Project Virgin

  I scrambled around in the light from outside the windows. I found my panties and yanked them on with fingers that felt thick and useless. I struggled to get my bra back on. My camisole was an instrument of torture, and I was just tugging it into place when the bathroom door swung open again and the light blinded me.

  Or maybe I only wished it blinded me.

  I blinked until I could see Damon again in all that brightness, but I knew he was standing there, watching me while I did it. And once I could see him—still naked and so beautiful it hurt almost as much as the shock of the light—I couldn’t read the expression on his face.

  “Thank you,” I said hurriedly. “That was…” His dark brows rose as we both waited for me to fill in that blank. I swallowed. Hard. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  “I’m an excellent plumber.” His voice was dry. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  I wanted, desperately, to be cool and casual. Sophisticated, the way I imagined the women he usually slept with were. All knowing, heated glances and good humor as they made themselves scarce on cue. But he’d been inside me and he’d made me cry when I came that last time, and I was never going to be the same again.

  I knew better that to say any of that.

  “Come here,” he said, sounding disgruntled.

  But I was rooted to the floor and I was a little worried about the things he could see on my face. Someday I’d develop the same post-coital defense mechanisms everyone else had probably spent years perfecting. Someday. But tonight it was beyond me.

  Tonight there was that massive hollow inside of me and it was eating me whole, and it was darker and deeper and more terrifying than anything I’d ever felt before. It was so big it crowded out the world. It was crushing me and I didn’t even know what to call it.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, though I had no idea what I was apologizing for, and my voice was as thick as the back of my eyes were prickly, and I could feel my face start to crumple.

  “Scottie.” Damon’s voice was hard. It was his work voice, and I didn’t realize until I heard it again that he hadn’t used it in hours. “Did I tell you to stand there or did I tell you to come here?” It was beyond me to answer him then through the constriction in my throat, but he must have sensed that because he didn’t wait for me to reply. “I thought we were both clear on the rules.”

  The rules. I’d forgotten all about them.

  Do what I tell you to do.

  So I did. I walked over to him and when I stopped in front of him, feeling messy and misshapen, he simply wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I didn’t want to go, but then he was tucking me against his chest. Beneath his chin. As if I’d been crafted to fit perfectly right there.

  When in doubt, do it anyway, he’d said.

  I closed my eyes. I let the heat of his skin seep into me.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” he told me, in that same half-dark, half-impatient voice of his that was famous in the halls of Granger & Knox. “We’re going to go sit in the hot tub for a while. Look at the sky. Enjoy the dark.”

  As if he knew I didn’t want him to see me then. Too wide open. Too vulnerable. I felt turned inside out.

  “Okay,” I said against the base of his neck. “I can do that.”

  “Oh, you’ll do it,” he said. He reached down took my chin in his fingers, tipping my head back so he could look at me. “And then we’ll come back inside and see what you’ve learned.”

  I would have said that I’d slid too far down a slippery slope into far too many emotions. That I was pushed out of shape and might never feel anything sexual again. But I was wrong. His words were like lit matches to dry tinder, and my whole body went up in flames.

  I must have gaped up at him. Damon’s smile was slow and very, very male. It sent another burst of sensation coursing through me, and I might have been able to hide that. Maybe. But there was no disguising the way my nipples pebbled against his chest, giving me away.

  “Will there be a test?” I asked him, amazed to feel a smile tug at my own lips.

  Damon smoothed my hair back from my brow. His mouth was still in that impossibly sexy curve. And he was holding me close as if this wasn’t a simple transaction after all. As if it mattered, what had happened between us here tonight.

  And I wasn’t foolish enough to think it meant anything more than sex. But that didn’t make it casual. Nothing about this felt casual. Even if it tonight was the only time it ever happened between us, that didn’t make it casual.

  That, I understood, was the gift. Not my virginity. But how he hadn’t simply taken it. He’d made it matter that I’d given it to him. He’d made it matter that we’d done it together, and he’d made it matter that we were still here in the aftermath.

