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I stare at it and swirl the glass, sipping the alcohol and wincing as the slightly medicinal flavour assaults my back palette. ‘They’re weird. Plasticky.’
‘Not the real ones.’
‘No.’
I swallow, wondering at the way my gut is churning and my pulse is racing. I need to bring it back to business. It’s the reason I’m here with him.
‘The server in Canada can pick up the slack, but it’s going to slow things down.’
‘By how much?’
‘Just a few seconds’ lag. It’s unavoidable, given the distance.’
‘A few seconds?’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s nowhere closer?’
‘Not that can handle this amount of data.’
He throws his drink back in one motion. ‘And Wolf thinks that’s acceptable?’
He says his name with obvious derision.
‘You think he’d go to the effort of flying out here to propose it if he did?’
‘Well, he’s banging you, right?’
I can’t hide the angry intake of breath. Sure, he’s always rude. And demanding. And I’ve learned not to give a shit. I don’t expect the same courtesy from Jack Grant that most people pepper into life. But this is too far even for him...even when we’ve been flirting all night.
‘His suggestion is professional,’ I return softly. A warning lurks in my words. Does he hear it?
Apparently not. Jack is like a cat with a mouse.
‘But you are fucking him?’
‘God, Jack,’ I snap, standing up.
His eyes follow the fluidity of my movement. They’re narrowed. Assessing. He’s reading me like a book. But I’m too angry to care. Too worked up, as well. He’s halfway to being drunk, and he’s obnoxious, and since he pulled me hard against his body I’m a bit mushy.
I hide my mushiness, though. I hide it behind a veil of anger. ‘That’s none of your damned business.’
His eyes flick to mine. There’s a lazy arrogance in his features but anger palpitates off him.
‘He works for me. You work for me. If you’re fucking him I want to know.’
‘What I do in my own time, and with whom, is up to me. Until the day it starts affecting my job performance you should just butt out.’ I jut my chin, my eyes sparking with his. ‘Got it?’
He looks calm, controlled, but I know there’s an undercurrent of emotion just beneath the handsome surface. Because I know Jack. Probably better than anyone else on earth.
‘You don’t strike me as coy,’ he says.
‘Because I’m not.’
I step backwards. The wall is behind me. I brush against it, feeling cornered and unbelievably confused and turned on by this strange turn of events.
‘So answer the question.’
‘Am I fucking Wolf?’ My question emerges as a husk in the night.
‘Yeah.’ He moves forward. An infinitesimal step. ‘You know everything there is to know about me, don’t you? So why keep your secrets?’
I open my mouth to say something snappy, but shut it again. He’s right. I know a lot about him. Not the ‘everything’ he claims, but a lot.
‘You could always lock your door if you want to be more private about your love-life.’
‘Sex-life,’ he interjects swiftly, on autopilot, and I know it’s because of Lucy that he’s so emphatic on this point.
I don’t know anything about his wife. I presume she was a nice enough person—although agreeing to marry Jack does make me question both her sanity and her judgement. But maybe he was different before she died. Maybe his bastard impulses weren’t so apparent?
‘So you’re going to live out the rest of your life like this? Moving from one woman to another, never getting to know a thing about them beyond their cup size and their sexual proclivities.’
His eyes drop to my breasts and I can tell he is assessing my cup size. Crap. My nipples strain hard against the flimsy fabric of my dress—it’s too tight for a bra, and sadly I don’t really need one.
His smile is self-satisfied and I want to slap it off his face. I fight the urge to cross my arms and cover my involuntary reaction.
‘I’m trying to get to know more about you right now,’ he says.
My pulse is hammering hard in my veins. His revolving-door bedroom flashes before me in an instant. The number of mornings I’ve arrived to find him asleep after a busy night of... Best I don’t imagine that right now.
‘Are you afraid I’ll judge you?’
I open my eyes to find him right in front of me, his head bent, his body just a hair’s breadth from me. A soft moan escapes me before I can catch it.
