The Design (12 page)

Alan slapped his hand down on his desk, jarring me. “Cammie, I think you’re confused about your role in this competition. I want you here as more of a silent participant. Maybe you should direct this misguided enthusiasm toward the work I’ve given you, since you’ve had so much time to consider this competition design.”

My face burned with embarrassment. Peter tried to catch my eye, to ease the pain of being reprimanded in front of all of my table-mates, but I kept my eyes trained on my notebook. I had pages and pages of ideas for the park project. Some of them were wild and much too costly, but a lot of them would enhance the park and fit well with what the design committee had asked for in the first place. Despite all that, if Alan didn’t think my ideas were worth mentioning, then fine, I’d stay silent.

I bit my tongue for the rest of the meeting—if you could even call it a meeting. It was mostly Alan blabbering on and on to himself.

What gave him the right to treat me like that?
I would have assumed he was a misogynist, but he wasn’t any nicer to Peter or Mark either. No, I think he was just a crotchety old man, stuck in the old way of doing things. He thought that his title as a senior associate meant that his word was law. I was all for respecting authority and learning from those with more experience, but Alan wasn’t a teacher. He was a dictator without a throne, and I was sick of putting up with him.

By the time our
“meeting”
was over, I’d decided to do something wild. No, actually, something insane. The decision would jeopardize my relationship with Alan, my career at Cole Designs, and potentially my future in the architecture world.

Despite all that, if Alan didn’t want my help with the proposal, then I really only had one choice. I’d just break the rules and enter the competition on my own.

Chapter Fourteen

“Hurry!” I yelled back at Hannah as I took the stairs two at a time.

“Oh my god! I can’t believe you’re actually getting to leave work on time. This is the best. We should go grab dinner for once,” Hannah said as I pushed through the doors of the Sterling Bank Building. Alan had a meeting with Grayson just before 5:00 pm, which meant he hadn’t had time to assign me extra work before the day ended. As soon as the clock struck five, I’d bolted out of the office with Hannah in tow.

“Yes! Let’s go, we deserve it,” I said.

We ended up finding a little bistro on the way home from the office. It was packed to the brim—as all good restaurants are in LA—but we managed to find two seats at the bar.

“Y’know I lied to Grayson the other day,” Hannah said with a little smile as we perused the menu. “Alan is the worst.”

I laughed. “Um, duh. I’m glad we can agree on that now. I thought Alan had hypnotized you for a while.”

She laughed and I went back to browsing the menu. The restaurant had everything from pasta to hamburgers so I knew I’d have a hard time picking just one entree. I glanced over to see if Hannah was having the same problem, but she was fidgeting on her seat and glancing around the restaurant. Either she was nervous about something or really hungry.

“You okay?” I asked with a chuckle.

Her eyes lit up. Clearly, she’d been waiting for me to ask.

“You’ll never guess what happened at work today,” she said, dropping her menu and glancing over at me with dreamy eyes. She looked like she’d just been struck by Cupid’s arrow.

“What?” I asked while simultaneously wondering if I was hungry enough for an appetizer or not.

“Grayson invited me to go to happy hour with him,” she said, her voice brimming over with excitement.

I slapped my menu onto the bar.

What?

“Excuse me?”

That lying bastard.

…

I barged into Grayson’s office on Thursday morning like a bat out of hell. I pushed his door open so hard that it slammed back against the wall and shook the books on his shelf. Everyone in the office would have been able to hear the racket, but no one was in yet. I’d purposely arrived early to kill Grayson in peace.

“Looks like I chose the perfect day to install a new deadbolt on that door,” he remarked, keeping his focus down on his work.

I ignored him and shoved the door closed behind me.

“You realize that I’m trying to work, right?” he asked.

I scowled, crossed my arms, and waited for him to acknowledge me.

“The least you could do is bring me a cup of coffee when you interrupt me.”

“I’m not your secretary,” I snapped.

He rolled his eyes and pressed the intercom on his phone.

“Beatrice?” he asked. Silence.

She hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was on his own with the coffee. He stared up at me expectantly, but I arched a brow and held my ground.

It was his move.

With an annoyed groan, he pushed his chair back and stood, his full height threatening my confidence for a moment.

