Bad Boy Romance: Nick (Romantic Suspense Alpha Male Romance) (New Adult Rock Star Contemporary Short Stories) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 2) (71 page)

****

This is so wrong,
she
kept telling herself as she sipped from her champagne flute at Eric’s kitchen
nook. He was sitting right next to her, and their thighs were touching all
throughout breakfast.
This is wrong. Go home. Go home.

But she was feeling too daring
to go home. Eric’s eyes were darting to the window of cleavage afforded by her
blood red scoop-neck t-shirt, and she’d brushed her hair out so it fell in
shining waves past her shoulders. Her eyes were drawn to the muscles of his
biceps, and the way his tongue kept darting out to moisten his lips. He was
saying something about a board meeting when a question that had been on her
mind for three weeks straight slipped past her lips.

“Hey, Eric?”

He turned to her, his green eyes
hazy from the alcohol. “Yes, Cas?”

Her heart did a happy tumble at
the sound of her nickname. “You’re so intense. But I’ve seen you interact with
other people, and though you’re intense, you’re not…the same way with me.”

She could swear that his
breathing stopped. “What do you mean?”

She set down her glass and
turned her gaze on him. “Why do you look at me the way you do? No one else
looks at me that way. Like…like you’re analyzing me. Like you’re figuring me
out.”

Eric smiled lazily. “And you’re
not used to that.”

Cassie shook her head, feeling
tipsier than she’d anticipated. “So you are? Trying to figure me out, I mean?”

Eric put a hand on her lower
back, and her heartbeat accelerated. “Is that okay to you?”

Cassie’s mouth was dry, and she
had to try twice before she could successfully speak. “I don’t know. I don’t
know if I want to be figured out.” She placed both of her hands on his
shoulders and let him see the desire burning in her eyes. “But I don’t want to
stop you from trying.”

Eric pulled her toward him and
pressed his lips to hers hungrily, and her body cried out in joy. She wrapped
her arms around the breadth of his shoulders as he massaged her lips with his,
his hands slipping under her shirt to caress the silky warmth of her bare skin.
He stood and pressed her body tighter to his, his arousal pressing against the
front of her skirt, hard and heavy through his pants.

Cassie pulled back from the kiss
breathlessly. “Wait, Eric, are you sure you want to do this? I work for you.”

“I don’t care,” he said
deliriously, his hands running lower on her body until the lifted her skirt and
grabbed her buttocks roughly. “I want you, Cassie.” Cassie moaned and ground
her hips against his reaction, desire echoing through her body like a
shockwave. A rush of moisture drenched the crotch of her panties, and the next
moment, Eric was kneeling and pulling them away from her body, planting hot
kisses on the soft skin of her thighs.

Cassie lifted her shirt, letting
her high, round breasts spring free as she leaned back against the breakfast
nook and parted her thighs. Eric gripped her hips firmly and gazed up at her,
his green eyes burning with need. He kept her gaze as he slipped his tongue
between her slick folds, and Cassie threw her head back and shouted her
pleasure to the heavens as Eric dragged his tongue around her clit in long,
slow licks.

“Eric!” Cassie shouted, throwing
one leg over his broad shoulder and grinding herself more firmly against the
force of his tongue. She couldn’t believe how perfect his mouth felt on her
body, and couldn’t imagine the kind of pleasure his member would send through
her.

Eric pulled away from her
suddenly as though he could read her mind. He placed his hands on her hips and
lifted her until she sat on the counter, kissing her roughly as her hands
fumbled at the clasp of his khakis. She could taste her own sweet essence on
his tongue, and her hand moved eagerly over the hot thickness of his shaft as
she pulled his cock free.

He didn’t waste any time. Eric
held one hand behind her head as he pushed his round head inside Cassie’s warm
velvety walls, and she cried out in ecstasy as his length stretched and filled
her for the first time. It was like they were two interlocking puzzle pieces;
every slow stroke felt perfectly tailored to her body, expertly crafted to push
her toward her most delicious edge.

“Cassie,” Eric moaned, his thumb
passing over her erect nipple as he slowly pumped between her thighs. “Oh god,
you’re the most incredible woman.”

His strokes grew faster and
harder, and Cassie could only whimper and tighten her arms around him as his
body collided with hers. Pleasure was streaking through her muscles and
enveloping her brain, carrying away all thought except the joyous sensation of
his hips pounding into hers. Eric’s hand fisted in her hair, and Cassie cried
out as her ecstasy reached its peak at the precise moment that her lover
reached his.

