He takes off inside and I brace myself against the railing.
What have I gotten myself into?
Five
Holt
They say eyes are the windows to someone’s soul, that you can tell everything you need to know about them by a quick glance. Doors are like that for a business and the ones leading into Picante are ornate and heavy.
It’s my favorite place in all of Savannah. Sitting atop a luxury hotel with views across the water on one side and the city on the other, it’s spectacular. Especially at night. It’s also impossible to get into without a reservation.
“After you,” I say to Blaire as she enters in front of me.
“I should’ve changed, Holt,” she says under her breath. “Look at these people.”
“There are people? What people?” I grin.
She tilts her head, clearly unamused.
“Fine.” Looking around, I spot the hostess and give my head a subtle nod. She scurries our way.
“Mr. Mason. Good to see you this evening.”
“Thank you,” I say, less amused at her wandering eye than usual. Moving slightly to the side, so I’m closer to Blaire, I clear my throat. “Two, please. For the Radar Room, if it’s available.”
“I’ll rearrange for you, Sir. Right this way.”
Blaire casts a look over her shoulder, lips pressed together to hide a smile, as she follows the hostess along the wall to one of the private rooms along the side of the main dining area. I place my palm gently on the small of her back. I want to touch her so fucking bad, but I don’t want to come across the wrong way.
She tenses for a brief second before her shoulders relax, followed by mine. Flexing my fingers against the smooth fabric of her dress, her body is hard against my touch.
There’s a conversation between Blaire and the hostess, one I can’t hear, but I’m not mad about it. Just watching her speak, hearing her laugh at the hostess’s jokes, is enough for me. Right now, anyway. It’s a world-class view without any pressure.
We enter the room, lit with candles and ambient lighting, and I pull out Blaire’s chair before she sits. This seems to please her. That pleases me.
Once we’ve made a drink selection and the hostess is gone, the energy in the room starts to shift. I finally have her to myself.
“Thank you for coming with me tonight,” I say as she drapes her linen napkin on her lap.
“I believe you came with me, but that’s just semantics.”
“Excellent point,” I laugh. “How do you know the Landry’s exactly?”
“One of my brothers is dating, engaged, I’m not really sure, to their sister,” she explains. “My family lives in Linton, Illinois and I live in Chicago, so I don’t see them all the time. I’m not sure what Walker and Sienna’s official status is.”
Lifting the glass of water in front of her, she swirls it lightly around. My question seems to have made her think of something else and I want to know what it is. I want to know everything about this girl.
“Is that hard? Or are you not close to them?” I ask.
“I am close to them, actually. There’s just nowhere for me to work in the field I want to and be near. I visit as much as I can—at least once a month to see Nana.”
“Nana?”
“My grandmother. She’s as feisty as my brothers but, God, I love her. She was my dad’s mom and spoiled us rotten growing up.” She takes a deep breath and then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Now I try to spoil her when I can.”
Something about the way she says this catches my attention. It’s sweet and careful, something I’m not sure I’ve really attached to Blaire so far. But when she looks back up at me, that’s all washed away.
“What about you?” she asks. “Are you close to your brothers?”
“I work with Oliver. The rest of them live here in Savannah.” I shrug. “We golf together, go boating, play some poker.”
“My brother Machlan has a bar,” she tells me. “They tried to have poker night there a couple of times until I advised him to shut it down. I had no idea those things got so serious.”
“Oh, yeah. If you ever meet Coy, ask him what joker’s wild means.”
“I’ll make sure I never do that. Thanks for the warning,” she laughs.
A soft knock at the door sounds through the room and a waitress arrives. She takes our orders and disappears quietly.
Once we’re alone again, I relax back in my chair and look at the beauty across from me.
“So,” she says, resting her forearms on the table. “What do you do for fun?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes, honestly.”
“I work.”
Her laugh is the freest I’ve heard from her and it prickles my lips.
“You sound like me,” she says. “I get such satisfaction from finding a bit of evidence the prosecution didn’t think I’d see or hearing a verdict go the right way.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
Leaning forward, I mirror her posture. “Do you ever have to take on clients you know are guilty?”
