Sleeping With the Opposition (Bad Boy Bosses) (9 page)

He paused and waited for her to sit behind her desk before he took one of the plush seats in front of her and crossed his heel over his knee. His leg bounced as she emptied the bag, proving he was still jacked from his workout. A Leo with adrenaline pouring through his system was a horny Leo, and for her, it was like a triple orgasm just waiting to happen. Her body read the signs and was just as ready to go.

Her blood pumped; her breathing thinned; her skin heated.

She forced herself to focus on the food. It smelled divine. Garlic bread, Caesar salad, and a big Styrofoam bowl of steaming minestrone soup, complete with cutlery and napkins, and even a bottle of water. Her stomach growled so loud that Leo chuckled. “Aren’t you glad now that I came?”

She jerked her gaze up. Just like that, the teasing smile on his face shifted into something deeper, less casual, more intimate.

After a loaded moment during which she couldn’t look away, he simply said, “You better eat that before it gets cold.”

He got up from the chair and walked to the window, and Bria could breathe again. She popped the lid off her soup and breathed deeply before scooping a hearty spoonful into her mouth. It was heaven. Warm and comforting. The bread satisfied all her carb cravings, and the creamy salad gave the illusion that she was eating healthy.

When she was done, she watched him for a few minutes, finishing her bottle of water. His profile screamed to her of strength, focus, and success, all the things she should want.

And she did. She wanted those things, but it wasn’t enough.

He turned to her with a smile. “Did you know that you can see your old building from here?” he asked.

“What building?”

“That run-down place you had when we started dating.”

“Really?” That had been almost four years ago. God, they’d come so far since then. She stood and joined him at the window. She hadn’t taken the time to examine the view yet. It had been more important to keep working, stay busy, so she wouldn’t stop and think about what she had done to her career and her life in the heat of the moment.

He pointed out to the left. “It’s about four blocks that way.”

She peered out. “Where? How can you tell? It’s so dark, there’s no way you could see it.”

He moved behind her and leaned down to get to the same eye level. His chin touched her shoulder, and he lifted his arm in front of her and pointed again. “Right…there. See? You can just catch the corner of that blinking pepper sign from the all-night grocery store next door.”

Sparks raced across her skin at his nearness, his touch, his warm breath on her cheek. It was a conflagration of sensation she hadn’t prepared herself for and didn’t have the strength to fight against.

“Remember how that used to drive you crazy?” he said.

She saw it, too. The red, green, and yellow lights shaped like three different-colored bell peppers, with the words
Fresh Mart
arching above them and
Guaranteed
in a half circle below. That place had been a dump, but he’d never complained when she suggested hanging out there instead of his fancy apartment. When it came to money, Leo had always been several lengths ahead of her. As part of his Plan, he’d decided he needed to be rich, richer than an average lawyer’s salary could make him, and so he’d learned everything he could about investing. By the time his firm was doing well enough to net him six figures personally, he’d already made way more than that on his own.

She groaned. “I can’t believe it didn’t drive
you
crazy. That stupid sign was right outside the bedroom window, and it was on all day and all night, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, even Christmas.”

“Well, at least at Christmas, the colors kind of blended into the rest of the street’s holiday lighting.” He chuckled, his wide chest rising and falling against her shoulders. “Besides, with those things on and Mr. Dees’s son’s stereo going all night, I never had any need for candles and romantic music to woo you.”

Although the reminder of all their history put a lump in her throat, she had to laugh. The single father who’d lived in the unit directly below her had worked the night shift most weeks, which meant his fifteen-year-old son had enjoyed a lot of freedom. “Your memory is failing if you think Randall’s rap music was romantic. Do you think Mr. Dees knew that his son had his girlfriend in the apartment with him every night while he was at work?”

“He told me one time when I was on my way up those endless stairs to see you”—the apartment had been a walk-up, with Mr. Dees and his son on the third floor, and Bria on the fourth—“that since the kids were going to find a way to be together one way or another, he’d rather know that they were safe in his house than out there somewhere on the street.”

