His hangover headache intensified. “Yeah, I’m Nathan. Who are you?”
“I’m Layla.”
He dropped into a seat across from her and commanded, “Get me some coffee. Now.”
She just sat there, observing him in his pain.
“I said coffee,” he repeated.
“Please,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“You forgot to say please.”
He blinked at her. “Who are you?”
“I’m Layla,” she said again.
“No, who are you to me? Are you one of the servants? No, you’re too young. One of their daughters? Is that why you won’t fetch?”
“You have so many servants, you don’t know anything about their family members?” she asked.
“No, that’s not it. Maybe I’ve seen you before, maybe I haven’t. I just didn’t care enough to remember you until you came between me and my coffee.”
She closed her large textbook and said, “What if I was one of the servants’ daughters? Would you have her or him fired just because I didn’t get your cup of coffee?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “That depends. If you get me coffee now that you know what the situation is, then no, I won’t fire your mother or father. If you don’t…” He let the threat hang in the air.
“Wow,” she said. Then she expelled a breath of air, before she picked up the thick textbook, held it high above her head, and dropped it. The resulting bang against the kitchen table sent a piercing pain arcing through the back of his brain.
He groaned. “What are you doing?”
“My mother’s dead and thank goodness my father doesn’t work here,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “So I’m taking advantage of the fact that you can’t fire them because I won’t fetch.”
Her yelling had the equivalent effect of beating drumsticks against his throbbing head. “Shut up,” he commanded.
“Make me!” she shouted back. “Make me you ridiculous, arrogant, spoiled, rich boy!”
Nathan covered his ears, trying to block out her voice. But then it turned out he didn’t have to. Footsteps sounded from the other room, and Layla’s head jerked up, like an animal that had caught the scent of another.
She picked up the book and scrambled back into her chair with it, opening it to the page she had been studying before Nathan had come in through the back door.
By the time Andrew entered the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a light blue polo, Layla was the very picture of someone studying peacefully.
“Seriously, bro,” he said, upon seeing Nathan. “It’s ten in the morning and you smell like the Yuengling distillery.”
Yuengling was a local beer, and it happened to be exactly what Nathan had been drinking in copious amounts the night before. But Nathan was too furious with Layla to respond to his brother’s insult. He pointed at Layla, his head throbbing even worse than before. “Who is she?” he demanded. “And what the hell is she doing here?”
“This is Layla,” his brother said. “She’s tutoring me in chemistry.”
Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going into the family business. What do you care about chemistry?”
Layla looked up at him, confused, and Andrew blushed. “I’ve always liked chemistry,” he said, despite his red face.
Nathan turned back to Layla. “Where did he find you?”
“In the school academic development office,” she said. “He came in for peer counseling.”
“How old are you?” Nathan asked.
“I’m eighteen,” she answered.
“And he’s a twenty-one-year-old junior, who supposedly needs a freshman’s help in chemistry. A really cute freshman’s help. Yeah right. He just split up with his girlfriend and now he’s trying to get laid.” He turned back to his brother. “You probably aren’t even taking chemistry. No room for it on your business major schedule, right?”
Andrew didn’t answer, but the deeper shade of red he turned was answer enough. Nathan stood up. “Well, good luck with this harpy. If you see a servant, tell her to bring some coffee to the guest house.”
He left the kitchen on the high note of having blown his goody-two-shoes brother’s cover story.
But Layla even managed to thwart him in this. The last thing he heard her say before he left the room was, “It’s okay, Andrew. Actually, it’s kind of sweet...”
Less than two weeks later, they were officially dating, much to the consternation of their parents who had much preferred Andrew’s ex-girlfriend, Diana Swinton, a society blond, and the daughter of another prominent Pittsburgh business family.
But no one had disapproved of the relationship more than Nathan, who knew from the start what she was really like. He also knew he’d gone hard the moment he’d seen her sitting at the table, and he’d stayed that way for hours after that, until he jerked himself off, with visions of her underneath him, calling his name and begging him for more.
