Public Relations (28 page)

When their time on the ice ended, she was more than ready to find some privacy and some food. They ate at a tucked-away bistro on Forty-Seventh, then strolled hand in hand back to the building. Bet clearly forgotten for now, Peter walked her to her door and lingered before kissing her good night. It was a sweet kiss, full of tenderness and unspoken promises.

“I had a good time today,” he said, cupping her cheek, his thumb teasing her lower lip. “Thank you.”

She smiled up at him. “Me too.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to invite him in, but something hovered between them—the promise he’d made to her earlier in the day about not having sex with her again right away.

“Will you let me make you coffee tomorrow morning?” he asked. “Meet me for breakfast before we go to work?”

The offer shouldn’t have surprised her after how attentive he’d been all day, but it did. She was so used to waiting on him—being at his beck and call—that his willingness, possibly even eagerness, to wait on her a little made her heart pitter-patter more than it perhaps should have at such a simple gesture.

Oh, she was well and truly done for. Completely gone. Drowning in the Sea of Wells and happily going under for the third time.

“Sure,” she said. “I’d enjoy that very much.”

“Eight a.m.?”

“Eight a.m.,” she affirmed.

He stepped back. “Good night, Georgia.”

She watched him go, her fingertips lingering where his had touched, and wondered if reality could get any sweeter. If it did, she might believe she dreamed, because no one and nothing could be as wonderful as the man who smiled at her until the elevator doors closed, leaving her staring at her own dazed reflection.

* * * *

“I don’t know. I think a social networking approach is more viable.” Georgia chewed at the tip of her pen and stared at her laptop screen, where several windows of graphs and charts vied for her attention. “See where the Web hits spiked when we started allowing reader commentary?”

“Yes, but you’re not earning money off those comments.” Peter stared over her shoulder, tapping at her screen, before he took his coffee around to the other side of the table and sat at his own laptop. “You need a combination of subscribers and advertisers. At present you have precious few of either.”

They’d been going back and forth for ten hours, stopping only to have pizza delivered for lunch. It was past dinnertime on Wednesday, and Georgia didn’t know about Peter, but she didn’t feel like calling it quits until they hammered this out.

She tapped her pen against her lips, considering. “What if we used cookies and data mining? Targeted ads? Then we could charge advertisers per click. Like some of the social network sites.”

Peter shuddered visibly. “I hate the invasiveness.”

Georgia felt her bangs brush her brows as she looked up, surprised. “Really?”

Peter grunted into his mug as he sipped his coffee.

“It’s sort of de rigueur,” she said.

“But we can do better.” The straight line of his lips painted him determined.

Rubbing her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, she sighed. Getting money out of companies for advertising nowadays was like taking a hammer and chisel to a rear molar. Forget pulling teeth, the advertising associates practically had to pound them out of their own skull before anyone noticed. What the companies needed was incentive, and what the paper needed was news people felt compelled to read.

“Wait!” Georgia sat up straighter, and Peter flicked his gaze to her. “I think I have it.”

He made a “go on” motion with his chin.

“What if we entered into exclusive news agreements with the companies who advertise with us?”

Head tilted, frown quizzical, he regarded her.

“I mean…” She was getting excited, her hands fluttering to either side of her laptop as she leaned in. “What if we told them they could advertise with us at a cut rate in exchange for press release and interview exclusives? What if we literally got the local news before everyone else? We could charge subscription rates for the Web site access and people would pay them—especially for business news.” Barely pausing for breath, she explained, “With Wells Industries-related news alone, we’d have a corner on the market and our subscription rates would skyrocket. Once that happened? Even companies without exclusives would be dying to advertise with us.”

It was a tricky proposition, getting the timing and balance right, but if they could do it? Georgia sat back, grinning, feeling the light dancing in her own eyes. It’d be unusual. Very unusual, but with Peter’s subsidiaries on board it might very well work.

Peter nodded slowly, his mouth pulling into an exaggerated frown that said she’d impressed him. Georgia’s middle turned warm and tingly, but she brushed the feeling aside, not wanting to ruin the moment of professional victory with personal complications.

