I stepped inside.
Kyle’s office was nice enough. For starters, it was an office. I was still sharing a room with three other junior associates. He had a window. The pane of glass stretched from floor to ceiling, and the fading January sunlight cast a warm glow in the room. If our meeting lasted more than thirty minutes, it’d be dark when I left.
His computer monitor and keyboard occupied most of the large desk, but otherwise it was bare. A diploma from Randhurst law school hung on the wall. There was a half bookshelf below it, which held mostly books, and one framed family photo. I forced my gaze onto something else. Anything else. I needed to treat Kyle like he was just another attorney.
As he closed the door, I set my briefcase down on the seat of one of the chairs facing the desk, and sat in the other. There’d been a strange click as he’d shut it, as if he’d locked the door behind us. My surprised gaze found his, but his expression was plain.
He moved to his desk and sat. “How’ve you been?”
“How’ve I been?” I gave him a dubious look. “I’m fine. What did you want to discuss?”
For a long moment that stretched between us, he was silent. Then, he leaned back in his chair, pulled open a drawer, and produced a stapled packet of paper. As he reached across the desk to hand it to me, tension seemed to coil in him. The document was serious.
“What is this?” I grasped the packet and waited for him to let go. A cursory scan said it was a contract. The top sheet was full of dense paragraphs.
Finally, he released it. “It’s a partnership agreement.”
“Partnership agreement?”
“I’m proposing a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
Was he purposefully being vague? “Between which clients?”
He blinked slowly. “It’d be for us, Ruby.”
Chapter
FIFTEEN
Kyle’s expression was stoic, but I watched the rapid lift of his shoulders. He was nervous, which of course, made me very nervous.
“How’s that, now?” I asked, dumbfounded. My gaze fell to the agreement in my hands, and as I began to read, all my blood rushed to my toes.
Holy. Fuck.
“What am I reading?” I gasped.
His gaze didn’t deviate from mine, even as I looked down at the papers and back up to him. His intense stare pinned me to my seat while his tone was soft. “Take as much time as you need.”
I tried to keep reading, but the phrase ‘partnership of a sexual nature’ short-circuited my brain and now I couldn’t interpret a goddamn thing. “Okay, seriously.” I dropped the document on his desktop and jabbed a finger at it. “What the fuck is this? A joke?”
“No. I can’t stop thinking about New Year’s Eve. I want that again. I want more.”
Air constricted in my lungs, making everything in my body feel tight, yet weightless at the same time. What exactly did he mean? “More . . . sex?”
“More sex, more of you. More of us together, seeing how much further we want to go sexually. There are things I want to explore, and I think you do, too. This agreement lays the foundation for us to do that together.”
I stared at the document. “For fuck’s sake, you put it in writing?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “I communicate better this way, and I believe the same can be said of you.”
He did have a point about our shitty communication, but still. This was so fucking insane, I had no idea what to say. I wanted to see inside his crazy head and figure out what he was thinking. Yet he gave nothing away.
“Everything is open for discussion,” he said. “Except the last paragraph.”
He wasn’t going to elaborate. I picked up the agreement in a shaky hand and tried once more to read. The first paragraph outlined during the duration of the agreement, we were to remain exclusive to each other. The second was about both partners being willing to play whenever the other wanted to, within reason.
Meaning if I signed this bat-shit crazy proposal, I could call him up anytime, he’d come running, and would have to put out, unless he had a valid excuse. And the same would apply to me. I kept reading, because how could I not? It was the most ludicrous and exciting legal document I’d laid eyes on.