Page 83 of Skins Game

With a languid move, Kingston crossed his legs. He did not allow his face to show that he was suffering from a raging, unremitting hard-on that threatened to give him blue balls at the thought of bending her over that table, her bare ass in the air and pussy naked to him, and taking her right there in that damn conference room.

His throbbing blood pressure almost gave him a migraine.

35

Nicole’s Office

NICOLE LAMB

Nicole was in her office, sitting on her desk and sharpening a long, steel katana with a whetstone, stroking the round stone along the edge and ruminating on the metallurgy of the forged blade-style irons she was planning to design next.

Kingston stepped inside and closed the door behind himself. “We didn’t actually talk about what happened.” He glanced at what she was doing. “Do you want to put that back on the wall?”

She laid it aside but didn’t hang it up with the rest of her collection. “Nah.”

He smirked at her with a jump of his dark eyebrows and a half-smile. “Interesting.”

Nicole leaned back on her arms as he approached, his long legs taking only a few sauntering steps across the room. A Sidewinder employee badge with a photo of his chiseled face was clipped to his suit jacket’s breast pocket.

A white lace pocket square might be tucked in there later that day, and her face heated.

Kingston leaned over her, his arms braced around her, and he looked down between them at the pale blue dress with a fifties-style circle skirt she wore.

When he looked up, his eyes were alight.

Yeah, she would’ve had to tuck the skirt around her legs if she’d had to don Tyvek coveralls to enter the lab, but the paperwork and CAD work had built up to where she’d known she would be stuck in her office all day.

And Kingston was still in town. The heat in his gaze had scorched her when she’d worn the white sundress the day before.

Afterward had been fun, too.

Even though she was still mad at him, and didn’t see him as forever material, and suspected much.

She asked, “Did anyone see you come in?”

“No one was in the hall. I don’t think anyone saw when I badged myself into the engineering area’s back hallway.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“On the down-low. How exhilarating.”

The drop in his voice that sounded almost like malice made her skin heat, but she answered honestly. “I don’t want anyone to know about us yet. I need to think about what to tell them.”

Arvind and a few other lab people had noticed her red eyes for weeks.

Finally, their gentle probes had broken her down. “I have terrible taste in men,” she’d told them. “If I like a guy, that’s a huge waving red flag. He’s either a cheater or a thief.”

She didn’t want to explain to them that nothing between her and Kingston had been resolved, and yet everything was back on.

He leaned toward her, and his warm breath trickled over the skin of her shoulder and throat. “Our little secret.”

Dear Lord, the scent that puffed out of his collar was like dark caramel, freshly cut wood, and something dark and masculine that made her want to bury her face in his neck and inhale forever.

She closed her eyes as his hand caressed her curves. “Did you want to talk about?—”

His lips moved on her neck. “If you want to talk.”

No. No, she didn’t.