Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (119 page)

“Oh—oh, yeah, we definitely do,” he
agreed, nodding. He looked around and spotted a bench. “Do you want to sit down
and talk about that before we head in?” He seemed so reasonable, so pleasant; I
have to admit that it threw me for a moment.

“Okay,” I agreed, walking with him towards
the empty bench. I swallowed against the tight, dry feeling in my throat and
tried to compose my thoughts. I’d planned for every contingency except Zeke
being completely upfront and polite about the situation between us. That had
been my mistake. “I can’t invite you over anymore, and we can’t…” I glanced up,
trying to gauge his reaction. “We can’t kiss, or have sex, or do anything like
that again.” Zeke held my gaze for a moment before nodding.

“I’m moving forward in the program, and
I’m going to be starting to actually date,” he said, nodding again. “We need to
keep things between us professional.”

“Exactly,” I said, for a minute more than
a little flustered.
Was it… Surely it
isn’t that he thinks I’m bad in bed or something?
I should have been happy
that he was being so cooperative, but the fact that he didn’t even put up a
fight about no longer kissing or having sex gave me a moment of self-doubt that
I couldn’t quite move past. “The most important aspect of this for me is that I
really do need to keep my job,” I said, smiling again nervously. “And if Katie
finds out about what we’ve done…”

Zeke grinned. “I assume she’d probably
throw both of us out of the agency for it. You for breaking professional rules,
and me for…” he stopped short. “Violating a boundary with one of her coaches.
Not a good sign, I’d think.”

“Well,” I said, feeling my cheeks burning.
“I don’t know for sure that she’d throw you out just like that, but she would
definitely fire me.” I laughed, kind of forcing it, but I didn’t know what else
to do.

“I wouldn’t want to see you fired over
something that I can just as easily not do,” he said, smiling at me slightly.
“So, now that we have that out of the way: laser tag?” I laughed a little more
genuinely and nodded, standing up from the bench.

I still felt nervous somehow, with my skin
tingling and my heart beating faster in my chest, but as Zeke led the way to
the ticket counter, I could at least find it in me to be pleased at the fact
that he hadn’t lived up to my worst nightmares about what our conversation
could go like. He was being professional and polite—which I really should have
expected of him, considering that my first criticisms were that he was too
businesslike in his interactions.

We picked up our passes and went into the
building, finding the outfitting station. For the first several rounds, we put
ourselves on the same team together, and darted around in the black light
darkness, shooting at the members of the other team, crouching under and behind
the different obstacles, laughing and shouting with everyone else. I started to
relax more and more as we went in together again and again, and then as we
waited our turn for another room in the laser tag complex, or grabbed a quick
bite to eat and a beer for our break. The place didn’t really have much in the
way of food—chicken strips, some burgers, hotdogs and fries—but we scarfed down
our meals and took the opportunity to wander around the smaller arcade part of
the building for a few minutes while we let it all settle in our stomachs.

“What do you say we go on separate teams
when we go back in?” I raised an eyebrow at Zeke in challenge, grinning up at
him. Things couldn’t be the way that they had been before we’d ever kissed or
had sex, but I thought they could almost—maybe—be better, with our deeper
understanding of where each of us was coming from.

“Oh—I see how it is. You think you can
take me?” I nodded.

“I absolutely do,” I told him. “I think I
can take you out in five minutes flat.”

Zeke laughed. “I’ll see if I can pay
someone to close down one of the smaller rooms for us later on, and we’ll go
one-on-one.”

“Why don’t we just stick to being on
different teams for now?” I strapped on the equipment again and grabbed the gun
I’d put aside when we’d decided to eat, and grinned up at Zeke. “Then if you’re
feeling ambitious, we can discuss getting a private room to ourselves.”

“Deal,” he said, looking at me with
challenge in his eyes. We went into the laser tag section together and found a
group that one of the employees was splitting up into teams. Zeke took one
side, and I went to the other, grinning to myself.

“I’ve got the big blond,” I told the
woman, who told me she and her friends were at the place for their bachelorette
party. “I need to prove a point.”

We went four rounds with different teams,
picking different sides each time. The first time, I got the drop on Zeke and
tagged him out within three minutes of the round. The second time we went in,
he managed to sneak up on me, letting his teammates pick out their friends on
my side, while he devoted himself to dodging my team’s fire and getting to me
while I was besieged. The third time we managed—somehow—to shoot each other at
exactly the same instant, and we were both out of the game at the same time.
“Okay, this one is the tie-breaker,” Zeke said, while we waited in line again.
“If you win it, then we can grab another beer and relax and call the date
done.”

“If you get me out?” I crossed my arms
over the sensor covering my chest.

“Then we get a private room and see who’s
really the best, when there isn’t anyone else to interfere,” he told me
matter-of-factly. I considered it; I was starting to get tired from the running
around, but I thought I might have a couple more rounds in me.

“Deal,” I said, extending my hand to
shake. Zeke’s fingers closed around mine and I felt that hot jolt through my
body—that feeling that I’d felt every time I’d come into contact with his body.
I pushed it aside, reminding myself that we had both agreed to keep things
strictly professional and platonic, and pumped his hand twice before letting
go.

We plunged into the darkness with our
teams, and I immediately found the best hiding spot I could get to without
being tagged out by one of the members of the other team. I tried to spot Zeke,
but it was impossible in the darkness. I shot at anyone whose vest was red instead
of the blue my team’s vests showed, not really caring who I was tagging
out—except that I wanted to make sure to get Zeke.

