Secret Kiss (17 page)

Stepping around her desk, he gently moved her to the side so that he could go to work.

“It’s not there,” she said as she sat back in her chair with a sniff. “I looked everywhere. It just disappeared.”

“Why didn’t you back it up?” He regretted asking the question as soon as he saw the crumbled look on her face. He wasn’t trying to be an asshole, but that was exactly how he was coming off. “It’s okay. It’ll be fine.”

“Great.” Her voice cracked, and she sounded anything but convinced that everything would actually be fine.

Tears were starting to fall down her face. Without missing a beat, he grabbed a tissue from the desktop and handed it to her. When she reached for it, her body shifted and her leg brushed against his. As with everything when it came to Jane, it affected him a lot more than it should have.

Complicated.

His entire body was so acutely aware of her nearness that he was having a hard—literally
hard
—time focusing on retrieving the missing proposal. It also didn’t help that the entire space smelled like the perfect combination of fresh, flowery, and fruity. The scent was Jane’s, which turned him on like a light switch.

“Is this it?” he asked after finding what he thought she was looking for.

“Oh my God!” Her eyes widened as she looked at the screen. Her entire face lit up like she’d just won the lottery. She reached for her mouse and her face was a mix of wonder and disbelief.

A disproportionate amount of pride swelled in his chest. What he’d done was basic. Very basic. But Jane’s reaction made him want to puff his chest out, pound on it like Tarzan, and swing on vines to take her back to his cave.

Me Tarzan, you Jane
.

“Holy… What the… How did you…?” she asked as she scrolled through the forty-page document.

“Just have to know where to look.”

Adam was happy that she was happy, but if he stood this close to her for another minute, he would no longer trust himself not to pull her into his arms and do something he was sure they’d both regret.

Before he turned to walk away, he found himself in the exact position he was trying to avoid like the plague. Jane’s arms flung around his neck, the supple curves of her body pressed firmly against him.

“Thank you so much,” she murmured against his neck.

Adam’s situation got
harder
when the gentle touch of Jane’s lips brushed against his skin as she spoke.

Gratitude
, he tried to tell his solider downstairs, which was standing at attention. That was all this embrace was about. Jane was happy that her file had been saved. Nothing more.

His arms remained at his sides while she squeezed him tight once more before lowering. That should’ve been the end of the interaction. That should’ve been the end of their contact. That should’ve been all she wrote.

It wasn’t.

The second Adam no longer felt Jane’s body against his, one arm wrapped around her lower back and returned her to the sweet spot she’d just been in. The other hand cradled the back of her neck, tilting her head up, giving him complete access to her mouth.

The confusion in Jane’s eyes morphed into awareness as he slowly lowered his head. He felt her sharp intake of breath as he watched her irises dilate just before he captured her mouth with his.

The second their lips met, arousal spiked through Adam’s body, rushing through his veins with tsunami-like power. He brushed his mouth back and forth against hers, pausing only to pull first her bottom and then her top lip between his. With each sweep, his body demanded more.

When his fingers tightened on her hip, pulling her even closer to his body, Jane moaned and encircled her arms around him again, this time threading her fingers through the hair at the base of his neck. Her body relaxed, molding perfectly to his as she parted her lips in a silent invitation.

That was all the encouragement Adam needed. He slipped his tongue between her full lips, and she met him with hers. He massaged her tongue with his own, licking, teasing, and exploring her mouth with knowledge he shouldn’t have. Then Jane tightened her fingers in his hair as she leaned her head back and rolled her hips against his. A weighted need so fierce that his knees threatened to buckle crashed over him.

This didn’t feel like a first kiss. It felt like a kiss between two people who knew each other’s bodies, desires, kisses.

This kiss felt like
home
. What Adam had always imagined “home” would feel like, at least. This felt right.

However, somewhere in the back of Adam’s mind, he knew that this was wrong on several levels. He shouldn’t be kissing Jane at all, much less at work. And if they didn’t stop soon, this kiss was going to turn into a whole lot more.

Reaching deep down, he called on every ounce of self-control he had and fought against every cell in his body’s plea to pick Jane up, put her on the desk, and take this encounter further. He didn’t
want
it to be over. Knowing that there was no other choice, he reluctantly broke their kiss.

Not yet able to pull away from her completely, Adam rested his head on her forehead. Their labored breaths mingled as they both held each other in silence.

Adam was so focused on how powerful what had transpired between them had been that he didn’t hear the front door of the office open.

“Ooooh la, la! Wally, it looks like we interrupted some afternoon delight,” an elderly woman’s voice said, snapping Adam out of his lust-ridden state.

The surprise of people being in his space without him knowing caused Adam to act out of sheer instinct. He spun around, facing the unknown voice, and positioned Jane behind him to shield her from any possible perceived danger. When he saw the intruders, he immediately knew that his knee-jerk reaction had been overkill.

A man and woman who looked to be in their mid-eighties were holding bags and rolling suitcases. The man was wearing a Yankees hat and the woman had a Red Sox hat on. They also had on matching sweatshirts that read
California or Bust.

“Nana! Papa!” Jane exclaimed as she moved from behind him before he could speak.

He was still taking in these two people, who seemed like very colorful characters.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she threw herself between them in a three-way hug. While they were embracing, Jane’s tone changed. “Wait! Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

He heard the tremor in her voice, and it tore his heart in two. How had this woman managed to get so deep under his skin that he felt her worry in his soul?

“We came to see you and meet your beau.”