“God. Fine, I’ll go get your damn coffee,” I hissed, turning on my heels and heading toward the kitchen. I ran through every ingredient that I could sprinkle into a mug inconspicuously enough so that Grayson wouldn’t notice.
Did we keep cayenne pepper stocked in the cabinets?

“Get out of my way, Cammie,” Grayson hissed as soon as I opened the kitchen cabinet to reach for a mug. He moved up right behind me and reached over my head to get to the cabinet.

“I said I’d make it!” I snapped.

Grayson laughed. “I’m not drinking your spit. Now, move.”

I hadn’t had the confidence to tell him how I felt a moment before, but now his attitude made it all too easy.

“So, which of your two faces are you wearing today, Grayson?” I snapped, spinning around and pressing my hands onto his chest to push him away from the counter. “All of that bullshit about not dating employees and then you invite Hannah to get drinks with you? What the hell is that?”

“What are you talking about? And can you keep your voice down?” he hissed.

He slammed the cabinet door closed and moved around me to turn on the fancy espresso machine.

I hated that he was ignoring my outburst so he that he could continue on making his damn coffee.

“Let me speak slower for you,” I dragged out. “You. Invited. Hannah. To. Drinks.”

He narrowed his eyes, but didn’t speak.

“I understood the whole Nicole thing, but seriously,
Hannah
? Is this all just a game to you?” I asked.

Grayson slammed his mug onto the kitchen counter, practically shattering the ceramic in the process, and then he grabbed my arm just above the elbow and dragged me out of the kitchen. His grip was tighter than necessary and his fingers pinched the back of my arm so that I had no choice but to follow him. He pulled me after him as he walked to the side stairwell near the kitchen, an exit hardly anyone ever used.

As soon as the heavy metal door closed behind us, he let go of my arm. We were standing on a small concrete platform with stairs leading to the floors above and below us. Out of the thirty-odd floors in the entire building, there wasn’t a single person using the stairwell. It was as private as we could get inside the building.

“I didn’t invite Hannah anywhere. Are you clinically insane?”

I reached up to slap him, but he caught my wrist two inches away from his cheek.

“What in the world did I ever see in you?” I asked, yanking my wrist away from him.

He growled and turned back toward the door, rubbing the back of his neck to calm his nerves, no doubt.

“There’s an office happy hour Monday night. Everyone’s invited. Hannah must have overheard the conversation and embellished it. I don’t know what to tell you, but you’re acting like a child.”

He didn’t invite Hannah?

I’m acting like a child?

I was still trying to connect the dots when Grayson moved toward me, so quickly that one second he was a few feet away from me on the platform and the next he was pressed against me, pushing me back against the wall and caging me in against the cold concrete.

“I’m not dating any employees.” His breath hit my neck. “I'm not
fucking
any employees. But if I were… it wouldn’t be Hannah.”

His lips touched my skin just beneath my ear, a sensitive spot that interrupted my breathing and forced me to squeeze my eyes closed.

We paused there for a moment, on the precipice of something more. Just as I fluttered my eyes opened, prepared for him to walk away, his mouth collided with mine. The force of the kiss would have slammed my head into the wall had his free hand not reached up to cushion the blow. I gripped his arms, residual anger still burning inside of me. Then his hands found the hem of my skirt and my anger dissolved in an instant, replaced with an emotion equally as compelling: lust.

I gripped his arms tighter, but that didn’t warn him away. His hand slipped beneath my skirt until he was touching the bare skin of my upper thigh.

We were in the middle of an office building at the start of a busy work day. There might not have been anyone in the stairwell yet, but there would be soon. Grayson didn’t seem to care about that fact. His tongue slid past my lips as his hand pushed my skirt up higher. I was about to pull away, to warn him about us getting caught, when his finger skimmed the edge of my panties.

My grip tightened on his arms, but there was no way to warn him of the consequences. My warnings couldn’t develop past fleeting thoughts. There was only Grayson. Grayson’s mouth as he gently bit down on my lower lip. Grayson’s hand as he gripped my hair, keeping me pressed back against the wall. Grayson’s finger as he stroked the hem of my panties.

Instinctively, my leg wrapped up around his waist, easing his access. He moaned against my lips and then pulled back to watch me. For a moment, I kept my eyes squeezed shut, gripping onto the sensation of his touch, but then I opened them and my world lit on fire.

