Because he liked sex. He’d had a lot of it. He’d had long, endless nights in hotel rooms, dirty weekends, and still, they had done nothing to match the intensity of that last twenty-five minutes. It had been hot, fast, and filthy. And the intensity of his release had been far beyond anything he’d ever experienced before.
Regret.
Fuck, they should both regret it. But him most of all.
He was the one who was the boss. He was the one who was supposed to have a cool head. He was the one who was in charge. He was the one who could… Twist this, turn it into something that could hurt her.
No. He would never do that. He wasn’t his father.
And they had used a condom, they were adults, he wasn’t an asshole. It didn’t have to be something they regretted. It just had to be something he stayed in control of.
“I won’t,” he said, his voice sounding rusty, even to his own ears.
“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t. And I don’t want to.”
“Yeah. I think…” He got up and began hunting for his clothes. “It was inevitable.” He went into the bathroom and disposed of the condom, but then he stared at the wastebasket, which was going to get cleaned up by staff… Oh, this cabin had already been ready for guests. He was going to have to clean it. He would come back later, he would take out the trash, he would collect the bedding. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it in front of Marlowe. Not sure why he wanted to protect her from the consequences of their actions, but he felt like he did.
“Inevitable?” She was staring at him when he popped out of the bathroom.
“Yeah. You felt it. When we met.”
“Yes,” she said. “But nothing like this has ever been inevitable for me before.”
That brought him closer to regret. She was vulnerable. Not just because she was his employee, but because her husband had just broken up with her. Her husband.
And they had been together since high school, which…
There was a very good possibility he was the only man she had ever been with. But then, maybe that was actually a good thing.
“You kind of… broke the seal,” he said.
Her facial expression contorted, and she looked at him, appalled. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying. There had to be a first, right? After… Your marriage.”
“I guess,” she sounded ruffled. Offended, even. But he wasn’t wrong.
“I’m not going to take advantage of you, I am not going tomess around with you. Anyhow, it’s done. It doesn’t have any impact on your job. Plus, we got it out of our systems.”
“Out of our systems,” she said, nodding. “Okay. I mean, you’re the expert, I assume?”
He wasn’t an expert on this. There was nothing about this that was… Normal. Nothing about it that resembled anything he had ever experienced before.
He wasn’t the expert.
Not by a long shot.
He wasn’t going to let her know, though.
“Sure,” he said. “The expert.”
But there was absolutely no reason for him to get into all of that. This was best left as something that was one and done. It was just a really bad idea.
He pulled his jeans on and looked at her. “It’s just really important to me that you understand that this has no bearing on your job. My dad… my sperm donor, I really hate thinking of him as my dad, but it just… It’s too easy to say… He took advantage of the people who worked for him. He took advantage of people. That’s how he ended up with my mom, that’s how they ended up havingprobablythree children. Over the course of years, while he kept her living in poverty, while he didn’t acknowledge us. I would never do that.”
He wondered now if he was trying to convince her, or if he was trying to convince himself. He wondered if, actually, whatever his intentions were, this brought him into some kind of alignment with his dad.
Because maybe this would be his story. That he had just met a woman that he had an undeniable desire for.
