Womanizer

  “Not the mail guy either,” I whisper.

  “That’s right.” He takes my chin and turns my face to his, forcing me to look into his beautiful copper eyes, which seem to see right through me. “Just me.”

  I turn my head a little bit and busily tuck my phone away. Nervous.

  Callan just stands and shoves his hands into his pockets and watches me with this smile on his face. “Olivia.”

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s a giant cluster of freckles on your face.”

  “Shut up!” I groan, laughing because I’m blushing.

  We walk down the pier in silence.

  I want to kiss him and hold his hand; I want to do many things. I’m surprised by how much I want them.

  “I sometimes worry I’ll end my life doing nothing that I wanted to do,” I say as we keep walking along the corridor.

  He steals a look at me that clearly says, “Oh, are we talking personal again?” And it’s an amused look, so I just grin and fall quiet for a moment.

  “So what do you want to do?” he asks me.

  “Be my own boss one day. Travel,” I admit. “I want to help businesses, but I worry about choosing the ones I could most make a difference for. I’ll be no use to anyone if I run my own business into the ground.” I shoot him a soft smile. “I want to enjoy my grandma, too, you know. I mean, I know I don’t have her forever. I want to enjoy my parents and form a family like they have, but that needs a partner, and sometimes it feels like things going the way you hope isn’t even in you or your partner’s hands. . . it’s sometimes not meant to be.”

  His eyebrows pull together into a frown. “I wholly disagree. I don’t leave things to chance. You want it, you make it happen; if not, you won’t.”

  “That’s not true. So many people want things they strive for their whole lives and they’re always elusive; other people don’t want things that they take for granted. Like my family, for example. Living with them, I felt safe all my life, all my problems solved, yet it still felt like my life was a series of little dramas, from the slight of a friend to Daniel Radisson not wanting to hire me, and the tree house, and me saying the wrong things. I always had their love but I forgot the little dramas. Being away from them I’ve realized how much I depend on them to feel safe. Even my fear of heights. Or the one where I’ll die young and never be anyone’s wife or mother. I console myself I’d at least be buried with my parents.”

  “I don’t go thinking about my fears—hell, I don’t base my decisions on them.” He gives me a wink. “So the saying goes, there are two dogs barking over your shoulder, fear or determination. Which one wins? The one you feed. Never feed the dog who’s afraid.”

  “But you’re feeding the dog that tells you relationships don’t last. That dog will always win until you stop feeding it.”

  “Then I won’t. I’ll feed that dog plump and well.”

  “You’re so stubborn, I pity the girls who fall even half in love with you.”

  “Yourself included?”

  I roll my eyes. “Oh definitely. I’m just pitying myself so hard right now because I will for sure die alone. Nobody’s wife and mother.”

  “But very well made love to every night.”

  I feel this awful blush run all over me.

  What do you want from me?

  “My friend Lisa,” I tell him. “She’s a girl I knew . . . well, she was like a sister for the brief time I knew her. She was Tahoe’s first girlfriend.” I feel pain when I remember the hurt my brother went through. “She died before she could even legally drink. It caused such an impact. I remember how pale she was in the end, and how weak, and how sad I was to imagine her not being able to live her life longer and experience more things. No matter how much her loved ones tried to bring happiness into those bleak white hospital walls, it was just . . . not meant to be. You can’t say that was her choice.”

  “I’m not going to.” His expression softens. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.” I watch our feet and then stop walking and turn to face him. “Tell me one fear of yours. One, Callan. Or I’ll never, ever talk to you again. You’re freaking inhuman.”

  He laughs. “I’m so human. You have no idea.”

  “Prove it.”

  He scowls, but then we start walking again, and he says, “Being trapped.”

  “You mean physically?”

  “In any way, shape, or form. By the very things I want to have.”

  “Hmm,” I say thoughtfully, the wheels spinning in my mind. “So is that why you can’t commit to one company? You just take what you want and drop it so you’re free to move on with no commitment or emotional investment in making it work. Takeovers.”

