We locked eyes as he pushed up further, his fingers deep inside, his knuckles finding my folds. He rocked his hand back and forth, pulling my climax from me. A mixture of shock and pleasure spun up my spine and Andrew’s face split into a small, proud smile as he held me through the orgasm silently tearing through my body.
Andrew maneuvered me into one of the old familiar chairs to let me recover. “You should check your phone,” he said as he scanned the bookshelves. “It went off when we . . . When you were coming around my fingers.”
I shot him a warning glance. He needed to lower his voice or we were going to get arrested. “My cell rang?”
He shook his head. “Just vibrated.”
Thank Jesus I hadn’t been so drunk on lust for Andrew that I hadn’t heard my phone go off in a library. I pulled out my cell but there were no new messages and no missed calls. “Must have been your phone,” I said. “Nothing came through on mine.”
“I just checked mine—”
“Shit, it must be the Goode phone.” There was only one person who had that number.
I scrabbled through my purse and pulled it out. There it was: a missed call and an email. “What does he want?” I asked, Andrew’s head peering over my shoulder.
“I suggest you open the email.”
I took a breath and opened it, scanning it as fast as I could. “Lovely to meet you, yadda yadda, lunch, yadda yadda . . . loved your ideas about Verity. Could I put another offer on the table? I want you to come to work for me—What?”
“Shhh,” Andrew said from behind me. “We’re in a library.” He straightened and I turned around to face him. He shrugged. “Well, at least he liked you.” He pulled the phone out of my hand and read the message in full.
“He wants to discuss all possible options with you at breakfast on Monday.”
“This is a disaster. He was meant to like me enough to sell his company to me, not give me a job. I’m going to reply.”
He pulled the phone away before I could take it back. “No, you’re not. Not yet anyway. We’re going to take a breath and figure out our next move. No knee-jerk reactions. This is too important.”
He was right. We needed to keep a cool head, and I was still reeling from my orgasm. Andrew balanced out my impulsive side, but despite what others might think, he had a wild side of his own. I’d never be able to look at New York Public Library quite the same again.
Thirty
Sofia
Not even the devil himself was more terrifying than my mom if she thought her daughter was disrespecting her. “We have two minutes to finish this,” I said, hopping from one foot to the other. “My mom will never forgive me if I’m late. I’ll get a lecture about how I was brought up, and then she’ll start asking me how many times I’ve been to mass since I’ve been in London. That will snowball into how I could have saved money on a hotel if I’d stayed with her, and before you know it, the whole evening will be wasted.”
“Okay, we’re done,” Andrew said. “You want to read it through before I send it?” He’d drafted a response to Goode’s job offer.
“It needs to be in my voice,” I said. “Or Goode won’t believe it.”
He grinned up at me. “So you keep saying. You’re more invested in this working than I expected.”
“That’s because it’s important to you.” I landed a kiss on his lips. “And you’re important to me.” I scanned the reply to Goode’s email. Andrew was so smart and he’d crafted my voice so perfectly; his focus got me so hot I mentally calculated if we had time to—no, we absolutely did not. My mom would kill me.
He grabbed my hips and pulled me onto his lap. “You’re important to me too.”
I pressed send on the email. “You think he’ll go for it?”
“You were clear and firm in your refusal of any kind of job working with him. But it was polite and you had good reasons—you want to build a business of your own. I don’t think he’ll try to convince you otherwise. All that remains to be seen is whether Verity is up for sale. Let’s see if he still wants the Monday meeting.”
I turned to him and stroked my finger along his jaw. “How can you be so calm?”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You want to come meet my mom?” The words were out of my mouth before I had a chance to think through what I was saying.
Andrew shrugged. “Sure. Will there be cannoli on the menu?”
“You’re a dufus. But you’re adorable.”
“We can fuck in the car on the way over.”