  He’d made it matter.

  “Of course there’s a test,” he told me lightly, keeping his arm around me as he turned and steered me toward the glass doors that led out from his bedroom. “There’s always a test. But don’t worry, Scottie. I have a good feeling about your chances.”

  *

  The next time I woke, dawn was a pink and red smudge on the horizon outside Damon’s windows. I sat up slowly, unable to keep myself from smiling at all the new and fascinating ways my body tugged at me. Reminding me in an instant that this was, truly, the first day of the rest of my life.

  This was the new Scottie. The one who’d lived through the Damon Patrick experience and was different now. Different in ways I imagined it might take me a while to fully understand.

  Damon was stretched out beside me, and the first flush of dawn made him look even more beautiful than the night before had. I couldn’t believe that I’d touched this man. More than touched him. He hadn’t tested me so much last night as he’d given me an intense tutorial. I knew all kinds of things, now. How he tasted, surging deep into my mouth. How it felt to climb on a man’s lap and rock us both a little crazy. What it was like to come like that, face to face and upright, and then come again when he tugged me down to the bed and draped my legs over his wide shoulders.

  Damon was a very good teacher.

  I eased myself to the edge of the wide bed and gathered my clothes again. This time, I didn’t dress in the room. This time, I bundled them all up with me and snuck out into the great main room, then pulled my clothes on beneath the manic scribbles that I liked more and more the longer I looked at them.

  It was like looking at Damon, I thought as I zipped up my skirt. So beautiful and so fascinating, and utterly impenetrable all the same. A language that defied fluency. Words that felt as if they made sense, but could never quite be read or analyzed.

  I laughed a little bit at my own silliness, and then I made my way to the elevator in my bare feet, my heels dangling from one hand.

  My reality didn’t include Damon Patrick, the man who might as well be my boss, and I figured it was better not to be here when he woke up in the cold light of this Saturday morning to deliver that message himself. It was better to accept the gifts he’d given me and move on gracefully. I could do it. After everything he’d done for me last night—over and over again, God help me—it was the least I could do in return.

  I pressed the elevator button, but nothing happened when I did. Only then did I remember that it needed a key to work. For a moment I let my mind wander into dangerous territory, fantasies of curling up on that couch and watching the sun fully rise, and maybe then having a repeat of one of Damon’s more delicious lessons—

  But that was only begging for trouble. Last night’s emotional moment was understandable, I reasoned, but that was last night, five seconds after losing my virginity some ten years after every other person I knew. This was a brand new day, and I knew better. I knew what I’d asked for and what Damon had agreed to do. I knew what my expectations ought to have been.

  I pushed on doors until I found the stairwell, and I shut the heavy door to his loft quietly behind me. I stood there for a moment, as if my legs
didn’t want to obey me, but it was only a moment. I texted for a car as I started down the stairs, and when I stepped out into the crisp San Francisco morning and paused to slip my shoes back on, I could see it coming around the far corner down the block.

  This wasn’t a walk of shame, I thought as I made my way toward it. This was rebirth. This was me made new.

  This was felt like to get exactly what I’d wanted.

  At last.

  *

  I spent the rest of the morning avoiding Alexander’s calls because he had no idea how ancient our history seemed to me after a night with Damon. I packed up the things I knew he’d left behind deliberately and I called in a locksmith that afternoon.

  Only then did I answer exactly one call from my ex-fiancé, that epic waste of my time and energy.

  “What the hell, Scottie—” Alexander started, having obviously moved into his the best defense is offense phase. It amazed me how little I cared.

  “I’m putting the rest of your crap on the sidewalk outside the building,” I told him without emotion. The truth was, I didn’t feel anything. I was done. “And I already changed the locks. Come get your stuff or don’t, I don’t care.”

