Talking Dirty with the CEO - By Jackie Ashenden Page 0,23
“No, of course not.” Her voice had a husky, smoky quality that sounded downright illegal.
“Liar,” he murmured, holding her gaze. “You’re as turned on as I am.”
The tension in the room pulled achingly tight.
Then there was a brief knock on the door and Liz, clearly oblivious to the mood she’d just killed, poked her head around it. “Five minutes, Joseph.”
Ah, shit. Already? “Thanks for the reminder, Liz,” he said through gritted teeth.
Christie blinked and sat back in her seat, pushing back a thick lock of hair that had fallen over her eye. “Great. Thanks for wasting my time, Mr. Ashton.” She said his name with particular emphasis. “Now give me my damn phone.”
If she thought he was going to let her go so easily, she had another think coming. He wanted his explanation.
Not just an explanation. Don’t kid yourself.
May as well admit it. He wanted her, too.
She sat across from him, arms folded, looking all stern and annoyed. And all he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and kiss her. Find the passion they’d had in his bathroom.
He’d never experienced anything like it in all his life, and he’d be damned if he let the chance of experiencing it again slip through his fingers.
Joseph leaned back against the couch. “No,” he said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no, you can’t have your phone back.”
“Why the hell not?” The green sparks in her eyes had become tiny flames.
“Because I want to know why you ran out on me. And I’ve got a feeling getting an explanation from you is going to take longer than five minutes.”
“Are you always this irritating?”
“Frequently.”
Her chin lifted. “I don’t have to give you anything.”
“Yeah, you do.” He held her gaze, letting her see what was in his. “You came apart in my arms, Christie St. John. You screamed my name. You gave me the best orgasm of my life. Then you left me standing there with my pants around my ankles, trying to figure out what happened.”
She blushed, the red chasing over her face like a forest fire over snow. She opened her mouth but he raised a hand, silencing her. The hand that held her phone.
“So here’s how this is going to go. If you want your phone, if you want your precious interview, you’re going to have to give me a full and frank explanation of why you left.” He smiled. “At my place.”
…
Christie gaped. Then realized she was gaping and shut her mouth before she started looking like some kind of moronic fish.
His place? This interview was turning into the debacle of the century. She’d decided to act as if the whole one-night stand thing hadn’t happened. Tough it out. But had that ever been mistake. One mention of the vanity incident and she’d been stammering like an idiot. Then, for some reason, the net had been ultra-slow and she hadn’t been able to download her questions from her cloud storage drive. And then he’d bloody hijacked her damn phone.
Crap. Crap. Crap.
Joseph sat opposite her on the soft plush red couch, one arm along the back of it, holding her phone in the other. A relaxed pose. As if he had all the time in the world.
“Well?” He raised an eyebrow. “What do you think? Do we have a deal?”
As if she could actually think with him sitting there, looking so damn gorgeous. She’d thought from the pictures she’d unearthed on the net that he wouldn’t be her type, but had she ever been wrong. The pictures hadn’t captured his formidable charisma, the fizzing, buzzing energy that crackled around him like cut electrical wires. The energy that had been so compelling that night outside the bar.
Christie tried to kick-start her sluggish brain cells. “Your place?”
“Yeah.” He smiled that incredible smile of his and a few more of her brain cells expired in ecstasy.
“As in go home with you?”
“I think that’s what I said, didn’t I?”
Christie’s mouth dried, a peculiar feeling curling through her body. A weird combination of fear and anticipation and…excitement. She tried to ignore it. “But why your place?”
Joseph’s gaze turned intent. He fiddled with her phone, turning it over and over in one long-fingered hand. “Would you like a benign, well-intentioned lie or complete honesty?”
Something about the way he said it made all the air in her immediate vicinity feel very thin. “Um… Maybe honesty,” she said unsteadily.
His movements stilled. The look in his eyes pinned her to the spot. “Because after the interview, I’m planning on