Sheltering His Desire (6 page)

She ducked her head, heat flooding her
cheeks. Was she supposed to say thank you? Tell him he was as much
responsible as she was? Definitely not ask when they were doing it
again. She forced confidence and professionalism to the forefront,
despite the way lust kicked and clawed to maintain her attention.
She was grateful her voice stayed even when she replied. “I take
back anything I said yesterday. The random hookup was way better
than trying to find a guy online.” She plowed forward before he
could reply, not sure she could maintain her mask otherwise. “We
have a deadline, right?”

It would be good to stay focused. She’d keep
from lingering too long on emotions she couldn’t possibly unravel
right now. Feelings she shouldn’t have. If they dove back into
work, everything could go back to what it had been before tonight.
Was it last night that had been the catalyst? Or eight years ago?
Or— she shook the rambling thoughts aside.

“Work. Right.” He nodded at her chair. “There
are storyboards and a script for you to approve.” He let out a
shaky breath. “You sure you’re okay?”

Arrogant asshole. Irritation flared inside.
Like she couldn’t cope with a simple thing like a fling? A retort
rushed to her lips.

He wasn’t done. “With this whole Thompson
thing and the news?”

Her angry comeback evaporated as her gut
deflated in on itself. Right. That. The question was a more painful
reminder than anything else that he’d been comforting her, and her
entire world was about to crumble for more important reasons than
her childhood crush didn’t feel the same way about her that she did
about him. She gave him a weak smile. “I’m good. If we get this
done, it helps, right? Shows people the shelter is the real
deal?”

“I suspect it’ll help.”

She focused on the sentiment, and the
business of things, and dropped into her desk chair. She navigated
to the files automatically. He would have placed them on their
shared folder on the cloud.

A knock echoed through the room, and she
jumped at the sudden banging. She giggled at her own antics. Tate
gave her one more glance, furrowed his brows in concern, and
smoothed down his shirt before unlocking the door. She pulled her
hair back and twisted it into a knot, sticking a pen through to
hold it in place. At least if it was a mess, tying it up would hide
it a little. Would people be able to tell? Were her cheeks flushed?
Mouth swollen and red? Her fingers twitched against the keyboard as
she resisted the urge to trace her them over her lips to check.

Greg—the guy who was taking video of the
animals—hovered in the doorway. She’d met him a couple of times at
company parties. He was a nice guy. A little hard core when it came
to his love of video, but Jared was the same about machines so it
didn’t faze her.

The moment her brother’s name popped into her
head, she dropped her face into her palms. Would Greg know what
they’d been up to? Did the rest of the office know? He was going to
tell her brother. Shit. She’d have to deal with another lecture
about why she couldn’t get involved with his colleagues, or anyone,
really, as far as she could tell. Why he’d be happier if she joined
a convent…

“What do you think?” Tate’s question
shattered her out of control thoughts, and she yanked herself back
into the conversation. Greg was gone, and her office door stood
wide open. Tate was on the other side of her desk, thumbs hooked in
his pockets, watching her. “Do you need a couple more minutes to
read?”

Right, she was approving the storyboard and
script. “Yeah, give me a sec. Sorry.”

She could stay as calm and collected as he
was. What they’d done was meant to take the edge off her stress,
and it had done that. She was going to ignore the new layer of
tension that had drifted in instead. Besides, she promised Tate she
didn’t want more.

So she’d swallow the impulse—her
preprogrammed desire to make sex into something emotional—and she’d
move on, just like he was. She glanced up from her monitor,
surprise filling her when she saw his fingers drumming on his leg,
and his toes tapping.

She pushed the observation aside and went
back to work. All she had to do was act normal and it would all be
fine. Right?

Tate counted to ten as he breathed out. Last
night’s ‘stress relief’ session with Lys had been amazing, but the
world kept turning during and after. If anything, the one thing it
did for him was give him a painfully erotic fantasy to slide into
every time he remembered how she tasted, her scent, her soft lips
wrapped around his cock.

