CALLIE (The Naughty Ones Book 1) (89 page)

I slipped into a bar down the street from our corporate offices. I rarely came in here, but I knew that some of the other executives at the office often came here after work each evening. I knew because I’d heard rumors of the sort of things they said about me and my dad when they were gathered together. It wasn’t always flattering.

Running a business isn’t always easy. It had crossed my mind more than once that it would be so much easier if I just took a lower-level job with someone else’s company. I’d be a pretty good personal assistant. Less responsibility. Less stress. But then I wouldn’t feel that rush of pride when I stood on a project site and knew that the building that hadn’t been there a month, or even a week before was there now because of me and what I’d done to bring it all together.

I imagined it was something like being a parent. You watched your child grow from nothing more than a few cells to a fully realized person. It was the same with an apartment building or a new corporate office. There was nothing but a pile of dirt there before you started. But with your planning, your hard work, it became something that would stand for decades. It was a work of beauty.

How could I give that up?

“What can I get for you?” a waitress who looked old enough to be my grandmother asked.

“White wine.”

She walked away and I found myself looking around the room, wondering about the other souls who were in a bar in the middle of a Monday afternoon. How many of them were without jobs? How many were hiding from bill collectors or overbearing wives or demanding bosses? How many were here simply because it was better than being anywhere else?

How many of them would be Berryman Construction employees after we sold the company?

My dad and I would walk away a couple million richer. Our prides would be hurt. Our position in the business community would take a ding. But we would survive. Our employees…not so much.

I remembered that summer, when I worked for my dad, moving from project site to project site, how the guys would go out for beers after work. It was something they enjoyed doing, a way to blow off steam. Would they lose themselves in that little pastime when they no longer had jobs and they were struggling to get another?

I liked the guys who worked for us. That summer, they invited me multiple times, but the disapproving look on my dad’s face—never mind that I was also underage—always made me turn them down. But I wondered what it would be like to feel a part of that comradery, to be like them.

Grant told me I wasn’t missing anything.

“They mostly bitch about the foreman and then go home to their wives and children.”

But I wanted to be a part of it because it was
something
. It was a companionship. I always felt separated because I was the boss’s daughter. Like I was untouchable. Not until Grant did I ever feel like I was a part of anything other than the life my dad had made for us where he worked all day long and didn’t know what to do with me when he finally came home.

Why was I thinking so much about Grant today? It had been seven years since the last time I saw him. Seven years since we made plans to sneak away and get married. Seven years since he stood me up at our rendezvous spot and forced me to go home like a dog with its tail between its legs.

Not even my personal assistant spoke to me unless I spoke to her first. How pathetic was that?

I thanked the waitress when she set my wine glass in front of me. I considered it for a moment, thought of how my dad would approve of such a ladylike drink.

“Excuse me. I’ve changed my mind.”

The waitress regarded me with weary eyes. “Yeah?”

“Could I get Jack Daniels? Straight up?”

That weariness turned into surprise and then amusement.

“Of course.”

She took the wine glass back and returned a moment later with a shot glass filled with a deep tawny liquid. I’d never drank whiskey before. I stared at it for a second, then picked it up and downed the shot.

It burned like a son of a gun all the way down.

The waitress laughed. “You might be better off with the wine.”

I shook my head. “Bring me the bottle.”

The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Are you sure?”

I nodded.

I’d done everything my dad had always told me to do. I was on the debate team in high school. I was a track star, too. I got straight A’s in college. Graduated summa cum laude. Ran his company according to his direction, allowing him to ignore all my ideas. I pumped everything I had into the company, devoted every minute of my life to it for the last three years. And now it was failing.

So why continue to be the perfect executive? The perfect daughter? The perfect…whatever?

“I’m sure.”

My jacket was gone. My hair was flowing down my back, loosened in public for the first time in three years. It wasn’t proper for an executive to wear her hair down, my dad told me once. He disproved of secretaries who came to the office with new haircuts, didn’t trust the ones who wore their hair short. He felt that a woman should always have her hair up and well coifed.

What did
coif
even mean?

