Dirty Little Secret (4 page)

The view up his body was gorgeous. Alex’s head was thrown back, the masculine column of his neck centered by his bobbing Adam’s apple, stubble marching along the strong line down to his heaving chest and rippling stomach. A dark nest of crisp hair surrounded his navel, trailed along his lower abs, and surrounded his erection as if it needed something extra to draw her attention to it. It didn’t. The solid length jerked in her mouth, and Cailin swallowed, the sound that erupted from Alex’s mouth causing both her throat and channel to squeeze at once.

He lifted his hips slightly, and Cailin slid down, taking more of him, trying to relax as the knob fitted itself to the opening of her throat and pushed lightly inside. Back. Forward. Then back again. Together they set up a rhythm that drove them both wild. And when Cailin reached with tentative fingers to surround the tight sac hanging below his shaft, rubbing lightly at the furred skin, Alex’s muscles seized against her, and spurts of bitter cum sprayed into her throat.

“Oh shit! Cailin!”

The sight of Alex, bowed up before her, straining through his completion, seared her heart. Tears gathered, but not from the aching in her throat. From the aching in her chest. When Alex reached for her, dragging her roughly against him, she blinked the moisture away quickly.

His tongue speared inside her salty mouth at the exact moment his semihard shaft forced its way between her legs. At the touch of wet skin to wet skin, he flinched. “Just a minute,” he whispered roughly and broke away, only to reappear with condom in hand. He was sheathed and inside her seconds later. Cailin lost count of the minutes as he took her, made love to her, brought her to a screaming orgasm she’d never even allowed herself to imagine existed. By the time she drifted off to sleep in his arms, she knew for certain: Alex was someone she could fall in love with. He was hers.

Chapter Three

The phone on the bedside table rang, startling Cailin out of a deep sleep. It took a moment for her drugged brain to come online, but she finally fumbled for the handset. “Hello?”

“Miss, this is your four o’clock wake-up call, per your request. Late checkout is in half an hour.”

Late checkout? Turning her head, she listened with half an ear to the dial tone while she surveyed the hotel room. Pillows lay scattered with wild abandon across the thick beige carpet, bringing quickly to mind all the things she and Alex had done with those pillows through the night and early morning hours. Her aching pelvis echoed the sentiment, but the man responsible was nowhere to be found.

“Alex?”

Easing up, she replaced the receiver and moved carefully toward the bathroom, but the door stood open, lights off. Empty. She flicked the lights on and pulled open the shower door, as if he’d be standing in there in the dark with the water off.

No Alex.

It took about three more minutes to search the room with ridiculous thoroughness and realize Alex was no longer there. He’d left, and not a molecule of his presence remained. Not a business card, a note, not even a stray piece of lint from a sock. He was just…gone.

Gone. What else had she expected?

Not wanting to answer that question, even to herself, she scrambled to dress and make herself halfway presentable for the walk of shame out of the hotel. She called a cab and, ten minutes later, hurried through the lobby with her head firmly down to meet it, promising herself the whole time she would not cry.

She kept that promise until she stepped into the shower at home.

The heat of the water mingled with her tears until Cailin’s face was so swollen she couldn’t breathe. She scrubbed every inch of her sore body, taking inventory of each bruise, strawberry, burn mark from the stubble along Alex’s jaw. Yeah, that appeared in some embarrassing places, places she was forced to pat dry carefully after using all the hot water and stepping, shivering, into the cool air-conditioning to run a towel over her body. Avoiding the mirror was difficult but necessary. She’d seen enough of the evidence, and if she didn’t have to look herself in the eye for about ten years or so until she got over her stupidity, she’d be perfectly happy with that.

What an idiot she’d been. And was.

Numb, acting on autopilot, she made herself dinner and sat in front of the TV, her plate untouched before her. The screen could have been channeling messages from God—primarily about her coming judgment, more than likely—and Cailin wouldn’t have flinched. She’d switched off at some point. And would probably be thankful for that if she could feel anything at all. But she couldn’t.

Tomorrow was her first day at her new position with Keane Industries. Knowing that made it easy to abandon food and TV and thinking and climb under the covers instead, carefully setting her alarm clock, then burying her head in the blankets and allowing the world to drift away. Her last thought was to wonder where Alex was sleeping—and with whom.