“Yes. Sometimes. But, before you go judging me, I’d like the opportunity to explain.”
“The floor is yours.”
She smiles, but her game face is on. “My job is to ensure my clients are tried fairly in accordance with the Constitution. Yes, I’ll represent men and women that I know are guilty if, and this is a big if, they haven’t been accused of a violent crime. I refuse to represent someone if they’re guilty of that sort of thing. I have to sleep at night, you know?”
“For what it’s worth, I think that’s highly admirable.”
“What do you do? Work-wise, I mean?”
“Business shit,” I say, trying to brush it under the rug. Going into the ins and outs of my world seems like a waste of time when we could be talking about her. “I do love it though. Mason Ltd. was my grandfather’s company years ago. My father built upon it and now Oliver and I are ushering it into a new age.”
“I love the sound of that.”
“It’s fun.”
She slides a lock of hair behind her ear, the candle in the middle of the table casting reflections across her high cheekbones. She looks like a model sitting across from me, but one that you could touch without bowling her over.
I’ve been with a lot of women, but none quite like her. What may just be the total package.
“What?” she asks, looking up.
“You’re beautiful, Blaire.”
She flushes, looking anywhere but at me. “Thank you.”
“I don’t mean it as a line. I mean it—you’re fucking beautiful. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable,” I add, feeling like a dick.
“It doesn’t. Not really.” She takes a deep, steady breath. “In my real life, I don’t have a lot of dinners with men I’m not trying to outwit or one whose job I’m not trying to take. So, this whole thing is a little foreign to me.”
“You don’t date? At all?”
She shakes her head back and forth. “I mean, I’ve dated. Here and there,” she tacks on. “I’m just too busy to entertain another human. I can barely keep my own life on target, let alone adding someone else’s in.”
“I feel the same. My life goes a hundred miles an hour. I can’t be thinking about buying flowers or chocolates or making sure I pick up my shoes.”
“See? That’s a hard limit for me. Pick up your damn shoes,” she laughs. “This is one of the reasons I find men to be barbaric creatures, as you so carefully noted.”
“May I also note you might kind of like it?” I ask, pointing a finger at her with a coy smile.
“Excuse me?”
“You like to think you find barbaric tendencies in men to be appalling. Society has taught you that. There’s no place in the world for aggressive men, men that know what they want. We get tossed into a heap without a second look.”
She bites her bottom lip before responding. “That’s not completely true. I do find those tendencies appalling. They insinuate that the woman is lesser than them, that we should pick up their shoes, make them dinner, have a lower paying job and, to that, I call bullshit.”
“As you should,” I say, my voice lowering. Breathing in the warm notes from her perfume, I watch her chest rise and fall at a quickened pace. “I have no doubts you are as capable and intelligent as any man I know. But I also know something else.”
“What’s that?”
“I have no doubts that if I bent you over a chair and buried myself in you, there wouldn’t be any complaints.”
Her eyes widen as she shifts in her seat. She wants it as bad as I do, but there’s no way I’d do that. Not here. Maybe with another woman, one that wouldn’t orgasm all over my balls in the middle of this dining area and not regret it. But Blaire? She’s cut from another cloth, albeit one I’d like to mark.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I silently curse whomever it is. She hears it and motions for me to take it. While I type a quick response back to Rosie, I glance up. She’s watching me carefully.
“Like what you see?” I tease, slipping the device back into my pocket.
Her lips part as if she’s going to say something but drop closed again before she does. Her brows tug into one long line as she mulls over a thought.
Giving her space to work whatever it is out, I sit back in my seat. She starts to speak again, yet stops herself.
“Blaire?”
She looks up at me, her eyes wide.
“Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you keep stopping yourself from saying.”
She makes no movement to do anything of the like, but I see exactly what she wants.
As soon as our eyes meet, really meet, the desire burning in the blues is undeniable. Her lids hood, her tongue swiping along her bottom lip as she watches me very slowly shove away from the table.