“Cassie!” he moaned, throwing
his body against hers with abandon. “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

Cassie arched her back and
screamed wordlessly as the slick walls of her pussy tightened and pulsed around
Eric’s thick, rigid shaft, his cries reaching a fever pitch as he exploded
inside her. His mouth covered her breasts in wet kisses as they both twitched
and moaned together, hips bucking together weakly to pull all the pleasure from
each other’s bodies.

She didn’t have time to catch
her breath before she was being carried to his bedroom and laid across the bed.
He wrapped his arms around her naked body and gazed down at her, stroking her
soft hair as she gazed at him wearily.

“Eric,” she said softly, her
eyelids growing heavier by the moment.

He smiled. “Yes?”

Cassie took a breath. “I love
you.”

His face went blank, and for a
moment, Cassie feared he wouldn’t respond. “I love you, too,” he said finally.

Something in his tone made her
open her eyes. He was starting to turn away, but she put a hand on his arm to
top him. Eric was startled, but Cassie fixed him with a stare.

“Hey. What’s wrong?”

The look in his eye was of pure
terror. “I didn’t think it would get this far,” he said.

Cassie frowned and sat up on the
bed. “You mean…love?”

Eric covered his eyes with his
hands, and Cassie’s heart started to sink in her chest.

“Oh, no,” she said quietly. “Do
you have a girlfriend that I don’t know about?”

He looked up, his anguish
interrupted by surprise. “What? No.”

Cassie shook her head. “Then
what is it?” she demanded. Eric didn’t answer, so she took hold of his chin and
reputed her question. “Eric. Something tells me you think I’m going to find out
anyway, so tell me what it is. You just fucked my brains out; I think I’m in a
good enough mood. Come on, did you find the person sabotaging your project
already, and then hide it from me so you could get in my pants?” she grinned at
him to show him that she was joking, but when the panic in his haze sharpened,
her smile faded. “Oh, no. Oh, god…Eric. Have you been paying me so you could
woo me?”

His silence gave her the answer.

“Eric, what the fuck?!” Anger
coursed through her, and she felt her heart start to gallop in her chest. “How
long have you known?”

Eric met her eyes briefly. “A
long time.”

Cassie scoffed. “So who is it?”

Eric covered his hands with his
eyes again, a small sound of despair escaping his lips.

Cassie went numb with shock.
“Eric…no. It can’t be. It couldn’t be…”

He raised his green eyes to
hers, and they were brimming with tears. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I didn’t mean for
it to go this far.”

A bitter laugh burst from her
mouth. “You sabotaged your own project for some ass, Eric? Are you fucking
kidding me? You led me along just so you could fuck me?”

“No!” Eric said desperately.

“Then why?”

“Because I wanted to get to know
you, Cassie,” he said, his voice pleading. “I wanted you to get to know me.”

“Good idea, except the part
where you lied to me about everything!” she shouted, scooting away from him on
the bed as he tried to reach for her. “I can’t be with someone like that,
Eric—I can’t be with a liar.”

Eric was following her as she
raced through the apartment and pulled on her clothes. “I was so impressed by
you, Cassie, I just wanted to work with you. And then I fell in love with you.
I didn’t mean to.”

Cassie laughed in his face as
she pulled on her shirt. “Well, that makes it better. Have a nice life, Eric.
Don’t call me. I’ll bill you.”

“
Cassie!”

But she sprinted to the road and
was flagging down a taxi by the time he caught up with her. Cassie sobbed in
the back of the cab, unable to stop herself from watching Eric’s place growing
smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

****

Cassie wasn’t sure how long it
took her to stop crying. Hours maybe, or perhaps it was minutes. It was
nightfall when she left her house again, and that was only to check the mail.
She saw Eric’s silver Mercedes on the street and dashed back up before he could
even leave his car.

She wasn’t sure what had hurt
her more—that she’d been lied to, or that she’d fallen in love before she
figured out. She kept going over the last few weeks in her mind, trying to find
a warning or red flag that should have tipped her off. Cassie kept going back
to their first serious conversation about who was sabotaging his company;
once
the truth comes out in a case like this, bonds can be broken and never
repaired.
How right she’d been.