* * * *

The Atlanta headquarters for Keane Industries were located on the eighth floor of a multistory building situated in the thriving financial center of downtown Atlanta. Cailin held her breath as she walked off the elevator to a complete wall of glass panels displaying a breathtaking—and for someone with a severe phobia of heights, bloodcurdling—vista of the surrounding city. She turned as quickly as possible and made her way toward the receptionist’s desk across the entryway.

“Cailin Gray,” she told the young redhead behind the desk.

“Hey, Cailin, so happy to see you, hon. We’ve been expecting you. Transferring to the big city, huh?” the receptionist asked with a sweet smile. Her Southern drawl was the strongest Cailin had ever heard, which was saying something considering she’d lived in the South all her life, but she withheld her wince and smiled instead as the woman tucked a loose strand of fiery hair behind one ear and consulted a computer screen to her left. “I believe Mr. Brannigan has an off-site meeting first thing this morning, which will give you a bit of settling-in time. I was fixin’ to get some coffee from the break room, so let me show you around.”

An hour later the receptionist, whose name was Tammy, dropped Cailin off at the senior VP’s office. “Call me if you need anything, hear?” she said, her voice trailing behind her as she hurried down the hall. Cailin waved and stepped inside.

More of those blasted windows. Shuddering, Cailin turned her back on the floor-to-ceiling display and walked over to the desk she figured belonged to her. The surface was dark, gleaming wood, the chair behind it a cushioned showpiece that would have done Captain Kirk proud. Even the drawers opened with barely a whisper as she explored, putting her purse away and familiarizing herself with the supplies available.

She had parked herself in the plush chair and reached to turn on the computer when a noise from the inner office drew her attention. The sound, a long, low moan, whispered around the door Cailin only now noticed was slightly ajar. Concerned her new boss might be ill, she hastily stood and hurried toward his office, the thick carpet cushioning her heels as she ran.

“Sara Beth, please…”

That voice. What was it about that voice that was so familiar? She didn’t know anyone in Atlanta, not really. No one except…

The door slid open with barely a sound, freezing just in time to prevent it from thudding into the ultramodern black suede wall. Cailin froze as well, outlined in the open door frame as she watched the man inside bend down and place a soft, loving kiss against the corner of the lips of the woman he held in his arms. No, she didn’t know anyone in Atlanta, except this man. The man she’d given her body to, the man she’d trusted, the man who’d disappeared like a shadow in the sun while she slept in the bed they’d had sex in.

The man who now held and kissed someone else.

“Alex?” she whispered.

He shouldn’t have been able to hear her, not all the way across the room. Maybe he didn’t; maybe he simply heard a sound and reacted. Either way, he turned his head, hands—those rough, tender, drive-her-to-the-brink hands—still cupping the woman’s delicate jaw, and fastened his gaze on her. His eyes widened with recognition. Confusion. Panic. He jerked his lying ass off the edge of the sleek chrome-and-glass desk it rested on, bumping into
her
, startling, and jerking back from them both, hands fisted as they dropped to his sides. His hissed “oh shit!” echoed in the sudden silence.

SHIT
WAS RIGHT; he was neck-deep in it. Cailin stood in the door to his office, and his wife stood in his arms.

How the hell did she find me?

Sara Beth waited quietly, looking from one to the other of them as if an explanation might eventually become clear, but no sound passed her lips. It was so like her. She assessed situations, drew her own conclusions, but waited to gather all the information before deciding how to proceed. Just one of the few things that made her a successful vice president in a world that favored men. One of the things he loved about her.

And he did love her. His eyes slid closed as the enormity of the situation hit him, the reality that to Cailin, he was an adulterer, the worst of the worst, a bastard. And maybe he was—a bastard, not an adulterer. Rare as it was nowadays, he and Sara Beth had what used to be termed a marriage of convenience, though less than a handful of people knew. The two of them were best friends, not lovers, and never would be. But they did have to keep up appearances, at least for now, and he’d let his dick help him forget that Saturday night. Now that decision was coming back to bite him on the ass. The worst part of it was, he couldn’t explain the situation to Cailin, not without risking Sara Beth’s future.

