The List Read Online Free Page B

this.
    Backspacebackspacebackspace. Face-to-face was the only way to do this, because she had to see his face when he realized what he’d done. She had to see his face and know if she’d made a mistake, refusing to go on a date with him. A trick of the moonlight made him look more innocent than he was.
    She picked up her clutch and opened the door. Penny glanced over at her, rocking back on the four-inch-heeled ankle boots that lifted her to five feet two. In her four-inch heels Tilda stood five eleven, and felt like a Great Dane next to Penny’s teacup Yorkie size. “Can I redo the front windows?” Penny asked.
    “Absolutely,” Tilda said. She did the business side and the product selection but had no flair for creative design, so she hired Penny, straight out of Parsons and a seemingly endless fount of creative window displays. “I’m going out for a coffee,” she said. “Can I bring you back anything?”
    “A latte,” Penny said. “Extra shots.”
    She hailed a cab and directed the driver to Federal Plaza. “Everything okay, miss?” the cabbie asked.
    “Fine,” she said. Just the unexpected from a man she’d written off.
    She took the stairs to the front doors, and asked the uniformed officer staffing the front desk for Agent Daniel Logan.
    “He expecting you, ma’am?”
    “No,” she said, and left it at that.
    The officer rang through, then said, “Tilda Davies is downstairs.”
    Daniel walked out of the elevator, into the lobby, finishing a conversation with two individuals in jackets and suits. He made eye contact with Tilda and beckoned her to come with him without halting the conversation. Intrigued by the difference in his demeanor, she waited quietly by his side while he finished issuing instructions. Then he put his hand under her elbow and guided her into the elevator, then through open desks to an office at the back of the room, where he closed the door. He braced his bum against the edge of his desk, crossed his legs at the ankle, folded his arms, and said, “What can I do for you, not–Lady Matilda?”
    She’d been right about everything from the color of his suit to the subtlety of his tie, and now she could add a dark brown leather belt and matching brown wingtips to the ensemble. The wave in his hair was tamed to lie flat above his forehead, but held furrows, as if he’d been shoving his fingers through it. She held out her phone, the bubble announcing that he was going to take care of his arousal. “You’ve been texting the wrong woman.”
    He didn’t even look at the screen, just kept his gaze focused on her. “No, I haven’t,” he said. “The old-fashioned method of asking you out didn’t work. I took a different tack.”
    She stared at him. He looked different at work, in his suit and tie, less open, less likely to smile. Like he was the one sitting on a ledge, inviting her to join him.
    “Did you come?” he asked, without a hint of modesty or embarrassment. As if it were perfectly reasonable for him to sext her in the middle of the day, for them to have this conversation in his office with other FBI agents working outside.
    You told me not to
hovered on the tip of her tongue, but what she said was, “I was in the middle of a consultation with a client.”
    “I’ll take that as a no. Did it make you hot?”
    She flicked him a glance. “What do you think?”
    He bent forward and put his lips close to her ear. “I think it did. Even better, I think it made you curious.”
    A shiver coursed down her spine.
    “Would you do it now?”
    “Do what?”
    “Get off while I watch.”
    She had been wrong, so very, very wrong. He knew exactly what to do with his voice. “We’re in your office, which has rather large glass windows.”
    “And you were sitting on a ledge two hundred feet above the street. You were shaking so I thought you were cold, or afraid. Then I thought it was the adrenaline. I was wrong. It was desire,” he said, looking away from her as he spoke.