Now nine years later, he was in the shower and once again hard as a college-aged boy at the thought of seeing her again. Nathan turned the water fully to cold to try to calm himself down, but that didn’t work. Visions of her pulling her top off, revealing dark breasts with even darker aureoles came to mind, and despite the cold water, his dick pulsed with an aching, red hot longing. He took himself in his hand and started massaging the heat of the vision out of his rock hard flesh. But as he did so, he imagined himself bending her over his desk and taking her from behind, his hand pinching her pebbled nipple as she moaned.
His hand moved swifter over the rising tide of his cum until he finally released, spraying a thick stream of semen against the shower wall and down his leg.
He breathed hard into the cold shower spray. Yes, it had been a really bad idea to ask her to come to his office in person. But he refused to let her off the hook by telling her she could mail the installment. He was the cat and she was the mouse. And at the end of day, the cat would win. He promised himself that, even as he washed the sticky evidence of his desire for Layla Matthews off his body with freezing water.
CHAPTER FOUR
INSIDE HER cozy apartment in Squirrel Hill, Layla was also cursing herself. Honor was always being touted as such a great quality to have in movies and books, but in real life, it only caused you more trouble than it was worth. For instance, if she hadn’t felt compelled to pay back her father’s debts along with her student loans, she might have a bigger nest egg of her own by now. And if she weren’t so honorable, she definitely wouldn’t be in the position of having to meet with Nathan Sinclair, a man who didn’t even try to hide how much he despised her for reasons she still couldn’t remember.
Moving to Pittsburgh in order to unearth the mystery of her last year here had been a gift to herself for being so good and honorable all these years. For once, she was putting herself first. She had even started saving money toward hiring a private investigator. But then she’d had her run-in with Nathan Sinclair, and her honor hadn’t let her back down and walk away with a simple apology for her father’s deceit. Oh no, her honor demanded she not only pay him back the money her father had taken from his family, but that she also do so as quickly as humanly possible.
She sold her car and started taking the bus everywhere. She’d also picked up extra hours by signing up for the center’s mobile physical therapy service, which involved visiting clients all over the city. The extra hours wouldn’t have been so bad if she still had a car. But as it was, bussing everywhere meant she often didn’t crawl into bed until eleven at night, only to wake up again at five am for her regular shift at the center.
Layla had never been a complainer and wouldn’t have minded the lack of sleep, except for two things: one, by her calculations, she would have to work at this rate for eight more months to pay Nathan Sinclair back, and two, he kept showing up in her dreams.
She only got six hours of sleep a night, but for some reason, an embarrassing number of those hours were taken up with images of the man she disliked most in the world doing things to her, in a large window seat of all places…sexual things, so graphic in nature she’d often wake up from them with a hot face and an aching leftover desire between her legs.
The morning of her check appointment with Nathan Sinclair had been no different. She woke up from a scorching hot dream, dripping wet, and with no time to pull out her vibrator, because it had taken her braying alarm clock fifteen minutes to actually break into her sex dream and wake her up.
“Girl, please take a day off,” Peggy, the grandmotherly receptionist at the St. Mary’s Physical Therapy Center said when Layla dragged into work that morning. “I’m getting tired just looking at you.”
Layla tried to rub some of the sticky sleepiness out her eyes. “I’ll be fine after a cup of coffee. A really large one.”
“You know what’s even better than coffee, I hear.” Peggy leaned in and whispered like it was a state secret, “Sleep.”
Layla gave her a tired smile. “I’m fine, Miss Peggy. But I really appreciate your concern. You’re kind to fuss over me.”
“You know what’s even better than an old black lady fussing over you?” This time Peggy cupped a hand around her mouth to whisper even louder, “A good-looking man fussing under you.”
Layla burst out laughing. “Peggy, you need to stop.”
“No, you need to stop. Literally. Go find yourself a nice man and start spending your weekends with him as opposed to all these busted up people.”
Layla waved her off and continued into the center after a little more small talk. She wished she had the time and energy to date. She could use some non medically-mandated company.
