Hot to Touch

by Valentine, Layla

  And soon enough, neither did I.

  We moved together, mindless with bliss and need until he pushed up hard into me, bellowing, and the pressure and hot burst of fluid inside me tipped me over into ecstasy.

  He caught me when I collapsed over him and we lay there, tangled up, my head tucked under his chin. My lungs and thighs burned as I gasped for breath. Under my cheek, I heard his heart pounding, gradually slowing to a calm beat as he sighed with contentment.

  “You know you’re gonna have trouble getting rid of me after all this, right?” he purred into my hair before kissing the top of my head. Inside me, I felt him linger, his cock relaxing slower than the rest of him.

  I laughed gently. “Ace, that’s the least frightening threat I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Once he drifted off, though, I lay there in his arms, eyes closed and muscles relaxed, but my mind racing. To Ace, big life changes were something to embrace and celebrate. To me, they were scary. I was still stuck worrying over my inevitable parting with the company.

  I’ll be okay, I tried to tell myself. I’ll hide the pregnancy, buy myself some time to plan an exit strategy, and see a therapist if I’m really conflicted over letting go of Daddy’s flawed, backward, dying engineering firm. It’s not losing. It’s not giving up.

  But my heart still sank just thinking about it.

  Ace let out a soft grunt in his sleep and tightened his grip on me, seeming to sense my tension. I smiled faintly, nestled close to him, glad at least that he had accepted the pregnancy and wanted to work things out with me.

  Even if everything back in Denver was ready to go to hell in a handbasket, so far things here in Aspen were going just fine.

  Of course, all that did, as I slowly relaxed again and drifted off, was make me wish once again that I could stay.

  Chapter 12

  Naomi

  By Monday morning, Ace and I had explored a lot of Aspen as well as our fair share of new sexual positions. But we still hadn’t discussed what we were going to do about the baby in any real way, besides his simply wanting to be involved. I was too busy having fun with him to think much about it until I was packing my overnight bag to go home. Then I felt my stomach drop.

  He encouraged me to take the weekend off with him to celebrate. But we still don’t have even step one of a plan. I don’t even know if he wants to try getting serious-serious, or just wants to date and be co-parents.

  I couldn’t bring it up now, on the way to the airport, with both of us yawning after days of sleeping in. I didn’t want to break the mood. But I also didn’t want to spend tonight sitting up late, wondering how soon he would consider too soon to bring up asking about it.

  Are we friends with benefits? Lovers? Headed toward more? How much more?

  What did Ace want? And for that matter, what did I want from him?

  Maybe I should get that part straight before I bug him to do the same.

  We had time. He kept reassuring me of that. It would be months before I started to show, months before I had to put any exit strategy into play. Many months before the baby came, and we would have to finally have all these questions sorted out.

  “When can you get over here again?” Ace asked as he drove, the hopeful note in his voice making me smile a little. We might not have plans, but we had interest, good sex, and a blossoming friendship. And…maybe more. I was too busy swimming in the afterglow to sort out my feelings yet. I would let it simmer while I dealt with my day-to-day at the office.

  Not to mention the meeting. Which would be annoying and uncomfortable, and require me to be very careful about what I said. But that was all right; I was up for it. My time with Ace had recharged my batteries, and my talk with the Orloffs had given me fresh confidence.

  I’ll sort it out. We will. We have time.

  “Next Friday night at the absolute earliest.” Maybe I could bring all this up then. “What’s your schedule like?”

  “I’ll clear it,” he said, so warmly that my pulse picked up.

  “I’ll be here by suppertime, then.”

  He surprised me by walking me in, an arm around me as we moved quickly through the thin crowd. “I’ll miss waking up to you,” he said.

  I felt that little flutter in my stomach again that told me there was more than afterglow at work here. Maybe a lot more.

  We were headed for the gate when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a knot of suited older men crossing the wide corridor toward us. They looked vaguely familiar, but I was in Aspen, on vacation with my lover, and so I stayed focused on Ace and where I was going.

  “Miss Richards!” Ian’s voice called behind me.

  I stopped dead. You have to be fucking kidding me. Not now—what is he even doing here?

  “What the hell is going on?” Ace asked, stopping with me. “Why is he here?”

  “Causing trouble. No idea what his excuse is this time.” I called over my shoulder, “I’m off work right now, Ian.” Then I turned to the little weasel, lifting an eyebrow. “This had better be good—”

  Oh, no.

  I managed to keep my jaw from dropping when I saw who he was with: four members of the board, including red-faced, gray-mutton-chopped Chalmers and rail-thin, Puritanical O’Brien, two more of my least favorite people on the planet.

  “Oh, it is,” Ian said, arms folded firmly across his hollow chest. “Do you want to tell me what is going on here?”

  Ace still had an arm around me. He didn’t drop it. “Oh hey, I know you. You’re the guy I had to pry out of the bathroom and strap into a carry-cage because he was freaking out so badly when the cable system died.”

  Ian’s eyes widened as Chalmers let out a tiny chuckle, and his mouth closed with a snap.

