Everlasting Bad Boys (25 page)

“Ah—not my work. An ex-boyfriend of mine designed that. Not exactly practical.”

Justin was reading the fine print next to the image of the bed. “Says here that it lights up at the moment of orgasm.”

Uh-oh. She’d forgotten about that part. Beth gave him a sheepish smile. “He never did build it.”

“Great concept, though.”

Beth cleared her throat. “Never was more than that. Okay, moving right along—”

She finished her presentation and Justin’s attention never strayed. If she had to describe his reaction, she would say that he seemed really excited by her ideas. Maybe even by her.

His energy was definitely contagious. Her initial nervousness had completely vanished by the time the interview was over.

He got up while she shut down her laptop and wandered around his office, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“You never did mention where you’re from,” she said, by way of making conversation. She closed the cover with a snick. “New York?”

“Yeah.” He waved at the skyline outside. Or the sky. Whatever. She didn’t need to pry.

“Still live in the city?” she asked lightly.

Justin turned around. His energy almost seemed to crackle around him, but then he’d said he’d just bought the company, so maybe the carpets were new and full of static.

Beth tugged at her skirt to keep it down, just in case it got electrified and started clinging. The interview had been all about her talent and not her knees.
Good sign,
she thought.

“Yes, I do. How about you?”

She nodded. “I have a studio just off Hudson Street.”

“Oh, then you’re not far from me. I live in the Bolt Building.”

Beth thought a minute. “The Art Deco skyscraper that’s way downtown? The one with all the lightning bolts on the façade?”

“That’s right. Built in 1935 by Jasper Bolt, the world’s craziest billionaire.”

“How did he make his money?”

“No one really knows. But the building is great, full of freaky architectural details.”

He didn’t say anything tacky like
come on up and play in my penthouse
. But given a few weeks of working with him, assuming she had been hired, she wouldn’t mind if he did. Was she, then? He had quoted a salary. He just hadn’t said the most wonderful three little words in the world.
You have job.

I love you
would’ve been okay with her too, but that was definitely rushing things.

“I bet it is,” Beth said politely.

“Okay,” he said suddenly. “Let’s get back to business. You do have the job, if you want it.”

She inhaled, and tried desperately not to squeak on the exhale. “I do? This job?”

“Yes.” He waited for a beat. “Now you say yes.”

Beth willed herself to remain completely calm and forced her voice to reflect some self-control. “Exactly what will my responsibilities entail?”

He shrugged. “We’ll figure that out as we go along, Beth. You know the salary.”

She nodded, rigid with the effort of not jumping around the room. “I think it’s commensurate with my abilities.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Talk corporate to me. I love it. Is that a yes or a no?”

That damned dimple of his was flashing like a go-for-it sign. “Full benefits, by the way. Dental. Disability. And 401K matching, the whole nine.”

Beth fought the urge to throw her arms around him and give him an exuberant kiss on the cheek. But she couldn’t resist the excellent offer a second longer.

“I accept. Thank you.” She wanted to scream a yes. She hoped her measured voice communicated some enthusiasm. She knew her eyes were sparkling, because her nose was itching. She couldn’t scratch it, just couldn’t.

Justin nodded, and gave her a huge grin. “All right. See you Monday. Bright and early.”

“Okay.” She couldn’t think of anything else intelligent to say. “Wow. This is so incredible. Thanks again. This is going to be great.”

“I agree.”

He stayed where he was. She backed out, trying not to trip on his new carpet. Beth clutched her laptop under one arm and gave him a fingery wave. Then she skittered down the long, white hallway, flashed a huge smile at the receptionist, and went out the door. She did dance in the elevator. There was no one in it but her.

Out on the sidewalk, she felt like she was walking on air. She had a job. She wasn’t going to be broke. She was ready, really ready to sell blue jeans. Life was good again.

She blew her last bucks on a work-appropriate wardrobe for SpectraSign, shopping until early evening. You deserve it, you need it, you will be able to pay for it in another week, she told herself, lugging the bags home, along Hudson Street, trying to keep the strap of her laptop case from sliding off her shoulder.

It was twilight and the streetlamps were just coming on. A strong westerly breeze was blowing from the river, making a few pieces of litter fly around through the side streets, including hers. Beth went up the stoop of her five-story building, the bags rattling and bouncing against her legs. Her short skirt was a lost cause, flipping wildly.

It was a relief to edge inside the main door. She set everything down except the laptop and peered into the brass grille of her mailbox. There was something white in there. Probably another bill.

