I didn’t even have to think about it. I widened my stance, and Jagger’s hand dipped down and under my skirt. He sucked my tongue as his fingers pushed away my panties and stroked along my center.
“Fuck.” His voice was a sexy, low rumble. “You’re wet for me already.”
One finger pushed inside, and he started to massage along my walls. He added a second finger, and it didn’t take long before I was a panting mess. I was on the edge of finding ecstasy, standing in the middle of his glass-walled office.
But then Jagger abruptly pulled away.
I reached for him, thinking he was playing some kind of a game—until I realized why he’d backed off. Someone was coming down the hall.
And it turned out to be my stepfather.
***
“Sutton.” Edmund’s eyes slid over my face before moving to Jagger. Luckily I’d put some space between us before he walked in, so at least we weren’t caught standing inappropriately close. “Is everything okay?”
My stepfather misread my heated cheeks for something other than what they were. “Oh, yeah.” I fanned my face. “I’m fine. I just came straight from the gym. It takes a long time for me to cool down after.”
“Oh.” He nodded, seeming to at least mostly accept my explanation. “What are you doing here so early?”
I’d made up one good excuse, but my brain was still misfiring from what had been going on thirty seconds ago, and I couldn’t come up with a second one. Luckily, Jagger helped me out.
“I had my assistant call her last night,” he said. “As Sutton’s mentor, I thought it would be good for her to sit in on this morning’s meetings. She was the first one to arrive.”
That did it. My stepfather’s face went from ninety-percent satisfied to one hundred. He looked at me and smiled. “Eagerness is a great asset in the workplace.”
“Indeed it is.” Jagger’s eyes slanted to meet mine with a glimmer. He was lucky my cheeks were already red. Though Edmund thankfully seemed oblivious.
“I’m just going to get some coffee,” he said. “Where are we meeting?”
“Board room,” Jagger responded.
Edmund looked at me. “Did you get your morning cappuccino yet?”
I shook my head.
“Join me.” He gestured toward the hall. “I’ll fill you in on your mother’s latest plans to set you up, this time with Patrice’s nephew, so you can thwart them before she accepts a goat for your hand in marriage. That was all the two of them could talk about when she was over yesterday.”
“Great.” I rolled my eyes before exchanging glances with the boss. It was just my mother being my mother, but the glimmer of fun in Jagger’s eyes was gone now, replaced with something I thought looked a lot like jealousy. It made me smile.
“I guess I’ll see you at seven,” I told him.
***
The seven-AM meeting went on for more than six hours. A team of in-house lawyers, outside attorney consultants, and every member of the executive team sat together, going through all of the details of the antitrust violations Apex and Jagger himself had been accused of. I got lost in some of the minutia of the law, but I definitely followed the government’s theory when it came to the algorithm. Basically, they claimed that Apex and other large financial investment firms were colluding without having any direct communication just because there were some commonalities between their algorithms. This caused the companies to provide similar guidance to investors about the prices at which they should buy and sell stocks, thereby creating what looked like a conspiracy to fix prices. The problem was, in order to defend such a claim, Apex would need to prove that their algorithm differed from their competitors’ algorithms, and doing that meant spelling out the secret sauce of Apex’s internal system, which obviously Jagger did not want to do.
By the time the meeting started to break up, the boss looked like he’d been through a twelve-round fight, and he wasn’t anxious about hearing the referee’s decision. I hated the stress he was under, but it didn’t stop me from admiring how he’d handled himself when his feet were held to the flame. Jagger Langston commanded a room full of men twice his age with twice as much experience, skillfully navigating between listening to their thoughts and opinions, weighing them, and managing to draw his own conclusions.
I’d been excited to spend the day near him for personal reasons, but in the end, I’d learned a valuable lesson inbusiness. A commanding presence wasn’t about having the loudest roar so your team followed in a straight line behind you. It was about earning influence and respect so they followed you willingly.
There had to be forty people in the room. I stalled as many of them cleared out with marching orders, hoping to get a few minutes with Jagger alone. Though when I realized there was a long line of more-important people ahead of me, I figured I should let him work and quietly made my way to the door.
Jagger’s booming voice stopped me before I walked out. “Sutton?”
I turned, and he glanced over at one of the attorneys who had been brought in on retainer. “Excuse me a moment.” Jagger looked back to me. “About the suggestion you made this morning to correct the issue we were discussing…”
It took me a few seconds to extrapolate that mysuggestionhad been dinner Saturday night and theissuewe were discussing was my wanting to sleep with him again. At least that’s what I assumed he meant. “Yes? Have you decided how you’re going to handle things?”
There were still a dozen people in the room left, yet when he locked eyes with me, I felt that spark between us light again.
