Page 52 of Play for Power (Central Sparks #3)

just another dirty little secret

Caleb

“ S o hypothetically, if I wanted a woman to, just sleep with me…like exclusively…how do I do that?” I’m doing my best not to sweat and shift on my seat at the bar table, where I sit with all the guys, minus Matt, at our usual table at Pucks.

To say I am crumbling with my obsession is an understatement.

I had no qualms about my ability to get a woman to sleep with me, but I was feeling increasingly out of my depth when it came to one woman in particular.

“Hypothetically?” Lucas asks through a smirk, and unfortunately, I seem to have garnered all their attention.

“Yeah, like…obviously I don’t want to be exclusive with anyone…

because that’s just not me. But if I did want to?

You guys have girlfriends, serious girlfriends, so how?

” I mostly direct that at Noah and Jessie.

I don’t know that Lucas has any game, he rarely takes home women these days but seems quite content pining from a distance.

He can pretend it’s a secret, but apparently the only people who haven’t noticed where all of Lucas’s attention is, is the woman of said attention… and her brother, Jessie.

“First of all, I actively told Addison I wanted to be with just her and then was just…there, all the time.” Noah lifts a lazy shoulder, sipping his beer while Jessie looks like he is searching for patience as he shakes his head slowly.

“There?”

“Yeah, like she tried to go on a date. I ruined it.” He flashes a smug smile.

“She was sad, I was there. She needed space, I was there in the distance. She was angry, I took her somewhere that was safe for her to let it out. You just kind of have to be there, and make your intentions clear.” I nod, feeling a frown pull at my face, not really sure how to apply that to my current situation.

It’s not like I am sleeping with anyone else, I just don’t know if Rosie is .

And every time I let my mind picture what she’s doing when she isn’t with me, this blinding rage takes over and it takes everything in me not to storm over to her apartment in some weird caveman, me Tarzan, you Jane display of alpha-ness.

She’d made it clear what our arrangement was, painfully clear…

could not be clearer…and I lost all courage to ask her to be exclusive after the way the gala night ended two weeks ago.

But wondering where she is and who she is with, whether they are getting her cheeky side, seeing her blush, or hearing those sweet moans?

It’s driving me insane. It is also beginning to affect my work.

“You could try using your words, like a grown-up.” Jessie grumbles, shaking his head.

He and Ethan are slightly older than the rest of us, being in their thirties, Noah and Matt are close to my age, Lucas is a couple years younger, so I suppose the most adult response would come from him.

I just ignore him though. He doesn’t get it.

He could pull the whole caveman thing because Casey was a wispy little thing and wanted to be swept off her feet.

But I know for a fact that if I tried to sweep Rosie into a bridal carry and demand she be my girlfriend, I’d get a ton of Spanish curses and a heel to the back of my head. She is skittish, at best, and far too proud. So, I need to be more creative.

I look over at Lucas and Ethan, but they both just shrug.

“Who’s the unlucky woman you’re trying to lock down?” Lucas spits through a grin, and a grunt leaves my throat.

“None of your business. You lot aren’t very helpful.” I give up on the hypothetical insinuation, I don’t know that my walls are that sturdy, and they can probably see right through me.

“Look.” Jessie huffs impatiently. “Just tell her how you feel, set ground rules and boundaries and then a little of what Noah said. If she’s that important, you’ll be patient.

Short of that, you can’t really do anything.

It’s not like you can tie her up and kidnap her.

” The mention of ties reminds me of that night in her apartment when I was tied to her chair, and a satisfied grin tips the corner of my lips.

The desire must show on my face because Ethan kicks my leg under the table.

“No, you can’t kidnap her,” he emphasizes.

“I wasn’t going to actually kidnap her.” I huff at him…but then think a little more on it. “But what if she’d be into that sort of thing?”

“I don’t think women are into some guy breaking into their apartment in a balaclava, tying them up, and kidnapping them,” Ethan scolds.

“Check her bookshelves and then decide that,” Jessie says under his breath, and we look at him. Noah chokes on his drink through a laugh.

“What?” Jessie demands, his cheeks blushing gently, and I have to bite down on my amusement.