“Did you see the news about the animal
shelter?” His assistant, Alan’s voice floated from the speaker
phone.

Tate shook the images away. He wouldn’t let
the question get to him—the implication that the news report last
night was anything more than an irritating splash in the media
pool. There was a solution, he just had to keep his cool. He spoke
into his speaker phone. “I did.”

“Do we need to worry about backlash?” Alan’s
voice was hollow, echoing through the Tate’s office. “They’re not
live yet. Are we sure this is a good pilot group for us? If people
buy into the hype, and that spreads onto us for supporting them… We
look like we’re backing animal abuse.”

Tate choked back a snarl. This was why he’d
hired Alan. Why the guy made such a great assistant. He thought of
these things, and he didn’t keep the thoughts to himself. But damn
it, this wasn’t what Tate needed to hear right now. The bad press
wouldn’t be an issue. He already knew Lys would be able to stop the
rumors before they became an issue, and this wasn’t just business,
it was a good cause. “They’re going live. We won’t have any
problems.”

“Right. I’ll update the time line to show
they’ll be live by tomorrow night.”

Tate tossed a few instructions out about
meetings that afternoon, and disconnected the call. He rubbed his
face, but it didn’t push away his gnawing tension. He’d already
ignored the email from his mother reminding him how easy it would
be for Alyssia to make this go away.

He needed to step back, do his job, and let
the rest roll off. He’d make sure it all worked out. This business
venture, and his test user, meant too much to him to let anything
go astray.

A knock drew his attention, and he dragged
his gaze to the doorway.

“Lunch?” Mikki—Jared’s fiancée and the
company’s top developer, was leaning against the frame. Her black
hair had a violent blue streak through it that week, and she’d
pinned the locks back from her face with butterfly-shaped
barrettes. While he still struggled to understand the attraction
between her chaos and his best friend’s unyielding order, he knew
she was the best thing to ever happen to Jared. That kind of
relationship was a once in a generation kind of fluke, like a sappy
movie or something.

The idea made his brain twitch. Something
unfamiliar and completely unpleasant surged inside and he
obliterated it, focusing on Mikki instead. “I just have to be back
by two.” Alyssia was coming in to record the voice-overs for her
promo video. The name summoned every positive and negative emotion
he’d just stuffed inside. He needed to get a handle on that before
she showed up. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Epic.” She was already spinning away.
“Microbrewery off one-forty-one.”

He rolled his eyes and let out a short laugh.
“Got it.” Almost a year in Atlanta and she didn’t care to learn the
names of anywhere they regularly went. Said the world was too
transient for things like proper nouns on buildings.

The moment she was gone, he sank back in his
chair. The two conversations had summoned the one name and image
he’d been trying to keep from his mind all morning. Or rather, the
memories of last night. He could still taste Alyssia, like a
phantom tingle on the tip of his tongue. Every exquisite inch. The
woman he’d seen almost every single day since she was a kid, and
now just her name made his cock twitch.

He swallowed the lust. The inching desire to
figure out what else they could get up to if there were no strings.
He had lunch to get this out of his system. No big deal. He was a
big boy, and flings were his specialty. He could handle this.

He finished replying to a couple more emails,
suppressed any lingering fantasy from the night before, grabbed his
sunglasses, and headed out the door.

Fifteen minutes later, Tate strolled through
the front door of the pub. The drive had been enough to clear his
head, and he felt like his mind was working again. Never pausing,
he nodded at the host and cleared the corner to head into the
dining area. His friends would probably be at the same table they
were always at, near the back of the room.

They were exactly where he expected, but
instead of three heads he counted four. He hesitated, and then
forced himself to keep walking at a normal gait. Instead of the
standard one table they usually sat at, two tables had been pushed
together because Alyssia had joined them. No big deal; she dropped
by for lunch all the time when she was working night shift.

So why were Jared and Mikki sitting across
from each other, Mikki by Alyssia, and Jared by Vivian?

“I don’t get the point,” Jared said as Tate
drew within earshot.