  “Miss Roth,” he scoffs, tugging my ponytail, “I do nothing out of fear. I do it because I’m good at it. Because I can. Let’s not forget I’m the best at it.”

  “Any person in the world can give a life or take it; it doesn’t mean you should.”

  “All right then. Because it’s all I know. I don’t know how to do it differently.” His lips curl as he raises one inquiring eyebrow. “My brother and his roughhousing, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, five years older is a lot when you’re five. I had to devise plans to get what he had and win the game without physically wrestling it from him.”

  “It was your mode of survival. I’d like to meet this evil brother.”

  “He’s not evil, he’s just a sibling; we were both fighting to be the alpha of the house.”

  “Well, who won?”

  “We’re still fighting it out.”

  “Ha ha. I want to meet him, then.”

  “I don’t want him to meet you.”

  I flush at the possessiveness in his eyes. God. The way he pays attention makes me so self-conscious and aware of him.

  “So he’s a bad boy, huh?”

  “More like you could fire up holy water.”

  We sit on a bench and sip on cold drinks. His words, though they make me giggle, tug at all of my heartstrings, and every inch of my sexy parts too.

  “You have a way of opening me up,” I accuse.

  He shifts forward on his elbows, glancing at me past his shoulder. “You have a way with me, period.”

  “I’m not sure we should flirt; it’s not professional.”

  “I agree, it’s not.” He nods somberly, his hazel eyes watching me.

  “Well then, no flirting.”

  “Miss that pink on your cheeks? I don’t think so. I’ll have some of that pink with an extra spoonful on the side, Miss Roth.”

  “You’re a cad.”

  “You like me best when I’m a cad.”

  “I do not.”

  “I can say anything right now, bring on the pink, and you will have a very hard time proving me wrong.”

  “I pity the girls who fall for that. Losers, all of them. I’m not falling for that or you.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “What are you asking for?”

  “Just time with you.” He gazes deeply into my eyes, and slowly, Callan lifts his brows at me.

  I stare at the laces of my sneakers. I’m not sure he’s making a pass at me. I’m not sure of my own name.

  He gets a phone call.

  “Carmichael,” he answers. He motions with his head for us to leave, and I toss my empty water bottle into a nearby trash can and follow him to the Range Rover.

  Several hours after Callan drops me off, he texts me at 9 p.m., making me cancel an evening plan with Wynn. He wants me at his home office. Lincoln is also there with a thousand printed pages of Callan’s new obsession. I’m kind of relieved Alcore is off the hook, and in a way, so am I, for having proposed it as ripe for takeover—for now.

  At 11 p.m. Lincoln excuses himself to go home and recharge, leaving Callan and me poring over company documents.

  By 1 a.m., I’m ready to bail.

  “Come on, stay,” he says. He sounds almost disappointed that I?
??m giving up already.

  “So I get a peek at a strumpet in the morning? No thanks.”

  “No strumpets,” he says.

  I shoot him an I-don’t-believe-that look but I stay and even make some coffee for us.

  At 3 a.m., I set down the papers and doze off to him speaking on the phone with someone overseas.

  I feel a delicious warmth spread over me and hands shift me on the couch—then I sense something hard beneath my cheek and a hand stroking the back of my head. I turn a bit and realize my head is on his lap, his hand running down my hair, stroking me.

  Sunday morning I wake up to the sound of male voices. I’m disoriented, glancing around and trying to adjust my eyes to the blazing sunlight pouring through the massive arched windows before me.

  Someone covered me with a blanket and plumped a pillow under my head.

  It takes me a second to realize where I am and another to realize I must look a sight. Attempting to reach the stairs that lead to the second landing, where I assume both the master and guest bedrooms are located, I pass the conference room downstairs and hear a group of men talking animatedly. They’re talking in legal terms and I realize they’re Carma’s law team.

