The Exhibition (An Executive Decision Trilogy) (8 page)

‘So Dr. Thorne’s efforts didn’t work, then?’

‘Oh, they helped, but in my case, there was only so much the poor woman could do.’

As the music slowed and the band began to play Meatloaf’s
I Would Do Anything for Love
, Harris settled his hands onto her hips and found he rather liked the way moving with her made
him
feel less awkward. She slid her hands behind his neck, and he held his breath, preparing for the full frontal rub-up he both anticipated and feared. But she surprised him by talking business.

‘Look, I don’t expect you to make the decision to work with me right here and now. I know it’s a lot to take in, and I know … well, I know how you feel about me. But if you can put that aside and look at what I’m proposing objectively, I’m sure you’ll see that it could be good for everyone. If it’s OK with you, I’ve got a written proposal that should answer all of your questions and clarify anything you’re not sure of, and –’

They found their space invaded by Kyle Waters and his camera. He was dancing with some woman in very tight black spandex, who smiled and blew them a kiss.’

‘Just had to get a picture of this,’ Waters yelled, snapping shots as he moved way less awkwardly on the dance floor than Harris would have liked. ‘Never figured you for a dancer, Walker.’ Before he could respond, Kyle continued, ‘I think these shots might be good for my portfolio even if they’re a bit too gritty for your exhibition, Stacie.’

Harris wanted the man to go away, but all at once it was as though Stacie was on exhibition, draping herself over Harris and forcing him into a mock tango that had him laughing in spite of himself. It wasn’t just that; it was the fact that he was now the plaything of clearly the most interesting woman on the dance floor, and people were staring at them, something he normally would have loathed. But he was first and foremost male, and he could almost guarantee that there were very few men in the room who weren’t jealous of him. And Harris wasn’t a total stick in the mud. He could certainly play along, letting her sway around him and dipping her dangerously close to the hard wood floor, only to hear her squeal of laughter as he pulled her back to him, with a little
Dirty Dancing
thrown in for good measure. All the while Kyle Waters snapped away.

He spun her in a dizzying ring-around-the-roses and she literally tripped and stumbled into his arms, laughing hysterically. ‘Go away, Kyle,’ Harris yelled. ‘Photo shoot’s over. Go dance!’

With his arms wrapped tightly around Stacie’s waist, he half marched, half dragged her to the quieter edge of the dance floor, if there was a quieter spot.

Stacie was still giggling, still draped around him up close and personal. ‘Did you just drag me away from the photographer I’ve been propositioning for the last three hours?’ Her voice was breathless and close to his ear to be heard above the driving beat of the music, which had turned heavy metal, a song Harris didn’t recognize.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling her way closer to him than was polite. ‘I thought you’d propositioned Waters already. I thought you were propositioning me now, and I’m the jealous type, prima donna, you know? Artsy fartsy and all.’ He was just about to lose all propriety and kiss her when the police showed up.

Chapter Ten

The fact that cops were pouring through the door only half registered in Harris’ Stacie-addled brain. Then some woman screamed raid, and people were running and shoving in all directions. Someone was shouting something in an authoritative voice into a blow horn. It all felt like a scene right out of a gangster movie.

Stacie grabbed him by the hand and dragged him back toward their table. She shoved her iPad in her bag, and shouted at Waters, who had rushed back to the booth with his dance partner hanging on for dear life and was now shooting pictures like crazy.

Every time the man had a camera in his hand, he looked like he was about to get well laid. Did his work really do that for him? The adrenaline rush that came from fear of losing life and limb was the best Harris ever managed.

‘You all right?’ Stacie yelled to Waters.

Nodding breathlessly, he handed Stacie something that Harris couldn’t see. ‘Need you to do me a favor.’ His words were clipped, excited. ‘Can you take care of this for me?’ He nodded toward the ladies’ room.

‘Seriously? You brought that here?’ For a second, Harris thought Stacie was going to belt the man.

Waters only shrugged, gave her a sheepish grin, and kept shooting. ‘I didn’t think.’

She said something that Harris couldn’t hear over the chaos, something he figured wasn’t very nice.

She grabbed Harris by the hand and headed toward the bathrooms, dragging him right into the women’s room. ‘What the –?’

She shoved her way into the first stall, dropped a tiny plastic bag with what looked like a couple of roll-your-owns into the commode, and flushed with her booted foot.

‘Jesus! Are you kidding me?’ He felt the tension ratchet up a notch in his shoulders as she watched the swirl of water in the toilet to make sure her efforts were effective. ‘He brought pot here? Idiot.’

