Shopping for a CEO (Shopping for a Billionaire Series Book 7) (11 page)

The limo takes up half my driveway and between it and the Tesla, my Turdmobile looks even more ridiculous. I see it’s Lance who is driving tonight, and he’s pulled up next to my pile of steel excrement. I know from Shannon that Lance and Gerald are the two drivers who transport Declan and Andrew the most, and that they’ve been with Anterdec for a long time, largely because of their ability to remain stoic in damn near any situation. 

Which is why Lance’s expression of unmitigated disgust is all the more alarming as he pokes his head out the limo’s driver’s window and openly examines my, um—

I realize #poopwatch could have another meaning.

“Nice car,” I say to Andrew as he guides me to the back door, his hand hovering over my shoulder. Curiously, he doesn’t touch me, keeping his palm an inch or so above my back. How do I know? I can sense it, the heat of attraction like the pull of gravity. 

“Wish I could say the same.”

Lance snorts. Andrew startles, giving him a curious look. Lance’s face goes shockingly blank in a way that makes it clear he’s fighting hard to look impassive.

“I make an extra $200 a month to drive that all over Boston,” I say as I get in the limo. “Plus expenses.” 

“I would pay $200 a month
not
to have to drive it,” Andrew says. 

My laughter fills the night and he joins in, the sound so different from our tight conversations, our tense volleys and verbal jabs that walk a tightrope.

“We can’t all be CEOs,” I answer as I step into the limo. The cool leather seats feel like I’m sliding into a spa chair.

“No, we can’t. Declan just learned that the hard way today,” he says as he shuts my door. Within seconds, he’s opened his and is climbing in. The limo is so wide we have more than enough room to share the back without touching.

Which is a shame.

“Funny. Shannon didn’t say a word about that. You told him?”

“Dad and I did. I’m not sure whether she knows yet. Thank you for not telling him—or her. It was important that he hear it from me and Dad. No one likes to hear bad news secondhand. I worked very hard to keep this information under a tight level of secrecy.”

“Of course. How did he take it?”

“Relatively well. I don’t have a shiner like yours.”

“Muffin didn’t like being told I was going to be CEO, either.”

Andrew doesn’t laugh, but he turns to me and crosses his legs, one ankle to knee, his body open to me. I turn and face him as well, matching his body language, though I cross my legs at the ankles, because if I imitated him perfectly this wouldn’t be a date. It would be a peep show.

“Why are you here?” he asks softly.

The limo pulls away and into the night. My mind floats off, as if it were clinging to the back of the vehicle by its fingernails, carried aloft by speed like a stowaway on an airplane. 

“What?” There goes my brain’s Vitamix again. 

“Why did you agree to dinner?”

“Why did you ask?”

“Because it was about time.”

“Yes.”

“And because I’ve been stupid.”

“Oh, definitely yes.”

“And because you’re loyal.”

Say
what
?

“You mean, like a dog?”

“No. Like a good friend.”

“Why did you kiss me the first time? That day when I barged into your office?”

Hey, if we’re being blunt, I might as well go for the brass ring.

He nods, eyes looking at everything and nothing, finally settling on my face. “Because you were so passionate about protecting Shannon. You were adorable and irate and you had this energy I wanted to taste.”

I’m holding my breath. I thought we would spend this first date doing the awkward getting-to-know you dance. Andrew’s gone right to the point. Laser focus.

Just like a CEO.

“Taste?”

“Yes. I know what I want. I don’t equivocate. I decide and act. I compartmentalize. I issue orders and execute strategy. You came in that day and started ordering me around and it was cute and exciting and inspiring. Oddly sensual. And when you kissed me—”

“You kissed
me
!”

“And when
we
kissed,” he says, eyebrows raised, as if settling this point once and for all, “I got something far more forbidden than I realized I was getting when I went for that simple taste of you.”

Forbidden?

“What’s that?”

He studies me, as if sizing me up, trying to determine whether he should tell me what’s next. Or not. Finally, his face changes through a series of three or four emotions, most of them involving some variation of deliberation.

And then:

“You didn’t fit in a box.”

“I fit in a closet.”

