He waited, holding his breath. Maybe he should have stopped already and not pushed her further, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to see how far she was willing to bend.
Fuck. Now he was thinking about her bending over the desk, looking at him over her shoulder, telling him to slide her panties down over her hips and make her come. The look on her face when she’d first seen him this morning, in these conservative, boring clothes, had seemed to say it all. She preferred him buttoned up and subdued. But then, when he’d caught her staring at his bared arms, she hadn’t agreed with him that he should cover up his tattoos. She’d ordered him not to.
Would she be that demanding when it came to sex? He knew she had it in her. Fire and passion and want, if she would only open herself up and embrace it…embrace him…
Stop thinking about her that way.
She might have a secret side that composed edgy songs, but in the end, hadn’t she shown him that she wasn’t someone who gave in to impulse? She was staid and predictable and did everything by the book. She didn’t have office quickies on the furniture.
Besides…he wasn’t even sure he could trust her.
He hadn’t been trying to look, but it was impossible not to see the number on her screen when he’d passed the phone to her. That was an LA area code. And then she’d acted all cagey about it, looking flushed and nervous and refusing to answer the call in front of him.
She’d better not be trying to sell his secrets to some Hollywood bullshit. But at least, this time, he was protected by an NDA. He wouldn’t hesitate to come after her with everything in his power if she did to him what Kendra had done.
Finally, after a long moment of silence, she opened her mouth to reply, and for a second, it seemed like she was going to argue, but then she placed the violin on her shoulder again and lifted her bow.
Yes. There was that fire.
She played essentially the same thing, but this time she added a funky riff in the middle. He felt excited and eager that she’d stepped out of her usual rules of composition and tried something a little different. But he wanted to keep pushing. He wanted that side of her that he’d heard the morning he and Daria had looked at the apartment.
So he kept his expression neutral and tone as nonemotional as possible. “Still too similar.”
The frown she got when she was thinking was sexy. And he loved the way she gently stroked the neck of the violin when she was resting. It made him think of her fingers stroking over his body. Down his body. Gripping his—
Shen came in just then from downstairs and smacked a piece of notebook paper on the table, breaking the mood. “I’m going on a donut run. Want something?”
Fucking Shen. Minh had brought the violin down again and was retreating back into her stuffy, standoffish pose. Maybe if Chris got him out of here fast enough they could get that spark back. “A jelly donut and a cruller,” he ordered.
Shen wrote it on the paper, then turned to Minh. “What about you?”
She flicked her eyes down to the paper, then back up at him and shook her head. Aw, for fuck’s sake. The mood was broken. There was no way she was going to open herself up now, not in front of Shen over a box of greasy donuts. She probably thought fried dough was too lowbrow for her taste. Kendra was the same way, toward the end of their relationship. By then, she’d already been cheating on him with the studio owner to whom she’d given all of Chris’s secrets. She got plenty of nice meals that way. “No, thanks. I have a rule that I don’t snack after lunch.”
A rule? Not just a preference. A fucking rule. Maybe they’d been making some progress on her music, but when it came to getting involved on a personal level…she could not get any more wrong for him.
Not that it mattered. It’s not like anything could happen between them, anyway. Even if she was right for him, she clearly thought he was inferior. He ignored his pang of disappointment and motioned toward her. “Do you feel like playing that last version for Shen?”
She tensed, looking annoyed, but played it again.
Shen frowned. “That’s for the first meeting scene?”
“Yeah.” Chris raised a brow. “What do you think?”
Shen shrugged. “It’s good, but it could be a lot better.”
Her face fell. Had she really been expecting to get by on mainstream stuff after everything she’d learned in the past few days at the studio? Chris should have felt satisfied that someone was backing him up. But instead, he found himself feeling disappointed and more than a little sorry for Minh—and for himself. He’d thought he was getting through to her, but the song she’d just played…well…Shen had said it all. It was good enough, but it could be a lot better.