By the end of the first week
holed up in her apartment, Eric stopped calling, and his Mercedes couldn’t be
found outside on the street any longer. Her relief was enormous—but she was
surprised to find that she was more than a little disappointed, too. Had his
love for her dried up so quickly?

Don’t be stupid,
said a
nasty voice in her head.
He never loved you—he just wanted to get in your
pants. Now that it’s over, he has no reason to try again.

She burned with rage at the
thought of him simply losing interest in her and the body he’d ravaged so
insatiably. Was she really so disposable to him? Cassie took another week off
work and spent it wandering the streets aimlessly, bumping into walls and
citizens at random as she tried to sort her jumbled thoughts and feelings.
Cassie hated to admit it, but Eric had given her a purpose beyond
professional—she’d felt important to someone for the first time in years. Maybe
that was why she’d been so upset with him; not because she felt disposable now,
but because she’d felt so invaluable before. Could it be possible that she
liked feeling so desperately needed—so desired that a man would concoct a wild
scheme just to get close to her?

Am I that crazy?
She
thought—and then:
Do you have to be crazy to miss being madly in love?
Maybe. Probably. Cassie pushed open a door without reading a sign, and her
heart stopped when she realized where her legs had carried her: the bookstore
where she’d first met Eric.

Definitely crazy.

Cassie’s heart felt strangely
heavy as she strolled through the aisles, the cashier and bored shelf stockers
ignoring her like they had the first time. There was
The Joy of Sex,
precisely where she’d picked it up last time. The arrangement of spines looked
just as dusty as they had before, and when she turned toward the front of the
store, she could swear Eric was standing right where she first laid eyes on
him. Then she did a double take, and her heart stopped.

“Cassie.”

Eric hurried toward her, and
Cassie stood, rooted to the spot by the panic and heartache mingling in her
chest. “Cassie, please, just let me say this.” He took her hands in his,
aquamarine eyes shining with sincerity. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I should
never, ever have lied to you. But you’re right—I have blind spots. Huge ones,
put there by money and the privilege it brings. One of those blind spots kept
me from realizing that all I had to do was be real with you—and let you come to
me yourself.”

Cassie gazed up at him, her eyes
wide and unblinking.

“I don’t have any common
sense—but please, don’t let that scare you away from me. I’m willing to learn.
I
want
to learn. And more importantly, I want to show you the way you
make me feel—so you understand why I’m so damn taken with you.” Eric swallowed,
and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “You make me feel like I’m the only one who
matters on Earth…and I’m so used to putting that idea out of my head in favor
of work or profit, that I didn’t realize I wanted and needed that kind of love
so badly.” He squeezed his hands. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

Cassie finally opened her mouth
to speak. “I think I do.”

Eric didn’t try to hide his
surprise. “So…will you give me another chance?”

Cassie paused. His eyes were
shining with such luster and love that she felt like she was being warmed by
the sun from the inside out. She did know exactly what he meant—Eric was the
only person immune to her shield of invisibility. Before him, she had no idea
being seen could feel so good. Cassie pulled him down and pressed her lips to
his hungrily, wrapping her arms around his neck as he slipped his hands around
her waist and melted into the kiss.

When he pulled back, he looked
dizzy and more than a little dazed. “So…that’s a yes?”

Cassie laughed. “Let’s run
another test and see.”

THE
END

“So, hopefully, with this
feature, we’re going to see a real growth in new accounts at IQID, and thus be
able to start building toward our goal of being able to tailor responses to
client need. And remember, we need more clients for more capital… So what are
we focusing on?”

The room was too warm to be
productive for this kind of meeting, he realized. When the eleven men before
him responded with “more clients!” it was not only less hearty than he would
have liked, several of them looked genuinely confused as to what the meeting
had actually been about. Damian couldn’t talk to anyone about turning up the
air conditioning without being reminded that their planet was being destroyed
because of their need for ultimate comfort—at least, that was the way Brian in
HR put it every month when Damian went to complain.

“Okay,” he continued. “Let’s all
look forward to tomorrow’s recap email; you can shoot back any questions—”

“I’ve got a question,” said
Jamie in his jagged baritone. He leaned back in his chair, his lids drooping as
he spoke. “Is the retreat still going to be catered?”

At the mention of the quarterly
retreat, every man in the room straightened up. This year, they would be in
Maine in a luxurious resort where they could request more types of massages
than they could possibly have time to receive. It was one of the perks that
many higher-level employees signed on for exclusively, partially because of the
parties Damian tended to fund while they were there—Damian Wyles’s parties had
always
been worthwhile in Silicon Valley.