Leo moved back and braced his hip against the window ledge with his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles.

His profile took her breath away. As his gaze swung the length of her office, she could breathe again, but her racing heart didn’t seem to know that, and her overheated flesh didn’t seem to care.

He faced her. “How are you doing here? Are they treating you right?” he asked gently. She recognized the genuine concern in his voice, and her throat tightened. From the moment they’d met, there had been an intense chemistry between them that had sizzled, crackled, and popped. They’d jumped into a whirlwind relationship.

Bria hadn’t ever known Leo without the hard-core sexual component being a factor, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been softness, too, and that they hadn’t been friends as well as lovers…before.

She bit her lip. “It’s not exactly what I thought it would be,” she admitted. Part of her didn’t want to say it aloud, especially to him, but it wasn’t the same working alone, without Leo by her side tag-teaming the files. She wanted to be the hard-core career woman who made partner before the age of thirty and was defined by something other than her husband’s success and her child-rearing abilities, but she was starting to fear that she might be too soft to do it on her own.

She hated this weakness, this doubt and fear…and oh God, the wanting. She still wanted Leo so bad, it was a hard ball lodged in her gut.

She sucked in her breath and moved as far away from the window as she could, which put her pretty much at the office door.

The air thinned as Leo straightened again and followed. Like a slow-moving, heat-seeking missile, he closed the distance between them. “I’ve missed you so damn much,” he murmured. “This agreement has been torture. Pretending we’re just two people passing the time before going our separate ways.”

She swallowed and couldn’t stop looking at his mouth.

She blamed the food for making her complacent, the intimacy of the deserted offices for her waffling determination. Bria knew all the reasons why she needed to maintain the distance that
she’d
put between them, but right now, none of those reasons seemed as compelling as the warmth of his hand sliding up her arm, or the flutter in her belly as he pulled her flush against his hard body.

When he touched his lips to hers, she didn’t pull away. Her pulse pounded, and she inched even closer and kissed him back. She went on tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck.

With his hands spanning her waist, he lifted her the few inches off the ground and sat her down right on the flat surface of her desk.

She automatically stiffened, but Leo wasn’t letting up. Bold and brash as always, he buried his hands in her hair and pushed himself between her legs, trapping her between him and the furniture. She wasn’t even sure which one to call the rock and which one to call the hard place.

But his lips were soft, scorching her with epic, unrelenting tenderness, and his hands shook with restraint, betraying the force of his need as they lightly smoothed down her back.

Then his arms curled around her waist. She tipped her head back, and his kiss followed the length of her neck, pushing her off-balance until her elbow hit the desk and Leo bent over her.

“Too long since I’ve touched you like this,” he groaned, sliding his open palm down her cheek and curling around her neck possessively. His hips pressed into the cradle of her pelvis. “It’s been way too long, Bria. I can’t stand it anymore.”

She gasped and turned her cheek. “Leo,” she murmured, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “Leo, I can’t—”

“Don’t,” he bit out harshly. “Don’t keep doing this to us. You love me.”

“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I can be with you.”

His jaw clenched. “Why the hell not?”

She pulled back. His gaze was shuttered, but she sensed the turmoil in him. He’d been so calm and controlled, but there was a fountain of frustration and disappointment bleeding from him now. She was pushing him to the breaking point, to the point where he would either finally share his feelings with her…or give up completely and walk away from it all.

“This isn’t about what
I’m
doing to us,” she whispered, her voice failing her. She squirmed off the desk and ducked around him, crossing her arms protectively over her chest.

“Really? Because it sure feels that way from where I’m standing.” The bite in his voice threatened to draw blood. It was full of pain, sadness, anger. All things he had every right to feel. All things she’d needed him to feel a long time ago.