And standing here like the stupid dick he was wouldn’t solve anything either. Plastering a smile on his face, he moved toward Sara Beth, clasped hands with her, and took the first steps toward the door. Damn, he should have remembered to shut it.

“Cailin, what are you doing here?”

Cailin stammered. The visible effort it was taking to get herself together gripped his heart in a vise. “Today’s my first day.”

Sheer, ball-gripping panic had scattered his normally sharp thoughts. It was Sara Beth who made the connection.

“You’re Alex’s new executive assistant! What a pleasure to meet you.” She dropped his hand and advanced on Cailin, her feminine skirt swirling around her. “I’m Sara Beth Brannigan, Alex’s wife.”

Cailin’s face paled, going sheet white and strained in seconds, and he wondered if she would actually faint—and what the hell he would do about it—but he had to give her credit for class and discretion. She squared her shoulders and greeted Sara Beth politely, exchanging pleasantries as she studiously avoided looking toward him. Were her hands shaking the way they had the first time he’d touched her? He pushed the thought away quickly, ignoring Sara Beth’s questioning look.

What the hell was he going to do? The entire situation hung in a delicate balance he wasn’t sure he could deal with right now, wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with. He’d deliberately left Cailin without a way to contact him—he had no room in his life for a lover, even if she’d been the type to accept the only kind of arrangement he might be free to offer. She wasn’t, and he couldn’t. It was too dangerous, too unethical, too something he would never have considered.

Until he’d met Cailin. Until he’d touched her.

The women were moving slowly into the outer office, friendly chatter filling in his blaring silence. Sara Beth he didn’t worry about; she’d happily wait until tonight to have her curiosity satisfied. But Cailin? How the hell did he handle the fact that she would work for him day in and day out, in close quarters, usually alone—he groaned silently at the thought—and not explain why this wasn’t the disaster she thought it was, why he wasn’t the bastard she would, rightly, to her at least, label him? How—

The outer door opened, and James Allen walked in. Good ol’ boy that he was, the barrel-chested investor ignored the two women right in front of him and walked straight to Alex. “Brannigan, sorry about the change this morning. Car wouldn’t start, damn thing. You know how that is.”

Likely not, considering the fact that Allen’s car was a stretch limo complete with driver. His assistant had called earlier to explain the wait for the company to send out a new car, asking to change the location of their meeting from Allen’s office to his. “No problem, James. This works just as well for me.”

After shaking the man’s hand, Alex escorted him into the inner office. Pausing at the door, he hesitated for a long moment before he turned back to Cailin. Tight white lines traced the edges of her mouth, but it was the determination in her shoulders that concerned him. Determination to what? Run? Cuss him black-and-blue? Whatever it was, he had a feeling he was dangling on a very short rope; he’d have to figure out how to extend it before he ended up dropping off the cliff—or hanging himself with what was left.

He spoke carefully. “Bring us some coffee, please, Cailin. And hold my calls until lunch. We’ll talk then.”

Her lips pressed into a firm slash, but she didn’t contradict him. “Certainly, Mr. Brannigan,” she said in the perfect executive assistant’s voice. “I’ll be in directly.”

Sara Beth walked casually toward him, snuggled against his chest, the minx, and whispered in his ear, “And we’ll talk tonight.”

When he looked down, a devilish light sparkled in her eyes. She tiptoed up and brushed his cheek with a light kiss. “Have a good day, love.”

Love. Her nickname for him, their own private little joke. But today all he could think about was how Cailin would take it. Forcing a smile, he nodded before turning his body and his thoughts to the man waiting in his office. Anything to avoid the disaster facing him when this meeting was over.

* * * *

She tried to cut herself some slack; she really did. She hadn’t known he was married when she slept with him. She hadn’t asked… Oh God, she hadn’t asked! She’d just assumed everyone would be as honest as she was, that the act of sex would make it as impossible for him to fake emotions as it did for her. She knew how hard it was to fake affection; she’d done it for the last two years of her marriage, or year if you counted only the time she’d actually had any hope of getting laid. Maybe she was just too stupid to figure out how a true expert did it.