 Jamie was still speaking.
“Those salmon rolls were divine last year. Most perfect things ever. I’ve been
dreaming about them every night since the last one cleared my system.”

“With Lola next you?” Gary said,
leaning across the gleaming table to show Jamie his roguish wink. “I wouldn’t
be able to sleep at all.”

Damian closed his eyes,
resisting the urge to roll them. “Guys, can we keep things professional here?”

Jamie snorted. “You wouldn’t be
so eager to jump behind the wheel with Lola if you’d been on the rides
I’ve
been on,” he said darkly.

Gary’s expression turned
curious. “What do you mean?”

Jamie shrugged. “My tastes are a
little more vanilla, I guess. Once I start bruising, I’m out. There’s a reason
Lola has so many private tennis lessons—better him than me.”

“Okay, gentlemen, it’s nearly
eight,” Damian said hastily, waving his arms toward the door. “We should all
head out. We can talk about the retreat as we get closer to the event.”

The men finally started to
stand, but now they’d all broken out into various shades of lewd conversation.
Damien pulled his blazer on and walked through the long, mirrored conference
room, thankfully slipping out before Jacob could finish telling Miles about the
time he and his girlfriend went skinny dipping in Majorca and nearly got
arrested for indecent exposure. Someone near the door called his name before he
closed the door, but they were pulled into another conversation before they
could even finish addressing him, so he turned out and completed his exit
uninterrupted.

The dim fluorescent lights told
him it was past eight o’clock now, so the silence of the hall wasn’t at all out
of place. His footsteps were completely swallowed by the plush blue carpet, the
fibers reaching up to sweep the top of his gleaming black loafers. Damian
caught sight of himself in the glass door of his office before he unlocked it,
and he was shocked to see that his skin was far paler than usual, his wavy
black hair making him look more vampire-like rather than camera ready. His legs
were aching as he closed the door behind him, and he took solace in the fact
that it was Friday—meaning he could sleep in as late as eight or nine if he
wanted, though his body surely wouldn’t let him lay around that long.

Damian’s office sat in the
corner of the thirtieth floor of a slate gray building on Palm, two blocks from
the center of Mountain View’s downtown area. He could see the bay, and the
windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling of his back wall also gave
him an incredible view of a good half of the city, and even parts of Palo Alto
if the fog wasn’t pressing against the glass. He remembered the first time he’d
seen the view from his window, four years before; IQID had just begun to come
into its own, with its first televised commercials rolling out around Labor
Day.

“IQID is Identification
protection—that’s the
ID—
that works smarter to keep you safe—that’s the
IQ!”
Chirped the bubbly young woman in front of her laptop. The letters floated
above her as she spoke, and Damien was so shocked at seeing his company name in
glossy, computer-generated letters on his flat screen that he had been
momentarily convinced that someone was actually pranking him. By the fifth time
he’d viewed the commercial, things were starting to feel real, and his half a
million subscribers went a long way toward helping that feeling solidify. Then
Damian got the news that they could buy three floors of the huge building on
Palm he’d strolled past a million times while he interned at Intracode, and his
dream-like sensation sharpened and receded at the same time, somehow—like he
was trapped in limbo, or that strange space between sleep and waking where
thoughts and words drifted away and were never heard from again. He got that
feeling every time he looked out the window for nearly two years; after that,
the reality of the relentlessly gray life in the tech capital of the world started
to dull his reactions to everything else. Damian kept his shades drawn during
the daytime, especially.

A soft chime filled the room,
and the cool voice of his assistant followed. “Will you be needing takeout
ordered, Mr. Wyles?”

“No, Alexis,” Damian answered,
“and hey—go home. Have a good weekend.”

“Yes, sir,” Alexis said, and he
could hear the relief in her tone, though she tried hard to hide it. “You, too.
Don’t forget to find your dress shoes tonight.”

As the intercom fell into
silence again, Damian felt confusion tint the words tumbling around his skull.
Dress
shoes?
What did he need dress shoes for?

