Adam cocked an eyebrow. “Never what?”
I wrung my hands behind my pillow as I tried to figure out my phrasing. “Never… take care of yourself,” I finally said.
He eyed me with amusement. “You’re asking if I ever jerk off?”
My stomach clenched.
God, was I? Was I really asking my boss if he masturbated? How did this conversation even get here?
My toes curled under the sheets as I forced myself not to bite my lip. “Yes. That,” I confirmed, to which he smirked.
“I do.” He held his glinting gaze on me as he took another long pull of water. “I just use my imagination.”
I nodded.
“Huh,” I said, making some vague sound of acknowledgment to play off the sudden pulsing between my legs—and the fact that my boss was literally watching me right now as I thought about him jerking off.
Dear God, stop, stop, stop, I chanted in my head, but my insides clenched without mercy as my traitor brain flashed with images of twitching forearms and nine-inch dicks.
Adam laughed. “You good?” he asked.
I was legitimately burning up inside, but despite the internal chaos, I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yes? Why wouldn’t I be?”
He was still leaning there casually in those goddamned sweats, that dimple showing as he capped his empty bottle and tossed it in the bin. He let the silence stretch another tormenting few seconds before he finally answered. “No reason,” he said before pushing off the bar and going to the bathroom.
Only once I heard the electric whir of his toothbrush going did I finally exhale.
Because we both knew he was lying.
He knew well that my mind had just gone deep in the gutter—that I had just been picturing him in ways that were so beyond inappropriate for our relationship that I was literally staring at the ceiling mouthing what the fuck because I needed someone, something to react to.
Unsurprisingly, the ceiling did not suffice.
So with a groan, I yanked the covers over my head and burrowed myself deep into the sheets. I was never one to go to bed without getting ready, but clearly, tonight was the night for all the firsts.
Brushing my teeth be damned. It was time to sleep all this away.
7
ADAM
I had to give myself props this morning despite the fact that this wasn’t exactly a surprise.
I was accustomed to crushing presentations.
Regardless of circumstance.
It didn’t matter how foreign the territory, how early the meeting, or how annoyingly cold and unwelcoming the client—like the one sitting in front of me at this table.
Sean Knox. Twenty-nine. Right-handed pitcher with a cutter you couldn’t hit if he told you it was coming. He was an incredibly talented athlete with a nightmare reputation and just about no other agencies pursuing him, thanks to the whole nightmare reputation thing. But I’d had my eye on the kid for awhile now. Three years to be exact, which was why I’d been preparing for this meeting since the day he dropped his agent last month.
That agent, of course, had been his unqualified friend from back home whom he’d hired because he was famously untrusting of authority and the so-called “suits.” Which put my chances on the slim side.
But I didn’t give a shit.
I was hell-bent on landing this prickly motherfucker and that started with crushing this goddamned meeting in spite of multiple obstacles, the first being that Knox had moved the start time up three hours on short notice.
The second being that I was coming off one serious mindfuck of an unexpected night.