  “That was the time Naomi cut into her personal time and spent her personal money to fix your mistakes and make things good with an Archimedes client. Meanwhile you mostly freaked out and complained.” Ace’s voice was so cold that I barely recognized it. He was genuinely pissed at Ian’s cutting in and ready to fight for me.

  As much as I would have loved to sit back and let him have at it, though, I needed to take back the reins of this conversation.

  I cleared my throat. “The board’s already aware of his behavior when you rescued us, Ace. Thanks for making sure.”

  “No problem, sweetheart.” He took the hint and restrained himself while I stepped forward to deal with Ian.

  “How is it any of your business what I do when I’m not on company time?” I demanded, voice dripping with icy annoyance. “I have dealt with many of your indiscretions, and those of board members, without their having to answer for it, even when it threatened our company reputation. So why are you here?”

  The presence of the board members made me nervous—but I wasn’t about to let Ian know that. I knew at once from the smug look already creeping back onto his face that I had better not show any vulnerability to him at all.

  “Oh, I think anything that reflects this badly on Archimedes Gears is very much my business, and the board’s.” The corner of his mouth curled up in the most punchable smirk I had ever seen in my life. “In fact, we just got finished checking in up at the resort, just to make sure that your current…state…hasn’t left a poor impression on our client.”

  “A poor impression?” I burst out laughing. “And what did they say?” If they had checked in over there, depending on the Orloff brothers’ orders, they might already have learned how much trouble Ian had gotten them in—and that I was being blamed for none of it.

  “They said that you spent over an hour in a conference with the owners, something you neglected to warn us about.” Chalmers peered at me disapprovingly over his tiny, rimless glasses. “Is there any reason why you left this out of your conversation with our chief operations officer?”

  Ace dropped his arm off me as I sank deeper into business mode, hating it with every fiber of my being. “I did so because I wanted to take the most sensitive information to the board direc
tly. Our chief operations officer is both incompetent and only out for himself,” I said firmly.

  Ian squawked a protest, but I simply went on. “There is no way that he would not have acted on the information to profit himself, unless of course he simply panicked and made the situation worse. I wished to address the assembled board with the whole information.”

  “I see,” O’Brien rasped. He looked over at Ace, who looked so nonchalant that it made me less nervous, and his scowl deepened before he looked back at me. “So it was your plan to approach us at the meeting.”

  “Yes.” I looked around at them, frowning. “You may have camaraderie with Ian, but that doesn’t make what he says to you accurate.”

  “And what did you plan to say?” O’Brien coughed into his fist. He kept looking over at Ace.

  I looked around at them in confusion, gesturing around us at the very public space. “Right here, in the middle of the airport?”

  The board members harrumphed and shuffled uncomfortably. They knew that Ian had set up this very public confrontation with me for maximum drama and humiliation, but they had gone along with it. Now that the information being spilled could embarrass the company, however—or worst of all, them—it was making them nervous. The reminder just drove the point home further.

  I sighed and shook my head. “Well, all right then. Since you asked…”

  I straightened my shoulders and lifted my head, looking them right in the eyes.

  “Ian’s meddling in the cable lift project in Aspen has opened us up to the possibility of a lawsuit. I did everything within my power to take responsibility for the situation, but as I am not responsible for the actual problem, there is little that I can do that I have not done already.”

  I turned my head to stare over at Ian, who kept going from mozzarella-pale to almost purplish in turns. I had never seen him have mood swings this strong before. It would have amused me if I wasn’t right on the edge from this ridiculous situation.

  “Seriously, what is going on here?” I looked around at all of them. “I did my job. I was on the way to you with the information—”

  “Who is this man?” O’Brien suddenly demanded, stabbing a finger at Ace that made him lift a bemused eyebrow.

  What? What the hell was he asking me about Ace for?

  “My boyfriend,” I said simply. “He lives here. He was seeing me to the gate. Explain to me how your knowing that is relevant to anything?”

  And then I stopped dead. Because I knew. I knew why this group of horrible men were here, why they were so angry, and why they had been trying to confront me publicly. It was because they wanted to shame me.

  The pieces fell together in my head one by one, and I hated the picture they made up. The picture was of a man—five men, really—who had stepped so far over the line with me that it made clear how little any of them respected either me or common decency.

  Ian wanted to fuck me. He wasn’t able to, so he wanted to ruin me and take my job instead. And now, someone had shown up who liked me, and who I liked, and Ian had figured that out when he saw us together during the rescue. And Ian was jealous. Furious. Ian wanted revenge. Instead, Ian found one more thing his creepy, inappropriate, possessive ass could get angry over.

  A pregnancy. A baby. A clear sign that I had sex, and not with him. Or with any of these old bastards either. With someone I had chosen, who was everything they weren’t.

  Of course they were furious. But that still begged the question: how had Ian known about the baby?

  There was only one possible way. And that was just the cherry on top of why I was so pissed off at him.

  I looked up at Ian, looked him right in the eye, and simply said it. “You’ve been spying on me.”

  Those extra clicks on our phone line when I had scheduled with my OB-GYN. That had been him, listening in on my call. Probably listening in on all my calls since he had started to suspect I was with someone.

  Like a goddamned stalker, but nowhere near as unobtrusive.

