RISK(22)

He mumbles something under his breath, but I don't stop to ask him to repeat it. I swing open the door and almost knock the file folder from his assistant's hand as I breeze past her on my way to the elevator.





Chapter 15


Nolan




"There's no way in hell this is happening." Crew looks right past the woman who opened Ellie's apartment door just as I was about to knock. "Talk about a roleplay. Are you seeing what I'm seeing, Nolan?"

Unfortunately, I am. I see all of it. It's being imprinted on my retinas so every time I close my goddamn eyes from this point forward, I'm going to see this in front of me.

Ellie is wearing a bikini top. The most perfect bikini top ever to grace a female body. Two small triangles of black fabric and some thin black string are all that cover her breasts. The black very short shorts she's wearing sit well below her belly button. Her hair is pulled back and high in a ponytail. She's standing near an open window with her hands on her hips, her skin glowing with a mist of perspiration.

She turns to the side, and I swallow back a moan born from somewhere deep inside me when the profile of her gorgeous ass comes into my view. The thin material of her shorts leaves nothing to the imagination, and suddenly my cock is hard as steel.

The bastard standing next to her is hard too. I'm clear across the room from him but the outline of his dick through the faded jeans he's wearing is obvious to anyone within a mile radius. The tool belt he has on does nothing to hide his arousal.

He flexes then, drawing his arms up over his head. His biceps tense, his abs ripple, and Ellie's eyes are glued to everything but the T-shirt, that I assume is his, bunched in a pile at his bare feet. She's practically naked. He's half-way there and I'm staring at it all with a bottle of wine and a gallon of melting cookie dough ice cream in my hands.

"What the hell is going on here?" I snap.

"The air conditioning stopped working," Ellie's friend says. I remember her from Las Vegas, but apparently not well enough to recall her name. "The building manager told us the repair guy wouldn't be here until tomorrow afternoon, but he showed up fifteen minutes ago."

I glance at her. She's clothed. She's wearing a short yellow dress and a huge smile.

"You're Ellie's bosses, aren't you?" She steps toward us. "I'm Adley York. I'm Ellie's roommate."

Crew pushes past me to grab the woman's hand. "I'm Crew. Nolan didn't tell me where we were headed, but I'm glad I tagged along."

She laughs. "You'll regret saying that. It's like three hundred degrees in here."

"Nolan?" Ellie approaches tentatively, her hands clenched together in front of her. "Crew? What are you two doing here?"

I tuck the bottle of wine next to my elbow before I run my fingers over my brow. I'm burning up, but I can't tell if it's the temperature in here or how Ellie looks. I thought that black dress in Vegas was hot. Now, I can't even remember what it looks like. "You invited me for dinner, Ellie. I brought wine and your favorite ice cream."

"You thought I was serious?" she asks tightly. "I didn't think you'd actually show up."

She doesn't know me very well. I never back down from a challenge. There was a trace of amusement in her eyes yesterday afternoon when she invited me for dinner. I decided by the time she pressed the elevator call button that I'd be at her apartment promptly at seven with a bottle of crisp chardonnay, along with a container of the ice cream I saw her friend give to her at Cremza.

"I'd never turn down an invitation from you." I glance back at the repair guy. His eyes are focused squarely on Ellie's ass. "I would have worn my board shorts if I knew the evening was beach themed."

She looks me over from head to toe. Her gaze lingers appreciatively on the gray dress shirt and black pants I'm wearing. "There isn't a theme. We're not having dinner. We postponed."

"We canceled," Adley interjects. "Bean decided we should cancel after the air conditioner died. I was just on my way out to have dinner with one of the guys who planned on being here."

"Bean?" Crew chuckles. "What's that nickname about, Ellie?"

"I came up with it, "Adley says, pride evident in her smile. "Ellie is my jelly bean. I call her that because she used to sneak jelly beans from a jar in my mom's kitchen. Eventually, my mom just gave her the entire jar."

"You've known each other since you were kids?" I step forward. "Tell me about her back then."

Crew and both women turn to me. It's not my words that draw their attention. It's my tone. Firm and demanding, it's a command for information about a woman who just started working for me. It's obvious to all three of them that I'm not trying to lure playful memories about Ellie's childhood from her best friend. I'm hunting.

"We should take off." Crew shoots me a sharp glance that's spiked with the anger he's barely containing. I was intentionally sparse with the details when I told him we were meeting two beautiful women for dinner.

I accessed Ellie's payroll record to find her address, unsure if Crew had taken note of it when he handed her file to human resources the day she started working for us. He didn't clue in when I asked my driver to drop us a block up from Ellie's building. I told him to call the store in Midtown to check on the shipment of lipstick that arrived earlier today. I did that to keep his focus away from the direction we were headed.