Novel Square
8
I was going to show him how wrong he was.
“All right.” I took another drink.
“You and my sister are hopeless romantics. That shit isn’t happening here.”
“Fine, but I have a condition of my own.”
“You think you’re in a position to negotiate?” He winked. “I don’t think so.”
I ignored his cuteness and said, “My condition is that you have to teach me how to be the best lover. How to use my mouth and my hands and my body, so the next guy I date, I can blow his mind with my sexy skills.”
“Isn’t that what lessons are for?”
I took one more drink and returned the glass to the table. “And-”
“Fuck no. There is no and in this conversation.”
“Camden,” I gasped. His relentlessness made him the best litigator, but impossibly difficult to bargain with. “I’m giving you all my firsts. The fantasies I’m going to come up with are things I’ve never done before-I mean, I’ve done things, but not much. I want one of your firsts. I want something that you’ve never experienced with another woman.”
He leaned against the cushions, extending his arm across the back of the couch, a single eyebrow rising. “You do know there’s very little-if anything-that I haven’t done with a woman.”
“Now, that’s something that doesn’t surprise me.” I laughed.
He was quiet for a moment. “How about I promise to come up with something you won’t ever forget? Does that work?”
“I like that idea.” I stuck my hand toward him. “So, we have a deal?”
He stayed still for what felt like an excruciatingly long time, and then he set down his drink and used his arms to lift himself off the couch. Placing a knee on the cushion between us, he moved toward me.
It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to react.
To think.
To process what he was actually doing.
But he gripped my cheek, aiming my face toward his, and leaned my back into the couch, moving on top of me.
Muscles I’d seen and known he had but never touched were now pressed into me.
His scent completely enveloping me.
A combination that was setting me on fire.
As he hovered above me, his stare was animalistic, his thumb running over my top lip and then my bottom. His face was a foot away, but he closed that distance, and as I drew in air, I anticipated our lips to lock.
But they didn’t.
He brushed his beard across my neck.
The feeling was rough.
Almost painful.
But there was something else, this pleasure that I hadn’t expected.
When I felt it again, this time on my cheek, my lips parted, and a moan escaped from between them. My back arched so deeply into the cushions that my chest aligned with his as he worked his way to the other side, dragging his whiskers. The feel of his hand, the strength of his fingers, the way his flesh rubbed into mine were scorching.
Until it all stopped.
And his lips were above me, and we were only breaths apart.
I waited.
I inhaled.
I felt my eyes close.
And when he finally kissed me, it wasn’t an embrace that was soft and tender even though he’d told me it wouldn’t be.
It was as coarse as his beard.
As ravenous as his grip.
As powerful as the cars I could hear on the road outside my apartment.
The moment he pulled away, he scanned my eyes while he licked me off his lips.
I wanted to know what he was looking for.
I wanted to know what he saw.
I wanted to know how I tasted.
Just as I was about to ask, I heard, “We have a deal.”
FOUR
Camden
I
‘d arrived at the office an hour earlier than normal so I could finish scrolling through all the data from the thumb drive we’d collected yesterday in Boston. Declan would be walking in here within the next thirty minutes, following his meeting with Dominick. In order to answer all his questions, which I knew would come at me in rapid-fire, I needed to make sure I understood everything I was looking at.
I picked up my office phone and dialed the number to Easton’s direct line. Even though Hooked had three equal partners, Easton was the CEO and my main point of contact.
“Easton Jones,” he said as the call connected.
“It’s Camden Dalton.”
“Camden, I hope you and Declan had a safe flight back to LA?”
My hand returned to the mouse, and I began to scroll through the documents that I’d transferred over from my laptop. “We did.”
“Excellent. What can I do for you?”
I flipped through one of the spreadsheets before pulling up several side-by-side images. “Within the next hour, our team is going to start plowing through all the information you provided. Before that happens, I want to confirm that the forensic data analyst who Hooked hired was able to detect that files were actually stolen from your network. I can’t seem to locate their findings or contact info.”Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!
“We never hired one,” he replied. “We conducted an in-house investigation to rule out other possible suspects, and our lead developer was in charge of that. At the time of the investigation, that was all the proof we needed. Now that new evidence has come into play, I know that changes things tremendously.”
I closed out the files and opened my email. “Our firm employs a full-time forensic data analyst who’s incredible. If information exists, I assure you, she’ll find it. I can send her your way sometime this week and have her run her own investigation, if you’re open to that?”
“Absolutely. We’d welcome it,” he confirmed. “I’m extremely interested to see what she finds and if it’ll help our case.”
“I’ll set that up, and I’ll reach out if we have any further questions. As we dig deeper, we’ll be talking daily-quite possibly, even hourly.”
“It’s a good thing I like you, Camden.” He laughed. “Honestly, it’s almost a relief to have a fellow Harvard grad on our legal team. I know you and Declan are going to do great things for us.”