  And I had been so distracted by Ace and by my pregnancy and all my problems that I had missed it.

  “Admit it, Ian. You have been spying on me.” I took a step toward him and he scuttled back into the knot of older men, who closed ranks beside him and glared at me. “About things that are none of your business.”

  The board members looked to Ian, who started shaking with fury, his fists balled at his sides. “Oh no. You don’t get to claim this isn’t our business. Not at all. Not when you’re bearing an illegitimate child from an illicit affair while sitting as CEO!”

  I just stared at him. I had heard of conservative men taking refuge in audacity to drive women out of power before, but this?

  Behind me, I could feel Ace tensing. His weight shifted, and I heard the little catch in his breath that told me he was restraining himself tremendously.

  I had to end this quickly. “Let me get this straight. You practically stalk me, you decide that my romantic life is your business somehow, and you drag four members of the board along to Aspen on your inappropriate policing of my work and…of my private life? After years of being expected to look the other way as you all bragged about your affairs and pandering habits at the meeting table? And yet, you want to tell me that somehow, I’m the one in the wrong here?”

  I couldn’t believe these wealthy, expensively dressed, grown-ass men—most of them grandfathers—gathered in the background as they watched him try to take me down for something that, to them, was only a scandal if you were a woman.

  “Answer me, Ian!”

  He seemed to puff up to half again his size, like a frog confronted by a larger predator. “You can’t talk to me that way anymore. The whole board knows that you’re expecting an illegitimate child—and by whom? The help?” He looked Ace up and down disdainfully—and then hesitated a moment.

  Ace was behind me. I couldn’t see his face. But I could see how Ian’s eyes widened when he looked up into it, and how he stopped dead for a few moments. He must have seen a warning in Ace’s expression.

  Then he barreled right on, like having a chunk of the board at his back and a mouthful of scandal somehow made him invincible.

  “This isn’t about policing your personal life; it’s about maintaining the public character of this organization. How are we supposed to keep the confidence of our shareholders if they find out that our CEO got herself pregnant by some meathead she barely knows, with all the planning and decorum of a teenage class slut—”

  Ace punched him.

  I had seen him move fast before, playing with the dog, crossing the gap between the two gondolas, catching a falling vase. I had never seen him move so fast that there was no seeing it—only a blur, and the sense of him passing me—and then a single, surprisingly quiet smack of fist on flesh.

  I turned in time to see Ian go over on his back, mouth open, cut lip drizzling blood as it started swelling almost as fast as he hit the lobby floor. His eyes had this blankly astonished look on them, as if he had never actually taken a punch before in his life.

  For a moment, everything stopped. People around us paused in mid-step, conversations died, the board members froze. The thud of Ian hitting the thin industrial carpet was louder than the blow.

  Ace stood half between us, very still, but his fists still up.

  Ian lay there, mouth flapping open and closed like a beached fish as he went pale. His hands were curled in front of him, having dropped the strap of his bag, and his hair was askew. He sat up slowly, running one hand back over his scalp, and stared between the two of us in amazement.

  He was forcing a smile as he got up. Behind that rictus-like curve of his thin, colorless lips, I could see he was on the verge of tears, like a kid pushed down in the sandbox.

  I had almost wanted to hit him myself.

  But Ace…Ace had gone and actually done it.

  He stepped back next to me, fists down at his sides, elbows just a little bent, muscles bulging against his shirt sleeves. The look of
fury on his face would have terrified me had he aimed it in my direction. Instead, he was angry on my behalf, something so rare for me that I couldn’t even speak.

  Not that I thought he would even have been able to hear me in that moment, as he stood there barely restraining himself from knocking Ian down again.

  “You don’t talk about her that way,” Ace said in a tone of frosty warning. “Ever again. If her lawyers don’t get you, I will. Have you got that, you dried-up, backstabbing creep?”

  “I—you will be hearing from my lawyer… Where is law enforcement when you need—” Ian sounded completely scandalized, like an old church lady someone had sent a dick pic.

  “Shut up, Ian,” O’Brien said, suddenly smiling for the first time. It wasn’t very nice—wide and sly-eyed, like a lizard might have smiled. “This situation has abruptly resolved itself.” He met my eyes, and I saw the triumph in his expression.

  My stomach dropped even further.

  I’m so tired.

  I closed my eyes again, a sense of disbelief washing over me. Things had happened too fast for me to process, and way too fast for me to stop things before they had gotten out of control. Ian had stepped over the line. Ace had responded by doing the same. Caught in the middle, I was the one who would be paying.

  Just like that, I watched my career at Archimedes Gears go up in smoke.

  The assembled board members knew it. They didn’t have to say it. They now had something to hold over my head that I couldn’t escape. Something huge.

  Thanks, Ace.

  O’Brien moved forward past Ian, looking me in the eye. “We’ve seen enough, young lady. I suggest you put in a call to HR on your way back to Denver. I’ll expect your report on this incident to be submitted by the end of the day.”

  They turned and walked away, O’Brien keeping a firm hand on Ian’s elbow as he limped off with them. I just stood there, numb, my choices ripped away from me by other people—including one who had doubtless thought that he was helping me.