“How long have you lived over here?”
“Eleven years.”
Jonah wanted to ask how old that made Sacha. His strong jaw gave his face a maturity that didn’t quite match his boyish features, but he had wise eyes too, the kind of eyes that would be the same until the end of time, giving idiots like Jonah no clue how long he’d been on the earth. “Do you have family over here?”
“Some. Not close, though. Cousins, and their children. I don’t see them.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“To study.”
“Where?”
Sacha’s lips rose a touch more. “That is many questions.”
“Sorry.”
“Is okay. I don’t mind. I studied at Imperial College, then I like the city, so I stay and find work.”
“In app development?”
“Not at first, but it is what happened.”
Something was lost in the phrasing. Jonah tried to puzzle it out, but it was hard to make his brain work while Sacha was still so close and so very naked. He gave up and braved a step sideways, hoping Sacha would take the bait.
He didn’t. He turned the water off and reached for a towel. “I should leave.”
Still breathless from their first fuck, Jonah hadn’t anticipated a second round, but the prospect of Sacha’s departure disappointed him than he could explain. He followed Sacha out of the shower and snagged another towel from the shelf. He wanted to ask him to stay, but how? What was he supposed to say? A sleepover would be weird, but please don’t leave without fucking me again?
No. Definitely not. Some things were better left unsaid. Right?
Reason warred with a stomach-clenching reluctance to let Sacha go. Jonah was a confident man—born to such privilege, how could he have been anything else? But the G&G Christmas ball always left him unsettled, had done for years, ever since—
Stop. That’s what you’re thinking about right now?
Not literally. But it was impossible to deny that the disquiet his yearly encounter with William Ratner left in the pit of his stomach was largely absent. Jonah was flying, in a muted sort of way, and he didn’t want to come down. Not yet.
He certainly didn’t want to watch Sacha put his clothes on. It felt like sacrilege. “You don’t have to go,” he blurted. “I mean, unless you have somewhere else to be. I have food, um, and you said you’re always hungry, so…”
Smooth, Gray. This is why you don’t date, because you can’t have a conversation with a beautiful man without making a fool of yourself.
There were other reasons, including the ones they’d already discussed, and he’d never found himself in conversation with anyone as devastatingly attractive as Sacha Ivanov, but tripping over his words was an old flaw.
An amusing flaw, if Sacha’s dancing gaze was anything to go by. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
Jonah nodded, not trusting himself with more words. He bent to retrieve his shirt from the floor, his underwear too, but strong hands gripped him before he could reach for his discarded clothes, and brought him upright again.
Sacha was right in front of him. Somehow, he’d crossed the room with no sound. “What food do you have?”
The question didn’t match the intensity blazing in his liquid gold eyes.
Jonah swallowed. “Charcuterie, cheese, wine. Some smoked salmon, maybe. No caviar, though, I’m afraid.”
“I do not like caviar. It’s a cliché and it’s disgusting.”
“Agreed. What about the rest of it, though? Can I entice you to stay?”
For a long moment, Sacha said nothing, and Jonah feared he would leave after all. Then his fierce grip on Jonah’s biceps slackened. “I will stay and eat,” he said. “And after…”
“Yes?”
Sacha shrugged. “Eat well, Jonah Gray. I am not finished with you.”
4
Incompetence irritated Sacha more than the stupidest person ever could. Stupid people were stupid, they couldn’t help that. But the spectacle of a perfectly intelligent individual being monumentally moronic incensed him beyond belief.
He cast a baleful glare around the meeting room. “It is not a hard concept to grasp. If this app fails again, we will miss the soft launch date and cost this company a significant amount of money. Meaning operating capacity is reduced. Employment is reduced. Your employment. If you do not believe in the app itself, this is your motivation to be better. If it isn’t, you should work somewhere else.”
Silence met his statement, and the faces around him were a futile mix of slow comprehension, and the bored complacency that had brought them to this mess in the first place. They’d started with a simple brief: to build a fitness app that appealed to, and empowered, ordinary women. A recycled mission statement, bought for peanuts from a failed start-up. They hadn’t even had to come up with the concept themselves. But somewhere along the line of bad decisions, laziness, and plain inanity, the message had been lost. The app didn’t even work, let alone appeal to female consumers who, frankly, deserved better.
Sacha shook his head. “You’re all idiots.”
“What Mr. Ivanov means,” Sacha’s boss—the main investor of the failing app, and the man who’d hired Sacha to save it—broke in, “is that we have a lot of hard work ahead of us—”
“No,” Sacha refuted. “I mean they are idiots.”
More silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable for Sacha. He didn’t care about massaging the egos of people who’d made such fundamental mistakes. Even the basic data aggregation was flawed. At this rate and with these clowns for company, Sacha was going to have to reengineer the whole thing himself.
The meeting dragged on. Sacha was blunt, and his boss wasted ten minutes after each eventuality, smoothing hurt feelings and explaining Sacha’s intentions.
Stupid man. But the break in conversation that required actual brain power gave Sacha’s mind the opportunity to drift to his current favourite topic: Jonah Maximillian Gray. That’s right, Sacha had looked him up the moment he’d got home in the early hours of Saturday morning. Who needed sleep? Not Sacha. Liar. But after an evening spent in the company of the most charming man Sacha had ever met, it had been low down on his list of priorities.
Company? Is that what you’re calling it? You fucked him on every surface of his penthouse apartment.
It was true. The only place he hadn’t screwed Jonah was his actual bed, but that suited Sacha. After a long day topped off with too much champagne and several mind-blowing orgasms, Jonah’s pristine white bed would’ve been a dangerous place to be. Sacha didn’t do sleepovers.
Anymore. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d last broken that rule, and he didn’t intend on doing it any time soon. Or ever. Sharing a bed for anything other than sex brought a shift in dynamics, a closeness that he didn’t have the time or inclination to enjoy. No. He stuck to fucking. Drinks beforehand at a push. Nothing more.
Yeah? So how does a cosy picnic in Jonah Gray’s kitchen fit into that?
Sacha hadn’t decided. The only takeaway he had from that night was that there was zero chance of him not spending every precious free second daydreaming of fucking Jonah again. And, that despite two days of furtive glances across the foyer that divided their office space, he’d yet to catch so much as a glimpse of the auburn hair his hands had found such a welcome home in. If Sacha closed his eyes, he could still feel the silky locks tangled around his fingers as he’d fucked Jonah from behind, at the window, over the kitchen counter, against the front door.