t we jump in and get started with some football basics as we head upstairs.  How about I explain the different offense and defense positions first.  Got your notebook ready?”

Just like that, she looked ready to poke her pen in her eye.  Or his.

Oh boy, this was going to be fun…

***

Great.
  Leila had to fight hard not to roll her eyes as she got her pen ready to start in on some major doodling.  Then the man started with the
quarterback
position—for crying out—and she knew she wasn’t going to make it.  So she quickly tried to distract him away from her soon-to-be-rolling eyes by dazzling him with a vapid smile.  The same one that had made Lloyd all buttery during her hiring interview.

Jackson’s eyes fell down to her lips as if utterly fascinated—
men
—and his remedial lesson abruptly came to a stop.  “You know what?” he gave her an indulgent half-grin, the kind that all the men she’d grown up around usually reserved for the women they thought were
really
adorably stupid.  “I’m probably getting ahead of myself.  Why don’t we start with breaking down the game first?  That way, you’ll know what I mean when I talk about touchdowns and field goals, and the sort.”

He had to be
freaking
kidding!  Of all the annoying, condescending—

Her barely-contained glare sliced up to his now laughing eyes when she belatedly realized, “You’re messing with me.”  It wasn’t a question.  Judging by his expression, Leila was pretty certain that he’d been fully prepared to keep regressing his lesson to explaining how many yards were on the field, hell, to even showing her the color of a football, if she’d let him.

“Not messing with you per se.  More…running an experiment.”

“On how much I know about football?”

“I think we both know the answer to that question, sunshine.”

She startled, momentarily distracted from his use of that damn nickname again.  He looked so assured in his confidence over her knowledge about football.  What in the world?  But she’d been so careful…

His gaze lowered to her lips again.  “I was simply wanting to see how much it would take for you to lose that fake smile and forced shiny-eyed look.” 

That whiskey-warmed voice of his took on an equally entrancing ‘serious’ tone that was a spellbinding match for those sexy-as-hell glasses he wore like a freaking cover model. 

For some reason, she was then hit out of the blue with the wayward thought as to whether he wore his glasses—and just his glasses—when he got ready for bed. 

His mouth curved up at one side into another amused half-grin.  “Damn, I’d offer a penny for your thoughts right now, but something tells me I’d be under-negotiating by a heck of a lot.”

Everything the man said was so intelligently sexy.  A major turn-on. 

Even so, she hit him with the most affronted look she could pull together, which still simpered with honey and butter, of course. She was well aware how these fragile male egos worked in this old boy’s network.  “Something tells
me
that I could say the same thing about your thoughts…Mr. Gray.”

Oh lord.  Why did she pause before his name?  That hadn’t been planned.
  Don’t you DARE think about the fifty shades of color in his tie, Leila!
 

He grinned.  “Touché.   Why don’t we get upstairs and start your actual training before I start thinking thoughts that’ll make me bankrupt.”

His tone was so business-like and matter-of-fact that it took her a few beats to process his words.  The man was some sort of sneaky, flirting savant.  Clearly, she’d need to keep her wits about herself if she didn’t want to accidentally trip and fall into his bed.

Or couch, or closet, or dark corner
, added her imagination helpfully.  Leila kept her expression impressively reaction-free, however, as she busied herself getting her higher-floor-access key card out as they walked over to the elevator.

Ooh, elevator.  Her brain added that to the list.

Stop it, Leila! 
“So you’re the most senior analyst, right?  Does that sort of make you the head of the department?” she asked, mentally patting herself on the back for how steady her voice was.  Nicely done.  She was a professional.  She could do this.   
    

He shrugged.  “I guess if you had to put a label on it.  But I don’t make anyone call me Mr. Gray or anything.”  His lips twitched to the side as he leaned a few inches closer to swipe his keycard and push the button for the twentieth floor.  “And certainly not with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’ in my name,” he added quietly.

Dammit!  If women couldn’t count on an unreachable, exclusive claim over popular erotica references, the whole gender inequality war was even less fair than she’d thought.  She feigned a look of confusion.

Thankfully, Leila was allowed a moment to regroup when the elevator stopped at the next recording floor and a bunch of studio production crew folks filed in to fill the elevator to capacity.  During those few short seconds, Leila watched as a stunning blonde expertly wove her way through the bodies until she—oops—bumped up against Jackson with a look of mock-surprise.

Thank goodness the woman’s well-inflated breasts had cushioned the impact.

Though Leila wasn’t thrilled with the development, the ever-present reporter in her seemed to want to focus more on breaking the situation down into microscopic data, over getting unproductively jealous.  Good.  That said, Leila couldn’t help it when her data-driven brain began hypothesizing about the physiology of air displacement—as in, if the woman’s current breathiness was the direct result of the funbags on her chest having suddenly grown at least another cup size somehow. 