‘You? You think you’d have any right to judge me after parading half of England through here?’
‘Not half of England,’ he murmurs, a smile shifting over his face. ‘Half of London, maybe.’
‘How do you justify it?’ I ask, feeling a dangerous pull towards a line of questioning my brain is shouting at me to back away from. ‘You think Lucy would be happy that you’re fucking your way through a smorgasbord of women just because you won’t have an actual relationship? Is there a sliding scale of monogamy that the dead expect?’
A muscle jerks in his cheek. I recognise that I’m stirring him up and still I don’t stop. I’m angry, too! He doesn’t have a monopoly on thwarted desire and pent-up frustration.
It feels good to goad him! So good!
‘You think what you do is fair to these women?’
His smile spreads slowly, but it is cold, angry. ‘I don’t hear any complaints.’
Boom! It’s the proverbial match to the fuel of my anger. I explode.
‘You boot them out before you even know their names half the time! Where, exactly, would they lodge their complaint? My God, Jack. Of all the chauvinistic, selfish, careless—’
He lifts a finger to my lips, silencing me with the touch. His eyes on mine are intent. Heat builds inside my blood, at fever pitch now.
‘You know...’ His fingers dip into my drink, fishing out the bright red orb at its base. ‘You have a tendency to be judgemental.’
My sharp intake of breath is dangerous, given his finger’s closeness to my mouth. He runs it across my lower lip and I don’t pull away. He holds up the cherry with his other hand. My eyes slip to it of their own accord.
‘Haven’t you ever discovered that you like something you thought you hated? Haven’t you ever been wrong?’
I shake my head, not really sure of the question he’s asking. He surprises me by lifting the cherry to his own lips and sucking it into his mouth. I watch for a moment, and as his finger drops from my mouth I try to say something. I’m not sure what, and I’ll never have a chance to find out. He brings his lips to mine, pressing the cherry into my mouth, rolling it around before sucking it back into his and crushing it.
The flavour is all around me and I no longer care. Because it is dwarfed by something else: the taste of him. Cherry flavour is on his tongue, evaporating in the flame of our kiss.
His lips crush mine, silencing any words, sucking them out of me, and a new heat spreads in my body. His kiss is punishment and it is possession. I cannot explain it better than that. It is a moment of clarity in which my anger seems to evaporate temporarily before it is back and I am kissing him—just as hard, with just as much fury.
My tongue lashes his and my hands are in his hair, rough, pulling at him, and I am kissing him as though I am still shouting at him with my touch.
He groans angrily and his body weight holds me to the wall, his strong legs straddling me, pinning me where I am. I think my brain is trying to tell me something, but I can hear nothing above the pounding of my heart and the rushing of my blood.
Desire is a whip, and it is lashing at my spine.
He drags his lips lower, nipping the skin of my shoulder with his teeth and teasing the racing pulse-point in my neck with his tongue. I groan, tilting my head back, knowing I need to stop this madness but accepting we are past that.
A line has been crossed. Not just crossed! Obliterated! There is newness to this. But I want to shape it, not be shaped by it. I need to be in charge—at least to some extent.
‘Why do you care?’ he asks, bringing his mouth back to mine and kissing me with enough force to hold my head hard against the wall. His hand drops to my dress, lifting the hem, and his fingers slide between my weak, shaking legs.
‘Care...?’ I mumble. What is he talking about?
He breaks the kiss but I have no space to think—not when his fingers are sliding inside me, his hand easily pushing aside the barrier of my flimsy underpants.
Oh, my God. I’m about to come. I swear, I’m this close. He swirls his finger around my wet muscles, teasing me, feeling me, and I am his. Completely.
‘Why do you care who I fuck?’
The question is a gruff, deep demand.
I blink my eyes, trying to think straight. But he moves his thumb over my clit and I shiver, trembling in every bone of my body as I feel the wave building around me.