He doesn’t laugh.

“You intrigued me.”

“Not enough to call me after that kiss, though.”

He shakes his head. My heart plummets.

“No, Amanda. The opposite. You intrigued me too much.”

I get the sense that the word ‘intrigued’ means something else.

“You mean I scared you.”

His eyes flash with emotion I can’t read.

“Yes.”

Men like Andrew McCormick don’t do this. They don’t lay their emotions out on the table like this. Why is he doing this?

“Then why did you kiss me again? And again. And
again
again—”

“I don’t know.”

“C’mon.” The driver takes us onto the Mass Pike, lights flying by like spaceships. Little orbs shooting past us, filled with people oblivious to the quantum shift taking place inside this tiny space. “You always know. You’re a CEO. You compartmentalize. You execute. You decide. You act. You can’t tell me that the great wunderkind Andrew Mc—”

He’s on me before I can take a breath to continue speaking, his body so big and bold, so impulsive and unrelenting. The limo becomes its own dimension, his hands seeking to hold all of me as we tumble into some new plane of awareness that doesn’t factor into any life we’ve known until this moment. His mouth finds mine, hands under my suit jacket, palm cupping the lines of my breasts, my waist, my hips, and he’s tasting me again, this time with an urgent need that comes from an honesty I don’t think he’s felt permission to express in a very long time. 

If ever.

I break the kiss. His breath is hot against my lips, my chest pushing up as I inhale, trying to synthesize the tactile feel of him in my personal space as the rate of intimacy between us increases at the speed of light.

“What are we doing?” I ask, buying a moment of clarity as I inhale, shaky and shocked. I have never wanted anyone more than I want him right now. This sensation is wholly foreign and delightfully enchanting. 

“Whatever it is, let’s do more of it.”

The reconnection of his mouth against mine, of the sensual weight of him on me in this small space as my legs pull up, closing all gaps between us, feels simultaneously pure and naughty, innocent and illicit, virginal and promiscuous. Once the boundary between our bodies is breached, we navigate every inch with negotiations brokered in sighs and bites, in tongue strokes and caresses, with touch and without words.

My skin rises an inch above my body with a pounding flush that can only be satisfied by no remedy other than his hands, his mouth, his skin, his attentiveness.

More of his skin.

The limo slows, the driver painstaking in his glide to a spot on a city street that is both familiar and daunting.

And then the limo halts entirely.

Andrew sighs, the sound like a churning ocean before a sea storm. His mouth kisses my ear and he murmurs. “We’re here. Dinner.”

Oh. Right. Dinner.

Date. Public. Food. Single words are all I can muster in my mind. Words like hair. Lipstick. Legs. Skirt.

Throb.

Pulse.

Desire.

Ache.

Andrew.

If he asked me, right now, to skip dinner, I would. One offer. One question is all it would take. I’m past the point of worrying about what he thinks of me. Long gone are the days of sobbing over ice cream and Thai food at Shannon and Amy’s apartment back in the suburbs. I’m here to get something out of this
whateveryoucallit
between us, and it’s dawning on me that he is, too.

And it’s not just kisses in closets.

This is not “just” anything.

Chapter Fourteen

Andrew sits up and adjusts all sorts of parts of himself, from his shirt tails to his jacket to other pieces that need to be put in place in order to make a public appearance. His hand stays on my knee, like a claiming.

And those eyes watch me.

“Hungry?” he asks, dimples firmly in place as he smiles. 

I bite my lips and exhale, a little sound of frustration making the back of my throat vibrate.

“You could say that.”

We’re in front of a series of brick buildings that look like converted lofts and businesses. As Andrew opens his door, a blast of warm night air fills the limo. April in Boston is a crapshoot. You never know if you’ll get a balmy breeze or need your down winter coat. 

Salty air, carrying the ocean on it, fills the small space. Aha. I know where we are.

The Seaport district. Congress Street.

I look outside and my eyes adjust. We’re just at the curb, not even in a parking spot or an underground garage. The driver simply pulled over and we’re blocking traffic.

My door opens. I reach up to touch my hair, then my lips. I must look frightfully disheveled, bright red lipstick smeared across my lips, hair thoroughly mussed.

