Tease (Cloverleigh Farms #8)(60)

“Come here,” he said, tugging me out to the living room. “I have a surprise for you.”

“You do?” I let him lead me over to the couch. A room service tray sat on the coffee table, a silver cloche over the plate.

Hutton pulled it off. “Tada! Warm chocolate cake with raspberry creamsicle ice cream.”

I squealed with delight and jumped up and down. “You made a phone call!”

“I made a phone call.”

“How did you get it up here so fast?”

He shrugged. “I paid a little extra.”

“It looks so good, I bet it’s worth it.”

“Your reaction is worth it.”

I smiled at him. “You’re spoiling me way too much on this trip. I’m going to be terrible to live with. You’ll be glad you’re going back to California.”

He laughed. “Sit down.”

I sat on one end of the couch and Hutton handed me the plate and fork. Then he swung my feet onto the other end and sat down, placing them in his lap. “What’s this?” I asked as he took one foot in his hand and began to rub it.

“It’s a combination of dessert and foot massage.”

Was he serious? Simultaneous dessert and foot rub?

How was I supposed to ration my feelings whilst eating warm cake and enjoying his strong, sexy hands on me? He was making it impossible to hold back the tide.

I stuck a bite in my mouth and groaned as Hutton’s thumbs pressed into my sore arches. “God, this is insane. I might have another orgasm.”

He chuckled. “That would be okay too.”





FOURTEEN





HUTTON





“Your turn,” she said sleepily. “Tell me something.”

“What do you want to know this time?” I asked, curled up behind her between the soft, cool sheets of our hotel bed.

“If you could do anything else with your life, like if it had gone in another direction, where would you be?”

Here, I thought. Right here with you.

In this place where I felt sure of myself. Comfortable in my skin. Were there still doubts buzzing around in my head? Yes. But they were softer. Quieter. I could endure them when it was only the two of us like this. I could accept them as part of me, because she could—just like she’d accepted the part of me that craved power and control in private because I felt so overwhelmed in public.

So often my mind was ahead of itself, on to the next worry, the next room I’d have to enter, the next time I’d have to be on. But when we were alone, it was blissfully quiet in my head. She made it easy to stay in the present—she made it impossible to want to be anywhere else.

She rolled onto her back and looked at me. “You can’t think of anything? I guess that’s what it’s like being a hot billionaire. You’ve reached the zenith. There’s nowhere else to go. Nothing else to achieve.”

I laughed. “Hardly.”

“Okay, so then what? Like, let’s say you never created that algorithm. What would you be?”

I thought for a moment. “Okay. Don’t laugh.”

“I would never!”

“I’d have liked to teach math. Like be a professor or something.”

“I could see that. You’d be great at it.”

“Uh, standing at the front of a room with everyone watching me? I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you would. You were a great tutor back in the day—those middle school kids loved you.”

“That was one on one. Teaching a class is very different. You have to be on every single minute. You have to explain things exactly right, you can’t get a single word wrong. If you say something in error, you look like you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not saying being a teacher is easy or doesn’t take preparation.”

“It doesn’t matter how prepared I am. I could plan a lecture, rehearse it a thousand times, bring notes into the classroom with me, and still second guess myself to the point where I’m standing up there sweating and shaking, unable to even read my own writing because a hundred pairs of eyes are on me waiting for me to fuck up.”

She studied me for a moment. “Did this actually happen?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“A couple years ago, I was invited to give a guest lecture at M.I.T. to one of my mentor teachers’ classes, and I bombed.”

“Your mentor said that?”

“No. But I knew she thought that. And I knew every kid in that room was like, ‘who is this fucking hack and why does he make billions of dollars when he can’t even form a coherent sentence or write on the board without staring at every problem wondering if he wrote it right?’”

“Wow. That’s so cool that you can read minds.”

I frowned at her. “That’s what it felt like.”

“Sorry.” She snuggled closer. “But if I don’t call you out on this stuff, who will? It’s like Winnie with the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Huh?”

“Everyone in my family always wanted to watch the Wizard of Oz, but that witch scared the bejesus out of Winnie. She would hide under a blanket every time the witch came onscreen. But then Frannie bought us a nonfiction book about witches. We learned the truth about where the idea behind evil witches came from, and how female healers and priestesses were accused of getting their magic powers from the devil when really, it was just terrible men trying to suppress women’s influence.” She stuck her tongue out at me.