I look down at my hands. She's right. They're trembling against my keyboard, fine tremors I can't control. Richard's scent is still in my nose, his cologne clinging to my clothes where his body pressed close, and the need to scrub it off is so overwhelming I can barely breathe.
"I need to go." I stand so fast my chair rolls back and hits the partition. "Cover for me. Please."
Tamsin doesn't ask questions. "Richard won't be back until four. Go."
The elevator takes forty seconds and I spend them scrubbing my hands over my face, trying to wipe away the ghost of Richard's thumb on my lip. It doesn't work. His scent is in my clothes, in my hair, ground into my skin where his hand gripped my hip. I can still feel the pressure of his fingers.
The doors open on eleven, Amos already in the hallway, which means either he heard the elevator or he was waiting for it. His expression shifts the second he sees me, from warm to alert to something darker as his nostrils flare.
"You smell like him." The words come out with a dangerous edge to them. "You smell like my father."
"He cornered me." My voice cracks on the second word. "In the corridor by the windows. He touched my face, Amos. He put his thumb on my mouth and told me you can't protect me from him."
His hands curl into fists at his sides as his scent spikes with fury, the soft pine turning sour. For a moment, he looks like he's going to turn around and go find Richard, and I grab his wrist before he can move.
"Don't. Please. That's not what I need."
"What do you need?"
The truth spills out. "I need to not smell like him. I need to smell like you. I need—" My voice breaks. "I need to feel like my body belongs to me again."
Amos' expression shifts. The fury doesn't disappear but understanding blooms beneath it. "Come with me."
His office door is open but he walks past it. I follow without questioning the change in destination, because right now I'd follow Amos anywhere that isn't the corridor where Richard's hands found me. Anywhere that doesn't smell like his cologne.
He stops at a door marked SUPPLY ROOM 12-C and opens it. The room is small, lined with shelves of printer paper and toner cartridges and boxes of office supplies. It smells like cardboard and cleaning solution.
"You brought me to a supply closet." I stare at him from the doorway.
"I brought you somewhere that doesn't smell like him." He holds the door open, the look on his face carrying an edge Irecognize from the kitchen, the version of Amos that has teeth beneath the warmth. But there's something else there too, a fierce protectiveness that makes my chest ache. "Get inside, Niah."
He follows me in and lets the door swing shut behind us, but he doesn't lock it. "You didn't lock it," I say.
"No." He backs me against the shelving unit. A ream of printer paper digs into my lower back. "I didn't."
"Someone could walk in."
"Someone could." His hands find my hips. His thumbs press into my hips, the way they did in the kitchen, directly over the spots that make my breathing stutter. "Does that bother you?"
The honest answer is complicated. The honest answer is that the thought of someone opening that door and finding me pressed against a shelving unit with my stepbrother's hands on me should bother me enough to make me leave.
My mother trained me to be invisible, to never be caught, to control every variable in every encounter so that nothing could be used against me. An unlocked supply closet in the middle of a workday is the opposite of controlled. It's reckless and stupid and dangerous.
My scent sweetens so sharply that Amos' nostrils flare.
"That's what I thought." His mouth finds my neck, his nose dragging from below my ear to the curve of my shoulder, his breath warm against my skin. "Your mouth says this is a bad idea, but your body just told me exactly how you feel about bad ideas."
"My body is an unreliable narrator." But my hands are already gripping the front of his shirt and my head is tipping back to give him better access to my throat, the unlocked door behind him sending a thrill through my nervous system that I don't understand and can't control.
Amos' mouth opens against my neck and his teeth graze the skin, a question asked with his mouth instead of words. “This is one of the only rooms that man has never touched, not even on accident. It’s also one of the few rooms no one ever enters because people fucking hate restocking the printer.” The information pulls a short laugh out of me before it turns into a whine. His hands slide from my hips to my ass and pull me flush against him. I can feel him through his slacks, hard already, and the contact drags another sound from me that bounces off the supply room walls.
"Careful." His lips brush my ear. "Someone might hear you."
"Amos." My voice comes out breathy as I push against his chest. "We're at work."
"I know where we are." He spins me around so my chest presses against the shelving unit and his body lines up behind mine. Printer paper and file boxes rattle as my weight hits the shelves, the noise making me flinch because it's loud enough to carry into the corridor. His mouth finds the back of my neck, his hands working my belt open with a competence that tells me he's thought about doing exactly this. "The question is whether you want me to stop."
I don't want him to stop. The risk isn't killing the arousal. It's feeding it. Worse, I need this, even if I won’t voice it aloud. Smelling like Amos and being claimed by him is everything I need.
