Page 137 of Charming Deception

And I’m a living, breathing mind-blown emoji.

I snap out of it, willing myself to function.

I get up and go over to him. “Aw. Come here.” I take his hand and bring him to sit down on one of the cushy bench seats along the wall. I sit on the upright seat at one end of it, and he lies back.

“What happens in book three?” He starts babbling again, like he’s spilling to a therapist, and I have to bite my lip to keep from giggling. “I mean, book one ended on a cliff-hanger too but they were okay. There were those two men who tried to attack Rowan in the woods but then Wolf saved her and you could’ve stopped right there and I’d be happy that they were together and they were safe. But then you just kept writing and now I need them to be okay. You know. Together.”

He finishes, staring at the ceiling, like he’s still reliving it all in his head.

“Jameson?”

“Yeah?” He blinks at me, like I’ve just yanked him back to reality.

“You know what this means, right?”

“What?”

“You’re a romantic.”

He groans, like it’s a loathsome curse to bear. “Don’t tell my brothers.”

* * *

Jameson wore a three-piece suit onto the jet, but I manage to convince him to take a break from reading and get changed into his lounging clothes. He emerges from the bathroom in soft sweats and a T-shirt, looking as delectable as he does in a suit, and far more touchable.

Dear Lord.

If he really is trying to resist fucking me for my brother’s sake, no wonder he avoids bedtime. It’s way too intimate.

I’m already in sleep shorts and my Dirty nightshirt, a soft blanket for each of us in hand. The sky outside has darkened to a deep azure in the west as the sun melts into the horizon, and to the east, where we’re headed, it’s pretty black.

“Chat for a while, then sleep?” I ask hopefully, holding up the blankets like a safe buffer between us.

He holds up a bottle of wine. “Add wine to that and you read my mind.”

He pours us each a glass, and we settle onto a couple of the big reclining captain’s chairs near the front of the cabin. There’s a small table between us where we set the bottle of German Riesling he chose, my favorite wine, in a bucket of ice that the flight attendant brings out at the tap of a button; he vanishes again into a room at the back, leaving us alone.

Locke and Rurik are back there somewhere, too. Jameson told me he never travels without at least two men.

We touch glasses and drink. “Tell me more about what we’re doing in Paris?” I ask him.

“Well, we’ll be enjoying your first time there.”

“Ah yes, my virgin French experience.” I mean that as sexually as it sounds and laugh when his eyebrow lifts slightly. His eyes darken, landing hungrily on my lips. “I may flirt more in Paris. Just to warn you. I feel like I’ll be drinking a lot of wine.” I swig my wine gratuitously.

“It’s the French way,” he says simply.

I’m not sure if he means the flirting or the wine, but I’ll take plenty of both.

However, the heat in his eyes clears so quickly, I wonder if I imagined it. “And I’ll be working. Though it probably won’t look like it.”

“What does ‘work’ for Jameson Vance even look like?” I inquire. He works from home while I write during the day, but I don’t actually see what he does. I’ve only ever glimpsed him on business calls here or there.

He told me he has a corporate office in Vancouver, and I know he has an executive assistant named Annabeth who seems to work her butt off for him there, but it doesn’t seem like he ever goes there.

“Whatever you do, don’t ask my brothers that question,” he says dryly. “My job is hard to define, if you’re someone like Graysen or Harlan. As our CEO and CFO, they only see in numbers. I’m our head of marketing, but sometimes, I don’t think even they know what that means. We work with a lot of celebrities, from athletes to actors, to align our luxury brands with the right ambassadors. I oversee the general direction of things, and I’m the one out there forging and maintaining a lot of the relationships that are essential to our business. So my work, when it comes down to it, is mostly envisioning our future, and social meetings.”

I smile a little. “Is that code for daydreaming and parties?”

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