Project Virgin (10 page)

I must have gaped up at him. Damon’s smile was slow and very, very male. It sent
another burst of sensation coursing through me, and I might have been able to hide that. Maybe. But there was no disguising the way my nipples pebbled against his chest, giving me away.

“Will there be a test?” I asked him, amazed to feel a smile tug at my own lips.

Damon smoothed my hair back from my brow. His mouth was still in that impossibly sexy curve. And he was holding me close as if this
wasn’t a simple transaction after all. As if it mattered, what had happened between us here tonight.

And I wasn’t foolish enough to think it meant anything more than sex. But that didn’t make it casual. Nothing about this felt casual. Even if it tonight was the only time it ever happened between us, that didn’t make it casual.

That, I understood, was the gift. Not my virginity. But how he hadn’t
simply taken it. He’d made it matter that I’d given it to him. He’d made it matter that we’d done it together, and he’d made it matter that we were still here in the aftermath.

He’d made it matter.

“Of course there’s a test,” he told me lightly, keeping his arm around me as he turned and steered me toward the glass doors that led out from his bedroom. “There’s always a test. But don’t worry,
Scottie. I have a good feeling about your chances.”

*

The next time
I woke, dawn was a pink and red smudge on the horizon outside Damon’s windows. I sat up slowly, unable to keep myself from smiling at all the new and fascinating ways my body tugged at me. Reminding me in an instant that this was, truly, the first day of the rest of my life.

This was the new
Scottie. The one who’d lived through the Damon Patrick experience and was different now. Different in ways I imagined it might take me a while to fully understand.

Damon was stretched out beside me, and the first flush of dawn made him look even more beautiful than the night before had. I couldn’t believe that I’d touched this man. More than touched him. He hadn’t tested me so much last night
as he’d given me an intense tutorial. I knew all kinds of things, now. How he tasted, surging deep into my mouth. How it felt to climb on a man’s lap and rock us both a little crazy. What it was like to come like that, face to face and upright, and then come again when he tugged me down to the bed and draped my legs over his wide shoulders.

Damon was a very good teacher.

I eased myself to the
edge of the wide bed and gathered my clothes again. This time, I didn’t dress in the room. This time, I bundled them all up with me and snuck out into the great main room, then pulled my clothes on beneath the manic scribbles that I liked more and more the longer I looked at them.

It was like looking at Damon, I thought as I zipped up my skirt. So beautiful and so fascinating, and utterly impenetrable
all the same. A language that defied fluency. Words that felt as if they made sense, but could never quite be read or analyzed.

I laughed a little bit at my own silliness, and then I made my way to the elevator in my bare feet, my heels dangling from one hand.

My reality didn’t include Damon Patrick, the man who might as well be my boss, and I figured it was better not to be here when he woke
up in the cold light of this Saturday morning to deliver that message himself. It was better to accept the gifts he’d given me and move on gracefully. I could do it. After everything he’d done for me last night—over and over again, God help me—it was the least I could do in return.

I pressed the elevator button, but nothing happened when I did. Only then did I remember that it needed a key to
work. For a moment I let my mind wander into dangerous territory, fantasies of curling up on that couch and watching the sun fully rise, and maybe then having a repeat of one of Damon’s more delicious lessons—

But that was only begging for trouble. Last night’s emotional moment was understandable, I reasoned, but that was last night, five seconds after losing my virginity some ten years after
every other person I knew. This was a brand new day, and I knew better. I knew what I’d asked for and what Damon had agreed to do. I knew what my expectations ought to have been.

I pushed on doors until I found the stairwell, and I shut the heavy door to his loft quietly behind me. I stood there for a moment, as if my legs didn’t want to obey me, but it was only a moment. I texted for a car as
I started down the stairs, and when I stepped out into the crisp San Francisco morning and paused to slip my shoes back on, I could see it coming around the far corner down the block.

This wasn’t a walk of shame, I thought as I made my way toward it. This was rebirth. This was me made new.

This was felt like to get exactly what I’d wanted.

At last.

*

I spent
the
rest of the morning avoiding Alexander’s calls because he had no idea how ancient our history seemed to me after a night with Damon. I packed up the things I knew he’d left behind deliberately and I called in a locksmith that afternoon.

Only then did I answer exactly one call from my ex-fiancé, that epic waste of my time and energy.

“What the hell, Scottie—” Alexander started, having obviously
moved into his
the best defense is offense
phase. It amazed me how little I cared.

“I’m putting the rest of your crap on the sidewalk outside the building,” I told him without emotion. The truth was, I didn’t feel anything. I was done. “And I already changed the locks. Come get your stuff or don’t, I don’t care.”

