Bad Boys Online (15 page)

He still had her pinned against the desk, so she tried to slide around him as he tucked the mummified condom into his pocket.

Before she could get by him, Jared grabbed her arm and trapped her leg with his. “Where are you going?”

“To get my panties off the floor.”

She expected him to grin, but he didn’t. Holding her tight, he said, “Can I see you tonight?”

Candy smiled, unable to contain herself. Not only had he asked her out, he actually looked like he cared what her answer was.

“Yes. Now let me get my panties before we manage to get ourselves caught.”

Then a knock rattled the door and they heard Harold call out, “How’s it going in there?”

Jared said, “Holy shit.” He zipped his pants and moved away from Candy, tripping on the edge of the chair next to him. “We didn’t even lock the door.”

He was dead. Harold had wanted him to sort out his differences with Candy, not have sex with her. On company time.

The doorknob was turning. One glance at Candy showed her frozen in horror, her hair every which way, and her blouse buttoned wrong, leaving a big gaping hole in her middle, flashing pink skin.

Neither one of them was wearing their jacket, and the entire room had the sweet smell of sex in the air. He didn’t even want to think about the condom in his pocket.

In an attempt to stave off the inevitable, he called out, “Uh, we’re doing great. Just give us five more minutes, Harold.”

Candy’s black lace underwear was still lying on the floor.

“Get your panties,” he whispered.

She started and bent over just as Harold stopped opening the door. “Oh, you’re not finished?”

“Not quite.” Jared pulled his suit jacket back on and ran his hand through his hair to smooth it down.

Candy shoved the panties into her waistband.

“Fine, but let we know when you’re done.”

Harold whistled as he walked off back down the hall and the sick feeling in Jared’s gut lessened a notch. “Shit, that was close.”

Candy pulled her panties back out. “Watch the door while I put these on.”

Visions of her with one foot in her underwear and one foot out with Harold throwing the door open popped into his head. “Just leave them off and put them in your jacket pocket.”

She looked at him like he’d announced he was going to start wearing dresses.

“Yuck! I can’t walk around the rest of the day wearing stockings and a garter belt, but no panties. It would be uncomfortable and I’d feel like everyone knew.” Kicking her heels off, Candy quickly slipped into the panties and shimmied them up her legs.

Jared thought about her sitting in her office with no panties on under her skirt, her soft backside pressing into the chair. Her curls rubbing against her skirt. And nobody would know but him. He went hard again just thinking about it.

Candy stepped back into her heels then put on her jacket. “We need to finish the counseling session, you know, before Harold comes back.”

Right. That’s why they were here in the first place. Somehow or other that had managed to slip his mind.

“Candy, the screen’s blank.”

She whirled around. “What? Oh, my gosh, we unplugged it.”

Between pounding against the desk and flailing arms, he wasn’t surprised. “Why wasn’t Harold using his battery? How stupid is that?”

Candy plugged the computer back in and rebooted it. Jared was distracted by her hot little ass bending over and wiggling in the air as she stuck the plug in the socket.

He said, “Maybe this is better. We can get out of the rest of those dumb-ass questions. We’ll tell Harold it crashed.”

She looked doubtful, but he pulled her into his arms and kissed her with plenty of tongue until she relaxed.

“Mmm,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my mouth.” He stopped her as she tried to tug loose and head for the door.

“Seven tonight? I’ll pick you up.” He wasn’t letting her out of this office without a commitment to see him again.

“Okay.”

“You go out first. I’ll run Harold to ground and tell him we’ve solved our problems and his karma is at peak levels.”

She grinned as they paused in front of the door. “I like your karma.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from.” And because he couldn’t resist, he squeezed her ass and molded her skirt to her, one finger sliding down between her legs.

Her eyes fluttered shut. “Oh, stop it, Jared.”

“Sorry.” Not.

Jared opened the door and when she stepped out Candy found herself face to face with Harold. “Oh! Harold.”

Oh, Lord, she must look guilty as sin.

And Harold was studying them
way
too closely.

“Everything okay?”