I moved to the music, not really sure that my movements matched the rhythm, just loving the way it felt to shake my hips and run my hands over my sides. How long had it been since I’d last danced like this? I couldn’t even remember doing it in high school, though I was pretty sure I attended a few of the dances the administration grudgingly allowed us. I went to a private school where academics were everything. But I remember going to one dance in particular. I remember sitting by the refreshment table, wishing the boy I liked hadn’t come with the class president.

I was done wishing and dreaming and living a life I didn’t want. I was done letting men walk out on me, letting my dad tell me what to do every moment of my life, and pretending none of it bothered me. Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t I change, too?

That thought in mind, I stiffened only for a second when a man came up behind me and slid his hands around my waist. I leaned back into him and closed my eyes, my thoughts going to a place I hadn’t allowed them to go in a very long time.

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to be intimidated? The boss’s daughter and all that?”

Laughter made his eyes crinkle around the edges. “I’m supposed to be intimidated by a slip of a girl who’s half my size?”

“You are. Because if I go to my daddy and tell him you were mean to me—”

“He’d kill me. Yeah, I get that.”

“No. He’d just fire you.”

Grant pushed me back against the wall. “What would he do if I did this?”

He kissed me, his lips brushing lightly against mine. It was beautiful, just like the half dozen or so he’d offered me over the past few weeks. But something changed almost immediately. That brush, that chaste little kiss, became something deeper. Something much more intense. It became something I’d not experienced before in all of my eighteen years of life.

To say I was sheltered would be to say an alcoholic likes to have a drink after work. I didn’t date in high school. My first kiss was from a classmate at graduation. I had the sexual experience of Mother Theresa when I met Grant. So, for him to kiss me that way was like a god offering a mere mortal the secret to immortality. It was a gift I couldn’t refuse.

But it was also a gift I didn’t quite know what to do with.

My body melted against his, but my teeth seemed to be in the wrong place. I opened my mouth wider, but then it seemed to be too wide. And then I closed it and nearly bit the end of his tongue off.

He laughed. “You are so innocent.”

I blushed, humiliated. I brushed his hands away from my hips and tried to move around him, but he pulled me back.

“What?” he asked softly, lifting my face so that I was forced to look him in the eye. “What’s the matter?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No,” he said, his breath warm on my skin. “I’m awed by you, Addison. You are so beautiful, so intelligent…”

“So innocent.”

I said it in a mimic of his tone, trying to belittle him. Trying to make him feel the way I felt. But he just ran his thumb over my bottom lip, his eyes drinking in everything about me like he wanted to devour me there on the spot.

“What’s wrong with innocence?” he asked. “Personally, I love the idea that I’m the first to touch you this way. That I’m the first to taste your kiss.”

As though his words invited his touch, he bent close and brushed his lips over mine again. This time my head just kind of shut off and allowed my body to take control. And that…that was how it was meant to be.

I turned into the arms of the man I was dancing with, expecting impossible height and intense blue eyes. What I got was an average-looking man with average brown eyes. But he had full lips and a need in those eyes that was familiar. When was the last time a man had looked at me that way? Men didn’t look at me that way. A woman executive in a man’s business? They looked at me with resentment if they looked at me at all. So this…it was refreshing.

I moved closer to him, raising my arms above my head as I started a little shimmy that moved my hips provocatively against him. He smiled, his hands sliding up over my waist only to go back down again, over my ass like it was his to explore. I didn’t really mind. I liked the music. I didn’t recognize the song or the artist, but I liked the steady rhythm of the drumbeat, liked the way it seemed to reverberate in my bones.

We kissed a lot, Grant and me. I snuck away as often as I could to be with him. Long, hot afternoons tangled on his couch in that run-down little apartment he had on the wrong side of the city. Even longer evenings in his bed after…

I’m not sure my dad ever knew just how long we’d been together before he saw us together at the company picnic that August. He took it surprisingly well. I think maybe that had a lot to do with the fact that I was due to be shipped off to New Haven in a week. Maybe he thought it hadn’t progressed far enough to put that opportunity in danger. If he’d known about the plans we’d made, he might have done more than refuse to shake Grant’s hand when it was offered.

