Faking It to Making It

The cold night air pressed in on her back as his heat burned her front. Heat won, pouring through her as the kiss slid into something deeper. Nate fisted his hands in the back of her top and Saskia rose to her toes, sinking completely into the kiss, into him.

As she began to feel drugged, hot and flaky, nearing the edge of control, Nate pulled back.

When she finally found her breath, Saskia asked, “What was that for?”

“Credibility.”

She glanced up the street to find a few late night stragglers looking in shop windows and ignoring them completely. “I reckon the cabbie’s convinced.”

Nate laughed, the sound reverberating through her still pulsing body. “So am I, to be honest. A hell of a lot more than I was five minutes ago.”

Saskia blinked up into Nate’s hooded eyes. When she licked her lips his grip tightened, and Saskia could feel her pulse whumping all over her body as her heat levels ramped up in preparation for more...

Then Nate neatly pulled away, making sure she was steady before he let her go completely. She wasn’t. Steady. She was wondering if she’d bitten off more than she could chew.

Hands now in pockets, all that latent heat trapped behind a wall of cool, Nate said, “Six weeks and a bit. And a wedding.” As if she might need some kind of warning.

You kissed me! She ached to throw it back at him, but she’d been all too willing to let him.

“And debts paid off,” she said instead, getting the feeling it would become some kind of mantra in the weeks to come. “And if you decide to be helpful and tell me about your dating life, I’ll be all ears.”

“Sweetheart, I’d pay double what you asked not to have to talk.” He held the back door of the cab as she slid inside. “I’ll call you soon.”

Saskia nodded, and as the cab drove away she couldn’t help but look back, to find him standing on the footpath, watching her too. Tall, broad, hair gleaming under the lamplight.

She lifted a finger to her mouth, which still tingled from the attention of his wonderful mouth.

There goes a man I could forgive for snapping my carrots, she thought. And probably a lot worse.

THREE

Nate ran two hands over his face, trying to get some blood flowing to his brain. He was working more than ever; the number of emails bouncing into his inbox every minute proved it.

Ignoring them as best he could, he concentrated on the contract on his desk. Bamford Smythe, the “gaming guy” whose start-up company BamBam Games Gabe had discovered, had signed an exclusivity agreement with BonAventure, and now they were in the process of nutting out the finer details of the capital investment.

Smythe was pessimistic, pedantic and paranoid that everyone was trying to steal his ideas. Thankfully he was also brilliant. Nate just had to keep him on a short leash—which was turning out to be akin to lassoing a Tasmanian devil.

A knock at the door and a glance at the watch strapped to his wrist told Nate that it was three already. Dammit.

Rubbing a hand up the back of his neck, he called, “Come in.”

The door was opened tentatively, followed by a head poking around the door. “Hiya.”

“Saskia.”

After their date he’d emailed her with a half-dozen questions—basic stats about age, family, schooling. Then she’d called, suggesting they get together for a “get to know one another” in a “pretend we’ve had a half-dozen dates” kind of way. He’d told her to make an appointment, hoping she might waver. Alas, she wasn’t easily swayed.

Nate waved her in with one hand and finished annotating with the other. “Won’t be a sec,” he said, glancing up as she sauntered in. But his hands stopped midscrawl when he saw what she was wearing.

Her hair was tucked beneath the same fedora from her online profile picture, her legs were swimming in wide calf-skimming pants that looked like they’d been cut from a Hessian sack, sandals were tied up over her ankles, and she wore a brown cardigan she near got lost in, and a scarf long enough that a lesser woman would have stooped under its weight.

A thread of tension shot through him, landing with a twitch at the corner of his right eye as he considered what his family would be expecting. Certainly not this gamine creature who looked as if she might start sprouting poetry or drawing in chalk on his office floor.

What had he been thinking?

She shot him a quick smile as she took a curious tour about the room, her wide eyes shadowed beneath her hat, her lips soft and pink. The memory of how they’d felt beneath his own hit him and hit him hard—her gentle heat, her soft sighs, her sweet response that had licked at something deep inside him. Okay, so he’d been thinking of kissing her from nearly the moment he’d sat down.