“Wonderful. Great.” She cleared her throat and ran her fingers through her hair, guessing it looked like a blond feather duster. "Wow, what a great idea, Harold. That counseling just broke through all kinds of barriers and really just brought Jared and me to a… new level of understanding.”

She broke off her babbling when she heard Jared cough over a laugh.

Harold still looked puzzled, but he smiled. “So you finished the session?”

Jared spoke. “Actually, we were two questions from finishing when your laptop crashed, Harold.” He shrugged. “Just one of those things, so we didn’t get our certificate of completion.”

Candy tried to maneuver around Harold, being careful not to touch his leather pants.

“What? No certificate?” Harold pouted, which was so not attractive on a fifty year old bald man. “Then how do I know you actually did the counseling? For all I know, you’ve spent the last two hours playing checkers online.”

More like naked Twister. Candy couldn’t think of a single doggone thing to say and starting inching down the hall, noticing there were quite a few curious heads poking out of offices.

“I can guarantee you that we were not playing checkers,” Jared said in a serious voice. “And you’ll see the results of your counseling when we hand you Chunky Chocolate completed next week. We’re going to work on it tonight.”

“Tonight? You’re working late?” Harold’s ears perked up, presumably at the idea of employees working overtime without compensation.

“Yes. We’ll work on it all night if we have to.”

A gurgling sound left Candy’s mouth before she could stop it.

“Are you okay, Candy?” Harold’s eyes swung towards her.

She didn’t dare look at Jared. She blinked at Harold and grabbed her neck. “No, actually, I have something stuck in my throat. Excuse me, I’m going to go get a drink.”

Without waiting for an answer, she got the heck out of there, rushing down the hall on wobbly ankles. First stop was the ladies room.

Jan from payroll was walking down the hall with a stack of mail in her hand. She fell into step beside Candy.

“How was Harold’s kooky Internet counseling?” Jan asked in a whisper.

Since Jan had been one of the few Stratford Marketing women who had been nice to her, Candy couldn’t blow her off the way she really wanted to.

She gave Jan a weak smile. “It wasn’t as kooky as I thought it would be.”

Jan flipped her dark hair over her shoulder and grinned. “But at least you got to do it with a hottie like Jared Kincaid. With my luck Harold would stick me in counseling with the office geek.”

Oh, Lord, she was blushing. She could feel the heat stain spreading across her cheeks. “You just treat it like any other work assignment.”

Yeah, right
. If you were a hooker, maybe.

“What’s Jared like? Is he really the cool customer he looks to be?”

Cool wasn’t the word she would use.

“He was very… accommodating.” Candy choked on the word as she came to a halt outside the ladies room. “Excuse me, Jan. I have to use the restroom.”

Jan stopped next to her. “Well, while you’re in there, you might want to fix your blouse. It seems to have gotten crooked during your counseling session.”

She winked and started off down the hall.

Candy glanced down in horror. A good deal of her stomach was flashing through the Titanic sized hole in the middle of her blouse.

And Harold hadn’t even seemed to notice.

Maybe his eyes were going the same way as his hair.

Yanking her blouse halves together she pushed open the door and wondered how long until the last employee would leave the building for the day.

She just might want to hide in the restroom until then.

Jared didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

Everything had seemed a lot easier when he and Candy had been semi-naked and moaning in Harold’s office earlier.

Now things were complicated.

Candy had avoided him the rest of the day and he had been unable to work for all the confusing feelings tumbling around inside him. Feelings that were about as welcome as the stomach flu.

Feelings that had him standing outside her door sweating in his wool coat like it was July.

As he rang the doorbell to her apartment, he wondered exactly why Candy had agreed to meet him tonight. He also wondered exactly why he had agreed to meet Candy tonight. He didn’t know what he wanted any more than he knew what she wanted.

Aside from sex, that is. If she even wanted any more of that. And just why in the hell did he care so much?

Candy opened the door and smiled shyly at him. “Hi.”

