“I would, Em, but it’s been trying. I’ll figure something out. Besides, adversity only toughens me up,” I tell her, wishing I could believe it. “Otherwise, I’ll never make it through this court case unless I ditch the tender-assed, softy act.”
“Toughening?” Em asks. “Tender…? You’re a lawyer, Vi. Not steak.” Her high-pitched voice huffs, and I hear the flip of notebook pages on her end, her usual sign of frustration. “Besides…” she comments, her tone lowering. “I know why you’ve really been acting weird lately. Might it have something to do with this new slice of beef coming to the office? Or are you still crushing on that older George Clooney type AKA Daddy David King?”
I roll my eyes, soon hanging up Emily’s call, setting my bags to the side and my thoughts to David King.
Emily’s supposed “Clooney of a Daddy.”
And still my boss.
David King was a legend. Always has been.
The irony doesn’t escape me that one of the most attractive men in law works for my firm—as I’m sure it hasn’t escaped any other woman within fifty miles. A salt-and-pepper haired daydream with deep set eyes and an even deeper knowledge for the law, David King was everything I’d once wanted to be.
Fearless. Full of hard-hitting honesty and doggedness.
The man had once been considered mystical, seductively arrogant. A legend to every upcoming law school student—including me, I’d crushed on him because he was a myth—a story to tell.
I crushed on him because, like every little girl who dreams of dating her teeny-bopper puppy love, I’d wanted to believe in “something.” Something good—even if it wasn’t real.
What I’d dreamed about with David King was a fiction tale. A folklore.
What I’d wanted with Heath? Well, there was nothing fictional about it.
And every moment I spent with him, every laugh we shared, every joke, every touch was just another stack of cement on the thought that had been forming in my mind.
My stomach now twists at the thought of him. Not from daydreaming about him, no. Not that. But from the sudden understanding, the overwhelming, tiring and inexplicable awareness, that of all the things I do want, David King—fantasy that he once was to me—no longer qualifies.
I no longer want him at all. It’s a frustrating reality in spite of everything.
Because Heath Sparrow was right in all the ways that felt most wrong. Handsome. Devilish. Charming. With a smile that sent a lightning bolt between my thighs and the easy walk of a man with a golden cock, Heath Sparrow doesn’t just put people at ease… He seduces them into it.
And I’ve been seduced by him from the moment we met.
It wasn’t enough that David was considered the phenom at the firm. The second Heath walked onto the floor, he had shown that it was his to take. And the firm wasn’t all that belonged to him…
Every day, I give more and more of myself to him.
To the seductive playboy. My CEO. My boss.
And every day, I fight—like hell—with myself not to want to give him more. Bouncing between the urge to tear him limb from limb and tear his clothes off, I battle with my body not to do both, a small tidbit I would never share with anyone.
Not even my closest girlfriends.
I’d had to choose between career and love before…and lost a bit of both in the process. As a woman in charge of her own life, I still struggle with one or the other all the damn time, and what is most frustrating to me is that at the moments I least expect, life comes along and spits all over my perfect plans.
“Why Heath?” My body wants to scream. “Why now?”
He was supposed to be a fuck. A fling, at the most. So why couldn’t I get this fucked-up fling out of my head? And more importantly… my heart.
Both my head and my heart are still hammering by the time Heath slides back into his seat. I’m a veritable mess when he returns, his body still chilled as he swings in beside me, his warm, minty breath blowing over his freezing cold hands. He rubs them in front of me with a laugh, glancing at the driver up front.
“Where to next, Rudolph?”
“It’s up to you, sir.”
Heath’s face is full of joy, sprinkled with tinsel and glitter as he grins in my face, his thin nose red at the tip as he questions me. “M’lady? Where would you like to go?”
My heart beat slows as I stare at him. And as I reach up to swipe the shiny strands of Christmas sparkle from his sandy hair, my chest squeezes from the sudden emotion, the unexpected gift I didn’t know I needed from Heath giving me pieces of my battered past back. Pieces I’d forgotten felt so good.
All in the span of one evening.
I glance up at him, knowing what my answer will be. His eyes widen when I answer.
I lick my lips, grinning. “Your place.”
Chapter Twenty
HEATH
I needed to be with Violet Keats again tonight. For reasons I don’t even want to admit.
I had to see if she was as sexy as I remember her being. Was her voice really that low and husky? Were her eyes really that goddamned blue?
Couldn’t have been.
She can’t be as irresistible as I remember. She just can’t. The booze, the engagement party, the ambiance—it all had to have been playing a trick on my mind.
I never fixated on a woman … Until now.
She’s been the hardest to shake. And a part of me—stubborn and sick—was in desperate need to get rid of her. To shake her out of my system.
The poisonous parts of me needed to nix the disillusionment that I’ve been having about her so that I can get back to being the Heath I was always comfortable being—the Heath who didn’t have mid-day fantasies about a woman he doesn’t know, the Heath who only has a hard-on for one wily woman.
She wasn’t my first one-night stand. Not by a long shot. I just needed my cock to remember that so I could go back to making him normal again, and when we step out of the heated car and into the chilled night air, when Violet bunches in closer as we cross the curb outside of my apartment building, I can’t help but to put my arm around her—to pull her tiny body into mine and take in her fragrance.
The scent of sweet strawberries and cream.
I can practically taste it—taste her.
The rising elevator to my penthouse seems to take forever. With Christmas bags over one arm and Violet cuddled closely under the other, we walk slowly to the front door of my luxury apartment, each step agonizing, the long walk nothing but a wake-up call that this—what I have with Violet—is real.
Realer than anything I’ve ever had with any woman.
I insert my key into the entry’s opening, turning the lock. But before I can push the door open, I spin Violet in my arms, brushing thick auburn-red strands off her shoulders, my fingers sliding down her back to follow. I gaze into her gorgeous face, finding lust.
Finding all the answers I need.
I bend down to her, my fingers grazing across her tiny waist. My gut tightens.
“You don’t have to do this, Keats,” I probe. “You know that, don’t you?”
She smiles slowly. “Call me Keats one more time and I’ll have to kill you.”