‘I don’t,’ I snap through gritted teeth, sweat sheening my brow.
My eyes are shut, so I don’t see him dip his head forward. It is a surprise when his mouth clamps over my breast, his teeth biting down on my nipple through the silky fabric of my dress.
My stomach lurches as he drags his teeth along my nipple, pulling, making me throb with pleasure. And his finger pushes deeper, then draws out. My own wetness glides across my clit as he thumbs my nerves, and I am lost. Exploded. Gone.
Heat shoots through me, bursting me apart, and I am panting loud and hard as he moves his head to the other breast.
Shit. It’s too much. My muscles are clenching and my legs are hardly able to hold me up. I have had amazing sex, but something about this has blown all my experiences out of the water. Is it the illicitness of being with my boss?
My boss.
Jack Grant.
I groan in awareness of a moment I will undoubtedly regret, and then I groan at my weakness because I can’t stop. There is a compulsion—no. An awakening. It is an acceptance of a truth I have fought too hard and for too long.
Two years of looks, laughs, infuriating arguments and differences of opinion have been leading to this. Two years of finding him in bed and fantasising about climbing in with him. I have resisted because he is my boss and I love my job—and because he’s Jack-bloody-Grant. I have resisted acting on my deepest desires, but now I find it is impossible not to welcome his.
His hand drops to my side. His fingers dig into my flesh just enough to make me arch my back forward, but his hips rock me against the wall, crushing me with strength and passion. Hell, he’s good at this. So, so good. So much better than I imagined.
And I’ve imagined a lot.
I whimper—a sound I don’t think I’ve ever made in my life—as he brings his mouth back to mine, but the ghost of his kiss lingers on my breasts, making them painfully sensitised.
‘Now do you think women complain after they leave me?’ he asks, and he is stepping away, backwards, his eyes glinting in his handsome face as he stares at me with a confusing lack of passion.
There is colour in his cheeks and his chest is shifting hard, as is mine, with the pain of laboured breath. But his voice is steady and his eyes are cold.
His question doesn’t make sense. I lift a finger to my breasts. They’re tingling and swollen. I stare at him, unusually slow on the uptake.
‘I give them what they want. What you want.’
And he turns sharply, stalking across the room and grabbing another drink. His back is to me as he throws back the glass and swallows, but I hardly register the movement. Shock is seeping into me. Shock at what we’ve just done.
Holy hell!
Was he proving a point? I am trembling, moistness slicks my underwear, my dress bears the marks of his kiss, my mind is tumbled—and he is nothing?
Feminine pique stirs in my gut. I fantasise about slipping the dress from my body and storming across the room. About pushing him to the floor and straddling him, making him admit he wants me.
I know he does. I felt the proof of his desire hard against my stomach. But sanity is returning, and with it the realisation that we have done something very, very stupid. There is no turning back. No unwinding time. I need to salvage my pride and get the hell out of his office before I do something really stupid. Like ask him to finish the job he started.
‘I’ll email you a full report on the server’s feasibility tomorrow.’ My words are pleasingly stiff.
He grunts. ‘There she is. My cold-as-ice assistant.’
I straighten my back. I have never been his assistant and he knows it. He’s goading me. Spoiling for another fight?
I narrow my eyes. ‘Oh, I’m not cold,’ I hear myself say. ‘I’m very, very turned on.’
Perhaps my honesty surprises him. He turns his face, angling it towards me without actually looking in my direction.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and...blow off some steam.’
I walk out of there calmly, even though I am awash with doubt. Let him make of that what he will. If he imagines me going to Wolf... So what? If he imagines me going home to masturbate, looking at a picture of him, then let him.
I don’t know if I give a shit.
It is cold when I emerge from The Mansion, and drizzling with rain.
One of the decisions I made within six months of coming to work for Jack was to move to Hampstead, where he lives. The hours I work, I don’t want to lose any more to a lengthy commute.
