She'd quaked when he lowered his nose into the dark tangle of her hair until his lips brushed the shell of her ear. She could smell him — the subtle expensiveness of his aftershave, the bourbon on his breath, the heat roiling off him. The wild, untamed smell of his wolf made hers whimper, and the thought of his jaws at her throat, his knot stretching her open and sealing her shut . . . Vanessa tightened her grip on the arm of her chair, sure she was about to slide off.No way he doesn’t smell that.
“Because you smell like prey.” His voice was a low hiss in her ear, a bolt of lightning straight to her cunt, and she could feel the self-satisfied smirk into which his lips curled, not pulling away. “Good enough to eat.”
* * *
Chapter three
“Soyoudon’tactuallyknow.”
His words were impatient, the hand that jerked towards the door an aggravated dismissal as if she were nothing but one of the researchers. Her forehead wrinkled at his sharp tone, hands tightening around the file folder she carried as she shook her head.
“No, that’s not what I said—”
“You said ‘maybe,’” he interrupted, head lifting to pin her in place with his icy glare.
“‘Maybe’ isn’t an answer. ‘Yes, we have it,’ or ‘no, we don’t.’ Do you see the difference? I need absolutes. We’re not going into court with a pocketful of ‘maybes.’ Do we have the signatures, or don’t we?”
Her back stiffened, the desire to hit him with the folder making her arm shake.Hit him and mess up that perfect fucking hair.
“I saidmaybeJohanna hasn’t emailed you yet, but they signed everything this morning. If only you’d let me finish my sentence before needing to bite my head off over nothing.”
“Maybeyou need to communicate your thoughts a bit more concisely.”
“Ormaybewe just need to fuck and get it out of our systems.”
The words were out before she could swallow them down, her internal monologue bubbling to the surface and tumbling from her mouth with no way to snatch it back; the boldest, stupidest words she’d ever uttered.
She had just celebrated her second anniversary at the firm two months earlier, but the previous four months — having him right there, separated by a mere glass wall, in constant sight — had been nothing short of torturous.
“Unless you have a better solution for this shit mood you’re in,” she went on.In for a penny, in for a pound. “Because I’m all out of ideas, and I’m tired of being yelled at for giving you exactly what you’re asking for.”
It wasn’t even his office. The senior associate Vanessa reported to had called the glass-walled office home, until the day she’d come in and the woman was gone, relocated, Grayson there in her place. She was vain enough to convince herself it was because of her and the proximity to her desk, at least at first, but by the end of the workday, she’d heard that he’d informed the managing partner that he would walk out that day and not come back if he had to spend one more afternoon working under harsh fluorescent lights. He’d been hastily relocated to the makeshift office, and the entire upper suite was now scheduled for a renovation. By the end of the day, the glass fishbowl-like walls had been fitted with black curtains that were kept closed over the following weeks. Closed, except for the wall that faced her desk.
The track lights were almost always off, even when he had the curtain facing her open, and the sight of him there in the darkened room — suit jacket draped over the chair in the corner, shirt sleeves rolled up, his mouth and hands in perpetual motion as he took phone call after phone call — was driving her crazy. She’d watched him on more than one occasion with his head tipped back, eyes closed, fingers circling over his right temple. She imagined herself slipping into the cube-like room, closing the curtains securely and locking the door before dropping to her knees in the darkness before him, drawing down the zipper at the front of his pants, and swallowing his cock whole.
He had been snappish with her for the last several weeks, in a way that felt oddly personal, even though his words were icily professional. He still acted like an entitled asshole in general, looking down his nose at everyone, but Vanessa didn’t know what she had done to have been singled out in such a way, and she was tired of his unexplained ire.
. . . And now she had just offered to fuck him, had made the suggestion here, at work, in his office, in the middle of the day, with no martini lunch in sight on which she could blame it.
Grayson cocked his head, considering her words as if she had just offered a solution to a problem they were running into with the case and not something horrifically inappropriate over which she might be fired. He rolled his pen between his thumb and forefinger — a Montblanc in black ink, the only ones he would use.
She had watched a month earlier when he had risen from his desk, carrying the brand-new, unopened box of office supply store pens that had been left for him, tipping it into the trash. When she’d tapped on the glass a short while later, struggling to find the opening in the curtains and flailing like a ghost for several seconds as he snickered, she’d made a point of looking into the waste basket.
“You’re too good for the office pens?” she’d observed as he looked over the paperwork she’d placed on the desk, crossing her arms, waiting for a sputtering denial.
“Yes.”
He didn’t bother denying it, and she couldn’t help grinning at his brazen arrogance.Such a prick. Such an unmitigated asshole. So entirely fuckable.
“So are you, rabbit,” he went on, glancing up at her beneath a long fringe of lashes and his thick, dark brows.
“How do you know that?” she shot back. “You’ve never asked me a single question. You don’t know where I come from or what kind of family I have. Maybe I grew up in the system or came from a pack. You don’t know anything about me.”
Her words had no effect on him, never looking up from his own signature as the stupidly expensive pen flowed across the paper.
“Aside from the fact that you already mentioned your childhood in a human neighborhood, none of that matters. People remake themselves all the time. You’re never better or worse than the person you are each day. You wouldn’t be sitting in this room if you weren’t. And don’t presume to tell me what I know.”
Her stomach had flip-flopped, her insides seeming to liquefy when he went on seriously, looking up, at last, trapping her in the intensity of his bittersweet chocolate gaze.