Ha ha. She could pay them all now. She could even afford senior-care cat food for old Freddy, and maybe cut down on the hairball count. Beth found her key ring and looked for the tiny brass one that opened the mailbox, pulling out a letter from her father.

She knew it was from him without even looking at the return address. He always drew on his envelopes and letters, something he couldn’t do with e-mail. She saved each missive—since she’d moved out of his house on Long Island, there had been one every week for years. She slipped the decorated envelope into one of the shopping bags and continued upstairs.

Four locks later, she was inside her studio apartment. Still struggling with the bags, Beth bumped into the antique dressmaker’s dummy that she called Miss Boom Bah and used as a coatrack. The full-figured dummy tipped forward, then stood upright again when she gave it a shove back. It took a lot to upset Miss Boom Bah.

Beth slung her light jacket over the coat on the dummy’s shoulders and looked down at the old gingerbread-colored cat rubbing her ankle. “Guess what, Freddy?”

The cat gave a wheezing, very faint meow. She bent down to give him a chin rub just the way he liked it.

“We’re in the money. I have a job.”

Freddy wheezed, and she sat down and stroked him for a while. He got bored with it, wandered off, and stuck his nose into one of the shopping bags.

“Stay away from my fabulous new wardrobe,” she told him sternly. Freddy glared at her as she got up, gathered all the bags, and hung them on an inside hook in her tiny closet. Then she went into the kitchenette to call her dad.

Two months later…

“S
o this is the famous Bolt Building.”

Justin was waiting for her, a bulging plastic shopping bag in his hand. He was wearing jeans with a few for-real rips, and a linen shirt, and disreputable-looking sneakers. He looked fabulous. “Yup. And this is just the lobby.”

“Wow,” she said. The riotous Art Deco ornamentation didn’t stop. Every surface she could see was covered with stylized motifs, quite a few of them representing lightning, as far as she could tell.

The concierge, an unassuming older guy, sat at a console, if that was the right word, which would have been a great altar for a pagan god. Huge, freestanding bolts of lightning bolts framed it, done in chrome polished to a high shine. The console itself was also metal, with a huge bronze sun emitting spiky rays adorning the front.

When Beth got done looking at it, she studied the vaulted ceiling, shot through with more bronze rays and zigzagging lines. No matter where her gaze settled, something about the restless design made it move on. She got the dizzying feeling she’d walked into an alternate galaxy and glanced down again, at the floor, hoping it would ground her.

No such luck.

Even the floor was decorated with fanciful planets and stars and comets, done in flat metal and imbedded at random in each of the tiles.

“Welcome to my world,” Justin said laughing. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“It’s spectacular,” she said, “but I guess you get used to it after a while, like anything else.”

“Yeah, I am by now.” He walked toward the bank of elevators, and Beth followed.

“How long have you been living here?”

“I bought my apartment when I bought SpectraSign,” he said. He punched the up button, which was in the shape of a very small lightning bolt, and waited with her. “Glad you could come.”

“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” she said. And she didn’t mean the lobby. He’d taken her out for dinner several times since he’d hired her, and it was clear that his interest in her wasn’t all about work.

Though they had been doing plenty of that. The design team, a bunch of thirtyish men and women with eyeglasses so narrow she wondered how they saw out of them, had slaved away on the Blue Blazes account and the software geeks had actually been able to turn their ideas into something that worked.

The resulting sign concept was accepted by Blue Blaze top management and was now being built in Times Square. It would be fifty feet high, thirty feet wide. Beth couldn’t wait to see it. They were celebrating the go-ahead tonight.

She’d coordinated the project from her first day on the job, simply because she worked so closely with Justin. At first Beth had wondered if that was wise, but it wasn’t like she exactly had a choice. That was how he wanted it.

And it was really clear that he wanted her. Likewise, as far as she was concerned. Which was why she’d bought killer lingerie from Agent Provocateur for tonight. It did wonderful things for her, um, things. If he got that far.

From the way he was looking at her right now, she suspected he would.

An elevator arrived, the door whooshed open, and they went inside. She looked around, wondering why it had glass walls, then figured it was to let the passengers look at the decorated inside of the shaft. Yep, more lightning.

“This Bolt guy was crazy,” she said.

“Certifiable.” Justin put a keycard in a slot next to the PH button and up they went.

A penthouse. Ooh. She really wanted to see what life was like that high up in the air.

“Do you get vertigo?” he asked.

“Not usually, why?”

“We’ll be in the glass part of the elevator shaft in another few floors. It was added much later, about ten years ago—here it comes.”

