Page 13 of Nailed

This. This was the pushback she never used to give me. I liked it.

I hooked the towel over my neck and began walking toward the change room. “You should get going.”

“See? You did it again.”

I was in front of her, so I grinned.

Then I stopped abruptly. Across from where I stood, there was a wall of glass between the pool and the gym. There was a man on the elliptical machine with gray hair like mine, only his was thin on the top. He was sweating, too, and red as a tomato.

But it was his face I was staring at, trying to see…

It couldn’t be.

“Jamie, you really need—” Sarah was beside me now, but she’d seen my face, and followed my gaze. “You know that guy?”

I said nothing, just stared. Come on, fucker, turn around. If it wasn’t him, I’d mentally apologize for the fury building in my guts. But if it was him…

“Jamie, are you okay?”

The guy wiped at his face with a towel, and I looked down at Sarah. Her brows were angled in concern, her pretty eyes peering deep into mine.

Fuck, she was beautiful. I hadn’t stood this close to her in a long time. In the car, I could look ahead. But now she was here, looking up at me, those freckles sprinkled across her nose like stars.

And young. God, she looked so young.

I was a dirty bastard. At that thought, I glanced up. But the man in the gym was just leaving. High tailing it, actually, his walk brisk as he disappeared through the door.

“Thought I saw someone I knew,” I said, my voice low. “Get to the dinner, Cooper.”

Then, with strides too long for her to easily keep up, I walked away from Sarah Cooper.

* * *

I should have gotten dressed. I should have pulled on my pajama pants and called room service and flicked on the TV. But my mind kept oscillating from the guy in the gym—who was a dead ringer for the man I’d fired last year. A man I once called my friend. Until Cora came to me teary-eyed and told me what he’d said to her. After firing his ass on the spot, I’d called up Joyce, the receptionist I’d had for decades before she retired, and asked if he’d ever done anything like that before.

I’d nearly crushed my phone in my hand when she quietly confessed he had. To her. That he’d also drunkenly groped her at one of our office parties.

“We didn’t talk about that kind of thing,” she said.

My guts felt like I’d been punched. Repeatedly. I’d had a fucking predator in my office and I hadn’t known it. The cops said there was nothing they could do at this stage, but I knew there was no coming back from it. So I did the thing I shouldn’t have. I’d gone to his house, kindly asked his sweet wife to send him out to talk to me, and told him if I ever so much as saw his face again anywhere near Reilly Contracting—or in this industry—I’d smash it in for him. “You better either crawl in a hole or join a fucking monastery” had been my parting words.

I heard Gary’s wife left him the year after that, and he moved out of Quince Valley. I didn’t know where.

It probably hadn’t been him. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to come here knowing I was delivering the keynote and would be all over this place. But it had been jarring, nonetheless.

And then Sarah.

Oh, fuck. Sarah, dripping in that bathing suit that clung to her body; her tight little nipples pointing straight at me through the fabric.

I needed to have a shower, to wash the pool water off me. But instead, for the first time in a long time, I let myself give in. I dropped my shorts right there in the entryway of my room and wrapped my hand around my cock.

Sarah was the only thing that could distract me from anything bad. She was pure and perfect, and for just a moment, I let myself fall into feeling everything I felt for her. Everything I shouldn’t feel, because I could never.Wouldnever be anything close to that other man.

But right now, I let myself go. I stroked my long length, tugging at my balls with my other hand.

“God, Sarah,” I moaned, my dick so hard now I thought I might come in seconds, like I used to as a teenager.

“Sarah,” I moaned again, leaning forward and pressing my forehead against the door. Pleasure spread through me, hot and fast.

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