The Negotiator (Harbor City 1)
“You’re working on it from home? On a Friday?” That was…not what she expected.
“Always.” A soft ding sounded and his fingers made only the briefest of pauses as they clickity-clacked across the keyboard. “That’ll be your bags.”
Cheeks burning at the obvious dismissal, Clover spun on the ball of her foot and marched back down the way she’d come. Fine. Let Mr. Work From Home pound his frustration out on the poor defenseless keyboard. She’d do the fake backstory plotting on her own. His mom was just going to love hearing about how they met at a wine and paint class where Sawyer had been the nude model.
…
“You crackhead!” Clover railed, her voice not needing to be too loud in the all glass and metal penthouse for it to carry everywhere. “Don’t do it. You are waaaaaaaay overspending.”
Sawyer glanced up at the empty doorway of his office. The television had gone on about twenty minutes ago after what seemed like an eternity of Clover singing along to Top 40. She’d done it for hours, her alto filling up the otherwise silent penthouse. Of course she’d sing as she unpacked and did whatever else she’d been doing for the past few hours. He’d done his best not to picture it. Especially when he’d heard the shower turn on. Nope. He hadn’t imagined her naked and soapy as the water slid down her creamy skin. And he hadn’t hummed along with Clover’s song, he had just…rhythmically cleared his throat…on key. Thank God she’d moved on from singing to yelling at the people on the TV.
“Ugh. Not pink.” She made a melodramatic groan. “Just because the challenge is make a woman’s bedroom doesn’t mean it has to be pink!”
Calling himself every word for dumbass he could think of as the setting sun’s light streamed in from the window behind him, he refocused on the gibberish on his screen. Numbers and ideas were thrown together with all the illogical randomness of a monkey throwing shit at the zoo. So much for his sacred work from home time. For the second time that day, he erased the mess he’d been typing.
The first time he’d hit the delete button had been after his mom had called. He hadn’t picked up. Not the first time. Not the second time. And definitely not the third. If he had, his mom would have known something was up. Fridays wer
e sacrosanct for him and everyone knew it. He worked without interruption from the time he walked out of his post-workout shower to the single glass of single-malt Scotch and the eleven p.m. international business roundup podcast. It was usually his most productive planning and plotting day of the week.
“Ohhhh,” Clover crooned. “That is a brilliant idea for retooling that ratty chair.”
The six-hotel job in Rio? The pitch had come to him on a Friday. The idea for ten high-rise office complexes in Dubai? Yep, on a Friday. The missing piece of a proposal for a luxury tower in London? Happened on a Friday. But this Friday? He’d come up with exactly shit even as the clock ticked down on the call for proposals on the Singapore trio of high-rises job. Why? Because instead of being able to concentrate, he’d been quietly humming—okay singing—along to whatever pop crap Clover had warbled.
“Fuck this.” He pushed back from his desk and strode to the door. This was his house. He could tell her to be silent. Order her, really. He was the boss.
He got to the door and…hesitated. He peeked around the doorframe. The hallway was long—the penthouse took up one quarter of the top floor of The Carlyle High-Rise. Each of the four penthouses had a unique glass-and-steel extension on the building’s corner that allowed them a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the city skyline. The rest of the penthouse was more typical with an open floor plan that gave him a straight shot visual from his door to the living room. Instead of the market report or the 24/7 business news channel on his big screen, there was a woman in overalls going to town on a chair with a power saw. All he could see of Clover was the back of her head as the screen had her total attention.
“You are going to kick those douchebags’ patriarchal asses!” Clover said, raising her fist in the air above the back of the couch.
Leaving his home office on a Friday was the last thing he planned on doing, and yet that’s exactly what he did, not stopping until he stood next to the couch. Clover sat with her legs crossed, wearing black yoga pants and—God help him—a thin, oversized “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” T-shirt that hung off one shoulder and did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. The hint of nipple brushing against the shirt as she wrote something down in big loopy handwriting into a notebook drew his attention like a tractor beam. He shouldn’t look. He didn’t want to look. He couldn’t look away.
“What are you doing?” “To me” was the obvious ending to that question because whatever it was it had fucked with him greatly.
“Shhhh,” Clover hushed him, not even bothering to turn around. “I’ll catch you up at the commercial break.”
“Catch me up on what?”
“This episode of Flea Market Flip.” The show went to commercial then, and she glanced up at him, narrowing her eyes and giving him a naughty little smile that made his cock twitch. “You’re totally in violation of the contract, but I’ll let it slide since it’s our first Friday night.”
He was so lost. He’d blame the lack of blood in his brain, but it seemed to be his reality whenever he was around Clover. “What violation?”
“To binge-watch HGTV on Friday nights in preparation for hitting the flea market on Saturday morning.” She gave a little cheer and turned her attention back to the TV, which was now showing a commercial for birth control. “We’re totally going to find something fabulous to pop your cherry.”
The mental movie that started rolling at the phrase “pop your cherry” had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a flea market unless she had a kink for public sex.
“I didn’t think you were serious.” There were a hundred—a billion—things he’d rather do with her—and to her—than go to some dirty flea market.
She shrugged, the move dragging the thin cotton across her full tits. “Too bad, so sad, buddy, because you signed on the dotted line.”
“You’ll never get a judge to uphold anything scrawled on a napkin.”
“Sure you want to gamble on that?” she asked. “Anyway, I already came up with our backstory. I know how you hate dealing with the details. Your mom was a little shocked when I told her how we met, but she took it better than I’d expected.”
There wasn’t a single part of those two sentences that didn’t make his chest burn. “You talked to my mom? What did you tell her?”
“That we met when you modeled for a wine and paint class I took.” She looked up at him, all sweetness and innocence except for the hard glint of trouble in her eyes. “I told her that I was a goner the moment you slipped off your tighty whiteys and were able to hold your pose for so long, even though I could see it was very hard.”
Good thing his family had funded Harbor City General’s new cardiac wing because he and his mom were both going to need it. “You did not say that to my mom.”