Beth gasped. “Oh my God, what a view!” All of lower Manhattan suddenly appeared. The buildings thrust upward, almost appearing to move along with them, their lit windows turning into streaks of light here and there. She glimpsed details that were impossible to see from the street—on the older buildings, gargoyles and lion’s heads and decorative pediments and, on the new buildings, raked angles of glass that glowed strangely in the twilight and even neon outlining the tops.

What a view, she thought. She wasn’t going to crow it out loud again, because it was a corny thing to say and he was probably just as used to the spectacular scene as he was to everything else about the Bolt Building.

“Yeah, it’s incredible.”

There was a note of awe in his voice, which pleased her. She’d picked up on his natural enthusiasm from the first day they’d met and in the eight weeks that she’d been on the job, observed how it inspired the company clients and his employees, her, most of all.

Beth looked at him instead of the cityscape for a moment, observing the way the otherworldly glow of the city at night brought out something that was indescribably wonderful in his face. The color of his eyes seemed to intensify and become a different blue. Call it blue times two.

Justin sighed with pleasure as the elevator came to a stop and he held the button for her to exit ahead of him.

“Hold on. I just want one last look,” Beth said. She turned around to take in the panoramic view of New York’s harbor. Even in the semidarkness, she could make out the giant orange ferries coming and going from Staten Island, trailing long white wakes, and innumerable small boats out on the water. The vast shapes of tankers moved slowly, guided by the tugs she’d loved to watch as a kid, heading toward the graceful, gigantic bridge that soared over the narrows before the open sea.

“You can see that from my living room,” Justin said, keeping his finger on the open button and letting her look her fill. “And the Statue of Liberty, too. My big green girlfriend.”

She thought of Miss Boom Bah and smiled.

“We can drink a toast to her,” Justin added. “I have champagne on ice.”

“Sounds glamorous.”

He chuckled. “It’s good champagne. And I made great cheese dip to go with it.”

“Is that the gourmet meal you promised me?”

“In the bag.” He held it up so she could see it. “The delivery dude got to the lobby just before you did.”

“And I thought you came down to meet me.”

“I’m willing to take the credit for it.”

Beth shook her head. “Nope. And I thought that you were going to do the cooking.”

“I made no promises to that effect. Hey, you said you didn’t feel like going out to another restaurant tonight. Anyway, we’ve gone to all my favorites and yours.”

She nodded, understanding his unspoken message: I want to get you alone. He probably assumed she had a roommate, although he had never asked. Nothing doing. She wasn’t about to invite him over to her place for an intimate dinner with wheezing Freddy and Miss Boom Bah.

The kitchenette wasn’t really big enough to cook in, anyway. She could just imagine Justin perched on her rump-sprung sofa with a plate on his lap and a Chinese takeout bag between them, rolling up shredded moo shu cabbage inside those thin pancakes and trying to make small talk while the gooey sauce squirted out the other end.

Too suggestive. Nothing doing. He’d finally asked her over and she’d said yes at once.

He led the way down a hall lined with…that couldn’t be lapis lazuli. She looked closer and touched a hand to the smooth, floor-to-ceiling panel. Maybe it was. The deep blue stone was speckled with tiny fragments of gold. How rich was he?

Okay, she admonished herself, his apartment, which he owned, was on this floor, but that didn’t mean he owned the whole floor and had paneled the hallways in semiprecious stone. Justin Watts didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had to show off to that degree. He didn’t really show off at all, despite his engaging, boyish enthusiasm. And as far as she knew, he wasn’t a billionaire, which would have been fairly weird. No, he was down-to-earth, even if he lived up in the clouds. She couldn’t wait to see his place.

“So you didn’t do the cooking. Hmm. Any other secrets to reveal, Justin?”

“Not just yet,” he said.

Watching his broad shoulders under the linen shirt he hadn’t bothered to tuck into his jeans, Beth was willing to bet that all would be revealed—meaning her fabulous new underwear—before midnight.

He used the same keycard to unlock his door and in they went.

Beth looked around. Huge windows gave an even better view of lower Manhattan by night. She almost ran to them. There were the massive gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, joined by the delicate tracery of lights on the supporting cables. She could see for miles, over all of Brooklyn, low but lit up, and out into the harbor and beyond. Beth looked right and there was the Statue of Liberty, looking small and stalwart, her torch raised.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “This is amazing. Just amazing.”

“Glad you like it. Haven’t been here long enough to decorate much. Walk around, make yourself at home.”

