One Wicked Lick from the Drummer (The One Book 3)

was a good reason Grip had been her Mount Everest. That light-a-fire smile. Those massive hands, the deep chest and muscled arms, the ripped abs and thick quads. The way he played those wicked licks, effortlessly, as if he lived in the beat and it returned the favor by gracing him with the superpower of extreme musical talent, explosive energy and raw sexual attraction.
She could not get her tongue to work. He could probably see right down her top to the lace of her bra from this position.
“It’s all good,” he said, looking directly at her face, making everything below the waistband of her pencil skirt pull tight.
She got the words lucky and carpet out of her mouth, but he’d already moved and all she could see of him was his shins in denim and his no doubt wildly expensive collector’s edition trainers.
Lucky carpet. Dear heaven. Her brain was on stall. She had to give this man solid investment advice and she couldn’t manage her legs and forgot what words were when she looked at him.
Pull it together, Philomena Elizabeth Grady. It was one week, a million years ago, and you were a different person with a different name. He’s probably slept with a hundred million women. He is not going to remember you. Plus you have a date tonight with a very eligible lawyer.
She got to her feet and smiled at Caroline. She could rescue this with a witty quip and scream into her pillow about cosmic injustice later. She’d focus on the business at hand and once they got into the facts and figures it would all be suitable for work and she could sit back and enjoy the not so suitable for work secrets she had exclusive knowledge to.
The fact that she knew where Mr. MG Holdings liked to be touched, what he sounded like when he came, how he liked to fuck long and hard, what his tattoos meant and exactly how much fun you could have with his cock piercing.
She cleared the lust fog from her throat. “Despite that memorable entrance, clumsy is not the brand of my investment advice. I promise I’ll only ever offer you elegant solutions. Shall we get down to it?”
He flashed that gotta-love-me smile and a brow jumped on the words get down to it.
She winced and tried to hide it pulling out a chair, sitting, rolling it toward the table and opening her laptop, because getting down to it did sound like an invitation to something not appropriate for a boardroom.
Performance appraisal D-minus. At least her heart had stopped trying to make a hussy out of her by beating hard enough to open the buttons of her silk shirt, and her mouth appeared to be in rough working order.
She risked looking at her new client and her brain superimposed an image of Grip shirtless, drenched in sweat, arms flying over his rims, on top of the one of him leaning back in his chair, one sleeve-tattooed arm lying on the table, wearing a plain dark blue T-shirt that made his eyes pop and a bemused expression that made her suck in a deep breath before he slid her phone across the table to her.
As she reached for it, their hands grazed and she felt color flood her face. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Goddamn, he shouldn’t be allowed to say that word.
She focused on her laptop keyboard and pulled on her professional reserves to say, “Why don’t you tell us what your priorities are, er, Mark?” only just catching herself from calling him Grip like his fans did.
She was no longer a fan in any real sense. She didn’t go to gigs, didn’t read everything ever written about him and his band, didn’t follow him on social media or burn brain cells plotting how she might meet him, sleep with him, end up friends with him. They’d parted like adults who’d known their good thing was also a temporary thing so continuing to track him would’ve been stalkerish. Would’ve taken up time she didn’t have for frivolous activities. She’d put all that aside along with dying her hair black, flashing her boobs, drinking till she didn’t care what anyone thought of her and wearing the most revealing borrowed clothing she could get away with and still have all her vital parts covered, most of the time.
That’s not to say she hadn’t been aware of his rise to stardom from the drummer in a scrappy but promising pub band to global success. She’d have had to be dead not to have known Lost Property had hit the big time.
She’d always known he was the bomb. The best of the best and that’s why he’d been at the top of her drummers-to-fuck list and why she’d retired after their time together. It wasn’t ever going to get any better than bedding Mark Grippen.
Although managing his investment portfolio was a nice upgrade, given the circumstances.
As he tapped his tablet and pulled up scribbled notes, she could see he was focused on the matter at hand and she was in absolutely no danger of being discovered, until he looked up, quirked his head to the side, studied her across the table, and said, “Mena, I have the strangest feeling we’ve met before.”

TWO
Mena Grady blushed and that made Grip smile. She’d been pale and shaky after tripping and dropping her stuff when she arrived in the room, as if she was the one expecting contractions instead of her boss. Now she looked like her blood was pumping again.
Her arrival sure broke the ice. Just what he needed, a crack in the perfect glass and steel corporate facade of Swire and Yallop. He was fucking nervous. A fish out of water in this formal setting, underdressed; his lucky jeans and the only shirt he owned without artwork splashed over it, and