“Why are you giving me this?”
“Your birthday was last month. I saw your ID.” She pauses for half a beat. “Consider it a belated gift.”
I hold the box out toward her. “This is too much for a birthday gift. This is—I can’t. It’s too much.”
“It’s a watch.”
I stare at her. She stares back. She bought a Rolex for her bodyguard’s birthday, and she’s presenting it to me with the energy of someone handing over a Starbucks coffee.
And I hate it.
I hate what it does to me. She’s reminding me, without meaning to or maybe meaning to exactly, of every square foot of distance between her world and mine. She buys Rolexes for the men she sleeps with. She buys Rolexes for the men she employs. There’s no real difference in her books because both categories live on the same shelf. Temporary. Replaceable.
The watch isn’t a gift. It’s a receipt. She’s paid for my time, my body, my silence, and she’s tying a bow around the transaction.
Remember who you are.That fucking thought again. It never stops.
She slides her hand down the front of my trousers, and my brain freezes.
Her palm finds my cock through the fabric and presses, her fingers curling to measure the shape, and I’m already thickening against her hand because my body stopped listening to my head somewhere around chapter one of this disaster.
“I really want you to have it,” she says. Her voice is level. Conversational. The hand on my cock is not.
I swallow. Set the box down on the arm of the sofa beside me.
“The thing I really want to do right now,” she says, lower now, “is suck your cock.”
She doesn’t blink when she says that. Neither do I.
“But I’ll only do it if you accept the gift.”
Her hand squeezes me through the fabric. I don’t answer. She takes my silence for what it is.
Her fingers move to my belt. She works the buckle one-handed, the leather sliding free with the patience of a woman who has done this in offices before. She unbuttons me. The zipper comes down slow, tooth by tooth, and I watch her face the whole time. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at what she’s unwrapping.
I’m hard. I’ve been hard since the slit in that skirt. Since the memory of her ass up and the sound she made when I pushed inside.
She pulls me free and the air hits my skin and her eyes finally take me in. Then Diana Jensen drops to her knees.
The image is a detonation in my chest. This woman. This career. This office. Kneeling on the carpet of her corner office, with the park stretched out behind her. She wraps one hand around the base of my cock and takes me into her mouth, and the sound I make is involuntary. A grunt I couldn’t have caught if I’d tried.
Her mouth is hot. Wet. She doesn’t ease in. She takes me deep on the first stroke, her cheeks hollowing, her tongue flat under me, the back of her throat right there. My hand goes to the base of her skull, fisting her hair, and she doesn’t resist. Doesn’t slow down. Takes me deeper.
She told me what she wants. So I give her that.
I thrust forward. Her eyes water, but her hands grip my thighs and pull me closer, and I thrust again, harder, the head of my cock hitting the back of her throat. She gags and recovers and takes it. I set a rhythm. Deep. Punishing. My hand fisted in her hair, my hips driving forward, and she meets every stroke. Her nails dig into my thighs through the suit pants. Ten small points of pressure that saymore.
Her mouth works me. Sucks. Pulls. Swallows around me. The sounds are obscene in the quiet of the office, wet and hungry and deliberate, and I think about the door behind us. Solid wood. Soundproof, probably. She picked this office for a reason.
I look down and see her mascara tracking, her lips stretched around me, her eyes glassy and focused and entirely alive.
I thrust harder. She takes it. I thrust harder still. She takes that too.
The orgasm builds from the base of my spine, and I don’t fight it. I pull out at the last second, my cock slick and throbbing in my fist, and I come across her face. Thick ropes across her cheekbones, her chin, her open mouth with her tongue jut out. She looks up at me with my cum streaking her face, and she looks pleased.
I stare down at her. At the mess I made of her. And I understand, with the clarity of a man who has walked to the edge of a cliff and looked over it, that I am in this. Deep. A hole I dug with my own hands, and every day on this assignment, I drive the shovel in further, and there is no rope, no ladder, no exit strategy that gets me out.
The revenge plot is a joke. Jack Rutherford is a ghost I’ve been chasing through a house I no longer want to burn down.