He got busy in the kitchen, unloading the bag as she did what he suggested. There wasn’t much furniture and it wasn’t too different from what any young, successful guy in Manhattan had. Leather sofa, nine feet long. Monster plasma TV. Squooshy leather armchairs with ottomans. In a bedroom she peeked into, a really big bed. There were a lot of rooms but some doors were closed and she wasn’t going to snoop.

She realized she was going in a circle, though, and that the apartment was a floor-through. My, my, my.

Beth ended up in the kitchen again, determined to sound casual. What could she possibly say that wouldn’t make her sound like a gold-digger or a hick from the sticks?

She was going to keep right on relating to him like he was just this incredibly cute, nice guy she worked with, that was all.

“So what’s for dinner?”

“Steak. Salad. Baked potatoes.” He ripped off the menu stapled to the bag and read aloud. “From Peter O’Grady’s legendary steakhouse, home of the hundred-dollar sirloin.”

“How bad can it be?”

He gestured at the foil containers lined up neatly on his kitchen counter, which she was relieved to see was made of mere granite. “Let’s eat.”

She picked up a fork and speared a piece of salad. “Can’t go wrong with the tried and true.”

“Is it? I guess food like that is still kinda new to me,” he laughed.

Beth didn’t really hear him say it. The lettuce she was chewing was very fresh and very crunchy.

He stuck a fork into a piece of sliced steak and ate it. “Fantastic,” he said. “Have some. Want a plate?”

“Not really,” she laughed, “I’m starving.”

He nodded. “Me too. What about the champagne?”

Beth slid the foil container of sliced steak in front of her. “Let’s have it with dessert.”

“Good idea.”

They were both starving and the movable feast disappeared pretty quickly. Satisfied, feeling pleasantly absentminded, Beth licked the tines of her fork when she was done. Justin noticed. Boy, did he notice. What she was doing made him stop eating.

“Are you trying to turn me on?”

She snorted and put the fork down. “No. Does that do it for you?”

“Your pretty pink tongue? Licking? Yeah,” he answered boldly. “It really does.”

Well, all right. They had gone from zero to sixty in less a second.

“That was fast,” she said.

He sighed. “No sense fighting it, then, is there? I really care about you, Beth. And you turn me on like no one else.”

She squirmed in her seat. Not as if she hadn’t imagined herself in his arms a thousand times already. But being here, alone with him, was different.

“What’s for dessert?” she asked.

“You are.” He smiled a slow, slow smile that was scorchingly sexy. It melted whatever was left of her resistance.

As it turned out, he knew how to take his time. He’d suggested a move to the sofa and a look at the ever-changing view, and eventually he’d opened the champagne.

Giddy from it, and her own excitement, she was lying on his bed in nothing but stockings attached to a gartered thong and a demi-cup bra.

“Wow,” was all he said as he stroked her legs. “You are incredible.”

Beth blushed, a head-to-foot feeling of warmth.

“Would you mind rolling over? I want to see what this pretty stuff looks like from the back,” he murmured.

“There’s not much of it.” She smiled, though, and rolled over on her tummy, supporting her head on her folded arms.

Justin’s big hands moved in sweeping caresses over her back and shoulders. He took a minute just to play with her hair, running his fingers through it and letting the long locks slide away from her neck.

With gentle pressure, using mostly his thumb, he rubbed her neck and went on down her spine from there.

Slow, small circles. Circles that seemed interconnected in some way, as if he was joining together parts of her that needed to get to know each other again. Beth felt a whole-body sense of profound relaxation. And trust.

“Mmm.”

He kept on rubbing. “Moan away. I want this to feel as good as possible.”

When his fingers reached the back part of her bra, he unhooked it and pushed the two parts away. Then he continued to massage her spine all the way down to her tailbone and up again to her neck.

Beth sighed with delight. He stopped and she could tell from the sounds of zippers and buttons that he was shedding his clothes.

She wanted to look and almost turned around…and then it occurred to her how wonderful it would be to experience him first just through his touch. The feel of his bare skin against hers.

And Justin didn’t disappoint her.

She felt him clamber onto the bed, pleasurably aware of the muscular hardness of the thighs that suddenly straddled her bare ass. The prickle of the fine hair on them was stimulating. Little shivers of arousal coursed through her.

Staying up, he continued his luxurious massage of her back and shoulders. Every so often she felt his balls brush against her behind, and she smiled into the tumbling hair that covered the side of her face.

They felt soft but heavy, and tighter each time they touched down. His gentleness held an unmistakable strength, and she relaxed even more as the caressing pressure of his hands grew more intense.