Page 22 of Noah's Reckoning
“Guys know how to get off right out of the gate. That’s not the same thing as fucking a woman. Sex is like anything else in life. If you want to be good at it, you have to study, and you have to practice.”
She waited a beat. “Isn’t this the part where you tell me you’ve done a lot of practicing?”
I chuckled. “My fair share. Not as much as you probably think. And I’ve never--” This was getting oddly intimate again. Like that moment we shared when she wrapped her body around my feet to take away the cold. I wasn’t used to that kind of closeness.
“Never what?” she pressed.
“I’ve never been in a relationship. Not a serious one. I think, like sex, that’s something else that has to be learned and I’ve never been with anyone who made me want to try.”
“Me, neither,” she admitted. Which immediately made me feel better. “My focus has always been on what’s important. First that was school, then work. Because it’s more than a job for me. It’s a mission.”
“To save the planet,” I said, knowing all about her mission.
“Yes! Someone has to. Anyway, I never felt like I could let my guard down at school or on the job. I always thought that if I started dating any of the guys I was working with, they would have a certain perception of me.”
Instinctively, I squeezed her a little tighter. “I hate that’s your reality. I hate that you have to do your job wondering if today is the day some asshole is going to step out of line.”
“It’s worth the risk.”
“Is it? You can work anywhere, Olivia. I know you’re a crusader for the planet and your goal is to change things from the inside, but why Dyson? Why up here where you work with a bunch of hard ass men, where shit like getting stranded in a storm can happen?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment and I wondered if she had fallen asleep.
“At the risk of stroking what is clearly a healthy ego…I came up here to have a chance to work withyou. You’re the best in the industry. I wanted to see you in action.”
It hit me like one of her slaps across my face. Startling. Emotional. And it made me hot.
Then I smiled. “You respect me.”
“Of course, I respect you. You infuriate me, you push every last button I have, but I never said I didn’t respect you.”
“I respect you, too,” I offered.
“You do?”
It was truth. “You infuriate me, you push every last button I have…but yeah. I told you, I wouldn’t have left you in charge of my rigs, if I didn’t.”
She stiffened again. “Well, you had a pretty strong motivation for that. Jenny was coming.”
I could feel her body get tight again in my arms and I thought about how she kept going back to Jenny over and over again.
She wasn’t actually jealous, was she?
Sure, that’s exactly the move I wanted to make when I signed up for the stupid contest. But the minute I told her about it, she acted as if it didn’t faze her at all. Except, she’d mentioned Jenny no less than five times in the past two days.
I told her I wasn’t fucking Jenny. Surely that was enough to realize we were nothing more than friends.
I thought about correcting her assumptions, but maybe this was for the best.
I wasn’t going to sit here with a semi and convince myself I didn’t want Olivia like crazy. But even if the attraction did go both ways, what then?
She’d said it and she wasn’t wrong. If the guys knew we were banging, it would change how they saw her. It would remove that layer of professionalism she always worked so hard to maintain.
They would stop seeing her as engineer and start seeing her as a woman.
Which was probably ridiculously unfair, but the men who came up here had certain views of world. Role definitions were clear because, sometimes, they had to be to survive.
Hell, the first day Olivia had shown up at camp had shaken all of us. Until she made it clear what she was about.