  “You have to be kidding—”

  “I’m not kidding. And Alexander.” I paused, and it wasn’t lost on me that I sounded a whole lot like Damon then. Brisk and confident. It was a heady sensation. “I don’t want to hear from you again. I mean that.”

  Then I hung up on him. I blocked his number and I took a nap, and when I woke up, the boxes I’d stacked near the tree outside the front door of our building were gone. I wondered idly if he’d turned up before the city’s scavengers had made off with his ironic t-shirt collection, but I acknowledged the fact I didn’t particularly care one way or the other.

  The Alexander chapter of my life was closed.

  So I did what I did best. I went to work.

  A paralegal turned up with my work bag at some point later that evening, which I knew I’d left in Damon’s town car. But when I started to think about Damon, I shut it down. Or tried. I didn’t think the man who’d made certain the loss of my virginity had been that good would turn around and make my life miserable. I really didn’t. I couldn’t imagine him blackballing me. But that meant I couldn’t make myself miserable either.

  I went back home sometime on Sunday to shower and sleep, but was still feeling guilty for not checking my phone all of Friday night, so set my alarm for extra early on Monday. I’d been at my desk for hours by the time the secretaries came in, and had a draft of a brief on one of my supervising attorney’s desks shortly after. It didn’t make up for ignoring her calls on Friday, but it was a good start.

  “Did you hear?” one of my fellow first-years asked when I ran into her in the elevator lobby. I’d snuck downstairs to get a coffee and took a pull from it as we stepped out of the way of the usual traffic.

  Jeannette’s eyes were wide and sparkling.

  “Damon Patrick,” she said.

  I froze. I managed not to choke on my coffee. I hoped the look I gave her was mildly quizzical, nothing more.

  “What about him?”

  But lawyers were lawyers. Jeannette eyed me. “Didn’t you work a deposition with him last week?”

  “I did. Out in Napa. Why?”

  “He left the firm.”

  The sentence didn’t make any sense to me. “What do you mean, he left the firm? You mean… for good?”

  Why did that feel like a punch to the gut?

  Jeannette nodded, her gaze avid. “He walked. He took his biggest clients and he started his own firm. You didn’t know?”

  “Um, no.” My mind was spinning, but that worked in my favor just then. I was sure I looked as blank as I felt. “Damon Patrick did not share his plans with me, you’ll be shocked to hear.”

  I repeated that refrain all day.

  To my friends. My co-workers. All the associates I worked with, all of whom knew I’d worked with him last. Had I sensed something? Had he done something? Was there any indication that he was planning to jump ship?

  It was hours later when I made it back to my desk, and late that evening when I finally made enough of a dent in all the work that had piled up to decide I could go home. I was planning out what little remained of my night as the elevator hurtled me toward the street. A bath. Maybe some take out. Definitely a glass of wine. Maybe a whole bottle of wine, come to that.

  And the thoughts of Damon I hadn’t let myself indulge in all day. In private, where I could give them the kind of attention they deserved.

  My heels were loud against the lobby floor. I smiled at the guys behind the security desk and pushed my way out into the cool night. The thick sea air slapped at me, invigorating me. I debated whether or not to walk home—the only exercise I ever got on hideously busy days like this one—when the sound of a car door near the curb caught my attention.

  I glanced over out of habit, then froze.

  Damon stood there, leaning back against the sleek black car, his dark blue eyes trained on me.

  I didn’t have any idea what to do. My body wasn’t so shy. It exulted in the sight of him. It was like a wave crashing over me, sending me tumbling end over end, then dragging me out to sea. I didn’t move a muscle. I knew I didn’t.

  But inside, I drowned.

  “Here’s the thing, Scottie,” Damon said, and the way he leaned against the car was lazy. Almost indolent, the way he’d lounged like a sultan on that sofa. “I’m not a fucking plumber.”

  Chapter Nine

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  I moved then. My feet did what they wanted, or maybe it was the magnetic pull he emanated, dragging me closer to him whether I wanted to go to him or not.

