Page 7 of One Wicked Night with the Boss

But she continued examining the carving, her arched brows drawing together as she concentrated. Up close, I could see the dusting of freckles across her nose and the faint laugh lines radiating from her baby blues.

Oh yeah. Riley O’Sullivan was a woman who laughed. I imagined her caught up in unabashed mirth, her head thrown back, all that mahogany hair around her shoulders. When Irish eyes are smiling, sure, they steal your heart away. My pops sang that song around the house when I was a kid. I heard it a thousand times without giving much thought to the lyrics. I certainly never found them sexy.

Until now.

The buttons on her shirt were working overtime to keep everything together. With her jacket gone, the thin fabric gaped from her chest to her waist, giving me glimpses of deep cleavage and a flat belly. Her pulse fluttered at the base of her throat, where a tantalizing hollow dipped between her delicate collarbones. I let my gaze linger there a moment, then ran it down the peekaboo buttons that revealed more than they concealed.

She moved even closer, until she was near enough for me to catch a hint of her scent—something feminine and clean, like the heady fragrance of roses after a rainstorm. Gaze on the frieze, she tilted her head. Then she bit her bottom lip, white teeth pressing into plump pink.

And just like that, I was jealous of a strip of walnut.

“Battle of Jericho,” she murmured, reminding me she earned a master’s in architecture from Harvard, where she’d specialized in historical preservation. Judging from the intelligence burning in her eyes, daddy hadn’t paid her way in, either. She told the truth about that. Which meant she was in my office because she wanted an internship.

It wasn’t a surprise. She’d walked in with a portfolio under her arm and hope in her eyes. What was surprising were the clinging clothes and sky-high heels. They were old tricks, and she didn’t need them. Then again, maybe she thought I did.

She sighed, making the little bow between her breasts rise and fall.

My cock pressed hard against the front of my trousers.

Yeah, well, maybe she had a point.

In the game of life, it paid to use every available weapon in the arsenal. I could respect that. If Riley intended to capture my attention, she certainly had it. But I wasn’t going to let her throw me off balance. If we were playing a game, she was already up a point or two. She’d intrigued me. Now she was inching closer to impressing me. What would she do next?

My blood heated, my veins surging with something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Anticipation.

She turned from the frieze and picked up the list of tasks I’d given her. In profile, her chest and ass gave her an hourglass shape that made my fingers itch to unwrap her curves and find out if what lay underneath was as incredible as I imagined.

A cold draft whistled down the passageway, ruffling my hair and dropping the temperature at least ten degrees. Good old Boston weather. The way the sky appeared earlier, we were due for a storm.

Riley looked up from the list and left the bathroom, her heels clicking on the tile. The peephole’s position gave me a perfect view of her firm backside as she moved into the library attached to my office. Even as a little-used corner of my conscience whispered it was wrong to observe her, I knew I was going to do it anyway.

The game was afoot. And I was determined to even the score.

---