Damian’s eyes rose to the LED
calendar he kept on the wall at the exact moment he remembered his gala.
Despair flooded his weary bones, and he collapsed into the chair behind his
desk as his visions of a relaxing Saturday evening at home were dispelled. He’d
forgotten he bought a $20,000 table at a charity gala a month ago, and not only
did he invite friends to fill the seats, the chairman of the Lupus charity was
expecting him to show. That would mean a minimum of three hours of rubbing
shoulders with men who would kill their own trophy wives to be able to steal
his youth and vigor, and women who would smother their lauded husbands for a
weekend with him—every one of them climbing all over themselves to impress or
undermine him with every word. He got enough ass-kissing in his school days;
he’d done enough ass-kissing, too, come to think of it.

A crowd of voices moved down the
hall toward the bank of elevators around the corner from his office. His inner
door was open, so their words were just clear enough to make out as they went
by.

“Yeah, I’d like that too,”
someone was saying. “But we already know that doesn’t work.”

“Those women went about it all
wrong,” said a second voice. “You have to be accommodating and transparent
every step of the way—or at least appear that way.”

“For the
shareholders?”

“No,” the second voice said
mildly. “For the public. That was their downfall—the public can and will affect
your success, even before you open the doors on your product.”

“How do you even call a people
tracking app a product, anyway?” the man said, who sounded a lot like Gary.

“Don’t call it tracking, for
one,” said the other man, who was probably Miles. “It’s surveying. Curating.
Recording.”

“Stalking,” said a third man.
“You can’t have an app where you review people, period. I know you want this to
work, Miles, but it’s going to fail. Hell, the boss tried to do it before you
did—you think you have a better shot?”

Damian rose from his seat and
closed the door to his inner office before he had the time to catch Miles’
indignant reply. His face was burning, and he was struggling to contain his
shame at the mention of his old project, even though the name hadn’t even been
uttered aloud.
A people reviewing app.
Damian smiled, bittersweet
memories rushing back as he recalled his time only seven years before.

The app had begun as a way to
alert vulnerable people about abusive men in their area, aptly named Lookout4.
Damian’s younger sister June had a habit of attracting men who were as violent
as they were good looking, and he wanted a way to warn other women before they
walked into the same trap. After a year, the app had a respectable presence on
college campuses, and the then 24-year-old Damian Wyles was riding high on his
own success. He felt that he’d done his duty to make sure the app was stable
and functional, so when a buyer came forward with a price tag far higher than
the app’s worth, he jumped at the chance. Suddenly, he had enough money to
start a new business while the app he founded spiraled into a bloated platform
for advertisements and pointless features that turned Lookout4 into more of a
social media hangout than an alert system.

“They added aesthetic ratings,”
Damian told June over the phone one night. “And stickers. You can slap on a
cherry stamp or a sparkly birthday cake next to Richard Banks’ long list of
domestic offenses, if you want.”

“Good thing you got out,” June
said calmly. “Sounds like it really changed.”

“It changed
because
I
left,” Damian replied. “If I hadn’t sold the company, who knows what it would
have been.”

This wasn’t how the rest of the
world saw it, however; because of media spin, the world thought Damian Wyles’s
pet project tanked after a year, only to be rescued and then eventually mercy
killed by Johnathan “Jack” Summers, the  investor whose managerial and
operational tweaks often rescued a project that should have been dead. Worse,
Jack Summers didn’t deny this rumor at all—it was better than letting people
know the truth, which might lead them to realize that his success rate wasn’t
as high as it seemed. Damian didn’t push the issue, because Lookout4 was long
gone—plus, he really hated dealing with Jack Summers. Jack loved riding his old
friends’ coattails to his destinations and then throwing them under a passing
bus if it felt convenient, so they were closer to enemies than former business
partners; still, Jack’s acquisition of Lookout4 made IQID possible, so Damian
tried not to harbor too much animosity toward him.

Damian realized the hall had
been silent for quite some time. He put away his notes and locked the drawers
on his desk, pulling his phone off its charger before switching off the
overhead light in his inner office. His outer office was already dark, but he
knew how to locate the door handle from five years of making this exact trek in
various states of darkness and daylight. This office had been his home more
than the apartment he owned had been at first; Damian remembered his long
nights of coding and correcting with a mixture of fondness and joy—he’d never
be so young and energetic ever again, but he also was far more confident now,
and his success was undeniable. He might get nostalgic, he decided, but he was
definitely happier now. 

The elevator doors showed him
his face again in their reflective surface as they slid closed, and he was
struck by the depth of the circles beneath his eyes—they were soft and purpled,
like two impressionist black holes beneath twin pools of crystal blue water. He
closed his eyes again.

I need a drink.