“Please elaborate,” Lucas encourages.

“I’ve heard Casey talk about the books she, Addy, and Rosie read. That girly book club is bonkers. You should have seen their theme last Halloween. I am genuinely terrified.” I stopped listening at the mention of Rosie and the books she reads.

“What books do they read?”

He sighs, wiping a hand down his face. “I don’t know, man.

Like stalkers and creepy shit with masks.

The girls are insane. Casey usually just giggles, but Rosie?

Woman is possessed by a demon, I swear it.

” The guys at the table release like a joint shiver, and I have to take a drink to hide the blooming smile that spreads across my face.

The Rosie they speak of—my Rosie—is a fucking animal and I am obsessed with that side of her.

Since the gala two weeks ago we’ve been seeing each other on the regular.

I’d stopped by her office a couple of times to chat with Chris—or pretending to need to chat with Chris—and we’d end up in the storage cupboards, or the bathrooms for a quickie.

I’d have a late one at the office, and when I knocked on her door, she’d pull me in by my tie and have me naked and panting, sometimes begging her, within a matter of moments.

And while sex with her is possibly the greatest thing I’ve ever done, it’s the talking afterward that has me addicted to her.

She’s funny and intelligent and so, so incredibly driven.

Her new position has her exhausted, but with the same type of happy fatigue I get from my own job.

Run off her feet but can’t wait to wake up and do it again.

Though, she never openly engages in conversation, not straight away—I can see the deliberate wall she puts up.

It’s after orgasm five or six, when she’s at the point of begging, her whimpers delirious with tears of need that leak from her eyes, after that?

She’s an open book, and I don’t even think she realizes it.

I learned that she feels lost in her culture.

Having grown up in a family so obsessed with image and money and status, they lost sight of their history and what it means to be connected to your roots.

Her nanny, or ninera , Carmela, she called her, taught her to speak Spanish so she could understand and talk back to her parents.

Considering they saw her as more of an inconvenience than a daughter, they never bothered to speak to her or teach her much of anything.

This, I learned, is why she slips into Spanish when she’s swearing.

It was what she heard the most growing up.

My heart aches at the light that winks out of her eyes anytime she talks about her family, about growing up.

I know my own childhood wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but I could at least talk to my dad when it mattered.

Knew that when it came down to it, that he loved me and would always be there for me.

Even if we butted heads for the most part.

I also learned more about this family thing she told me about that happens in September, the Fiestas Patrias, which my own googling told me all about the two-day celebration, and it sounded nothing like the formal, stick-up-the-ass dinner that Rosie said her family was doing.

So I’ve made plans…I plan to surprise her…

but I am stuck on still being a nonexclusive fuck, and I want to transition out of that without ruining what we currently have, before my plans are put into action.

She has owned every single part of me since that night she finally gave into our little friends-with-benefits agreement, and I wasn’t sorry. But it’s starting to eat away at me, being the secret and wondering who or if another man is touching what I am starting to think of as mine.

I still can’t tell the guys who the hypothetical mystery woman is who is turning the elusive noncommitted playboy into wanting to become a boyfriend of all things, because she’s still keeping us as her dirty little secret.

It has been two weeks of almost daily sex, and I am anything but sated.

She isn’t leaving my system, she is embedding herself deeper. Into my mind, my soul?—

“Caleb?” The sound of my name repeated, followed by the jolt of my shoulder from Lucas, has me yanked from the spiral of Rosie I was descending down. See what I mean? This shit keeps happening.

“Huh?”

“Asking what you were doing for the Fourth?” Jesus, I really missed a lot of conversation.

“Oh, heading home to see the old man. Might hang with Addy and Noah for a bit too.”

“And Rosie.” I nearly snap my neck when I turn to look at Noah.

“Rosie?”

“Yeah, she talked to Addy, said she wanted to crash the Karvelases’ Fourth of July celebrations because she has nothing else on.” I fight with excruciating effort to keep the wide smile from spreading across my face.

“Oh.” I clear my throat, downing the rest of my drink. “Nice.” Yeah, I am failing at hiding anything.