“You have to be kidding—”

“I’m not kidding. And Alexander.” I paused, and it wasn’t
lost on me that I sounded a whole lot like Damon then. Brisk and confident. It was a heady sensation. “I don’t want to hear from you again. I mean that.”

Then I hung up on him. I blocked his number and I took a nap, and when I woke up, the boxes I’d stacked near the tree outside the front door of our building were gone. I wondered idly if he’d turned up before the city’s scavengers had made off
with his ironic t-shirt collection, but I acknowledged the fact I didn’t particularly care one way or the other.

The Alexander chapter of my life was closed.

So I did what I did best. I went to work.

A paralegal turned up with my work bag at some point later that evening, which I knew I’d left in Damon’s town car. But when I started to think about Damon, I shut it down. Or tried. I didn’t think
the man who’d made certain the loss of my virginity had been
that good
would turn around and make my life miserable. I really didn’t. I couldn’t imagine him blackballing me. But that meant I couldn’t make myself miserable either.

I went back home sometime on Sunday to shower and sleep, but was still feeling guilty for not checking my phone all of Friday night, so set my alarm for extra early
on Monday. I’d been at my desk for hours by the time the secretaries came in, and had a draft of a brief on one of my supervising attorney’s desks shortly after. It didn’t make up for ignoring her calls on Friday, but it was a good start.

“Did you hear?” one of my fellow first-years asked when I ran into her in the elevator lobby. I’d snuck downstairs to get a coffee and took a pull from it as
we stepped out of the way of the usual traffic.

Jeannette’s eyes were wide and sparkling.

“Damon Patrick,” she said.

I froze. I managed not to choke on my coffee. I hoped the look I gave her was mildly quizzical, nothing more.

“What about him?”

But lawyers were lawyers. Jeannette eyed me. “Didn’t you work a deposition with him last week?”

“I did. Out in Napa. Why?”

“He left the firm.”

The sentence didn’t make any sense to me. “What do you mean, he left the firm? You mean… for good?”

Why did that feel like a punch to the gut?

Jeannette nodded, her gaze avid. “He walked. He took his biggest clients and he started his own firm. You didn’t know?”

“Um, no.” My mind was spinning, but that worked in my favor just then. I was sure I looked as blank as I felt. “
Damon Patrick
did not
share his plans with me, you’ll be shocked to hear.”

I repeated that refrain all day.

To my friends. My co-workers. All the associates I worked with, all of whom knew I’d worked with him last. Had I sensed something? Had he done something? Was there any indication that he was planning to jump ship?

It was hours later when I made it back to my desk, and late that evening when I finally made
enough of a dent in all the work that had piled up to decide I could go home. I was planning out what little remained of my night as the elevator hurtled me toward the street. A bath. Maybe some take out. Definitely a glass of wine. Maybe a whole bottle of wine, come to that.

And the thoughts of Damon I hadn’t let myself indulge in all day. In private, where I could give them the kind of attention
they deserved.

My heels were loud against the lobby floor. I smiled at the guys behind the security desk and pushed my way out into the cool night. The thick sea air slapped at me, invigorating me. I debated whether or not to walk home—the only exercise I ever got on hideously busy days like this one—when the sound of a car door near the curb caught my attention.

I glanced over out of habit,
then froze.

Damon stood there, leaning back against the sleek black car, his dark blue eyes trained on me.

I didn’t have any idea what to do. My body wasn’t so shy. It exulted in the sight of him. It was like a wave crashing over me, sending me tumbling end over end, then dragging me out to sea. I didn’t move a muscle. I knew I didn’t.

But inside, I drowned.

“Here’s the thing, Scottie,” Damon
said, and the way he leaned against the car was lazy. Almost indolent, the way he’d lounged like a sultan on that sofa. “I’m not a fucking plumber.”

‡

I
moved then.
My feet did what they wanted, or maybe it was the magnetic pull he emanated, dragging me closer to him whether I wanted to go to him or not.

Damon watched me approach, the look on his clever face dark and hungry.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye before I left the other night,” I said brightly. “But then
again, it seems you had an action-packed weekend.” I stopped a foot or so in front of him and crossed my arms, as if that could save me from my own hunger. “You must have been planning this for a long time.”

“It was supposed to happen soon,” he agreed. “But I was inspired to move up the timeline.”

He reached over then and worked a tendril of my hair out from its usual twist, then tugged on it,
and I should have hated myself for the way it speared through me. Pure lust flooded me, making my nipples pinch tight and my pussy slick and soft. Ready. Not that I planned to share that with him.

“Why?” I meant that to be challenge. But my hair was wrapped around his finger and my voice came out a whisper.

Because he was here, and he didn’t have to be here. He’d left the firm. More than once
today I’d tried to come to terms with the knowledge I’d likely never see him again unless it was in a courtroom.