Oh, damn, she was wearing jeans that hugged every inch of her hips and rounded ass. A red turtleneck sweater stretched optimistically across her breasts and pulled northward towards her belly button when she reached up to run a hand through her hair.

The flash of skin left him dazed and hard. And possessive. He didn’t want anyone else to see Candy’s skin but him.

That sweater was the same one she’d been wearing the day they met, and it made her face glow golden. She’d put some kind of shiny wet looking stuff on her lips and he wanted to eat it off, one little nibble at a time.

After an embarrassing pause, he managed to say, “Hi. You look great.”

Oh, now there was an original compliment.

“Thanks. Do you want to come in or did you have plans to go somewhere?” Candy tucked her hands behind her back and rocked on the balls of her feet in sexy little black boots.

“Actually, we should get going. I made dinner plans.”

Alarm crossed her face. “I’m not dressed for dinner.”

“Don’t worry, this place is casual.” And blissfully close. His place was only twenty minutes from Candy’s.

“Oh, okay. Let me get my coat. Come on in.” She turned and disappeared into her apartment. “Do I need the Chunky Chocolate file? Or do you have copies?”

Naïve girl. She actually thought they were going to do work? He’d been called a lot of things over the years, but never stupid. Any man asinine enough to discuss how to market chocolate when he had Candy Appleton alone in his condo was… not Jared.

“I have copies.” In his desk back at the office.

Jared stepped into her living room and was immediately assaulted by an excess of floral patterns. Jesus, Candy had a whole meadow growing in there, various rioting prints covering a sofa, a loveseat and an overstuffed chair.

Violent red poppies danced across her curtains and every table was littered with little things that he wouldn’t even claim to know the name of. Things like little tiny wicker chairs with plants growing out of their seats, and wooden cats. The coffee table had a bowl full of lemons on it and a round ball of orange fur that was probably a live cat was sleeping next to it.

He pictured poppy curtains hanging in his apartment and shuddered. Not that he wanted Candy to live with him or anything. But love did not extend to ugly drapes.

The L word brought him up short. What the hell was he thinking? He did not
love
her. He was interested in her. He wanted to get to know her. He had great admiration for her brain and her breasts, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with love.

Did it?

Candy stuffed her arms into a very fluffy camel colored coat, with huge quantities of white fur pluming around her face.

He didn’t even know her.

She smiled. “I’m ready,” she said in a breathless siren voice.

He did know she was trouble. But sometimes getting into trouble was so much fun.

“Is something wrong, Jared?”

“No, not at all. Why do you ask?”

She shrugged and the fur nearly swallowed her face. “You just look a little serious. I was worried that maybe you’re embarrassed because we diddled around in Harold’s office.”

Diddled?
He was pretty sure he’d just been insulted.

“Diddling is not what I would call it. And I’m not embarrassed. I don’t get embarrassed. Especially not when I enjoyed being with you and would do it again in a heartbeat.” He was conscious his voice was rising, but shit, he couldn’t help it.

Diddled, for God’s sake.

Candy reached out and put her warm little hand on his cheek and stroked with her thumb. “I’d do it again too.”

His anger vanished along with the last of his futile resistance. “Good,” he said gruffly.

Candy was starting to figure out Jared was a whole lot of masculine bluster. Beneath the cool stare and the cutting words he sometimes tossed off, he had feelings.

Twenty minutes later when she walked into his condo, she realized those feelings included being really doggone romantic.

He had recreated her idea of a perfect evening, right down to his own addition of a fire popping warmly in the fireplace.

Oh, Lord. If she hadn’t been on the edge before- taking in the table set for two, the chilling wine, and the scented candles burning did her in for sure. It felt almost like she was falling in love with Jared.

Which was insane, since she was supposed to be using him just for the purpose of having some romping good sex. But the stupid man had gone and actually listened to what she had said when she’d been talking. She wasn’t sure any man besides her stepfather had ever actually heard a single word she’d said outside of work related topics.

Her ex-husband sure in the heck never had.

“Oh, Jared, you didn’t have to go to so much trouble.” But she was sure glad he had.