Brett rolled his eyes at me, and then he was gone. His gaze back to her for the rest of the meeting.
Which was fair. It was his job to listen to her, and she was most likely very competent, not that I’d heard a word she’d said. I had a feeling if I really listened to her, I’d quickly agree that she deserved Brett’s affection more than I did. And I really didn’t need more fuel for my self-doubt.
I glanced at the clock on the wall.
Fuuuuuuuuccckkk.
There was still another thirty minutes scheduled for this meeting. Kill me now.
But suddenly Tess exclaimed, “Fine!” boisterously enough to pull my attention. She swept all of her materials into her briefcase with an energy I couldn’t quite place then stood up. “Totally fine.”
I narrowed my eyes and listened for clues for context.
Of course, Brett jumped up right on her heels. “You don’t have to go right this minute. We still have half the hour left to talk more about it. We can make some recommendations for how to present to Scott. Then make an appointment for later. Or even next week. It doesn’t have to be today. His assistant probably isn’t even back from her lunch yet.”
Brett’s eagerness to keep Tess in the room made my chest ache. And it had already been aching. At this rate, I was going to be curled in a ball in the janitor’s closet with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy before the day was over.
“Thank you for the offer,” Tess said with almost as much kindness as when Brett had rejected me nearly two weeks ago now. “But I’m actually fired up from all your enthusiasm. Might as well strike while I’m still hot.”
“Okay, then. I wish you luck. We all wish you luck.”
This time Brett’s deflated tone didn’t hurt as much because I was stuck on Tess’s parting tone.
I recognized that tone.
That was a nervous tone. That was a nervous energy. A specific kind of nervous. The kind of nervous that a woman felt when she was about to see a guy that she could very possibly get it on with, usually because she had gotten it on with him in the past.
It was the kind of nervous I felt every time I was in the room with Brett ever since The Night.
Who was she off to see? Scott?
Well, well, well. Didn’t I say that he’d steal the girl from day one?
Poor Brett.
Except I was feeling too sorry for myself to really commit to that Poor Brett and instead was a thousand percent ready to rub it in.
Good guy that Brett was, he not only helped set up, but also generally always stayed to help me clean up. I waited until everyone else had gone, and it was just him and me.
Then I pounced. “She’s banging Scott.”
“What?” He’d been bent over the table, reaching for a crumpled napkin that Matthew had left behind, and now he shot up straight. “Who is?”
“Tess.” I was both exhilarated and devastated that he cared so much. “Tess is.”
“You know this for a fact?”
I considered. “Not for fact...but—”
He shook his head and went back to his straightening. “She’s not like that. She’s a professional. I trust her.”
I ignored what that implied about me. “And you trust Scott?”
He thought about it for a moment, his eyes turning toward the closed door as though deliberating going after her. Then shook his head. “There’s no reason to be jealous of Tess. She’s here to get a corporate sponsorship, not to steal your man.”
It took me a second to realize he thought I was jealous because of Scott. “You think—? I’m not—!” God, I was so frustrated, I couldn’t get a clear thought out. “I’m not jealous.” At least not for the reason he thought I was. “I don’t care about Scott.”
“Uh huh.” He moved to straightening the chairs.
I ran around to the other side of the table so I was facing him. “I’m not! And I’m not suggesting that she’s not a professional or that she isn’t serious about her sponsorship. I’m saying that despite the fact that she is, she’s into him.” For that matter, Scott was pretty professional too. He generally left his philandering to off-hours.
Brett paused again. This time he looked at me—really looked at me. “How do you know that?”
“I just…” No way I was telling him that she was a mirror of my own current emotions for Brett, but thinking about that made me alert to the knowledge that we were alone together. Truly alone. For the first time in days. “A woman knows these things,” I said softer. “She had a nervous energy about going to talk to Scott. Alone.”
He shrugged. “He’s intimidating. He controls the future of her pitch. Of course she was nervous.”
“Different kind of nervous. Her eyes got dark.”
“She has dark eyes.”
“They were darker. And she had that ‘Am I wearing cute panties?’ look on her face. I could practically smell the pheromones shooting off of her.”
He laughed, but he was listening to me. Regarding me. “Say she is into him—”
“She is.”
He set his executive notebook down on the table. “And he’s into her—”
“What hot girl is Scott not into?” In the past, I would have flinched saying that, but today there was nothing.
Brett didn’t say anything, but I could tell he realized it too. “And if both of them are professionals...what might happen between them?”
It stung that he cared.
Unless he cared because he knew I could answer the question from experience.
I pretended it was the latter—it wasn’t hard with his eyes burning into me so intensely—and slowly stalked around to his side of the table. “Well, it will start innocently enough. She’ll walk into his office with an agenda.” I stopped, two chairs away from him. “Then she’ll forget it when she gets close enough to shake his hand.”
“Stupid ritual,” Brett said.
“It is. And they might even forgo it since they’ve met before, but she’ll walk up to him anyway. She won’t be able to resist.”
As though he couldn’t resist, Brett took a step closer to me. “Then he’d close the distance? To get a better sniff of her perfume.”
I was a connoisseur of fragrances, and in her week at the office, I hadn’t detected anything notable coming from Tess.
On the other hand, I was currently wearing Marc Jacobs Perfect Eau de Perfum that I’d picked up recently at Ulta.
My heart skipped.
“He’ll say something funny so he can casually lean in to do it, and she’ll put her hand on him. ‘Oh, Scott.’” I placed my hand on his chest to demonstrate.
He looked down at my hand on his pec. “He’ll make a comment about her nail polish. How it matches her lip color.”
“And she’ll know that what he’s really saying is that he’s thinking about her mouth wrapped around his cock.”
The fortune of having my hand over his heart was that I felt when his pulse picked up. He didn’t move away when it did.
In fact, he suddenly seemed somehow closer, and the tension in the room turned up to ten. “Will he know she gets what he’s thinking?” Brett’s voice was a low rumble.