Science
was
all around us, after all.

After a while, however, she let go of her snarky scientific ponderings and began concentrating on listening in.  Sure, she felt a twinge of envy that Jackson was gifting the woman with smiles that Leila had yet to be privy to, but mostly, she found herself fascinated with the exchange. 

Aside from alternating between laughing a tad louder than what standard elevator decorum considered polite, and then contradicting that lack of consideration by whispering most everything else she was saying into his ear, the woman seemed sweet.  Genuinely taken with Jackson. 

Jackson, however, was considerably less receptive.  He was friendly, yes, but nothing more.  

Interesting.  And it didn’t even look like he was doing it for Leila’s benefit. 

A flirt savant with parameters.  Darn it, why did he have to be so intriguing?

Two floors later, and they were alone again.  Leila couldn’t resist.  “Is she not your type?  She seems like she would be.”  Inquiring minds wanted to know.  Not because she was trying to gauge his type for her own personal investigation or anything.

Visibly surprised, he gave her one of those half-smiles again and shook his head.  “Rachel is great.  Gorgeous, smart, sweet.”

“Yes, I can see why you weren’t flirting back with her; she sounds just wretched.”

He chuckled.  “Damn, caught that did you?  I was trying to be nice about it.”

And he had been.  It was perhaps the nicest brush-off she’d ever witnessed.   Not without a bit of regret, however.  Hence her questions.

They reached their floor and he lowered his voice as he walked them toward his office.  Before they got there, however, he redirected them around a corner and opened the door to an impressively lavish conference room.  The moment he shut the door behind him, he turned and gently backed her away from the big picture windows lining the far end of the wall.  When they were tucked invisibly into one of those dark corners her brain had been imagining earlier, he negotiated point blank, “If I answer your questions, you answer mine about why you’re hiding what you know about football.  Deal?”

She had absolutely no idea why she liked the fact that he split the focus of his gaze almost equally between her eyes and her lips, but she did.  She didn’t let the warm fuzzies in her stomach affect her negotiating, however.  “That doesn’t sound like a fair deal.  No one knows my reasons, but from what I gather from water cooler talk yesterday alone, most of the women in this building know your reasons.”

“A slight exaggeration.”  After a droll brow quirk, he had the grace to smother back a grin. “But not by much.”

Lordy, the man made honesty—even the utterly male variety—yet another seductively charming quality he’d been endowed with too much of. 

She was in deep, deep trouble. 

“My reasons,” he added, “and what’s hidden beneath those reasons are two different things.  I wasn’t planning on revealing any of my secrets, sunshine.  So I wouldn’t expect you to, either.”  He stepped forward and stared into her eyes.  “Not yet, at least.”

T-R-O-U-B-L-E.  She could almost hear the universe’s cheerleader shouting the seven letters while the crowd shouted back, J-A-C-K-S-O-N in response.

She shook her head to clear all the clamor.  “Fair enough.  Answers minus the deep, dark secrets.  Deal?”

A flash of something way more intent than mere interest, and a good distance away from acquiescence darkened his gaze before he tilted his head in agreement.

Somehow, she managed to keep her wits about her.  “You first.” 

He backed up two steps then.  As if they were playing a two-person board game.  “I don’t flirt with women who want more than I can offer—namely, a relationship.  Or anything resembling breakfast come morning.”

Well, that was…honest.  “The prototypical perpetual bachelor.”  Shame, he didn’t seem the type. 

And judging by the sudden darkness clouding his eyes, he agreed with her.  Huh.  “You don’t like being a bachelor?” 

He blinked and the clouds vanished.  “Damn, Lloyd should’ve hired you as a junior reporter.  You’re like a pit bull with a tug toy.”

She blinked back at him, making it clear she wasn’t going to apologize for it.  Nor was she going to stop tugging.

With a grudging sigh and the tiniest look of respect, he replied, “My life is…complicated.”  He broke his gaze away from her.  “A relationship would be doomed to fail from the start.”

He sounded genuinely disappointed.  Almost wistful.  The way her grandmother had sounded years ago when her doctors told her she had to change her diet to cut out sweets, her favorite thing ever.

His eyes found hers again.  “Funny thing is that I used to be one of those guys who figured he’d have a kid or two by now.  Cute hell-raisers who’d help me spoil their mom on Sunday mornings, that sort of thing.”  Doting affection filtered into his tone.  “And vice versa.  A partner in crime who’d help me plan surprises for the kids that would be so stinkin’ adorable that I’d max out the memory on my phone taking photo after photo.”

Jesus, she was pretty sure one of her ovaries just fainted. 

She had the sneaking suspicion that she was going to fall for this man.  Hard.  “So because of your secretly complicated life, you only date women who want…”