at work so I can’t talk right now,’ she said when she was sure her voice wouldn’t let her down. ‘Can I call you back?’
‘No. We need to talk now.’
Another please-be-silent slow breath, until Lane remembered she could mute the phone. She muted with a vengeance, and shot an apologetic smile at the analyst with whom she’d been discussing the consumer price index. ‘I have to take this, Rick. Just a minute, okay?’
She hurried away from Rick’s workstation to the closest empty meeting room she could find. She looked at her phone, contemplating disconnecting … but no. That would be unforgivably cowardly. She unmuted the phone before she could give in to temptation. ‘Adam, I thought I’d made it clear that all calls are to be made outside office hours,’ she said crisply. ‘I never take personal calls at work.’
‘You’re hiring me for my expertise, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘No buts. The first lesson is this—anywhere, any time. Starting with this phone call. So let’s schedule our first date, hmm?’
Date? It wasn’t a date. She opened her mouth to tell him so, to snap the words out, but stopped herself when she heard him laugh softly, as though he were reading her through the phone line. She took another breath. Calm, calm, calm. If this phone call turned out to be some kind of test, she didn’t want to stumble at the first hurdle.
Yes, she had hired Adam Quinn for his expertise; it was why she was paying him a small fortune. She therefore had to trust that he knew what he was doing—to do otherwise would mean she was wasting her money. The argument over calls at work would keep for another time, and as for the whole ‘date’ thing, what was the point of quibbling over semantics? If he wanted to call it a date, he could call it a date; as long as she knew the truth, what did it matter?
‘All right, then,’ she said in her best impersonally professional voice. ‘This week I’m free tomorrow night or any time Sunday.’
‘Tomorrow night’s fine with me. I’ll pick you up from work.’
‘Not at the office.’
‘Why not? It’s business, isn’t it?’
Lane couldn’t think of an appropriate answer—she wasn’t expecting such an early and flagrant flouting of the rules she’d set.
Not that Adam gave her a chance to respond.
‘Ah, I seeeee,’ he said, with way too much eeeelongation for it to be anything other than a dig. ‘You’re going to hide me away and only roll me out when you’re ready for a quick fu—’
‘No!’ Lane interjected, then hurried on. ‘I just feel a little … I don’t want the people here, the people I work with, to know … I mean …’ Lane squeezed her eyes closed in an agony of embarrassment.
‘Sorry but you’re going to have to deal with it,’ Adam said, before she could address her own incoherence. ‘Because I’m coming to your office at six o’clock tomorrow, and if you’re not ready to leave, I’ll have no qualms about using your desk as a bed. Anywhere, any time. Got it?’
Without waiting for Lane’s response, Adam disconnected, leaving Lane holding the phone to her ear, stunned into silence.
***
Adam looked at his phone and smiled.
Lane wasn’t sounding as controlled as she’d been last night.
Which meant yes! he was on the right track.
He’d figured a methodical, control-freak economist—a predictor of trends—would hate not knowing what was going to happen next. It stood to reason that wondering when or where he was going to pop up and what he was going to do with her when he did would crack that cold casing of hers. And with one short phone call, he’d proved it.
She’d be stewing now, all because he’d called her at the office when the contract clearly stated he should not. Because he’d gone one step further and arranged to visit her at her office when that was forbidden, too. She’d be regrouping. Strategizing. But no matter what she did, he was p-r-e-t-t-y certain she’d be nicely on edge tomorrow night.
So on edge, maybe she’d even end up calling the whole thing off. Sarah would be happy, his mother would be happy, Erica-the-unknown-quantity would no doubt be happy since she hadn’t sanctioned the plan in the first place.
But Adam, perversely, decided he would not be happy, and that therefore there would be no calling things off.
Not yet.
Not until he’d managed to get Lane Davis hot and bothered.
Making her lose her cool was the least he could do to pay her back for rocking his equilibrium so badly. He’d never considered himself a vain guy, but he sure as hell wasn’t used to women being totally unimpressed when they looked at him. So what was it that Lane wasn’t seeing in him that other women saw? That’s what he wanted to know. And was she not seeing it because he didn’t have it as far as she was concerned, or because she didn’t yet know he had it?
He supposed she might have expected someone who looked more like his sister, in which case—whoa!—he must have been a shock to her system! Sarah was a tiny, pretty, sparkly fairy, whereas Adam was … well, not exactly elegant. He was big, and dark, and brawny. Square-jawed, bold-nosed, hard-mouthed. Maybe a little long on frown and short on hair. A bit … intimidating. Maybe. But not hideous. Women liked looking at him. Women wanted him.
But not Lane. At least, not intrinsically. ‘You look like you’d be good at it.’ That’s what she’d said. But he hadn’t seen any evidence she thought she might actually enjoy what he was about to teach her. She’d sat across from him and talked about sex in the most unemotional, businesslike fashion, all blood tests and schedules and bank accounts, without giving him even one appreciative look. Not one!
Adam realized his temper was fraying again and pulled himself up. Did it really matter if she wanted to enjoy herself or not? Did it matter that she was only interested in the goals she wanted to reach and therefore had restrictions in place for how and where they connected? A contract, that’s what the two of them had. Lane knew his sister but she didn’t know him. She was right to be leery of parading him around her office—especially after what DeWayne the Douchebag had done to her.
But he was nothing like DeWayne the Douchebag, he told himself, rallying. He wasn’t going to shame her. It wasn’t an insult being seen with him. If he was going to make her look anything, his intention would be to make her look hot, not cold. And he wasn’t a trained seal who could be expected to perform when and where she wanted, begging for a treat when he came up to scratch.
Nope. No way. If anyone was going to be begging it was going to be Lane. And until she was begging, until she felt him like burning fever in her blood, he’d be damned if he was going to be giving over the goods all at once, either.
This was going to be a slow, sloow, slooow journey to the finish line.
And he was going to win.
***
The next morning, Lane dressed and undressed three times before deciding on the same square-cut navy suit she’d worn on Monday night on the basis that at least Adam hadn’t run screaming in the opposite direction at the sight of it. She then applied a full face of make-up only to scrub it all off when she realized her colleagues would know something was up if she turned up for work looking like that. In any case, she’d hate for Adam to think she’d taken any special care for their first … time.
Yes, ‘time’ was the correct word, not the ‘date’ he’d called it. It wasn’t a date, it was a time, a session, a meeting.
A lesson.
First lesson.
Whew. What that thought did to her