The next few months were terrible.
Absolutely awful.
Arielle hated it the whole time.
After that debacle in Chicago when she’d needled Mitchell Saltonstall the whole time during supper, and he’d chuckled at her every volley, she’d been so turned on by the lascivious sparkle in his green eyes, his ready smile and self-assured banter, and dammit, the way his broad chest and lean waist filled out that snug suit he’d worn, that she’d actually felt her temples swell and pound every time she looked at him.
And her skull wasn’t the only thing that had swelled up.
Her bra had felt too tight when she breathed, and her clit had felt needy every time she’d crossed her legs.
So she’d convinced herself that their contract stipulated that they should play out the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship even in private because, dammit, her whole body had thrummed with itching desire for Mitchell the whole evening, and standing in that suite with him with that big bed right there had been pure torture.
And she’d been right to do it.
The next day at the golf trade show, at the press conference that inevitably ended the day after discussing the Match Play dating app with prospective members all day long, that same dang reporter, Monica Matthews, asked Arielle, “So, what’s Mitchell Saltonstall like, really?”
The lecherous glint in Matthew’s eye and snark in her tone left nothing open for interpretation.
Arielle blushed.
She didn’t just blush, though. Horny lava had risen from her nether parts to burn in her cheeks. She’d shuffled feet as her clit had remembered the feel of Mitchell’s fingers and cock and tongue the night before. The memory of how she’d screamed his name at the blast of toe-curling ecstasy up her spine that had ricocheted inside her skull just like he’d threatened scalded her face, and Arielle had been certain that the reporters and curious onlookers could read her mind and see what she’d done the previous night.
The reporter laughed, and Mitchell had twitched an eyebrow at Arielle with a smug grin before taking the next question.
That kind of response couldn’t be faked.
Well, Arielle couldn’t fake it. She was a bad actress as well as a sadly unskilled liar.
Monica Matthews was as smart as she was beautiful, which meant she was the dangerous one. The other reporter, the blonde, might ask inconvenient questions, but Matthews was a threat. If she got any sort of information that Arielle and Mitchell were faking their relationship, she was the type of sharp reporter with an eye for details who could dig up everything.
The following weekend, Arielle again flew on a private jet to attend a convention in Austin, Texas, and Mitchell had reserved two separate hotel rooms for them.
Dinner with him in the hotel restaurant was another two hours of torment. Mitchell was intermittently charming, sweet, and sexy.
Arielle kept her mind on her sweltering week at the office and her frayed nerves from shampooed dogs on the other side of the paper-thin wall yipping and howling the whole time. She was pretty sure some of the shrill screams had been from a rabbit undergoing a makeover.
Everyone in the Match Play office walked in glum and left frazzled at the end of the day. The office atmosphere ran the gamut from crabby to irritated to exasperated.
Those were her friends. Those people had been her friends for years, and she was a lot more loyal to them than the guy who had purchased the place where they worked and was doing that to them.
What an asshole.
What a jerk.
There was no freaking way she was going to be anything other than contractually mandated polite to Mitchell Saltonstall.
After supper, he walked her to her hotel room, shook her hand good night, and walked down the corridor, presumably to his own room.
Arielle kicked off her shoes and flopped on the bed.
Dammit, Mitchell Saltonstall was so awful, and yet every inch of skin on her body wanted to be naked next to his. Her lips felt too big, plumped like she’d been kissing him.
She jumped in the shower and cleaned up, wrapping one of the hotel’s scratchy bathrobes around herself. It was a nice hotel room, but it wasn’t the penthouse at the Four Seasons.
Arielle paced.
She stomped from the hotel room’s window with its air conditioning unit that sucked air in from the outside past the king-sized bed and television sitting on the dresser, past the bathroom with its walk-in shower and mini-bottles of luxury bath care products, to the hotel room door, and then back to the window again.
Going over to Mitchell’s hotel room would be a terrible idea. The only reason she’d slipped the week before was because he’d been right there. If she didn’t go to his room, she wouldn’t slip.
Maybe her electric toothbrush would be buzzy enough to take care of business.
Arielle marched back and forth through the room, one time even grabbing the doorknob and starting to twist it before she dropped her hand and walked in the other direction.
This was ridiculous.
She should just lay down. Tempting herself by walking toward the door and then having to decide every time to turn around was making her crazy.
Not that she was going to do it.
As she approached the door again and was preparing her self-control to turn around and walk right back to the window, the door rattled with a knock.
She aimed her eye to look out the peephole.
Mitchell Saltonstall stood in the hallway, his elbow braced against the door frame. Even in the distortion of the fisheye lens, his shoulders looked broad in his tailored blue suit, and his jaw formed a sharp right angle under his sandy brown five o’clock shadow.
Arielle unlocked the door, grabbed Mitchell’s shirt, and hauled him into her hotel room.
Dammit.
But it didn’t make her like him, and it didn’t mean he was a better person. Mitchell Saltonstall was still the asshole boss who was ruining the lives of her friends by screwing up her dad’s life ambition.
She was still mad as hell and verbally jabbed him every chance she got because he deserved it.
Screw him.
Even though that seemed to be taking on a literal meaning.
The next weekend at a golf trade show in Atlanta, Arielle waited forty-five minutes in her room until it became painfully obvious that Mitchell wasn’t going to show up at her door, so she grabbed the elevator keycard he’d given her for his and rode up to the penthouse to knock on his door.
Mitchell smirked at her for giving in.
But he also shoved her up against the wall and took her right there with her thighs cinched around his waist because he had a condom ready in his pocket.
And the week after that when they were in Denver, Mitchell was waiting naked in her hotel room bed when she arrived from the airport, and he left a deep purple love bite on the inside of her thigh after he ate her out so thoroughly she thought her soul had left her body. Afterward, he told her he was going to use her face like a toy, and he had, his fists knotted in her hair while he shoved his cock down her throat until her mascara ran down her face.
The bruised rawness of the hickey on her inner thigh was sore the whole weekend. With every step she took, the deep bruise reminded her that his mouth had been there, which turned her on more.
Her weekends were frickin’ glorious. She could pretend that everything she’d ever wanted to try with this smoking-hot man was in the girlfriend contract. She could do anything under the guise that she supposedly had to.
She wasn’t a bad girl. She’d just signed a contract with sexy, charming Mitchell Saltonstall that forced her to act like one.
But the first weekend in September was a whole different story.