She has a boyfriend!
Adam froze. He could’ve sworn she’d said that she didn’t have a boyfriend. Damn. Now, that kiss had been a bad idea for even more reasons.

“Oh…um….­well…­actually…” Jane was stuttering and stumbling over her words. Which, although it was not unusual for her, seemed even more stumbly and stuttery than normal. When she turned towards him, her face was bright red.

Adam’s first thought was that she must have been embarrassed to have been caught kissing another man by her grandparents when she had a boyfriend. He hated that he’d put her in that position and was working on a plan of action when the older gentleman stepped forward and held his hand out.

“You must be Adam. Jane’s told us so much about you. Nice to meet you, son.”

Not a whole lot surprised Adam, but the fact that this man knew who he was shocked him.

“Yes, sir. Nice to meet you, too.” Adam shook the man’s hand, assuming he was Jane’s grandfather, Walter.

He remembered her talking about them when they’d had lunch on Friday. She’d said that they were more like parents to her than grandparents and that Dolores and Walter Marshall had stepped in and raised her after her parents’ tragic accident.

Turning his attention to Dolores, Adam extended his hand. “Ma’am, it’s so nice to—”

Before Adam was able to get his full greeting out, he found himself in one hell of a bear hug.

“Oh, Adam, it’s so good to finally meet you!” Jane’s grandmother burst out. She then squeezed him tighter than anyone had in…well, ever, making a loud squealing noise before releasing him.

Then Adam was in for his second surprise of the day. Dolores cupped his face in her hands, which were ice cold.

Tears formed in her eyes as she said, “I’m just so happy that my Jane has finally found someone as amazing as you.”

Adam’s eyes cut up to Jane, who was standing just behind her grandparents. She was white as a ghost, swaying a little. There was no way he’d let her fall. Not on his watch.

Smiling down at Dolores, Adam smoothly moved out of her grasp and stepped beside Jane, wrapping his arm around her for support. She was shaking beside him.

He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but all he wanted to do was pick Jane up and take her someplace where they could be alone and he could apologize for the kiss—not that he was genuinely sorry. Then he would tell her that everything was going to be okay. He would take care of whatever was upsetting her. He would fix it.

He would do anything to protect the woman beside him.

Shit. When did that happen?

‡

“J
ane, honey.” Nana’s face grew concerned as she rushed over to her. “You look as white as Casper. Do you need to sit down? Are you feeling all right? Are you
pregnant
?”

“No!” Jane yelled. Her hands defensively rose. “I am not pregnant!”

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!”

How was this happening?!

Jane wanted to die. She wanted the earth to open and swallow her up. She wanted to disappear. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

The walls started closing in on Jane and her ears were ringing loudly as her nana started listing, in detail, all of the reasons why Jane should be taking care of herself and multiple symptoms of pregnancy.

Trying to ward off the nervous breakdown that was making a very good case for itself in her mind, Jane tried to go into crisis-management mode. Because if
this
wasn’t a crisis, she didn’t know what was.

Facts:

Her grandparents were
there
. In
California
. That was amazing.

They believed that Adam was her boyfriend. Not so amazing.

They’d told Adam that they thought he was her boyfriend. Also bad.

They’d walked in on Adam
kissing
her. Adam had
kissed
her!
Amazing! But what the what?!

Her mind was swimming like sharks chasing chum. The only logical explanation was that she must’ve imagined the kiss. It couldn’t have been real. There was no way
Adam
had kissed her like he’d needed her more than he’d needed his next breath.

She might have gone along with that logic, except for one thing. Her lips still tingled from where he’d branded her. Because, make no mistake, that hadn’t been just a kiss. He’d claimed her.

What did that mean? Had it been a fluke? Had he been invaded by body snatchers and an alien had done the smooching?

Was it like that book she read,
The Secret,
and this was a clear-cut case of the law of attraction? She’d put it out into the universe that Adam was her boyfriend, and maybe this was just him acting on cosmic forces that were beyond his control? Was their kiss a
Secret
kiss?

Or maybe—and this was a Grand Canyon–sized
maybe
—he’d kissed her because that was what he’d wanted to do? Because
maybe
he felt the same way she did? Because
maybe
he thought about her like she thought about him, which was every second of every day?

No. That was crazy talk. Jane shook her head to try to clear it.

She’d have to process that later. Right now, she needed to get her grandparents as far away from Adam as humanly possible. So it was time to pull out the old faithful. She’d had to use this play more times than she could count on the campaign trail with Mike to get constituents to move along without making them feel ignored or unimportant.

Sure, they were her grandparents, but Jane needed to stick to the tried-and-true formula of redirecting the focus onto the parties themselves and then redirecting their attention onto another objective.

The key was knowing where the conversation was headed and not letting anything divert from that destination.

“I can’t believe you guys are here!” Jane said, interrupting her nana’s rambling, and briefly hugged them both again. “This was the trip you were taking so you couldn’t make our call!”

“Yep, I told your nana to tell you we were coming. I said, ‘Dolores, Jane’s a grown woman. We can’t just be showing up out of the blue, disrupting her life.’” Then, leaning forward, her papa whispered conspiratorially, “But you know your grandmother. She’s hardheaded.”

“Oh, Wally, I am not!” Nana playfully swatted her husband’s arm. “I just wanted to surprise you, bunny. And I didn’t want you going to any trouble.”

Thanks,
Jane thought dryly. This way, she wasn’t
going
to any trouble. Nope. She was already there, right in the
middle
of it.

Nana continued telling them word for word the conversations—plural!—she’d had with her papa on this subject, but Jane tuned out.