Nights with My CEO novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Rule

She confronts him over breakfast, keeps the arrangement by choice, and he shuts her up with a kiss when she tries to claim the model.

He came out of the bathroom with a towel around his hips and water running down his chest.

He saw my face and stopped.

"What happened?"

"Callender Capital," I said, and pointed at the tag.

He looked at it, and then at me.

I watched the pieces move behind his grey eyes.

"You work at Dunwoody," he said.

"Research. The thirty-third floor."

"Dunwoody Capital."

"I'm one of the hundred and forty people you bought at noon on Friday."

He sat down on the end of the bed very carefully.

He put his hand over his mouth and said a word I had not heard from him.

"I didn't know," he said. "I swear to you. Nobody sent me a name. I've never met anyone on that floor."

"I know you didn't."

"You wrote the rule."

"I wrote the rule," I said. "No work. First names only. I'm the one who made sure we'd never find out."

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

The radiator ticked.

"Jacqueline," he said, quieter. "Rule five is still there. If you want to end it, say so. You owe me nothing. I mean that. Nothing changes at the office. Nothing."

I looked at him.

He was a man holding perfectly still so he would not push.

"Is that you being kind or you being a CEO?" I said.

"I don't know yet. I'd like to find out."

I pulled the sheet up around my chest and thought about it honestly.

I could leave.

I could walk out of suite 1412, go to my walk-up on East Fifth Street, and cry into my pillow until Monday.

That was the version where Colby won on both ends.

"I want the thirty nights," I said.

His breath went out of him.

"Nothing changes at the office," I said. "On Monday I'm an analyst, you're the person at the podium, and if you ever look at me like I'm anything else in that building, we're done."

"Understood."

"And you don't get to be my boss in this room."

"I haven't been anyone's boss in this room," he said, "since you took off your dress."

I laughed before I could stop it.

He grinned, relieved, and the whole bed seemed to get lighter.

He ordered breakfast.

He ordered it like he had never done it before, tea and toast, and I ordered four eggs and every side on the menu.

We ate on the floor with the window at our backs.

He told me his name was Reed Callender and he lived in Chicago in an apartment with no pictures on the walls.

He told me his mother lived in Arizona and called him on Sundays to tell him to eat.

I told him I grew up in Duluth, where my father fixed boat engines, and that I started running at fifteen because it was the only way to be alone.

We did not say a word about work.

Not one.

I had not realized how badly I needed the rule.

By afternoon we were back in bed.

This time it was not hungry, it was slow.

He ran the bath in the oversized white tub and put in whatever the hotel had left on the shelf.

He sat behind me in the hot water with his arms around my waist and his chin on my shoulder.

"I don't know how to do this," he said. "The being with someone."

"You seem to be doing fine."

"I'm doing the part you can see."

I turned my head and kissed him, wet and unhurried.

His hands slid up from my waist and cupped my breasts, thumbs circling until I arched back against him.

I felt him hard against my back.

"Come here," I said.

I turned around in the water and straddled him.

He took himself in hand and I took him inside me, slow, my hands on his shoulders, the water sloshing over the edge.

We fit.

I rode him leisurely, his mouth at my throat, my breasts against his chest.

He held my hips and set the pace, deep and unhurried, then deeper.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

He was looking right back, and his eyes were wide open and hungry and not scared of it at all.

"Say what you feel," I whispered.

"Like I've been holding my breath for a month and you just let me out."

That undid me.

I came clenching around him, my forehead on his, his name breaking out of me.

He came a moment after, groaning, pulling me tight, the water going still around us.

We stayed there until it cooled.

"I read something on the plane," he said into my hair, sleepily, "that I can't stop thinking about."

My stomach turned over.

"Reed, rule two."

"It isn't about the firm. It's about the best piece of financial writing I've read in ten years. A railroad. Calder Rail." He shook his head against my neck. "The man who wrote it is named Colby Sargent, and I'm going to shake his hand Monday."

I froze in the cooling water.

"Reed."

"Forty-one pages. I read it twice."

"Reed, that's mine."

It came out of me small and strange.

He lifted his head.

"What?"

"The thesis is mine. I wrote it. Colby, he."

He looked at me, and I saw him start to understand how it sounded, a woman in his bath at the exact moment he said he admired the work.

I saw him wonder, for one half second, whether I was making it up.

Then he put two fingers under my chin, and kissed me, soft and certain.

"Rule two," he said.

"Reed, wait."

"Rule two, Jacqueline. Tonight, nobody works."

I let him kiss me again.

I told myself I would explain it Sunday.

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