The table between him and Mikki was clear.
She flicked a sugar packet across the smooth surface, where it
glided to a stop just short of Jared’s edge, half on, half off the
table. “If it lands like that, you score a point.” Mikki
explained.

“Of course.” Instead of tucking the sugar
packet away, like he would have six months ago, Jared flipped it
back.

Mikki met Tate’s gaze for just a moment
before returning her attention to the game. “Look who we
found.”

Tate didn’t have to look. Every time he tried
to pull his gaze from Lys, it drifted back to the heat and doubt in
her eyes.

“I dropped by to say hi to Jared before our
recording session,” Alyssia said.

Of course she had. Tate hid his grimace under
a wide smile. “Awesome.” His skin buzzed with memories of the night
before, every nerve ending dancing to life in anticipation just
from the way she caught her bottom lip between her teeth. That
wasn’t good. Apparently his rambling thoughts weren’t under
control.

He took the empty seat next to Vivian, rather
than continuing to stand there and gape. Vivian was the director of
operations for Skriddie Bust Media, and Mikki’s boss. She, Jared,
and Tate had clashed when she joined the company several years ago.
However, a handful of crises that pushed them together, proved the
three clicked on a whole new level when it came to problem solving,
and they’d become solid friends. Jared was closer to her than Tate,
but Tate still had nothing but respect and admiration for her
skills. And she played a mean hand of poker.

When V raised her brows in question, he
scrambled for the first excuse he could find that wasn’t, “
If I
sit next to Lys, I’m going to spend all of lunch with a hard
on.”
“I have a question for you about St. Louis.”

He didn’t mean the city. Before they hired
Mikki, her former employer, NSS had used her skill without her
knowledge to violate the Skriddie corporate network. Jared and
Mikki had spent several months pulling together enough information
to file a civil suit for the infraction. But the violation itself
had already done damage to Skriddie’s public image. St Louis was
their code name for the PR campaign Tate was spearheading to update
their image.

“What’s up?” Vivian asked.

Shit. Now he had to come up with something. A
long series of questions ran through his head in a millisecond.
“How often does operations re-certify developers?”

“Every six months or as operating systems
update, whichever comes first.”

Jared jerked his attention from the makeshift
sugar-football game. “Speaking of, we got a document discover
request from Vicker today about intellectual property No clue how
they found out we’d even done that.”

Damon Vicker was the attorney defending NSS
in the civil suit Skriddie had filed against them.

Tate was good—great even—with this line of
conversation. It was boring, it was dry, and it would keep him
distracted. “We all know there are other ears inside the company.”
It was part of the reason they called their PR project St. Louis
instead of Fuck-NSS-Over-Publicly.

“Send me a list of what Vicker wants, and
I’ll grab you the documentation this weekend.” Technically, Tate
was balancing two jobs. He still held his senior VP of sales job at
Skriddie, but was also president of the new venture. The extra work
would be worth it, though, to get his sites off the ground.

“If everyone’s here, are y’all ready to
order?” The waitress’s pleasant southern lilt drew Tate’s
attention. Her nametag said she was Brittany. Large blonde curls
framed her face, and her lipstick was just bright enough to draw
attention without being too gaudy. Her lips didn’t look as kissable
as Lys’s, though. And Brittany probably didn’t make the same
guttural moans—

He shook the thoughts away. He wouldn’t
compare her to Alyssia. He’d grab her number instead, to remind
himself how much he enjoyed having the option of hooking up with a
different woman every night.

“I’m not sure, Brittany.” He met her gaze,
never breaking eye contact, and let his own drawl slide in. A trick
he usually either saved to irritate his mother, or to give him that
boy next door sound. Even though he’d grown up in Georgia, he’d
never had the accent by default. His mother had taught him. She’d
said when it was used at the right time, it could shape all sorts
of impressions. He never had to use it around Lys. Which didn’t
matter because he wasn’t thinking about her.

Brittany moved to his side, and rested a hand
on his arm. “What can I do for you, sugar?”