Fair Game (18 page)

She didn’t want to move or open her eyes. It was too much, too good. If she spoke, she’d destroy the moment. Ruin the memory. If they got in the water, she’d make a joke or laugh, blow it all off as nothing.

Instead she lay in his arms, savored the scent of his sex, put her tongue out to test the saltiness of his skin, and kept the moment alive. Her thighs ached pleasantly, as if she’d had a hard work-out. They didn’t speak again. He simply stroked her hair with his thumb.

She hadn’t subjugated him at all. He’d carried her off with him into some orgasmic never-never land. A part of her wanted to stay there forever.

Not a good feeling to have, not at all. She was letting her emotions get away with her, going deeper. The downward spiral had to stop. She thought about how she could leave without saying anything. Without looking at him. Without admitting how much it had meant. Until his breathing changed and his body relaxed against hers. His foot twitched. His hand fell from her hair. He slept.

It was cowardly, but Josie slowly eased away. God, he was beautiful. His body was perfect, his features strong, the slightest shadow of a beard on his chin, though she hadn’t felt it when he kissed her. A shimmer of semen marked his belly. She wanted to lick it off. He lay with one leg bent to accommodate the shortness of the mattress, the other stretched out at an angle, his foot on the decking. An arm rested against the wall.

She rose slowly, then hung on to the rail so she didn’t slip on the damp stairs. After dressing quietly, she then grabbed the canvas bag. She’d put her keys and wallet in there. She left the dildo behind for him.

She couldn’t talk to him about this now. She needed time to think. She needed to put it in its proper place, give it perspective. It wasn’t
that
important. It was just fun. Yes, she needed to get to a place where she saw the act for what it was. Just sex.

Instead of some defining moment of her life.

 

 

 

A phone was ringing. For a moment, he thought he’d fallen asleep at his desk. Then he felt the mattress beneath him, the muggy atmosphere around him, his lassitude, the ache in his muscles, and he remembered everything.

The phone continued while he rose, gathered his equilibrium, then eased down the stairs to answer the insistent ring.

“You have ten minutes left.” A disembodied female voice he assumed belonged to the leopard woman.

“Thank you.” He hung up, leaned against the wall a long moment.

Where was Josie? The room was empty, her clothes gone. She’d left while he slept.

Climbing the stairs once more, he slid down into the bubbling water. He could afford five minutes before getting dressed. He closed his eyes, and let the heat of the water soothe his muscles. His body ached pleasantly. That was fucking good. More than good. Mind-blowing.

He wished she’d stayed. He wasn’t a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am type. He liked the long minutes afterward as you slowly came down off the high. Besides, he’d wanted to taste her pussy, feel her body shudder when he tipped her into oblivion with his tongue.

She, however, had to maintain the facade of the game. Perhaps she didn’t have an inkling how extraordinary it had been. Maybe she didn’t even know exactly what she’d given him.

But he knew. For those few moments, when she’d crooned to him, taken him, she’d given herself. He didn’t believe Josie Tybrook had ever called a man
baby
. In that moment, she’d lost herself to him. He’d be damned if he’d let her take it back. Because of course, she’d try. He knew that.

He knew something else. He wasn’t giving her up for a job. But neither was he giving up the job opportunity Connor Kingston had laid in his lap. He’d ended his marriage five years ago, and ever since, he’d been skimming the surface of life with casual sexual encounters that lasted a few weeks or months. He was ready for the VP slot, but he was also ready for more than a few hot interludes with Josie. He was ready for a relationship, maybe even heading toward a commitment.

He wanted both, the job
and
Josie. Nothing would stop him from getting what he wanted, not even Josie herself.

 

 

 

HE’D given her a piece of himself on Saturday. Josie didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t want him to think he’d get a piece of her in return. That was the thing that bothered her.