Grayson was touching me,
stroking me
, in a stairwell in the middle of our office building. At any moment someone could walk out and spot us with my leg tangled around him and his hand hidden deep beneath layers of clothing.

“Someone is going to walk out and see us,” I spoke through soft moans. I hardly got the sentence out before pleasure rattled my spine. I let my gaze settle on his stare and focused there as his touch grew harder and harder to ignore. He was enamored with me, with my body pressed against his.

He bent low, circled his finger again, and then whispered in my ear. “Let them.”

That’s not right. That’s not professional.
I should have argued with him, but my mouth wouldn’t move. The words wouldn’t even form in my thoughts because, the truth was, as my body shook from an earth-shattering orgasm, I knew that I’d
liked
being with Grayson in a public place. The desire to be with him at that exact moment, where anyone could have interrupted us—it spiked my veins with adrenaline in a way that made it so easy to lose control.

And he knew it.

…

Grayson walked back in first, leaving me with one last kiss on the lips. I straightened my clothes, leaned against the wall, and caught my breath in that stairwell for what felt like hours before finally stepping back into the office.

“Morning, Cammie,” Peter offered with a small smile as I took my seat at my desk. I wondered if he could tell how shook up I was.
Is there any redness from where Grayson’s hands gripped my neck a few minutes earlier?

“Hey,” I murmured, taking my seat and forcing myself to look down at my desk rather than peeking back at Grayson’s office.

“Did you hear about the office happy hour on Monday? I think we’re meeting at O’ Keefe’s right after work,” he said.

I blushed and nodded, keeping my head down so he couldn’t see my cheeks. “I’ll be there.”

…

“Do you have a sexy top I can wear for a work happy hour?” I asked as I scanned through Brooklyn’s clothing later that night.

“Why would you want a sexy top for a work happy hour? Have I raised you to get ahead by using your body? You aren’t secretly humping Alan are you?” Brooklyn asked, coming up to stand alongside me and help me hunt for a top.

“Ew. No. I just want something that makes me feel good. Like a nice blouse I could wear underneath a blazer.”

She didn’t need to know that the top was meant specifically for Grayson.

“Guys! The stir-fry is almost done,” Jason yelled from the kitchen.

“Sounds good, babe!” Brooklyn replied.

Oh, blech.

“Tell me again how you managed to land a cute rock star who also happens to cook?” I asked Brooklyn. Just then, I spotted a slinky cream top with crisscrossed spaghetti straps. The back was low cut, but the front was fairly conservative. It was perfect considering I’d have a blazer on in the office all day.

“You can thank LuAnne for the cooking part. She made sure to teach him a few recipes before he left Montana.”

LuAnne was Jason’s housekeeper back at his ranch in Middle of Nowhere, Montana. She kept everything in order for Jason while he was in LA with Brooklyn. Technically, LA was where Jason called home, but I knew he and Brooklyn both longed to go back to Montana. The ranch was where the two of them first fell in love. The ranch had served as a catalyst for their relationship and their collaboration as musicians.

“How about this top?” I asked, pulling out the one I’d spotted and letting it fall against me so that Brooklyn could see how it’d look when I put it on.

“It’s perfect,” she said with a clap. “Now, c’mon. Let’s go eat.”

I took the blouse out into the living room with me so that I wouldn’t forget it. Once it was draped along the back of the couch, I followed Brooklyn into the kitchen and cracked up when I spotted Jason. His apron was completely covered in what looked to be soy sauce, and there was definitely a small piece of broccoli stuck in his hair.
Clearly, LuAnne was not finished teaching him the art of cooking
.

Brooklyn knocked the piece of broccoli off before reaching on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

“When do you think you’ll go back to Montana?” I asked them. “I’m sure LuLu misses you guys.”

Jason paused cooking and shot Brooklyn a sharp glance.

“You haven’t told her, Brooklyn?” he asked.

I turned in time to see my sister trying to mouth something to him.

“Told me what?” I asked, glancing between the two of them. “What are you guys keeping from me?”

Brooklyn sighed and shot me a “please don’t kill me” smile as she clasped her hands in front of her chest.