She whipped around. “Don’t apologize,” she said harshly. “Thatwas precisely what I wanted.” She glanced over her shoulder. “You’re staying the night, right? I think we’ll need to do that again.”
I grinned. “Absolutely.”
9
ALEX
Law school officially sucked. When I started at the law firm, I had assured Zach that I could handle a full-time job and law school. I was a week into the semester, and I was already overwhelmed.
Then, one of my professors declared that we would be having a quiz on the first ten chapters of a textbook that I hadn’t even had time to purchase yet during the next class session. Luckily, the bookstore still had copies, and I was able to get one... but trying to read and comprehend the material in a three-day timeframe seemed impossible. Sleep had fallen by the wayside in favor of squeezing in reading wherever I could find time.
I was in the legal library at the firm, looking over my textbook while I shoved a sandwich in the direction of my face. I had been using all of my breaks and lunches like this for the past couple of days, and I felt no more ready for my first quiz in law school than I had when the professor announced it.
The door behind me opened, and I started gathering my trash and closing my books. “Alex.” I turned and saw Zach standing in the doorway. There was a soft, fond look on his face. “You look exhausted.”
I shrugged. “I’m just adjusting to the new normal,” I said. “I’m fine. My work hasn’t suffered, right?”
Zach’s eyebrows drew together. He looked behind him and then shut the door before he sat down beside me. “I’m not concerned about your paralegal work,” he said. “That has been top-notch.”
He was flattering me, but I didn’t fight him on it. It was nice to get some praise after the last week. I knew my professors wouldn’t shower us with praise all the time, especially when it was so early in the semester, but I had thought they might be... friendly, at least. It was like they were determined to teach us what ‘real lawyers’ acted like, but it came off as more of a caricature of something they saw in a movie.
“What are you worried about, then?” I asked, too tired for this conversation.
Zach touched my arm. “I’m worried about the woman I’m seeing,” he said. “I’m worried that she’s burning herself out, and I want to help.”
He was being incredibly sweet, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. “You can’t give me more hours in a day, so I’m not sure what you could possibly—”
He leaned in, cutting off my words by pressing his lips to mine. We’d shared a handful of kisses since the conversation in Jake’s office, but they’d all been relatively sweet, almost chaste. While this kiss might have started out the same, Zach nipped at my lower lip. When I gasped, he swept his tongue into my mouth, mapping me out. When he slid away, I was shaking. “Come to my place later,” he said. “I’ll help you study.”
“Really?”
Zach smiled. “I was probably the only one of three of us who actually enjoyed law school.”
Despite how tired I was, I smiled. “Okay,” I told him. “That sounds great, actually.” I looked down at the closed textbook. “I’m not sure how much more I could really absorb on my own.”
“It’s a date.”
* * *
Zach sentme his address right before I was due to leave for the day. By the time I got to my car in the parking structure, I almost called and canceled... but he had been so sweet this afternoon, and he’d promised to help me study.
I plugged his address into my phone’s GPS and followed the directions as they twisted and turned through the city. Zach’s high-rise was beautiful even from the outside. That squirmy feeling that I’d had at dinner with Thomas, after he’d vehemently denied being mysugar daddy, which I hadn’t even thought about until he said it. Whatever was happening between us, Jake, Zach, and Thomas were in a vastly different tax bracket. How could I ever compete?
It’s not a competition, I reminded myself, but it felt like one sometimes. They could—and would, they’d all promised—spoil me, but I couldn’t do that in return. It was hardly fair.
After parking in the garage filled with far too many cars that were more than my yearly salary, I met Zach in the lobby. “I didn’t think you’d want to ride the elevator alone,” he explained, taking my hand. “I’m on the sixteenth floor.”
Sixteenth was better than forty-second, but it was still a long way up. A different, much nicer squirmy feeling wriggled through me. I squeezed his hand. “Thank you,” I said.
He led me onto the elevator, and if I scooted so that my body was plastered against his as the car began to climb upward, Zach wasn’t complaining about it. When the door opened, we stepped off the elevator and into a vestibule that was far nicer than it had a right to be. Who needed a gilded corridor between apartments?
The corridor wasn’t long, and I realized there was only one door that I could see besides the elevator. “I own the whole floor,” Zach said when I glanced at him.
Well. That answered that question. I followed him into the penthouse. It was all open glass and modern furniture. Very masculine, a lot like his office at the firm. The wall of glass that looked out at the cityscape would be pretty if it weren’t so abjectly terrifying.
Zach grabbed a remote off the coffee table, and with a few clicks, automatic blinds were skittering across the bank of windows. “Sorry, I meant to do that before you arrived.”
My stomach clenched again. My heart stuttered in my chest. “You are so incredibly sweet,” I said. His head whipped around so that he could stare at me. He reminded me so much of a goldfish that I laughed. “Why do you look so surprised?”