Growing up, she dreamed of meeting a nice guy and starting a family. But first there had been all the physical therapy after the fall that had not only robbed her of her memory, but also broken just about every bone in her body outside of her spinal cord. Then she’d gone back to school and managed to get both her bachelor’s and PT masters in five years, after which she’d worked hard to pay back her student loans in record time. The next thing she knew, she was twenty-eight, and had never had a real boyfriend to speak of—that she remembered. Obviously, she’d become desperate if she was dreaming about Nathan Sinclair every night. He just might have been the most arrogant, horrible man she had ever met—
This last thought stopped her in her tracks. What if the dream wasn’t a fantasy, she wondered, but a memory of something that had actually happened? Her father had once mentioned “her boyfriend in Pittsburgh” who hadn’t wanted her after she fell, who hadn’t even visited her at the hospital. She could see someone like Nathan Sinclair pulling a cruel move like that. And that would also explain why she had been at his family’s mansion when she’d fallen.
So far, finding out anything about her accident had been like pulling teeth. The Pittsburgh hospital had transferred her records to the hospital in New Orleans. And the hospital in New Orleans wanted a large check and either an in-person signature or a notarized document to prove she was who she said she was in order to release them to her. Meanwhile a media search at the central library hadn’t turned up so much as a mention of her fall, even though it happened at such a high profile location.
The more she tried to find answers, the more she realized she was dealing with a very powerful family. They had not only paid her father off, but had also buried the story so deep, if she wanted answers, she’d have to go through Nathan to get them. Nathan who really didn’t like her for reasons still unknown.
On her lunch break, she googled him to see if he had also gone to Carnegie Mellon. But his online biography said he’d gone to Yale for both his bachelor’s and master’s after a few gap years spent in Pittsburgh.
Again, she couldn’t see how their paths would have ever crossed. She pushed back from the computer with the now familiar feeling of frustration. Why did this have to be so hard? It would have made it much easier if Nathan Sinclair had answered her questions as opposed to just glaring at her the entire time she was in his office for some crime she couldn’t remember committing.
Still, her instincts were telling her that she needed to apologize to him. For what? She had no idea. But part of her deep need to pay him back stemmed from a vague guilt that had been clawing at her stomach ever since he said he didn’t like her for reasons other than her father’s blackmail scheme.
Maybe, she thought, she should dial up her usual niceness a notch or two when she saw him next. You can catch more flies with honey, as the old proverb said. But Nathan Sinclair wasn’t like most of the other human beings she had come in contact with since her accident. He didn’t exactly exude sweetness or even seem to appreciate that quality in others. Look at the way he surrounded himself with black and grey furniture and walls of hard tinted glass. Even his assistant was a block of ice. Layla supposed one would have to be to work with Nathan Sinclair day in and day out.
No, being as nice as possible would definitely not work with that man.
“Do you know anything about Nathan Sinclair?” she asked Carol, one of her co-workers, a tough physical therapist who often played bad cop to her good cop with the more difficult patients. Carol had been born and raised in “The Burgh” as the locals called it. And though Layla had only been living in the city for a few months, she had already noticed how small-town it could be. Everybody who had been born there seemed to know a little something about everybody else who had grown up there. So she figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
That afternoon they were on therapy pool duty, calling out exercises to the ten senior citizens recovering from various surgeries with aquatic movement.
“Nathan Sinclair, the rich steel guy?” Carol asked, frowning.
“Yeah, him.”
Carol shrugged. “Not much. He’s rich, hot as hell. But I think he only dates, like, blond super models. People keep wondering when he’ll ever settle down.”
Layla could have guessed he was a playboy who didn’t want to settle down just by looking at him, so she pressed for more information. “Do you know if he ever went to Carnegie Mellon? Maybe he was there for a semester and dropped out?”
Carol’s forehead crinkled, “No, if he’d gone to a Pittsburgh school, we’d all know it. You know how we like to represent. But there’s some other weird factoid about him that I’m trying to remember—” She broke off to yell at a senior citizen leaning against the far wall. “No slacking, Mrs. Peterson! That hip isn’t going to recover by itself.”