grip. She leaned in and kissed him, and from the way Chance reacted, her tongue must have gone pretty deep down his throat.
“You’re fucking amazing,” I whispered into Lacey’s ear as I squeezed her thigh, my hand running even further up her leg, pressing her short little fucking dress up as I groped her.
I pulled the contract out of my briefcase and opened it up to the first page that needed to be signed.
When Anya’s tongue finally let Chance go, he looked down at the contract. He was drunk, horny—and most importantly of all—felt like the biggest man on this whole damn ship.
He grinned wide at me. “You have a pen?”
As he was signing, he looked up at me. “Make sure Lacey is here next time we meet. No offense, Noah, but I feel like she understands my work on a deeper level. I know that you know your stuff, but you’re more of a numbers guy. I get the feeling that Lacey understands true art, and that’s something I want to see when I commit to another book with you.”
“Of course,” I said, “she’ll be there. We are getting married, of course. ‘Till death do us part.”
I avoided looking at her as I said this part. Things were going really well right now between us, but it could have just been the heat of the moment. Telling Chance that Lacey would be there “next time,” which was two or so years from now, was potentially a complete lie. Maybe we’d sleep together—or maybe she’d get cold feet before then, and we wouldn’t even sleep together at all—and after two years she’d be completely out of my life.
The thought of that hurt. Thinking of her not being there in any capacity was like an arrow to my chest. Not a cupid arrow, but an arrow from some kind of barbarian. The ones who put poison frog goo on their arrow tips to make it even more deadly.
9
Lacey
It was like fireworks going off inside me. I’d somehow managed to close a deal that—if I had counted the zeroes on the contract correctly—was worth at least $20 million dollars. There had been a lot of other little subsections in the contract that threw in another million or two here or there, and I’d been sneakily reading the terms across the table and upside down, so maybe I’d misread. The point was, I’d just made Noah much more than a million dollars. That much was for sure.
Oh, also, his hand on my thigh. There was that. His hand was strong, rough, and possessive. I absolutely loved the feeling of him holding me like that. He did it casually and confidently, and he looked me brazenly in the eye, a devilish twinkle forming as he grinned at me.
We both knew, didn’t we? We both had wanted this since the moment we’d laid eyes on each other.
When I’d discovered that he was Noah Black, and that I technically hated his guts, that had just put a little bit of a wrench in things. It had been a test to see if I really had been that attracted.
Depending on the desired outcome, I either passed the test with flying colors, or bombed the shit out of it, because I badly wanted to sleep with the man that I supposedly hated.
Chance tried to order us more drinks, but Anya pur her fingers to his lips, looked at him with some truly intense “Let’s fuck” eyes, and she dragged him right out of the bar.
Once the two of them were gone, Noah didn’t let go of my thigh, but there was a strange feeling in the air. We were sitting together at this table, suddenly alone with each other. There was no longer a single thing keeping us apart. It was the feeling I used to get on the last day of school, when I suddenly realized that I had an entire summer in front of me. I’d imagined all the things I could do with that extra time, and how I’d make the most of each day. And then I’d gone home and watched Kim Possible and eaten popsicles.
I wasn’t going to just watch cartoons and eat popsicles now though, I really did want to seize the moment this time.
We were just staring at each other now, our faces inches away. My head tilted, and I moved a fraction of an inch forward. “Noah…”
He closed the rest of the distance, but not cautiously or scared like I