She placed a finger to her lips, then slammed the cubicle door shut once she was satisfied with the results. ‘I’m sure that’s not what they’re looking for, but it’s enough to land him at the police station.’

Outside someone shouted, ‘Hastings, check the crappers.’

Before Harris knew what hit him, she pulled him into the cubicle at the other end of the row and locked the door behind him, talking in a fast whisper. ‘Sorry about this. It’s not very professional, I know, but I promised to do my best to keep us out of jail, and I’m thinking groping in the ladies’ room’s not what this raid’s all about.’

The words were barely out of her mouth before she launched herself at him, lips first. Damn it; he wanted to be mad at her. They were about to go to jail, for fuck sake! But instead of giving her a piece of his mind, he kissed her right back, hard, and felt her yield and open, and his tongue was in heaven, sparring with hers, tasting, testing, thrusting. Harris found himself hoping that the inevitable arrest would wait until after he got his fill of Stacie Emerson, and that could take a while. She felt way better than she had even in his fantasies, and when his badly behaving hands moved down to cup her magnificent bottom and pull her closer, she returned the favor and gave his ass a good grope. As if that gave him permission to explore, he slid anxious fingers inside her trousers, wriggling down past a minuscule thong to cup an impossibly soft, impossibly firm buttock that gave a muscular clench in his hand, forcing her hips forward until she couldn’t possibly miss the press of his appreciative hard-on straining his jeans to get closer to her.

In the hall the noise got louder and the door burst open.

She had just managed a good, firm stroke to the front of his trousers that had his full attention and then some when a heavy-handed knock on the door caused her to yelp, and he nearly fell back onto the commode.

‘All right, you two, tuck it in, and come on out.’

Stacie opened the door before they could even attempt to disguise what they’d been up to. He cursed out loud just as the door swung wide and an unimpressed policewoman, who looked as though she could take them both in a wrestling match and not break a sweat, stood glaring at them without the least bit of surprise on her way-less-than-interested face. ‘You two got any drugs?’

‘I’ve got some aspirin.’ Stacie held her gigantic shoulder bag open for the police officer’s perusal.

The woman gave her a bored look. ‘You?’ She nodded to Harris.

Harris pulled his pockets inside out and a quarter and two pennies pinged against the edge of the toilet and went rolling across the floor.

The officer shook her head. ‘Get outta here and get a room. I really don’t need to see this kinda shit when I’m trying to work.’

As she herded them out of the bathroom and disappeared into the chaos, Stacie came to a stop and pointed to the crowd shoving toward the door. ‘We’re never gonna get out that way. I saw a couple of the wait staff taking a smoke break by the back door. Come on.’ She grabbed his hand again, took a quick look around, and when it was clear no one was paying any attention, she pulled him behind the bar, around a tight maze of booze crates and boxes to where the back door was propped open with an empty keg. They pushed their way past the keg and immediately came to a halt in front of a brick wall that was forehead-high to Harris. On one side, the building joined the wall at a right angle; on the other, a police car was wedged in tight in an effort to prevent exactly what they were attempting. The car was deserted at that moment.

‘Damn it,’ Harris said. ‘The park’s just beyond the wall. If we can get over it, then we can come back around to the parking lot.

‘Give me a boost.’ She offered him her very sexily booted foot, and he made a stirrup from his hand. Once she was up, he had an enticing moment with her gorgeous butt right at eye level, then, with a little yelp, she disappeared over the wall.

‘Stacie! Jesus! Stacie, are you all right?’ He had visions of the woman breaking her neck, but at last she answered.

‘I’m fine! I’m fine.’ Her voice was breathless, and unless he was seriously mistaken, the woman was actually enjoying this! ‘It’s an easy landing. A grassy slope. Can you make it over?’

He had already backed up and was making a run for it. His feet hit the wall as though he planned to climb it, then he heaved himself up and over, lost his balance, and found himself in a breathless heap next to her on the grass.

‘Are you all right?’ She grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet, and, to his surprise, she burst out laughing, then covered her mouth just in case whoever belonged with the cop car came back.

He wanted to ask her what the fuck was so funny, but her laughter was contagious, and he couldn’t keep from laughing right along with her. ‘Well, that wasn’t the most graceful moment for either of us,’ he finally managed. They could hear voices on the other side of the wall that sounded like they were getting closer.

‘Come on. I know this park,’ he said, easing down the dark slope with her hand still in his. ‘Dee and Garrett live on the other side of it.’ They were just at the bottom of the grassy slope when they heard voices and Harris shoved her behind a hawthorn hedge and pulled her close as a couple walking matching corgis passed in mid-conversation, lingering long enough for one of the dogs to lift his leg on the other side of the shrub, and Stacie was fighting back giggles again.