The second I climb out of this limo it’ll be obvious what Andrew and I have been doing. The thought makes me smile. 

Andrew reaches one strong hand for me and I take it, lifting up into the dark night, his palm splayed at the small of my back without interruption. He seems incapable of not touching me now.

“Is my lipstick smeared?” I whisper, the intimacy of such a simple question feeling both natural and out of place. I’m living in two different realities right now, second by second, as time flows and I am with him.

There is this dream world, where Andrew McCormick is kissing me. And then there’s reality, where I am waiting sorrowfully to wake up.

“Does it matter?”  

The limo takes off like a silent jet, disappearing down Congress Street as Andrew guides me up a set of stairs. There is no sign. No obvious door. We might as well be headed into a nondescript, restored historical building that houses tech start-ups rather than a restaurant.

“Where are we?” I ask as I fumble around in my purse, looking for a hand mirror or a compact.

“You’ll see.”

As he holds open a door, I see a small brass plaque, so subtle I would never have noticed it if I weren’t on guard, nerves firing at random intervals as every cell in my body is alert and ripe.

The plaque has the name of the most exclusive new restaurant in town on it, complete with the chef’s name.

“We’re eating
here
?”

“You’ve been here before?”

I shake my head, my fingers closing on my compact. I’ve heard about it. This is the apocryphal restaurant that the celebrity chef created for friends, family, and few of her closest Boston billionaires. 

When I look in the mirror, my lipstick’s half gone. Where did it go?

Andrew looks down at me and I find my answer.

“You look good in red,” I say, pulling on his arm. He gives me a puzzled look and I reach up, using my thumb to wipe some of the lipstick off his mouth and show him.

He laughs, then reaches into his suit jacket for a handkerchief, removing the evidence of our limo encounter. At least, the visible evidence.

I look at my reflection and he gently takes his handkerchief and presses it into my hand. Our eyes lock.

“I must be a mess,” I say, suddenly self-conscious, dabbing at my smeared makeup. 

“You’re gorgeous,” he murmurs, bending down, so close his words send shivers down my spine. “And you’re even more beautiful when you’re a mess, because I know
I
made you that way.” 

No man has ever talked to me like this. I’ve never even imagined conversations like this, the kind that cut to the chase. He’s so direct, so virile and masculine, filed with the warrior’s gaze and the lover’s tenderness as he stands there beside me, just...there.

He’s finally
here
. It only took him two years. 

And I don’t know what to do with him now that he’s decided to show up.

Andrew takes me to a tiny elevator. It’s quite literally just a door, and if I didn’t see him wave a small card, like a hotel key, in front of a little circle, I’d think the elevator appeared via magic.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“A secret door.” We enter it and the elevator lifts us up at a snail’s pace.

“How do I know you’re not really some kinky billionaire who’s taking me to an illicit sex club and I’m about to disappear into an underground world of sexual torture?” I tease.

“I typically save that for the third date,” he answers. 

The elevator halts and opens onto a rooftop garden. As we step out, I murmur, “Then I have something to look forward to.”

The smile he gives me makes my toes curl. A maître d’ appears in a suit tailored so well he looks like he just flew in from Milan.

“Mr. McCormick. Ms. Warrick. Welcome.”

How does he know my name? Probably the same magic that allows limo drivers to effortlessly glide through the streets of Boston, that gives Andrew cards he can wave in front of sensors to open doors no one else can see, that gives him access not only to luxury, but to the convenience of shaping the entire structure of his life around getting from Point A to Point B with as little friction as possible. 

That is the power of money. It’s not about buying things. It’s about gaining access to shortcuts the 99% can’t even fathom. And that buys you an advantage. The McCormick men don’t just live in a different economic class—they quite literally function in a completely different world.

One that Andrew has just invited me to visit.

As we’re walked to a small table, surrounded by large candles in shimmering glass olive jars the size of toddlers, I realize we are one of only four tables in the entire restaurant. Each has its own pergola, wine grape vines snaking through the wooden slats above us, entwined with strings of pale white lights that give the rooftop an ethereal sense of being a world apart.