Page 52 of Whisking It All

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Jamie stared at her last message as he tucked himself back into his pants, the wad of tissues in his wastebasket like an accusation. Just a few minutes ago, he’d been barreling towards bliss, jerking off at his desk, his phone propped up against the edge of his computer monitor and playing the video clip she’d sent over and over again, just a fraction of a second of her moan at the end teasing him towards an explosive climax. He pulled his undershirt, now stained with his own cum, over his head and tossed it in the wastebasket as well, slipping his chef’s coat back on and buttoning it to hide the fact that he no longer wore a shirt.

It had been so fucking hot, thinking of her touching herself in her kitchen while she talked to him. Imagining laying her out on a workstation in his own kitchen and sucking on her clit until she screamed.

Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped thinking about Whisky, though, and started thinking about Tessa, the taste of her coming back to him as he fucked his fist. Suddenly he heard Tessa’s moan in Whisky’s, felt the tight squeeze of Tessa’s climax around his cock moments before he came all over himself like a fucking teenager.

And then Whisky had shut down on him. Shut down and shut him out.

He could hardly blame her. If she had even the slightest inkling that he’d been thinking about another woman—about his best friend’s daughter, no less—while they’d just done…that… Fuck, he’d shut himself out, too.

His office door flew open, Baz standing in the opening.

“Fuck, don’t you knock?” Jamie barked. Two minutes earlier and he would have walked in on—

“Here?” Baz snorted like it was an absurd question. And Jamie supposed it was. He’d never asked his friends to knock before.

You’ve also never jerked off in your office before.

“What do you need?” Jamie asked.

“I ran the numbers on The Barclay. It’ll work for the opening dinner if we host cocktail hour out on the patio, but that’s not in the budget,” Baz said.

“It’ll be pretty cold outside in December,” Jamie said.

“You got a better idea?”

Jamie blew out a breath and shook his head. “Let me talk to Norm and see if he’ll donate the use of the patio and the heaters.”

“You should have Tessa talk to him.”

“Why?” Jamie asked, his skin prickling with an irrational possessiveness and a sudden spike of fear that Baz somehow knew what he’d been up to in his office just minutes before.

“He likes her,” Baz shrugged. “He likes her ideas. You heard him at the Merchants’ Association meeting.”

Aster Bay is in her blood. Yeah, he’d heard Norm alright. He also heard what Baz wasn’t saying. Norm liked Tessa more than he liked Jamie, he liked her ideas more than he liked Jamie’s.

“Fine. We’re meeting Gavin over there the day after tomorrow anyway. I’ll see about having her talk to Norm.”

“Good.” Baz turned to leave, but stuck his head back in the door at the last minute, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “You should get a cleaning company to come through here. Smells funky. But if you do, remember, it’s not—”

“—in the budget. I know.”

Chapter 17

Jamie was already standing in the parking lot when Tessa arrived at The Barclay. How did he manage to look so good just standing there? He was even more handsome than he was in her imagination, and despite her best (okay, moderate at best) efforts, she’d imagined him a lot over the last week while managing to avoid him.

Every time she closed her eyes, she pictured Jamie, the filthy things she’d imagined him doing while she’d messaged with DDB, the even filthier things he’d actually done to her a few weeks ago in that hotel room in Providence, all the things she’d wanted him to do to her in his kitchen during the photoshoot.

An irrational fear that somehow he would know that she’d sexted with someone else while thinking about him settled in the pit of her stomach, mingling with her growing guilt. Bad enough to fantasize about her father’s best friend, but even worse to do so while talking to someone else. Even if she couldn’t be with Jamie, she needed to change directions with DDB, put up some boundaries and remind them both that they were only supposed to be friends. They’d hardly spoken over the last few days, but eventually the awkwardness would dissipate and it wasn’t fair to him for her to flirt with him the way she had, to send him pictures and videos, while she was wishing she was with someone else.

She threw her rental car into park and jumped out, nearly spilling her coffee in the process. She had worked too damn hard to get that coffee to spill it now. That was her emotional support coffee, and she definitely needed it if she was going to get through this meeting with Jamie. At least she’d have Gavin as a buffer.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said as she made her way across the parking lot to Jamie, coffee cups in hand. “Traffic was a nightmare.”

“From the other side of town?” he asked.

“No. I had to go two towns over to find a Starbucks and apparently you can’t turn left out of their parking lot so I had to turn right but I didn’t want to turn right, so then I had to figure out how to turn around so I was going the right direction and I picked the worst side street to turn down because I got stuck behind this school bus that stopped at every other house. But I got my Starbucks,” she said with a grin, taking a sip of the caramel mocha goodness so she’d stop anxiety-babbling at him.

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