  Seven men sit at the conference table, while Callan is the only one standing, wearing the same shirt he wore last night, his jaw shadowed from a day’s growth of beard, his chin resting on two fingers as he looks down at the team with a stance that says “NO BULLSHIT.”

  I would have never, ever in my life expected my mailman to live in a place like this. To be like this. I can’t believe that once, ages ago, I imagined he had a one-bedroom apartment, very cluttered—not a Gold Coast home, with a gated entrance, so clean that the floor could be a long, endless marble mirror beneath me.

  His energy fills the room. I can see the men scramble to please him and answer his questions. Tall and dark and solemn, he looks about as brooding and bloodthirsty as a vampire acquiring his next ounce of blood. In this case, a struggling business.

  Rolling his shirtsleeves to his elbows while he speaks on the phone, he seems oblivious to the men in the room, even to my presence at the door as I wonder if I should say hello or simply go freshen up and leave.

  I see the way he frustratedly tugs the top button of his shirt and I wonder if I hallucinated the way he ran his fingers through my hair last night. His hands are tanned, and although big, they are sleek, his fingers long and elegant. His hair is close-cropped, ending just where his collar begins.

  I wonder who the guy on the other end of the line is, probably some other investment-savvy genius like him, and for a moment I’d do anything to listen in on their conversation.

  Ending the call with a brusque click, Callan finally turns, assesses his employees in one sweeping motion and, to my mortification, suddenly spots me by the door with my hair probably a mess and in the same clothes as yesterday. He lifts a brow and drinks me in.

  And I quickly turn away and hurry upstairs, my cheeks red. I head into a guest bathroom and wash my face and find some toothpaste and mouthwash, then I fix my hair and clothes, call a cab for myself, and tiptoe inconspicuously out of the house.

  Wynn invited me over to her gallery on Wednesday afternoon, and I’m helping her set up her new artist’s exhibition. My job is the first thing she asks me about, and I’m nervously selecting what to say about it. “It’s consuming,” I settle on.

  “He was asking me questions about you the other day,” she admits.

  “What do you mean?” I stand in the middle of the gallery space, surrounded by one wall hung with canvases, the other empty.

  “Just if you had a guy back home,” Wynn says as she lifts one of the works that will go up on the empty wall.

  My eyes widen. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. He’s not like that. I mean, he’s been playing the field for years.” She tsks and shakes her head. “I smell sex, Livvy. And lots of it.”

  “No!” I cry. “I mean . . .” I can’t tell Wynn, even though I want to. “He was the first real friend I found in this city, and though it’s complicated now, I feel . . . a bit of a weak spot for him, in a way I can’t explain.”

  “I’m thinking he has a weak spot for you,” Wynn says. She smiles at me tenderly, then hoists a small oil on canvas up on the wall. “Tahoe would go ballistic, Livvy.”

  “I know! I know. Which is why I’m trying to keep it professional.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to be you right now. These boys can be so irresistible.”

  I glance at Wynn helplessly, not knowing what to say.

  “Get your fix from some other guy. Or get a toy,” Wynn says.

  I’ve had time for neither. I’ve hardly found time for anything other than work. Even time to sleep. He’s been calling in the middle of the night.

  “What do you think of HITT on the NASDAQ?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do you think of High Intelligence Tech Transformation?”

  “It’s 3 a.m.”

  “You know what they say when you wake up at 3 a.m. Someone’s watching you.”

  “Very funny. Asshole. Now I’m scared.”

  “Good. Open your computer, tell me what you think . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Because I told you I’d teach you—you don’t get to pick the times when you want to learn. Now I’m waiting, Livvy.”

  Between the late-night phone calls, his current takeover and his increasing interest in Alcore, and Mr. Lincoln getting hit with a stomach bug, I’m consumed by his demands for the week and am amazed how he accomplishes all that he does.

  I don’t even know how the guy fits partying into his schedule, he seems like he’s always in one place with a hand in another.