“I wish we could do this so neither of us would be hurt,” she whispered. “So that we could still be friends. But if you’re not going to—”

“Fuck, Bria. Before all this, there was more good than bad to what we had, don’t you agree? Instead of rehashing the bad, shouldn’t we be finding a way to bring back the good and make the most of it?”

He waited for her response with his arm outstretched toward her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He didn’t understand. This was more than just “a bad patch,” and she couldn’t go back.

He dropped his hand and squared his wide shoulders. Her chest ached with defeat and disappointment. He was never going to let her in.

“I guess I’m going,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be home tonight. I trust you can make it back to the house on your own when you’re done here?”

She bit her lip. It was late. He’d already been to the gym. Was he going to his boxing club? Or to…someone?

You have to stop caring.
Whether it was now or after he agreed to give her the divorce, Leo was bound to find someone else…someone who wouldn’t ask for more than he was willing to give.

Her chest constricted, but she quickly tamped it down and hurried to clarify, “Don’t think you can demand more time some other night in lieu of this evening just because it didn’t go the way you wanted it to.”

Was that a wince? He sighed, and his mouth turned up in a brittle smile that had absolutely no humor in it. “Don’t worry.” He sneered. “I’ve had about as much of our
agreement
as I think I can handle for one day.”

He was pissed. Here was the anger she’d been waiting on for weeks, but…it didn’t give her the satisfaction she thought it would to see him finally give in to it.

She crossed her arms. Her stomach flip-flopped, and it was hard to breathe, but she forced a nod. “Fine. Good. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

His jaw tightened as he turned from her without another word. She watched him walk down the hall alone but didn’t follow. He got farther and farther away, and she had to press her hand tightly over her mouth to keep from calling him back.

Only when the darkness beyond the reception area had swallowed him up did she stumble back to the window and bang her head against the cool glass. She raised her hand to trace the outline made by the distant red and green blinking lights of the Fresh Mart, but her fingers shook so badly she clenched them into a fist.
What if he doesn’t come back this time?

Despite all the violence Leo Markham welcomed into his life—whether in the form of hateful spouses on opposite sides of the boardroom table or actual fists coming at his face in the boxing ring—Bria had never, not once, been physically afraid of her husband. And she wasn’t afraid now…but she was afraid of herself. Because the flash of pain crossing his face when she’d jerked away from his touch had shredded her. He’d finally given her a sliver of the emotional response she’d been asking for, and seeing it had made her want to jump into his arms and beg to take it all back.

Why don’t you?
Her focus shifted and instead of looking out the window, she stared at her reflection. “Because it’s not enough,” she whispered to the night. She closed her eyes rather than look at the devastation in her own face reflected back at her. She could still go after him. It would be so easy. She could tell him she was sorry for making demands. She could beg him to forget all the harsh words she’d uttered in the last few weeks and welcome him back into their bedroom. He would forgive and forget, and there would be no hard feelings because he loved her. She knew he did.

But then what? He loved her now, but how long would it be before she got pregnant again? What if she ended up in the hospital again? She wouldn’t survive it if Leo shut down a second time. She couldn’t handle losing her husband and another baby, that horrible feeling of failure and isolation.

…

Leo took deep breaths and swore up at the glittering stars.
You fucked that up royally.

His eyes burned, but he wouldn’t cry. He never cried. His chest ached with the pain he refused to show. He’d been trying so hard to be strong and steady so that Bria could hold on to him and find her way back to a happy place…but it was all spiraling out of control no matter what he did.

He’d been certain that getting her to spend time with him would prove that he was
in
this with her, that it would help remind her how good they were together. But so far it had only proved to
him
that this disconnect between them had gotten worse.

He walked to the curb and flagged down a taxi. “Park Place, between Church and Broadway,” he said to the driver, intending to go to Big Joey’s Boxing Club. “Wait, scratch that.” The smart thing to do would be to go to the gym and release his frustrations on a punching bag—it was open twenty-four hours a day for moments just like this—but he was in the mood for something with a little more edge. He gave the driver an address down by the docks.