“I’ll get some of my people on it. See what we’re looking at.”

Georgia grinned so wide her face hurt.

Peter held up one hand. “I’m not promising anything.”

“I know.” Her voice sounded breathless to her own ears. “But I really think this could work.”

Finally—
finally
—he smiled, answering her enthusiasm with a little of his own. “I think it can too.”

She stood, cleared their long-forgotten lunch plates, and refilled her own coffee mug. The act of moving freely around his kitchen struck her as intimate, and she smiled, cup poised at her lips.

“What else do you want to go over?” she asked before taking a sip.

“You. Losing the bet,” he said.

Her head whipped around, impulse driving her movement.

“What?” Her mug met the counter with a thud. “I did not!”

They’d renewed their commitment not to touch one another when she’d walked in the door for breakfast yesterday morning. He’d regarded her over his momentarily lowered newspaper, his gaze smoky with need.

“Game’s back on,”
he’d said, then straightened the paper with a crisp rustle.

Back in the here and now, she asked, “When? When did I touch you?”

She turned to find him standing not three inches from her, and crossed her arms over her chest. As much as she loved the idea of what might be coming, she didn’t lose. Ever. If he had tricked her, then she wanted to know about it.

His grin, smug and flirty, accompanied the upward roll of his eyes before he met her gaze again.

“I was sitting there.” He directed her attention to the table with an outstretched finger. “You were showing me a chart. You put your hand on my shoulder.”

“What?” She couldn’t have said the word any more quietly.

“It was kind of sweet, actually.” He stepped closer, bringing her chest in contact with his own. “A very natural gesture. Completely unselfconscious.”

Her tummy turned over. His tone suggested he’d found it more than sweet. Perhaps endearing? Knowing she affected this man and made him feel things, things he very likely hadn’t allowed himself to feel for the entirety of his adult life, drew tender affection from deep within her, along with a hearty sense of responsibility. And with that recognition came a surge of fear. Fear that she could actually—and in all likelihood would—hurt him very, very badly.

“I have something I need to—”

He pressed his fingertips over her mouth. “Sh. I get to be in control. Remember?”

Her head buzzed, and her confession flew from her mind. Peter leaned low, his lips brushing her ear, nuzzling.

“I’m going to eat you like a peach, Georgia,” he murmured. “Then I’m going to fuck you.”

Grip tightening, she said something she hoped sounded positive. Warmth gushed from her core, and she clutched his shoulders for support. His fingers trailed along her throat, traveling lower and lower until his hand brushed past her collar and found her breast. Slipping under her bra, he toyed with her nipple, rolling and pinching with precise movements that made her pussy ache and her breath catch.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please kiss me. Love me. Touch me.”

“Take your shirt off.” Issued with his boardroom voice, the words weren’t a request.

Hearing that tone here, now, made her stomach react as if she’d just jumped from a trapeze and sailed through the air high above the ground, toward Peter’s waiting and outstretched hands.

She trusted him, she realized. He’d never let her fall. When she landed from this experience—her first foray into sexy games she’d always wondered about but didn’t truly understand—he’d be waiting for her, helping to bring her gently back to earth.

Chapter Twenty

“Take off your panties and sit on the counter,” Peter said.

With trembling fingers, Georgia reached under her skirt and rolled her underwear down her thighs. Stepping out of the lacy thong, she looked around, wondering what to do with them. Peter lifted them from her fingers and pocketed them. He regarded her with heavy-lidded intensity, as if every move she made was laden with promise. She felt gorgeous and glorious when he looked at her that way.

“Up on the counter,” he reminded her.

It never failed. When he used that tone, her belly went funny and the air in her lungs seemed a little thinner. Palms curved over the counter’s edge, she hoisted herself upward. Her bottom rested against the satin lining of her woolen skirt, and she shifted a little, enjoying the light abrasion. He’d said he was going to taste her. No…
eat
her. She shifted again, and stickiness met her thigh.

