Page 89 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“What do you care about?” I manage to ask, even as I remind myself that I shouldn’t go down this path. That I’m still reeling from Mason. That I’m leaving town and can’t get emotionally invested.

He searches my eyes, like he’s really concentrating on me. He says, “I care about the way I felt when I was talking to you. I liked the way we felt together.”

“I liked it, too,” I confess. Because apparently I’m all about confessing things to Mr. Drummond.

He comes nearer. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, inches from my lips now. The air between us feels charged with electricity; a frisson of aliveness plays across my skin. “It’s not how I usually am.”

“You’re not usually like that? Savagely ripping women’s clothes off?” It’s a joke, but not.

He reaches out and touches my shoulder, slides two fingers down the waffle-weave fabric covering my arm. Just that tiny touch and I’m breathless. Dizzy. The floor seems to dip.

“Not usually. But everything’s different with you,” he says. His breath comes hard—I can tell by the rise and fall of his chest. By the way his yellow tie moves in the light. “Everything with you was real and true in a way I never had. New.”

“Me, too,” I say. “With you.” The truth. And just like that, things feel intimate again, like our calls.

His finger is still on my arm, nearing my elbow, but something’s happening. The few atoms of oxygen left between us have changed. I feel him on my belly. I feel him on my thighs. I feel him in the stretch of my Henley shirt over my wildly sensitized nipples.

“I would’ve moved heaven and Earth to find you.”

“I can’t believe that Sasha tried to…” My words fade out and he lifts his fingers from my elbow and touches the nook of my throat. He slides those fingers slowly, slowly, down until they hook over the top of the unbuttoned V of my shirt.

He lets them hang there. The backs of them graze my breastbone as I breathe. The brush of his skin on mine burns—just that tiny point of contact.

His cuff link catches the light, seeming to pulse slightly, maybe in time with my breathing. Maybe in time with his. Maybe we’re breathing together.

He says, “Everything with you feels like a new discovery. Not of lands or continents, but something more. What it’s like to connect. What it’s like to want somebody so bad…”

“So bad that you rip off her clothes,” I say. “Because you need her pussy so bad…”

“So bad,” he rasps.

We both seem to still. To wait. Horns honk and helicopter blades chop in the world outside, but the small apartment feels pin-drop silent.

And I’m squeezing my pelvic muscles so hard, I might make myself Kegel-come.

“You rip off her clothes,” I say.

“Yeah?” he says, voice rough as sand.

“So desperate. And you haul her over your shoulder and carry her to her bedroom. And you throw her down there. You don’t even care, you just throw her down.” I lower my voice, “like a brute.”

His gaze roams heavy and hot over my lips, my neck.

I glance over at my bedroom door; then I look back at him.

It’s here I realize I’m trembling. Good trembling. Alive trembling. Like really crazy-alive trembling. That’s what we have together—scary honesty and aliveness.

“You totally ravish her,” I add.

His fingers curl more tightly over the V of my shirt. Just that little movement sizzles. What would it be like to really touch?

He’s wondering it, too. I feel him in a way I don’t feel other people.

“God, Drummond,” I pant, “you need to rip off my clothes and fuck me already.”

Something changes in his eyes. He doesn’t do it right away, though, power-mad jerk that he is. He uses his grip on my shirt to pull me to him, slow and strong, eyes on mine until we’re too close to see each other anymore, and then it’s just his lips consuming mine in a slow, hungry kiss—lips to lips, tongue to tongue.

I clutch his arms through his suit coat, shocked by the ferocity of his kiss and my breathless response.

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