The Devil You Know (The Devils #3)(43)

His fingers twine with mine as we walk to the waiting car, and even that tiny bit of intimacy makes my breath catch. He climbs in beside me, and suddenly...we’re alone. In a small, enclosed space. I cross my legs and his eyes go to my bare calves and then my heels. He swallows and I can barely stand not to lean over and press my lips to his neck.

We get back to the parking garage in record time. He reaches over the console toward me, pulling my mouth to his. “I’ve wanted to do that all night,” he says.

“I want you to do a lot more than that.”

“God, yes,” he groans, resting his forehead against mine. “Your place?”

“Uh—” If he comes to my place, then I can’t get him to leave. Suddenly he’s staying the night, showering, leaving items behind. I pull back. “Let’s just go upstairs. It’s closer.”

He studies my face. “You only live a few blocks away.”

“Your office is twenty seconds away by elevator,” I argue.

I see a tiny flicker of disappointment in his eyes. “We aren’t having sex in the office again.”

My jaw drops. “Why the hell not? What was the purpose of all this, then?”

His hand reaches out to cradle my face. “Maybe I just wanted to get to know you better,” he says. “Or maybe I really wanted to poison you.”

“I know which of those is more likely,” I mutter, rolling my eyes, “so it looks like I’m heading to the ER. Thanks, Ben.”

He laughs, and then he gives me the sweetest, most tender smile. Not unlike the look he has on his face in Drew’s wedding photos. “I want to be someone you trust enough to invite home, Gemma. And I’m willing to wait for it.”

There’s a small squeeze in my chest, and I can’t tell if it’s pleasure or terror.

“I’m only falling for this whole dinner ruse once,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt.

He grins. “I’ll have to come up with something new the next time.”

I climb out. “There won’t be a next time.”

He waits until I’m safely in my car and driving away before he texts:

Ben: Sure there won’t.

I smile like a fool the rest of the way home.





25





“I can’t believe he told me no,” I complain to Keeley.

She laughs. “That’s just the worst when a man expresses interest in who you are as a person. What a dick.”

“I just don’t get it. I mean, I know it’s not going anywhere. He knows it’s not going anywhere. The milk is very clearly free so no need to buy the cow. Why wouldn’t he take the free milk?”

“Please stop talking about milk,” she says. I hear the beep of the vending machine—it’s seven in the morning and she’s already buying junk food. “It makes me think of cervical mucus, or breast milk. Maybe he just couldn’t perform again?”

“It’d been twenty-four hours, and he’s thirty-six. That’s not old enough for stuff to stop working, right?”

“He’s only thirty-six?” she shouts. “You said he was old! No, that’s not an age at which anything stops working.”

Which leaves me back at the drawing board, wondering why the hell he’s acting like this is more than it is.

I put on the red dress I discarded a few days ago and take it right back off. Nothing has changed in the two days since I decided red was the color of sex and I refuse to let Mr. Maybe-I-Wanted-to-Get-to-Know-You think I’m trying to seduce him. That ship has sailed.

I will take my free milk elsewhere. Fuck Ben. No more free milk. I’m putting it back on the shelf, in the paid marketplace.

I probably need to work on my analogies.

I get to the office and try to focus, but it’s a struggle. Every two seconds I’m picturing him looking at me last night—saying, “I want to be someone you trust enough to invite home.” And each time I think of it, I soften a little, but how long would those good intentions of his possibly last? I let him come over once, and then he keeps coming over, and the moment I decide to trust him is the moment he’ll decide to move on to something else.

I put my head down and focus on the Lawson case. I’ve found ten different employee reviews now of managers who got promoted despite “incidents”. It’s probably enough to get Margaret a decent settlement, but I want better than decent. I want a number so high that it gets the press’s attention and Fiducia is forced to publicly admit they fucked up. But how? Margaret said there were outings she hadn’t been invited to. Maybe it was discriminatory, or maybe Margaret is the pain in the ass they’ve implied she is, and they just didn’t want her along.

I call and she sounds excited to be hearing from me, which is unfortunate since I don’t have any especially good news. “How’s it going?” she asks.

Not as well as I’d like.

“Great,” I say. “But we need more, so I’ve got a quick question for you. You said there were a bunch of trips and nights out for staff that you weren’t invited to. Were other women invited? And do you know what they were doing?”

“Not as far as I know,” she replies. “It sounds like it was mostly drinking, but a girl in accounting told me they were always at strip clubs too.”