Wrong for You (Before You #3)(18)
“Oh.” She hesitated, not sure how to respond. Dinner sounded nice, but dinner with Alec probably wouldn’t be a good thing, at least for her. The tiny spark of interest she felt on the first day she met him was growing at an unsustainable pace. By this rate, she’d be professing her undying love for him in a week or two. Oh hell, who was she kidding, by the end of dinner she’d be at his mercy. “I’ll probably work late again. I can’t seem to finish everything that needs to be done.”
“Hire another person.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. The Foundation has the money.”
“It’s not officially in the account.”
“It’s being wired today.”
“I don’t like to mix business and…” She halted her words midsentence because it suddenly seemed insanely presumptuous of her to assume that Alec wanted to mix anything with business. He claimed to be kidding about the whole women throwing themselves at him comment, but she had a strong suspicion it was true.
Within seconds, Alec closed the space between them, not close enough to touch her, but close enough for her to feel the electricity zinging between them, bouncing off the walls, filling her lungs, making her throat constrict. Holy shit. This man did crazy things to her.
“What exactly are we mixing here, Little Violet?” The way he asked the question, as though he were the big bad wolf and she Little Red Riding Hood, made her knees tremble and her breath kick up a notch.
Her eyes searched his, scanning for what she didn’t know—maybe the real Alec beneath his veneer of danger and angst and a whole lot of anger. And while she couldn’t see anything through his enigmatic mask, she didn’t feel threatened. There was something about him that made her feel safe and alive. Tattoos, lip ring, and scars be damned.
She shook her head and looked down at their feet nearly touching. “I don’t know…maybe nothing.”
“Hm.” His hands cupped her face and then his lips skimmed across hers, igniting all kinds of internal fireworks and alarms as her life turned upside down and inside out. “Maybe something.”
He was so close to her she could see every little detail of his face—the small crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the dark blue rim around his irises, the dark stubble forming at his jaw line. And then her eyes dropped to his mouth, cataloguing every dip, curve and yes…his lip ring. She barely felt it before, and she felt a little bereft, like she’d missed out on the full experience.
Almost involuntarily, her fingers lifted to his lower lip and she ran her finger along it, pausing briefly on the silver ring.
“Are you a fan of the lip ring?”
She dropped her hand back to her side. “I never thought about it before. I don’t know anyone else with one. Do you always wear it?”
“No, not all the time. Does it bother you?”
“No, but I didn’t notice it.
His lips twitched and then he leaned forward again, brushing his lips against hers, lingering a little longer than necessary, but making her want more of him than she should. She leaned into him, resting her hands on his waist, hoping he’d take the hint, but he didn’t. Instead, he kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, and her lips before he stepped away from her.
“I’ll see you tonight, Little Violet.”
With that he pivoted and left, leaving her and her fevered lips tingling with loss. When she heard the front door shut, she sighed, looking at the clock on the microwave. Ten hours. She wasn’t sure what it said about her that she was already counting the hours until he came back, but it probably wasn’t a good sign.
Chapter Eight
Four hours later and six phone calls with his attorney, Alec sat in his basement apartment reading the contract to purchase the Foundation’s building. Five hundred thousand dollars. He’d made good money over the past two years since Chasing Ruin burst onto the music scene, but not enough that a half a million dollars meant nothing to him.
His attorneys went back and forth with the Barrington Family Trust for several hours, and after thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees, the price had dropped fifty thousand dollars. They still wanted too f*cking much for that dump. He’d do it if that were the only option, but he still had to explore other ways for the Foundation to own the building.
Just as Violet suspected, the family wanted to sell the building to a developer. Fortunately, they hadn’t received many offers because it was overpriced. The real estate market was flat and the location, while pretty close to the campus, wasn’t ideal. It needed to be rezoned for apartments. Alec dialed his agent’s phone number.
“Rick,” Alec said when he heard his voice. “How’s the fundraising going?”
Rick exhaled loudly into the phone. “Fine.”
“Then what’s your problem?”
“If you want to raise money for a cause and you don’t want any publicity for you or Chasing Ruin, you’re wasting my time. You should be using this opportunity to create positive PR, especially after that shitstorm Cam caused with his videos.”
They’d been over this a hundred times. He didn’t want to bring attention to the Foundation or his connection to it. He had too many stories he’d prefer remained dead and buried. Any one of them would be worse than what Cam put the band through. The tabloid trash would eat up his drug-addicted mother, his dad’s death, his extensive juvenile record, and his nonexistent childhood. No f*cking way. He didn’t want to revisit any of it. “We’ve been over this and I told you I don't want the press connecting me to the Foundation or my hometown. Nobody knows much about my history and I’d like to keep it that way.”