Page 4 of The Billionaire's Beauty

In the long pause that follows, I think about how much I want to peel that dress off her, inch by inch. How much I want her scratches on my back and her tongue in my mouth. How much I want to hear my name on her lips when I make her come. And come and come and come.

“I don’t get everything I want,” I say flatly. “Take my word for it.”

The server returns just then, preventing me from seeing Bellamy’s unfiltered reaction to this information. He pops the cork and pours for us, then leaves us to our awkward silence. I wonder why Bellamy’s face and presence, which are constantly by my side at the office, now feel so unusual and intriguing.

Is the rosy romantic lighting at Bemelmans that good? Does that expensive little black dress of hers contain a magical sprinkling of some potent sex potion I need to know about?

Or has my simmering attraction for her finally exceeded my ability to keep it under wraps?

“Anyway,” I say gruffly, raising my glass and renewing my determination to behave like the professional I purport to be. No matter what signals I imagine she’s shooting my way. “Here’s to the upcoming year. Hope it’s a great one. Cheers.”

I give her glass a quick clink—

“Hang on,” she says, pulling her glass back and frowning. “We have to make eye contact.”

“Huh?”

“Otherwise, we each have bad sex for a year,” she says, her gaze direct and unwavering. Almost…bold. “It’s a rule. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it.”

I blink and try to get my head on straight, because I swear there’s a smolder deep in her eyes. That vague challenge is also back in her voice. For the life of me, I can’t get a bead on what she thinks she’s doing here. If she thinks I’m going to clink her again so she can have great sex with someone else, she’d better think again. And if she thinks I won’t take her up on her challenge to fuck her if she keeps looking at me like that, I’m more than happy to take her back to my place and prove her wrong.

All that scrolls through my mind in that blink of my eye, quickly followed by an unwelcome voice of reason.

Don’t do it, asshole.

“Cheers,” I say, maintaining eye contact this time. I gulp back half of my champagne and set my glass down. Then I rub my hands over my face and try to get my brain back online enough to remember my scrolling to-do list.

“So I need you to, ah, book my flight to Tokyo for a week from Thursday through that Monday. That’s first. Get the car and the, ah, driver lined up. All that. The usual. I liked that suite I stayed in the last time, so get that one again. Talk to them about making sure the cappuccino machine is there when I arrive. Also some of that sake I liked. Then we need to start looking at party planning for the event in the Hamptons. We’re going to have a lot of high rollers there, so we want to make sure…”

I trail off when it dawns on me that she’s not taking notes on her phone the way she always does.

“What’s the problem?” I say, frowning. “You getting all this?”

“Absolutely.” She downs all her champagne, then waves her glass at me for a refill. “I’ve done most of it already, anyway.”

That’s one of the reasons I keep Bellamy around. She’s got a great memory and an uncanny ability to juggle all the plates I’ve got in the air at any one time.

“Great,” I say, topping her off and then watching with vague unease as she kills it. “Have you got an alcohol problem I need to know about, Forest? Because we’ve got a shit-ton of work to do. I don’t have time to send you off to rehab.”

“Nope,” she says tightly, stifling a burp as best she can. “No problems here. None whatsoever. Never. Been. Better.”

“Well, that’s good,” I say. “What was I saying about the Hamptons? Oh, yeah. We need to—”

“Actually, I do have a problem.” She nails me with a look that suggests I’ve been popping balloons beside sleeping babies. “Are you ever going to call me Bellamy? Which is my name? Or maybe Bella, like my friends do?”

“Why?” I say, recoiling because I can’t think when I’ve heard a worse idea. I’m trying to maintain a professional distance between myself and Bellamy and keep frantically trying to throw bricks onto the wall between us. Calling her by her first name would be removing bricks from the wall. Plus, it wouldn’t feel right to say, for example, I want to fuck you, Forest. On the other hand, I want to fuck you, Bellamy rolls right off the tongue. “You call me boss. I call you Forest. Why switch it up?”

“It’s after hours. We’re having drinks.”

Exactly.

“I wouldn’t want to cross any lines,” I say, shaking my head.

“No.” One corner of her luscious mouth pulls back into a crooked smile that perfectly matches the complete lack of humor in her eyes as she waves her empty glass at me again. “The one thing we’d never want to do is cross any lines. Boss.”

A beat or two passes while I try to figure out what the hell is going on here. Why I’m feeling this push–pull from her tonight.

“What’s up, Forest?” Not the sort of question you should ask when you want to keep things professional, but I can’t seem to help myself. “Because I’m getting the feeling you’ve got something on your mind. Something I’m missing.”

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