Page 43 of Just a Little Tempted

I reached up and framed her face in my hands, tilting her head back so I could look into her eyes. Then I kissed her, pouring everything I couldn’t quite articulate into the press of my lips against hers.

She melted into me, her hands coming up to rest on my chest.

“Are you trying to distract me, Mr. Powers?” she murmured against my mouth.

I smiled. “Is it working?”

She gave me a flirty little grin. “Maybe.”

“Then I’ll have to try a little harder.”

I turned her around, pressing her stomach against the counter. Her breath caught as I brushed my lips against the nape of her neck, exposed by her messy bun. My hands skimmed up the outside of her thighs, sliding beneath the hem of her sleep shirt.

She shivered. I had her pinned between my body and the counter, and one hand slipped into her panties. She moaned when my fingers found her already wet, already wanting, and her head fell back against my shoulder.

“Simon…”

Her hand reached back, fingers twisting into my hair as she arched her spine and ground her ass against my erection, straining against the denim of my jeans. I bit down gently on the curve of her neck and whispered filthy things in her ear—telling her how good she felt around my cock when she came, letting her know how much I wanted her and exactly what I intended to do to her in explicit detail.

She came apart just like that, shuddering and gasping, her release coating my fingers. I groaned, my self-control snapping.

I shoved her panties down her hips and she kicked them aside eagerly, planting her feet wider apart, wanting this as badly as I did. Good, I thought, as I tore open my jeans and freed my aching cock.

She leaned over the counter, arching her back and presenting that gorgeous ass to me—flushed and beautiful andmine—and I notched myself at her entrance from behind. My hands gripped her hips. One hard thrust, and I was buried to the hilt.

We both groaned at the sensation.

I didn’t go slow this time. I took her hard, driving into her with a raw, primal need that bordered on desperate. She met me thrust for thrust, grinding back against me, her moans growing louder with every snap of my hips.

My hand slid around to find her clit again, and she cried out—oversensitive, overwhelmed—her inner walls clamping down around me as she detonated for the second time.

Her reaction ripped my own release from me. I buried myself deep and came with a groan that felt like it was torn from somewhere in my chest.

For a long moment, neither of us moved. I stayed inside her as she lay pressed against the counter, both of us catching our breath. I didn’t want to leave her body. Didn’t want to break this connection, even temporarily.

I was in so fucking deep. Over my head. Drowning in feelings I didn’t know how to name, for a woman I’d never expected to want this much.

But there was no stopping it now. No going back to who I was before her.

I understood her concerns. They were all valid, and I would do everything in my power to address them. But I also knew, with a certainty that surprised me, that I wasn’t giving her up. Not as my assistant. Not as… whatever she was becoming to me.

I needed to figure out how to make this work. All of it. The job, the relationship, the complicated tangle of professional and personal. Because walking away wasn’t an option.

For a man who had been content being alone, who had built his entire life around independence and self-reliance, the realization should have been terrifying.

Instead, it felt like the beginning of something worth fighting for.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Raina

The past weekhad been a revelation. As Simon pulled into the sprawling parking lot of Neptune’s Kingdom, I found myself reflecting on everything that had shifted between us since that night at my apartment. Five days. That’s all it had taken to upend every assumption I’d made about who Simon Powers was—and who we could be together.

We hadn’t slept together again since last weekend. Not because the desire wasn’t there—God, it wasdefinitelythere—but because Simon seemed determined to prove a point. During the workdays, there was a new ease between us, a current of flirtation running beneath our professional interactions. Lingering looks across his desk. His hand brushing mine when I handed him his coffee. The way his voice dropped half an octave whenever he said my name.

But he’d kept things deliberately restrained.

Instead of tumbling back into bed, he’d taken me to dinner. Twice. Real dates at restaurants with candlelight and wine lists, where we’d talked for hours about everything and nothing. I’d learned that he collected rare first-edition books but had never told anyone because he thought it seemed pretentious. That he hated cilantro with an irrational passion. That he’d wanted to be an architect as a kid before his father steered him toward business. That he ran five miles every morning, rain or shine, because it was the only time his mind went truly quiet.