Page 24 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“I’m not scared.”
She takes the shell from my hand. Her fingers brush mine.
She lifts it to her lips. She tips her head back, exposing the long, elegant line of her throat. I watch the muscles work as she swallows.
She closes her eyes for a second, savoring the brine and the heat of the sauce, her tongue darting out to catch a stray drop on her lip.
Fuck.
My grip on the table edge tightens until the wood groans under my fingers. She opens her eyes. They are dark and dilated.
“Good?” I ask, the word scraping against my throat.
“Salty,” she whispers. “And… unexpected.”
“Aphrodisiacs usually are.”
She flushes, reaching quickly for her water glass. “We should stick to the crab cakes for the party. Oysters are too… risky.”
“Risk is part of the brand,” I counter, though I can’t take my eyes off her mouth. I force myself to check my watch. “Okay,” I say, finally dropping the pretense. “We have twenty-five minutes left. Tell me how it’s really going.”
Tessa pauses, her fork hovering over her salad. “How what is going?”
“The job. The company. Us.” I gesture between us. “It’s been a week. Ethan has been tearing you apart on the data. Asher has been… well, Asher. And I’ve been trying to respect the ‘no flirting’ rule, which is physically painful for me, by the way.”
She laughs, a genuine, surprised sound. “Is that what you’ve been doing? Respecting the rule?”
“I’m trying,” I grin. “I think I deserve a gold star.”
“You winked at me in the budget meeting yesterday,” she points out.
“I had dust in my eye.”
“Uh-huh.” She smiles, shaking her head. Then she sighs, looking down at her plate. “It’s… heavy. You guys are overwhelming. You built this incredible thing, and you’re so protective of it. I feel like I’m constantly proving I deserve to be here.”
“You do deserve to be here,” I say seriously. “Ethan knows it too. That’s why he’s so hard on you. He respects you. If he didn’t think you could handle it, he would have ignored you.”
“He called me a liability,” she says quietly.
I wince. “Yeah. He told me about that. But you know it isn’t personal, right?”
“It sure feels personal.”
“It’s survival,” I correct her. “This company is his life. It’s our life. We lived in a basement apartment eating ramen for three years to write the code base. Now we’re on the verge of going public, and the stakes are massive. He’s afraid of anything that might rock the boat.”
“And I’m the boat-rocker?”
“You,” I reach across the table, my fingers brushing against the back of her hand. I feel the shock of it, a static snap that travels straight up my arm. She doesn’t pull away. She turns her hand over, capturing my fingers in hers. “You are a hurricane, Tessa. You walked in with that red dress and that text message, and you blew his entire controlled little world apart.”
She blushes, looking down at our joined hands. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so dangerous.” I lower my voice, leaning in. “He likes you.”
She goes completely still. “What?”
“He likes you,” I repeat. “He hates that he likes you, because you’re an employee and Harper’s friend and a ‘liability’ as he puts it, but he does. He stares at you through the glass wall of his office when he thinks no one is looking.”
Tessa’s lips part. She looks shocked. And… hopeful?