Peter leaned down and lifted one of her feet, encased in a high-heeled shoe complete with a sexy little ankle strap, and bent her knee before resting her foot on the counter to the right of her bottom. He did the same with the other, placing it to her left. Her pleated skirt pooled at her waist, baring her to him. Keeping his gaze locked on hers, he slid one finger inside her pussy in a smooth motion, grazing her G-spot as he passed. Georgia gripped the cabinets behind her head and bore down as she whimpered.

“Uh-uh.” Peter shook his head as he made a disappointed sound with his tongue. “Stay still or I’ll have to spank you.”

She whimpered as an embarrassing amount of heat flooded her sex. He had to have felt it. He fucked her slowly with his finger, hooking the digit so it bumped and caught on her G-spot, compressing the tissues there on each partial withdrawal.

“You like that idea?” he murmured. “Me bending you over the kitchen table? Spanking your bottom pink?”

Breathless, she nodded and licked her lips. He wriggled his finger, and she shuddered against the impulse to buck.

“That’s a good girl.” He circled his finger and slipped another digit inside, stretching her walls. “I’m counting, you know, counting every time you move. Every time you make a sound. I’m adding them up. Adding them to your punishment.”

She clutched the cabinets so hard she swore she’d leave dents in the wood. Though she wanted what he promised—the sensual punishment and the sweet high of sexual vulnerability it’d bring—she tried to keep quiet. Tried to comply with his demands. It was more fun that way. Trying and losing simply because his touch was impossible to ignore.

With two fingers deep inside her, he lifted his thumb and twisted so his hand formed a V that cradled her sex. Sawing in and out, he jarred her sex and hit her clit with each penetration. His fingers wrung a slick melody from her pussy, echoing her arousal off the kitchen’s chrome surfaces as tension coiled and built low in her abdomen.

Her orgasm began as a catch of breath. On the next penetration, the sensation of slowly expanding fullness built. Two more and the sweet ache ballooned outward, stretching her tissues with a sense of inevitability. The tension could not hold. Eventually, if he kept jarring her clit in that rhythm, the pleasure would overflow the cup of her sex and rush outward to claim every nerve.

He added a third finger, pressed inward, widened his digits, and circled his thumb around and over her clit. When the cry tore from her lungs, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, he leaned into her, applying pressure she knew extended from his forearm down to his hand, and opened her to the unfurling waves of her orgasm. Pulse after pulse of white heat jerked her clit, its force absorbed and cast outward with each pump of her hips. Peter captured her lips and swallowed her cries, taking her breath and giving it back to her in an affirmation of life.

Spiraling downward, she slowly became aware of her hands in his hair. Fingers threaded and bobbing, she moved as he moved. At some point he’d lowered to the space between her thighs, where he kissed and nipped her now, his tongue alternately spearing and laving.

“No…” she moaned, trying to push him away as he captured her clit between his lips and sucked hard.

Her hips bucked, and he placed his hands on them to hold her down. To force her to take the painful pleasure he commanded and coaxed from her sensitive nerve endings. Sweat coated the backs of her knees and ran down her calves. Peter cavalierly threw both her legs over his shoulders and palmed her ass, canting her hips upward so her pussy better received his tongue. Each lingual thrust brought him deeper within her, stretching walls that pulsed with the aftereffects of her orgasm.

Keening cries crested, seeming to bounce from her lungs on each shock of pleasure he wrought. She lifted against him, building her own orgasm, not even able—much less daring—to think how many spanks she’d earned in the last thirty seconds alone. Just when she thought she couldn’t take any more, he bit her clit between his lips and sucked hard. Her knees clamped around his ears, and her hips shot out of his hands as she came with a shriek that probably had neighbors three stories below calling the cops.

“Oh Georgia,” he said, his laugh wicked as he raised his head and met her barely focused stare with his glinting gaze. “You are so much fun.”

PETER REGARDED GEORGIA, noting her mottled skin and flashing gaze. She breathed hard, her chest heaving with each gasp as if her body attempted to wring oxygen from the air around her rather than filter the stuff in. Her fingers gradually loosened their grip on his hair, and her arms fell away.

“Ready for your punishment?” he asked, his cock so hard he didn’t know how he managed to speak in a normal tone, much less get the words out.