She didn’t have time to think about that right now. The day was blowing up in her face. Lydia was late. The Monday morning project meeting didn’t accomplish a damn thing, though at least Ronson was in South America and she didn’t have to deal with his sarcasm. Hey, there was a bright spot. But she had three interviews with candidates for the next Program Manager position, and she didn’t even have her questions prepared. That was bad, considering she’d never done job interviews before. Not that she couldn’t handle it, of course, but she needed some more prep time.

She looked up at the tap on her door frame.

“Got a minute?” Douglas Sarcose headed Human Resources. A tall man with a bushy head of prematurely salt-and-pepper hair, he’d been with Castle for six years. In his early forties and married to a pretty wife Josie had met at company functions, he was father to three primary school-age kids. She’d always found him to be soft-spoken, competent, and fair.

“Sure, come on in.” Josie waved him to the chair opposite.

He closed the door. “Great.”

Josie liked him. She just didn’t like him showing up in her office for an impromptu, closed-door meeting. “Is this about the interviews I’ve got today?”

“No.”

Damn. She didn’t know what to say to that. “Okay.”

He steepled his fingers and stared at her over them. “Chuck Eastman came to see me this morning.”

Her stomach sank straight to her toes. “Was it about Lydia? Because he told me about that, and I had a discussion with Lydia last week regarding her behavior.”

“A verbal warning?”

“Well, yes. Since this was the first time anything like this was reported. She said it wouldn’t happen again.” After she’d pouted and hadn’t taken the whole thing as seriously as she should have.

“You didn’t send over any notice of a verbal warning to be added to her file.”

“Yes. Well. Since it was the first time, I decided it didn’t need to be documented.”

He breathed in, let it out slowly, his gaze focused. “This isn’t the first time.”

Shit. “Oh?” She felt, and sounded, like a total idiot.

“If you’d come to me, I would have told you that Ernie had written her up a couple of times for the same kind of behavior with various male personnel.”

“Oh.”

“Sexual harassment isn’t taken lightly around here, Josie.”

“I know, but—”

He held up his hand. “I’m not done yet.”

She felt like a recalcitrant child.

“Before you make decisions like this, you need to consult me and the employee files. In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t already been over to HR to go through all the personnel files. That should have been your first order of business.”

“Yes, well, I . . .” Goddammit, she’d fucked up. She wasn’t an idiot, but she hadn’t thought things through. She hadn’t had
time
. Because she was too busy thinking about Kyle. How had she not noticed that Lydia had a sexual harassment problem? She felt totally clueless. Her job did take her out of town a lot, but if you kept your ear to the ground, these things got out. “You’re right. I’ll take care of that this afternoon.” Shit. She thought about all the interviews. “Well, at least by tomorrow.”

“Connor told me you’re going to a supervisory training course up in the city. Where’s your requisition on that? It has to be one of our approved courses.”

Dammit. “Oh, sure. Sorry. I’ll fill that out and get it up to you. I’m pretty sure it’s approved because I remember a Castle contingent attending last year.” She’d remembered it and looked up the course on the Internet instead of going to HR.

“I’m not trying to get on your case. I know you’ve been thrown into this with Ernie being sick. But we are human
resources
. So use us. Ask us for help. You don’t have to go it alone. We’re in this together.” He sounded like a twelve-step program.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“And I will have to call Lydia in for a talk.”

“Sure. I’ll let her know when she gets here.”

He raised one brow, but didn’t comment.

When he left, she felt like laying her head down on her desk as if it were a chopping block. She’d been dumb, hadn’t used her brain. She didn’t want anyone else to know she was an idiot, either, so she hadn’t gone to HR for a thing. Probably because she wouldn’t dream of going to them to complain about someone else. She’d always handled her own problems. If someone got uppity with you, you slammed them down. End of story. Going to HR was the coward’s way out.

The problem was, when you became a manager, HR was a fact of life you had to deal with.

All right, lesson learned; she wouldn’t cry over spilled milk. And gee, were there any other clichés she could think of?

She grabbed the stack of interview résumés just as her desk phone rang. “Josie Tybrook here.”

“We’re up shit creek right now.” Though he didn’t identify himself, she recognized the voice of Todd Adams, Coyote Ridge superintendent.