  Damon watched me approach, the look on his clever face dark and hungry.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye before I left the other night,” I said brightly. “But then again, it seems you had an action-packed weekend.” I stopped a foot or so in front of him and crossed my arms, as if that could save me from my own hunger. “You must have been planning this for a long time.”

  “It was supposed to happen soon,” he agreed. “But I was inspired to move up the timeline.”

  He reached over then and worked a tendril of my hair out from its usual twist, then tugged on it, and I should have hated myself for the way it speared through me. Pure lust flooded me, making my nipples pinch tight and my pussy slick and soft. Ready. Not that I planned to share that with him.

  “Why?” I meant that to be challenge. But my hair was wrapped around his finger and my voice came out a whisper.

  Because he was here, and he didn’t have to be here. He’d left the firm. More than once today I’d tried to come to terms with the knowledge I’d likely never see him again unless it was in a courtroom.

  He was here, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that meant something too.

  “My ex wasn’t wrong,” he told me, his voice low. Traffic slid by on the street, headlights and horns and the song of San Francisco all around us. I saw only him. “My family is cold and I only ever knew one way to warm up. I had a lot of sex and it felt a lot better than being around my family ever did and that was fine with me for a long time.”

  I sighed. “This is pretty much the exact opposite of anything I’d want to hear, in case you wondered.”

  His mouth curved and he straightened from the side of his car. He didn’t let go of that little silken chunk of hair.

  “But too much of anything is boring, Scottie. You’re still so fresh and new. You look around this tottery old firm the way I used to. I can see it in you. You love the whole game. The hierarchy and the dues. The golden handcuffs. Everything the firm has to offer.”

  “Of course I do.” I frowned at him, not tracking the change of subject. “Or I’d flounce off to some boutique firm and chase ambulances.”

  “A fate worse than death.” His blue gaze moved over my face, as if he was searching for something there. “I’m in a different
place. It all bored me. I don’t want to be a senior partner here. I don’t want to do the same thing I’ve been doing for seven years—hell, for my whole life. I want something else. Something different.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you started your own firm,” I said, and I meant it.

  I almost meant it.

  “The firm, sure.” He tugged on that bit of hair he held and then he sighed a little, then moved forward so he could slide his hand along my jaw. “And you.”

  “Me?”

  “I never saw you coming,” he said quietly. Intently. “You’re not what I had planned at all. But I don’t want to throw you back, Scottie. I’m not ready.”

  I blinked, and pretended my heart wasn’t going a little crazy in my chest.

  “Am I a fish in this metaphor?”

  “I’m not a plumber,” he said, firmly. “I don’t know what happened at dinner on Friday. I had no intention of touching you and then I couldn’t stop. This has never happened to me before, Scottie. I don’t know that I like it.”

  “That’s encouraging. And better than talking about your innumerable sexual conquests, by the way. Now that I’m one of them, I find they’re a lot less interesting to me.”

  “You gave me something you’ve never given anyone else,” he growled at me, his hand tightening slightly on my cheek, as if he could tell I was talking too much because I was as nervous, as uneven, as he was. “That matters to me. It matters a lot. I don’t particularly want you sharing all of that with anyone else.”

  And I grinned at him. It split me wide open, a bright thing from the inside out, as sweet as those emotions the other night had been dark. I understood they were two sides of the same coin. Big and unwieldy and maybe, in the end, the whole point of this. Sex and everything else that mattered.

  “This sounds a lot like attachment,” I said, shaking my head at him, but I thought the grin probably ruined it. “Crazy caveman tactics, no less. Entirely too possessive and besides, this whole thing is unethical. You’re practically my boss.”

  “That’s the point.” His thumb moved over my cheekbone, sweet and hot. “I’m not your boss. I don’t even work at the same firm. The senior partners might not love the idea because I’m pretty sure I’m now on their eternal shit list, but there’s nothing unethical about it.”