  Callan is at a polo match on Friday afternoon when I need to deliver some printouts he requested to review over the weekend.

  I arrive during the middle of the match and take a seat at one of the back tables, occupying myself by skimming over the papers to keep from drooling over my boss. He rides a black horse named Kaz, and when the match ends, I follow him to the stables. He hops off and leads his stallion into the stall, wearing riding boots and tight pants that put the sexy butts of baseball men to shame.

  “I miss Sara,” I say as he pats his horse’s neck.

  He unbuckles the saddle, admiring the animal’s movement. I’m from the South. I appreciate a guy who can take care of horses and ride them the way this guy does. He raises his brow. “Sara?”

  I add, “My pinto mare.”

  “This is Tinkerbell.” He signals to a lovely white mare in the stall next to Kaz’s.

  “Can we ride them?”

  We end up riding them in one of the pens, and I wear out poor Tinkerbell as Callan and Kaz chase us around. I remember riding Sara over the meadow in the back of my home, and how free I felt. That same freedom rushes in my veins as I thunder with the mare beneath me, Kaz’s hooves thundering behind me, and a guy I’m only too aware of chasing after me.

  I feel oddly aroused and breathless by the time we dismount, feed the horses, and head to the Range Rover in the parking lot. He drives me home before he goes change for a business dinner.

  I meet him at his house Saturday morning like he asked, and I expect to find some strumpet strutting half-naked around somewhere. I’m surprised that there isn’t. Only his naked body on the bed, covered by a sheet.

  For a moment I stand by his bedroom door, not knowing what to do, but the AC is at full blast and for some reason I feel the urge to go and pull the sheet a little higher.

  He rolls over, stirring awake. I slowly step back, flushing over being caught.

  “I was supposed to make sure you got this today.” I set the folder on the nightstand.

  He shifts up on one arm, his muscles flexing with the move, and he stares at me.

  “And I actually also brought coffee,” I add, flushing harder.

  He squints and takes the coffee cup. “Thanks.” His voice i
s gruff with sleep still. I wonder if he was with anyone after the business dinner and almost want to retch at the thought.

  “Callan, you really need to give me more than this,” I say, thinking if I’m to be suffering through the wicked temptation of seeing him half naked, it should at least be worth it. “I want to be in on the action!”

  He lifts his brows at my brazenness, then chuckles. “You wouldn’t know what to do with action if it stared you in the face.”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “So, I’m a struggling cellular phone company, my assets are my customer base, which is slowly trickling away and heading to the competition. What are you gonna do?”

  “Well, that’s easy. I would come up with a new model phone they have no choice but to buy.”

  “The banks don’t loan to you anymore, you’re up to your gills in debt.”

  “Oh. Hmm . . . See, that’s why I want to learn! I want to learn from the best. Not only with hopeful eyes of making a company work, but with realistic ones that would help me spot a sick horse from a dead horse.”

  He chuckles heartily—his laugh making me blush for some reason—and he drags a hand over his jaw then flings the sheets off him and stands to get dressed.

  Giving me a very real, very jaw-dropping view of his ass.

  He gives me a ride to the office, and I’m still reeling a little bit from the sight of his perfect bare butt.

  “If I’m going to be spending this much time with you, you should at least give me some good, solid business tips. Real ones,” I complain, still brooding over his gorgeous, unattainable butt.

  “All right then.” He eyes me, lifting a brow in challenge. “It starts with the way you dress. You can dress easy on any day but important days. You need to mean business, and you need to look the part.”

  “A.k.a. the dress code? Help your staff get into the business mentality?”

  “We’re not dicking around here. What we do is serious.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, because he sounds so passionate about it.

  “Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.” He shoots me a meaningful look. “Don’t talk, act. Don’t say, show. Don’t promise, prove.” He slices an invisible path in the air with his hand. “Your actions and your words should always be in line.” He looks at me cuttingly. “Tell me I can’t, then watch me work ten times as hard to prove you wrong.”