“I did,” he told her without so much as a blink or the faintest blush of shame.
A vivid memory of the red imprint of her hand on his cheek reared up inside her head, so fierce and gut-punching that she recoiled. He noticed too. She knew he did. Again, she wanted to slap him, right there across the table in front of everyone, for that single tilting quirk of a smug fucking grin.
Of course she didn’t slap him. Normal people didn’t go around slapping people in public. Or in private, she reminded herself, shoving away the memories again, harder this time. Put those motherfuckers in a box, she thought. And close that goddamned lid.
“This meeting is over.” Corinne stood and shouldered her bag. She tossed her napkin on the table. “Thanks for the wine. I trust you’ll take care of the check.”
Head high, back straight, she headed for the parking lot without looking from side to side. She couldn’t. If any tiny thing distracted her, she was going to burst into huge, ugly sobs.
This was not how she’d imagined seeing him again. In her dreams they ran into each other at a party, both of them dressed in their best. He was with another woman, she another man, but that didn’t matter. The second they caught eyes across the room, he’d move through the crowd toward her. He’d take her hand. Kiss the knuckles. Ask her to dance. He’d pull her close and whisper in her ear that he’d been a fool to ever leave her.
God, she was so stupid.
At her car, Corinne dug for her keys in her overstuffed purse, but they eluded her beneath the drifting tide of receipts and permission slips and used tissues with pieces of gum inside. It was a mom purse, like her shoes and her hair and her entire freaking life, and then shit, she was crying. Silent, painful sobs tore at her throat. She closed her eyes and gripped the roof of her car, hating how something so ridiculous and simple could make her so fucking sad.
He was surprised she’d ever spent a minute thinking about him in all these years? Of course he couldn’t know how sometimes all she felt like she did was pine away for the past, and her boy, and how it had felt to be young and kinky and in love.
Love.
She could admit it now, looking back, though for years after it ended she’d told herself it hadn’t been anything close to that. Corinne had learned the hard way that love could never be assumed or even really understood. You could say the words a million times without making them true; you could deny them for eternity and never make them false.
“Here.”
She looked up through the blur of her tears to see Reese. Corinne swiped at her eyes. He took her bag from her with a gentle tug. Dug through it. Pulled out her keys. He clicked the remote to open the driver’s door, then carefully snapped the carabiner around the strap of her purse exactly as it was meant to be done so that she wouldn’t lose her keys in the first place.
He handed her back her purse along with a paper sack emblazoned with the StockYard Inn logo. “I had them box up your salad. You should take it along.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You’ll be hungry later,” he said. “Then you’ll want it.”
Corinne dabbed at her eyes and gave him a long, hard stare. She did not take the bag from him. “The question is, Reese, what the hell do you want?”
“We have terms to discuss,” Reese told her. “A business meeting. Remember? This isn’t personal, it’s not about you and me.”
Corinne opened her car door and tossed her purse onto the passenger seat. She straightened to look him in the eye. “Oh, no?”
Reese shook his head.
“You’re a liar,” she told him. “And you’re not any better at it than you used to be.”
Then she got in her car and drove away.
Chapter Seven
Before
They are lying in her bed when Corinne says to him, “I could own you forever.”
He has already spent hours between her thighs, worshipping her with his tongue and fingers; she has so far denied him access to her pussy with his cock, and he’s throbbing. His balls are tight and hard and full, and a minute or so ago, Reese would’ve said that burying himself inside her heat was what he wanted more than anything else.
At her words, though, the spinning world seems to slow and stop.
“You want to…own me?” He pushes up on his hands to look at her. His mouth is full of her flavor, sweet and tangy. His cock, pressing the softness of the bed, twitches. He has to hold himself back from pumping his hips. It won’t take much to make him spill, and she hasn’t given him permission.