What would he think if he could see me now?

I laughed and my dancing companion drew me closer to him, grinding his hips against mine. I wrapped my arms around his oddly shaped skull, everything about him feeling off in some sort of way. He was too short. His jaw was too narrow. His shoulders not quite broad enough. He was good looking, I supposed. He just wasn’t the man who’d been on my mind so often lately.

I turned again, moving with my back to him. He slid his hands over my hips, pulling me back so that his body was pressed to mine. I closed my eyes to let the music wash over me, but what washed over me was another memory.

“I’ve never known anyone like you.”

I smiled as I ran my finger over his lower lip. “I haven’t spent a lot of time with people like you, either.”

“You haven’t spent a lot of time with anyone outside of your dad and your nannies.”

I groaned. “One nanny. And she was kind of the housekeeper, too.”

“My point exactly.”

“I can never tell if you’re making fun of me or not.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” He bent low and pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose. “I just don’t know what to do with you. You are not what I expected when they first told me who you were.”

“What were you expecting?”

“A spoiled brat who always got what she wanted.”

“Talk about clichés.”

“I know. I’m ashamed of myself.”

I reached up and kissed him lightly. “I’ll forgive you, if…”

“If what?”

I shrugged, pretending to think long and hard about my next words. He looked so worried, those blue eyes full of more emotion than I think I’d ever seen in them. It surprised me every time he looked at me like that, like I mattered to him. Up until that point, I’d only been a burden to my dad, a classmate, a friend. But I’d never really mattered to anyone the way he made me feel I mattered to him.

I was done teasing him. I ran my hand slowly over his jaw, loving the feel of his five o’clock shadow against my palm.

“If you’ll keep looking at me like that.”

His eyes widened slightly. “Like what?”

“Like…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say that I thought he was falling in love with me because that would give away the fact that I was falling for him. We’d been together only a month, but it felt like a lifetime already. I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it. I knew when September came we’d have to part. I had school. He had…I didn’t know what he was going to do in the fall. He’d told me that college wasn’t his thing. And construction wasn’t something he wanted to do forever. But we never really talked about what he wanted to do. It didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter except being here, together.

He didn’t need an answer. He kissed me in that way he had—that teasing thing he did where he brushed his lips against mine and then captured them, sometimes nibbling on my bottom lip for a moment, sometimes taking everything, exploring places inside of me I’d not known existed before him. This time it was the latter, his hand on my hips tugging me closer to him on the narrow couch, his body pressed hard against mine until there was no mistaking that he knew exactly what it was I’d been talking about.

Why was he on my mind so much lately? It’d been seven years. Long enough to let go.

The thing was, I was pretty sure I’d seen him a couple of weeks ago. He was walking down the street, just as casual as could be, a ghost from the past. I was on my way to a project site, screaming at the car in front of me because it cut me off just as traffic started to move for the first time in five minutes. And there he was, talking into a cell phone as he rushed across the street with a group of other pedestrians.

“Can’t be,” I had muttered to myself. It had to have been my imagination. I even convinced myself it was.

But now?

I moved away from my dance partner, much to his annoyance, and walked back over to the bar. The bartender set another shot glass of that lovely tawny liquid in front of me without a request. I’d been there long enough, drank enough, that he knew what I wanted. I picked it up and stared at the prism of colors it created in the dim light. Beautiful. I hadn’t stopped to appreciate beauty in a long time.

“I would have thought wine would be more your speed. A nice merlot, maybe.”

The glass began to shake in my hand, the liquid slopping over the edge in small drops. I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to see his face. But I knew his voice.

“Aren’t you going to say hello, Addison?” he asked, his familiar voice low and filled with amusement.

“I’d rather not.”

“Why? Haven’t you missed me?”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? I had missed him. More than I wanted to admit.

I set the drink down slowly. Carefully.

And then I turned and slapped him as hard as I could, right across that wide, perfect jaw.

Grant.

It hadn’t been my imagination.