I had to dart out of my hiding spot at one
point, and I heard Zeke’s voice off to the side of me, a few yards away. I shot
in that direction and hoped for the best, knowing it would be next to
impossible to find him again until the crowd thinned a little bit. All at once,
my vest lit up—someone had hit me. “Shit!” I went off to the sidelines to wait
for the round to be over, fuming to myself. I wasn’t sure who it had been—and
as soon as I saw Zeke, walking towards the benches in the “time out” area at
the same time as me, I smirked.

“You didn’t get me out,” Zeke said to me
tartly.

“And you didn’t get me out, either,” I
pointed out. He laughed.

“Call it even, then?” I nodded. I was
panting from running around so much, and my thighs were starting to ache from
crouching, jumping, and tumbling around. We waited for the round to end and
turned in our gear to head over to the bar on the other end of the facility.

We chatted for a little while longer
before I realized I only had about fifteen minutes before Brady’s sitter would
need to go home. As I gave Zeke a quick kiss on the cheek and hurried out of the
laser tag arcade, I hoped against hope that it was a sign of good things to
come: we’d go back at least mostly to the way things had been before and I
could keep my job and my conscience intact.

Chapter
Twenty Four

Zeke

Two days after my date with Natalie to
laser tag, I decided to go out to dinner by myself rather than staying in; I
felt restless, anxious for my date to come and irritable from impatience. I
went to one of my go-to restaurants, Mise en Place, a little bit before the
dinner rush was set to start.

“Good evening, Mr. Baxter,” the hostess
said, smiling at me.

“Have you got a table open? I’m alone this
evening—I will take anything.”

“You’re right on time; we have a two-top
that’s available and unreserved,” the cute, young brunette told me. She grabbed
a menu and led me through the dining room. Glancing around, I saw that I wasn’t
the only one that had had the idea of coming in before the rush—there were a
few married couples, who I assumed probably had kids they needed to go home to
early, and a few elderly couples and groups at the tables. The hostess stopped
at a two-seat table and pulled out one of the chairs for me and I sat down,
continuing to look around me for a few more moments.

My gaze landed on a table along the same
wall where I’d been seated, and I stared in shock at the sight of Natalie,
seated opposite a tall, middle-aged man in a suit. She had her hair pulled back
into the trademark bun I usually saw it in, and she was wearing a blazer and
blouse. Immediately, watching her, I felt jealous. Who was that man she was
with?
Balding…the suit doesn’t fit that
well on him…he’s not nearly good enough for her.
In the quiet of the dining
room, I barely caught the sound of Natalie’s voice saying, “I’m glad you were
able to meet with me so soon, Mr. Giles…”
Oh.
I could have slapped myself—of course, Natalie was meeting with a client. I
took a deep breath, turning my attention once more onto the menu. I had come to
the restaurant to eat. I had no claim on Natalie, and even if I had, she was on
a professional date, a first meeting—or so I assumed—with a new client.

The waiter came and I tore my attention
away from Natalie and her client long enough to figure out what I wanted to
order: pan-fried trout with roasted potatoes and sautéed green beans, with a
mixed vegetable salad to start, and a glass of wine to go with it all. The
waiter left the table, and I tried to occupy myself with my phone, but I
couldn’t help glancing at Natalie every few moments, wondering how she was
doing.

As her date with her new client went on, I
could tell it wasn’t going nearly as well as my first meeting had been. She was
seated just far enough away that I couldn’t hear most of what was happening,
but I caught the sight of frustration on her face, along with a few expressions
that looked pretty dismayed. I started to wonder if I shouldn’t intervene, but
for all I knew, the guy she was coaching, her new client, was just saying some
particularly terrible things about women in general.

My salad and wine came and I tried to make
myself mind my own business. I doubted that Natalie would want me to interfere
with her work—even if it didn’t seem like a very pleasant meeting for her.
She told you she’s used to handling clients,
and she’s been doing it for months now—I’m sure she’s figured out ways to deal
with even irritating or terrible people.
I couldn’t help glancing her way
as I heard her date’s voice beginning to rise over the muted murmur of the
dining room though. I caught a fragment of a sentence from him here and there:
“…it’s not like you have any authority over me…” “…You’re just someone the
agency hired…” “We both know that you’re just…”

I glanced at Natalie’s face—she was
looking more and more upset the longer the date went on, and I was starting to
get angry for her sake. It was pretty obvious to me why the man she was meeting
with would need a matchmaker to find a girlfriend or wife: I couldn’t imagine
anyone who would treat someone who was supposed to be helping him so poorly
would have much luck with women in general.
How
many of her clients are assholes like this guy?

In spite of how hard I could tell Natalie
was working to maintain her composure, as the date continued, and her client
started to get louder, I started to hear her speaking to him as she pitched her
voice to be heard over his ranting. “Mr. Giles, I need to insist that you
remain professional right now…” “Then yes, I will absolutely be making a report
about your current inability to work with a coach…” “I would really rather we
came to an accord in terms of how we’re going to proceed, but if you insist…”

My main dish came, but even though it
smelled amazing, I couldn’t quite make myself eat it. I was too wrapped up in
the unfolding drama of Natalie’s date with her new client. It seemed impossible
to me that she should—or would—put up with the kind of comments I could hear
him making. If it had been me in her shoes, I was sure I would have already
left the restaurant, but somehow she managed to mostly keep her composure and
keep going through the date. The rest of the dining room started to get quieter
and quieter as the man that Natalie was with became more and more obstreperous.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Baxter?” I
looked away from the couple a few tables down and glanced at the waiter.

“Isn’t there something you can do about
the man at that table?” I nodded in the direction of Natalie and her client.

“I think one of the waiters has asked him
to keep his voice down, but unfortunately…” The waiter shrugged, indicating his
helplessness. “He’s an investor in this restaurant, so he’s a little more
difficult to kick out than the average customer.” My stomach twisted with
disgust at the sight of the man.