Dirty Rogue: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance(29)

“I know that’s what you meant,” he says, softly, gently, and I know that if we weren’t on the job, if there was no one around, he would lean down and kiss my cheek right now, cocky persona or not.

As he turns back toward the press, confusion zings through me. Is there something he’s not telling me?

It doesn’t matter. It can’t destroy the way my heart sings when I look at him.

The emotion is deafening.





Chapter 22

Christian





My heart thunders in my chest as I turn away from Quinn and go to greet the press, and it continues to pound as I shake hands with the photographer and ask him about his gear. Then I chat with the reporters and mention casually that I’m making more time in my schedule to volunteer. I tell them that my mother did a lot of work while she was alive to try and lift people out of homelessness, and I want to honor her memory. At the last moment, I tack on that I’m making a rather large donation to the Bowery Mission.

The whole thing goes off without a hitch. A guy like me—like Christian Pierce—doesn’t let one moment of awkwardness throw him off his game.

But something nags at me.

I’m beginning to notice a pattern in myself that I don’t like.

The things Quinn says are innocent. She doesn’t know my secret. Intellectually, I know that, but every time she says something that brushes up against those boundaries, I react in a way that’s impossible to hide.

Well, it’s possible to hide it from other people, maybe. But I can’t hide it from her.

How does she know how to read me so well?

We just met each other last week, and already she can read me like we were born to be together. She even picks up on the subtle things that most of my other friends—even the closest ones—have never noticed, or if they did, they gave no goddamn indication of it.

I have to clear my head.

I’m falling so hard for her that I feel off-balance, out of control. I love it and hate it at the same time. I love that a woman has finally made me feel this way, but I hate that there’s something inside me that will bring it all crashing to the ground.

Jesus Christ, I have to get out of this.

It’s a half-hearted thought. I’m barely in it yet.

As Quinn and I walk back to my Town Car, I feel like I’m being torn in two.

Half of me wants to grab her right now and kiss her on the sidewalk, for all the world to see.

The other half of me wants to run in the opposite direction as fast and hard as I can and put Quinn Campbell far behind me.

She’s a threat. There’s no two ways about it. The way she reads me, the way she sees me, the way she is—it makes me want to be around her. Be with her. Be hers. Have her be mine.

And if that happens, I can’t keep secrets from her.

Not the kind of secret that I’ve been keeping.

I just can’t.

Why not?

The little voice in my head wants to play devil’s advocate again.

Why not? Why can’t I just have her, experience the greatest happiness I could ever experience in my life, and put the past behind me?

The answer comes immediately: because it will eat me alive.

When you feel this way about someone, you can’t lie to her for the rest of your life. That kind of guilt would rot me from the inside out. And now, knowing what I know about Derek—knowing what I know about Quinn and the way she always demands honesty, even from herself—how could I do that to her?

We get into the Town Car, and as soon as I’ve closed the door behind me, Louis steers the car away from the curb.

“That was really excellent,” Quinn says lightly, looking down at her phone. “I’m not going to do a big push on this one because it will look too heavy-handed, but we’ll get the photos circulating by tomorrow morning. You’re bound to get a couple of low profile mentions, which is perfect for our purposes.” She looks up at me and smiles, and I feel a little jolt of surprise. There’s something in her eyes that wasn’t there this morning. Part of it is confusion—after I got all f*cking weird out there, she knows something’s up but she doesn’t know what—but part of it goes much deeper than that. She’s practically glowing with it.

I smile back at her, because f*ck, she’s gorgeous, and despite all of it, I like her to be close to me.

Even if it is a recipe for disaster.

“I’m looking forward to the next one,” I tell her, both of us acting like it’s important to maintain the facade in front of Louis.

For about twenty seconds.

That’s as long as I last before I slide across the seat toward Quinn, wrap my arm around her, and pull her in for a hard, deep kiss.

“Wow,” she says softly when I pull back to look into her eyes. “What did I do to deserve that?”

“Isn’t it enough that I wanted it?”

“Wanted it?”

“Want you.”

“I want you, too,” she whispers in my ear.

“Come home with me.”

“I can’t.”

I laugh out loud. That’s Quinn Campbell—give her a direct order and she’ll refuse.

Just wait until I have her back in bed again.

“You can.”

“I can’t. I promised Carolyn I’d go for drinks with her as soon as this was over.”