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“Well,” he adjusts my rearview mirror, “I figured you needed it, anyway. You’ve been working too hard.”
I nod. “I have, actually.”
He rubs my knee. “Good. So, take this as a little gift for your effort, Lee-Lee. You deserve to be taken care of.”
I smile, touched by his affectionate gesture. “Thank you.”
We drive in silence, occasionally broken by him humming a tune now and then. The thrumming between my thighs intensifies. The emotions saturating the air in the car right now are intoxicating—leftover heat from last night's passionate love-making and the brief kiss earlier.
Biting my lip, I steal a glance at him. “You know, I haven’t heard that since I was in seventh-grade.”
“What’s that?”
“Lee-Lee.”
He chuckles. “It's my favorite. I’m glad I brought it back.”
It's dark when he eventually pulls up the car. I look out the window, and back to him, puzzled. "Why are we at the old amphitheater?”
“You’ll love this. Come on.”
He helps me out of the car and leads me through the raised stone steps. “Careful, they're steep.”
At the third-storey base of the towering building, we sit on a ledge that overlooks the city, our meal sitting between us. Ian doesn't waste time uncorking the bottle of wine. He eats a large helping of cake and nods in satisfaction. "Your brother was right. You definitely know your way around this."
I smile and say, "Thanks."
Dusk is fast approaching and the soft air caresses my hair. It's quiet, cool and romantic. I like this time of day. When work's over and it isn't time to think about tomorrow yet.
He stares at me tenderly. “I had a good time last night.”
My breath catches in my throat. Good time. It sounds a bit… basic.
But it's just sex, isn't it? Sex is just an activity. I needed it, and it seemed he did too. I should take it for what it is. Feelings don't need to come into play.
Ian's eyes are still locked with mine.
Feelings must never come into play.
Lowering my eyes, I whisper, “I did, too.”
He brushes away a lock of hair away from my face and smiles at me. My heart flutters again.
What's happening to me? Why's this happening? I know how to outwit desire. Ever since the divorce, I've done so with hardly an effort. But now something is sprinting inside me too fast, twisting and turning so I can't grab on and stop it from getting further and further out of my reach.
Should one night in bed have such an effect? No, it shouldn’t. Not with someone like Ian Reynolds.
Bracing to change the topic, I casually take a sip of my wine. “So, I’m dying to know, what happened after high school?”
“Me?” Raising an eyebrow, he licks the sugar frosting off his fingers and I shiver. “Well, there’s really not much of a story.”
“You’re a tech billionaire, Ian. There’s always a story.”
He smiles. “I wrote a couple of applications after high school. MIT was the first reject with Stanford, the second. CalTech was my saving grace. I did a four-year stint with them. I was the best student on the roll, so they offered me a spot on their team after graduation. They were affiliated at the time with Silicon Valley, so double touchdown.”
He brushes away the cake crumbs from his lips with an index fingers. “Uh, I worked with them for almost two years; it gave me good privilege. Building the app was the push I needed and they helped me with it. It took about fifty-six trial errors before I got it right, but that’s a story for another day.”
My jaw drops. “Fifty-six? That’s a lot!”