Her stomach had dropped to her toes with Doug’s visit. Now her heart quickly followed. “What’s wrong, Todd?”

“We’ve got less than half a silo of glass sand left, and the covered hoppers are lining up for loading. Gate-to-gate time is in the shitter. And the dryer isn’t here yet.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose as an ache shot straight to her forehead. They’d sent the drum out on Saturday. It was to receive a special cured coating that would help to retain its heat rather than bleeding it off into the atmosphere during down times. The sand plant ran seven days a week but didn’t load on Sundays, and they’d paid the coater a premium to pick up, coat, cure, and reinstall the dryer by Monday at nine. It was now ten.

Why the hell had Todd waited until ten to call her?

“I’ll get right on it,” she said, “and have an answer back to you in fifteen minutes.”

“Fine.” He was gone.

She grabbed the Coyote Ridge file, looked up the vendor’s number, and dialed. Dammit. This wasn’t like her. She should have been on the phone with the coater to verify the delivery the moment she walked in the door this morning. If there was a milestone, she was on it. How could she let this happen? Where was her head?

She knew. It was at the hot tubs with Kyle. It was analyzing her thoughts about him ad nauseam. To the exclusion of everything that was important.

Ten minutes later she was back on the phone with Todd. “There was an accident on southbound 17 causing a nasty backup on the highway, but the truck is about fifteen minutes out now, and the coater has agreed to drop the premium for the weekend service.”

“Fine. Great. But why the hell didn’t someone call?”

“I should have checked when I first came in. It won’t happen again, Todd.”

“Good.” And again, he was gone without another word.

She deserved the rudeness. Production was king, and her ineptness had just cost them. Granted, she couldn’t do anything about an accident on the freeway, but if she’d given Todd a heads-up, he could have rerouted the trucks. She’d
never
had to apologize to a customer for a mistake. What was that principle she’d heard about in some college business course? You were promoted to the level of your incompetency. Good at one thing, you naturally moved up the ladder. Until you failed. That was her, for God’s sake.

Okay, okay, calm down. Things weren’t that bad.

Then another thought struck like a tanker. Soon Kyle would be calling when he heard what an idiot she was.

 

 

 

KYLE’S flight landed earlier than expected, his rental car ready to pick up, and by ten o’clock Monday morning, he’d been on his way to the first of the sites he was visiting, this one outside of Pleasant Lady, Washington. The plant was a new acquisition for SMG.

He plugged in his hands-free, voice-activated phone and said Connor Kingston’s number.

The call went straight through. Kyle identified himself and cut right to the chase. “I’d like to accept the job if we can agree on salary, benefits, and the option package.”

They’d already discussed his desired salary range, and Kyle had done his homework on the other executives. Despite the fact that Castle was a family-controlled corporation, there was a fair amount of disclosure in their annual report. As Connor said, their executive pay was industry standard, though in Kyle’s opinion it was actually a bit better. For the most part, people stayed at Castle. The last VP of FI&T had moved on only due to family considerations; aging parents back East.

“I’ll e-mail you the offer I’ve come up with.” Connor ran down the basics over the phone.

It was exactly as Kyle expected. “Then consider this a verbal acceptance unless I see something unexpected.”

“Welcome aboard.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep a lid on it until I return on Thursday. I need to let my bosses know, then get out to the Coyote Ridge plant. I want them to hear from me that this isn’t going to make any difference to the upgrade.”

“Of course. And I’ll need a start date, too.”

“Done. I’ll have that for you on Thursday after I discuss the transition.”

“You’ll be a great addition to the family.”

Family? Did Connor know about Josie? Hell, no. He meant the Castle family, the company, the dynasty. It was going to be good. Kyle had never worked for such a closely held corporation before. He was looking forward to it.

There was one other thing he needed to do before Connor made an announcement. He had to tell Josie. She wasn’t going to like it. He was sure she’d fight him every step of the way. He’d be her boss, but he would make her see how well this could work.