The Negotiator (Harbor City 1)

“None of which are tangible,” she said with just enough blue-collar superiority to hit a vulnerable spot he didn’t even realize was there.

“Really?” He turned so they were facing each other, only inches apart. The air crackled around them as the tension built. “You’re sitting in one right now. The Carlyle High-Rise was my first build.”

She didn’t look impressed. “Did you lay the foundation? Put up any of the beams? Paint the walls?”

“No.” The single word blasted out of his mouth.

“Then you have no idea the kind of fun you’re in for.” Her face broke into a huge grin. “To actually take something, transform it, and give it new life? It’s a little like magic.”

Understanding hit him like a wrecking ball, laying him flat. She’d been winding him up on purpose. Not to knock him down but to blast him out of his own comfort zone and get him to see the adventure ahead of him in the same light she saw it. Damn. For all of his IQ points, he hadn’t used any.

“I never would have pictured you as being so philosophical about stripping paint and rolling varnish.”

A teasing promise lit her eyes. “And I never would have guessed you didn’t have any experience working with your hands.”

Now that was just a straight up lie. “I never said that. You know very well that I’m good with my hands.” He reached out and tucked a stray blond hair behind her ear, letting his touch linger. “Very good.”

Her breath caught, but she didn’t move away as his fingers trailed down the soft column of her neck. Her pulse thrummed under his touch and one glance down at the hard peaks pushing against her thin T-shirt confirmed she was skating along the same fault line between sanity and lust that he was.

“Are you flirting with me?” she asked, her voice breathy.

“No.” He didn’t flirt. That was Hudson. Sawyer was the grumpy brother. He never flirted. Still, his hand didn’t drop from where he was touching her and he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her perfect pink mouth.

“Of course not.” She leaned forward, cutting the distance between them, so close he could feel her soft breath against his skin. “That would violate the contract.”

The temptation to dip his head the few inches to kiss her had his entire body hard and wound tight with anticipation. Lust ran through him like a runaway freight train. The little voice in the back of his head screaming that this was a bad idea suffered the same fate as it had in the supply closet last night: death by ignoring. Clover Lee had that effect on him. It was going to be a very long month and a half.

“The napkin didn’t say anything about flirting,” he said.

No, he was totally free to give himself blue balls the size of watermelons every time he came near his personal buffer.

“Ah-ha!” The triumphant sound escaped her lush lips as she straightened, expanding the space between them and dislodging his hand from her soft skin. “You are flirting.”

Was he? No. He was torturing himself. That was a very different sort of hell. “You take all the fun out of things.”

“No way.” She shook her head, the movement letting a few more silky strands loose from the knot on the top of her head. “I am the definition of fun. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in your office banging on your keyboard.”

“I don’t bang.”

“Not me, you don’t.” She shot him a cocky smirk. “It’s in the contract.”

The mental image came complete in full color and sound in an instant. Her blond hair spread out across the surface of his desk. The dusky rose of her nipples, wet from his tongue. Her long legs spread wide. The feel of her ass in his hands as he lifted her upward and sank deep within her. Oh hell. He was not going to get the image of fucking her on his desk out of his head any time soon, if ever. “Now who’s flirting?”

“I’m teasing and teasing is not flirting.”

He straightened his glasses and put on his best I’m-just-here-to-learn face. “Oh really?”

Anticipation zinged between them—as tangible as a touch. Every part of him ached to reach out and caress the full curve of her lips, roll her hard nipples, and slide between her slick folds. He fisted his hands on his thighs, fighting the primal urge to take her and put every fantasy of her he’d already had to shame.

“Most definitely not,” Clover said in a prim teacher voice. “Their meanings are completely different. Definitions are very important. Like this—” Quick as a blink, she pushed him back against the couch and pivoted so she straddled him, her hands on either side of his face. Her mouth was on his in the next instant, too soft to be what either of them wanted and too real to be a fantasy. Then, as fast as her sneak attack was, she pulled back but remained hovering over his lap, her breath coming in shaky, gasps. “Is not sex so it was most definitely not covered in our contract.”

Sawyer had never been so happy for someone to point out a loophole in his entire life.

There were practically angels singing a hallelujah in three-part harmony. The 0.2 percent of his brain that dealt in details immediately pulled together a list of not-technically-sex things that involved Clover naked.

“It was a bunch of words scrawled on a napkin that wasn’t witnessed or notarized, not a contract. But you’re right, it did not cover that…or this.”

He slipped his hands free from where they were trapped between their legs and grabbed ahold of her hips, yanking her down against his hard cock at the same time as he turned them both so she was beneath him on the couch. Any lingering voice of reason echoing in his head was obliterated the moment she opened her mouth and his tongue swept inside.