Page 65 of The Money Man
“No wonder Myron Barsky doesn’t scare you.”
She laughed and slipped on her panties under the blanket. He caught her shyness and walked over to the dining table, keeping his back to her while he rearranged the takeout containers. Appreciating his tact, she scrambled into her clothes quickly, sucking in a breath as her panties touched the highly sensitized spot between her legs.
“I hate to think what my hair looks like,” she said as she joined him at the table.
He reached out to comb his fingers through it. “It looks like it belongs to the sexiest woman alive.”
The way he looked at her made her believe he meant it and she didn’t know what to do with that. “Okay, then. Let’s eat.”
“And the hungriest woman alive.” He held her chair and dropped a kiss on the side of her neck after she sat. Little sparks crackled over her skin just from that light brush of his lips.
As she sat across from him, swapping containers, she realized that parting from him would hurt. A lot. But she couldn’t regret any of what she’d done. She had become so afraid to do anything that would jeopardize the safe little world she had built with painstaking care that she had forgotten how to let go.
Somehow Derek had shown her that more was possible. He’d lulled her with his devotion to the sanity of numbers and then seduced her into forgetting about reason and rationality. Maybe it was the fact that, in the beginning, she hadn’t considered that this could be a real relationship that had released her inner wild woman. Maybe it was because she still couldn’t believe this man would want her of all people so it seemed like a dream. Which freed her to act like itwasall a dream, pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
The new Alice was bold and sexy and went after what she wanted. But the new Alice didn’t really fit into the old Alice’s life, a life she would have to return to once Derek jetted off to Asia. How was she going to stuff herself back into the circumscribed world of her town house, her cats, and her careful little business? Not that she didn’t love all those things, but Derek had shown her how much bigger her world could be.
Of course, her world could never be on the level his was with private jets and expense-account meals at elegant restaurants and custom-made suits. She’d never wanted those things before, but now that she had seen what he had accomplished, she found herself wondering how much further she could have gone if she’d tried.
Derek thought she was smart and hardworking, but was that enough to succeed like he had? He’d taken tremendous risks, something she’d been terrified of. Was it too late for her to shove past the fear and try for more?
“You’re very pensive,” he said, refilling her wineglass. “Are you worried about John Peters? Because you shouldn’t be.”
“No, I can’t picture anyone climbing up forty stories of steel and glass, and we have Pam and Christian to greet them if they did.”
“Then what’s made you so quiet?”
“Great sex. You’ve worn me out.” She tossed him a teasing smile.
Disappointment flitted across his face. “Let me show you to the guest room, then.”
“The guest room? I was hoping to sleep with you.” Yup, that was the new Alice all right.
He sat back and gave her a heavy-lidded look. “If you share a bed with me, there will not be much sleeping involved. So you’ll be even more worn out in the morning.”
“I’m willing to take that chance.” She didn’t want to waste a moment of her time with him, even under threat of evil computer hackers.
“Oh, it’s not a chance. It’s a statistical certainty.”
“Unfair!” she said, throwing up her hand in mock protest. “You know the effect statistics have on me.”
“Then let’s set some parameters.” He stood up and came around to her side of the table. “We’ll see if we get a positive skew.”
She took the hand he held out, savoring the strength of his fingers as they closed over hers and pulled her to her feet. “I’m interested in the standard deviation myself.”
He used their joined hands to bring her up against him, his gaze smoky with desire. “I would never say no to a little deviance.”
Derek stared out the window of his bedroom at the lights of boats moving on the Hudson River. Alice slept curled against his side, her hair spread like a satin curtain across his chest. Her breast pushed at his ribs as she breathed, reminding him of how it felt resting in his palm or pressed into his mouth. Her knee was crooked over his thigh—something she often did while she slept and which he appreciated because he could feel the silken heat between her legs. His cock stirred despite having just made love to her for the second time that night.
His unexpected Alice. She threw him off-balance at every encounter, but he came back for more. Couldn’t stop himself from coming back, in fact.
Because she banished the restlessness he’d been feeling. The dissatisfaction with work that he’d started the SBI to combat. She’d intrigued him with her project, engaged his mind in a different way from the complex corporate finances he usually dealt with.
She had reminded him of the honesty of numbers. People lied. Numbers eventually told the truth, as long as you were determined to track it down. Alice was committed to that truth in a way he wanted to recapture.
Her passion for the quest had somehow transmuted itself into a different kind of passion that flared between them. He frowned into the darkness. He was nearly certain that she was as surprised by it as he was. And that she didn’t normally have sex with a man she knew as little as she knew him.
She struck him as something of an innocent. When she’d suggested sex over the sofa arm, he’d nearly come at just the thought of gripping the sweet curves of her ass while he drove into her. His cock hardened even more but he wasn’t going to wake her from the slumber she’d fallen into as soon as they’d both come. She was exhausted.