‘It’s maybe a good idea if we stay off the beaten path,’ he said as the couple and their corgis passed.

‘What? To avoid getting peed on?’ She offered him a mischievous smile as he pulled her farther off the path to where the grass was a little less manicured and the surface was a little rougher.

‘It’s the barking I worry about more than the peeing,’ he said.

She let out a little gasp, lost her footing, and her forward momentum pulled him off balance too. They rolled ass over elbows down a grassy hill, her huge bag whopping him up the side of the head before the strap broke and the bag gained speed and rolled on ahead of them. She gave up trying not to laugh and totally ignored his efforts to shush her.

The harder he shushed, the harder she laughed, until they came to an abrupt stop in a patch of high grass on the edge of a rhododendron thicket. Stacie landed on top of him, forcing the breath from his lungs with a heavy “hmph”. It was dark, he couldn’t see well, and she was still laughing helplessly. On top of him! He reached to cover her mouth with his hand, but instead he found his fingers in a tangle of her soft hair and felt her breath on his mouth and there was nothing for it. It was hopeless, and he knew it. He fisted his hand in her hair and pulled her mouth down to his, inhaling her laughter as his ability to breathe came back, inhaling her soft gasp of surprise, inhaling his name forced between her lips, startled, surprised, but not in an unpleasant way. Not in an unpleasant way at all.

Her hands found their way to his hair, using it to pull his face closer to hers, nipping at his beard with her teeth as her mouth took on any challenge his could offer, full and hard and soft and inquisitive, teasing and sweet all at the same time.

His hands were on autopilot as they strayed down her spine and slid into the waistband of her trousers, back to the mounded pillows of her buttocks. A sharp little sigh caught in her throat, and she wriggled her bottom against him. He rolled until he was on top of her and kneed her legs apart. With awkward yanks and tugs, he opened her fly. Her hips jerked and she caught her breath in a moan as he slid his hand down over soft pubic curls, anxious for what lay beneath.

‘Harris … Harris, touch me there,’ she managed, biting her lip and shifting to accommodate him as he wriggled his fingers down. With her hand on top of his, she guided him to open her, to stroke the soft warm wet of her, to feel the grip of her. And when he found the place where it was warmest, tightest, softest, she trembled and practically cried out loud. ‘There, oh yes. There. That’s the place. That’s it.’

The ease with which she told him what she wanted made him blush into the darkness even as it made his cock jerk in his jeans. With his free hand he grabbed her trousers and tugged them down until he could see the shape of her, the rise and fall of her, the tremors low in her belly.

Though he couldn’t imagine how he still had the higher brain function to manage it, he unzipped one of her boots and tugged it off, allowing her to free one leg from her trousers while she worked on his fly, releasing his erection into the grope and tug of her strong hands, which he slapped away to keep from coming too soon.

‘Why, Mr. Walker,’ she said with a half giggle. ‘I’d have never figured you for a commando man.’

‘World’s full of surprises,’ he said, slapping her hand away again. ‘The condom, it’s in my wallet.’

He tried to grab it from his back pocket, but this time she slapped his hand away, pulled the wallet free, found the condom and tossed the rest on the grass. Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he should be worried that their things were scattered all over the great outdoors in the middle of the night, but then she eased the condom onto him, rose above him and mounted him, sliding down so tight and so warm that any other thought that didn’t involve him being inside Stacie Emerson went straight out of his head.

And then they were rolling, tumbling, scrabbling in the grass like two wrestlers. Him thrusting, her shoving, him feeling grass in his ass crack before she rode him down hard onto the cool earth, and he no longer cared. She ripped open his shirt to kiss and bite his nipples while he struggled awkwardly to return the favor, finding her bra a fortress to be assaulted until she reached behind her and undid it with a single flex of her fingers. Then she shoved up her top until he could feel her breasts against his chest, rising and falling and pressing hard with each labored breath, vying for the space they shared up close and personal.

In the tense darkness that practically crackled with the night’s excitement, it couldn’t last long, no matter how much he wanted it to. It was the heat of the moment. It was the fire at the core. It was the pure sensuality of the woman, of her laughter, of her ability to joke in the face of what could have been a disaster and turn it into … well, outrageous sex.

She came seconds before he did, and her spasms of release brought him to his own peak. Neither of them came quietly. Harris didn’t know he could make so much noise during sex. And when they both lay back in the grass, laughing nervously and struggling for breath, it occurred to him that any efforts he had made earlier to stay quiet and unnoticed had surely been negated by their lovemaking. ‘Well, I guess if the cops are gonna find us, they’ll find us,’ he said. ‘But it was worth the risk.’