by Holley Trent
No anger, either.
He wondered what that meant.
I shouldn’t wonder. Wondering is a waste of time.
Dragging a hand down his face, he took a deep breath and let it out. “I haven’t made a single assumption. I’m merely relaying what your own father has told the company on several occasions. He’s very unambiguous about the fact that there will be another Shannon at the top of the heap within the next few years. Didn’t you read his last Letter from the VP?”
“No,” she snapped, anger finally pervading her voice.
Good. Defend yourself.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Believe whatever the hell you want. Go home and take a selfie in your ugly sweater or something.”
“You’re wearing the exact same one,” he said neutrally, suspecting his lack of passion on the subject would spark real talk—not bullshit. “How unfortunate.”
“Yes. Very unfortunate for me because who the fuck can wear a sweater that garish and make it look like it’s intentional except you?” Incensed, she threw up her hands. When she laughed, it wasn’t the same as before. It was choked and spastic. Titters of incredulity, and he didn’t think they were solely due to his sweater.
Say what you need to say, Everley.
“The colorway may be garish, but the cut is exceedingly flattering on me.”
“And you just know that, don’t you?” she snapped. “You look at these ugly pieces of shit on the hangers and think, ‘hur hur, this’ll make me look super athletic and the color will bring out my vampiric pallor to its best advantage, hur hur.’”
It wasn’t her words in and of themselves that Raleigh found wounding, but the robotic arm motions she made while over articulating them. Under different circumstances, Raleigh might have found the exchange funny, but she was obviously hurting, and Raleigh had been living on the edge of hurt since third grade. At times, humor required trust, and he could rarely offer it.
“I’m a ginger,” he said flatly. “Being a vampire would be so very much easier given planetary warming and all that. I’ll be one of the first to fry.”
She huffed. “And you have an answer for everything. Go home, beauty king. Leave this mere mortal to her boring life and mock me from afar. At least at work, I can’t hear the gears of your brain ticking. Standing right here, though, it’s obvious I’ll never, ever win in a conversation with you.”
“I wasn’t aware it was a contest.”
“See. You’re doing it again.”
“Why do you concern yourself with winning? One day, you’ll be a decision maker, and I’ll be a peon wondering if you’ll wake and think that you hate my sweaters so much that my name would be added to the next round of layoffs.”
“Christ, would you shut up?”
He had no problem zipping his lips. He was a master of the quiet riot. All he had to do was stare with an eloquent squint and purse his lips ever so slightly.
“You. Are. Insufferable,” she spat.
Her fists were twisting his cashmere and her weight was on her toes.
And somehow, his lips were on hers or perhaps the other way around.
He didn’t really understand how they’d gotten to that place. Perhaps it was exhaustion. There was something to the Martinelli and Fisher phenomenon. People stopped thinking at the end of long days. Inhibitions were lower. Pride was quieter.
He vaguely registered that his hands were inching down the back of her sweater and that when his fingers found the hem they crept it up. When she moaned into his mouth, he clawed out yet another layer of fabric from the waistband of her skirt.
Soft, smooth skin, and so much warmer than the air. He decided all of a sudden that he was cold and needed her against him. That made the angle of their warring kiss exceedingly awkward but it continued anyway, just as her hands continued down to his fly and his brain continued to broadcast signals to his body that “This is fine.”
He was heeling off his brogues and having his coat yanked off and sweater tugged over his head.
Hers went sailing after his to the floor. Two bright, garish, Instagrammable sweaters owned by people who shouldn’t have ever been in the same room together.
And yet they were stumbling toward the bed. They didn’t fall gracefully on it. One tugged the other down. Raleigh had already forgotten who’d done what because there was a woman straddling his waist and trying to get his undershirt off. She was down to her bra and had her pencil skirt tugged up to her waist so she could get her legs spread wide over him.
He didn’t know what roused him out of the stupor he was in. Maybe it was the transparency of her underwear and the fact that him seeing straight through them meant the probability that he’d be welcomed inside had shot up astronomically. Or maybe it was the way she whispered “Off. Off. Off,” as she tugged at his clothes. Either way, he sat up with alarm, holding her wrists together. “Everley.”
“In the drawer,” she said. “Over there.” She canted her heard to the nightstand.
It dawned on him that she was referring to protective measures, but he was thinking about another one entirely—him getting the hell out of there.
“What are we doing?” he asked her.
“You offered me rebound sex.”
Rebounding because she’d been with Bruce, and Bruce hadn’t been a keeper. Under different circumstances, Raleigh might have laughed about them having such a perverted thing in common.
“No,” he said in a careful tone. “I didn’t.”
Tugging her hands free, she climbed off of him and unzipped her skirt in the back.
“Then it’s hate sex. I won’t ever bring it up after the fact, and I’m sure you won’t even think about it past tonight.” She unfastened her bra and, because he wasn’t a decent human being, he didn’t look away.
He’d been imagining what her nipples might have looked like since the night of that disturbing company party when she’d worn that slinky dress. He wasn’t sure that knowing was better. Instead of having his imagination preoccupied with amorphous nudity, he’d have her body in his mind in living color. Every little dip and pucker. Every striation of flesh. Every curve.
The lipstick weakened him the most. It wasn’t fair for her to have that body for him to worship and also to have the audacity to have bold lips.
She didn’t cover herself or shy away when he didn’t immediately move.
She sat on her shins with palms pressed to the bed for balance, head slightly lowered, meeting his gaze with impunity.
He snorted. “Is that a dare?”
“If you can’t handle it, beauty king, go home.”
“You think taunts will work?”
She nodded toward his midsection, or more likely, to the indiscreet bulge in his pants. “Oh, you’re dying to put me in my place. I’m inviting you to try.”
I shouldn’t, he thought, yet he was on his feet and yanking off his undershirt.
A warming shudder pulsed through him at her little laugh of satisfaction. After stowing his slacks over the back of a wooden chair and nudging off his socks, he opened that drawer.
He pushed aside thoughts that Bruce had probably been in that drawer and didn’t think about what they might have used or which of them had initiated. Her business was hers and Raleigh would have his own as well.
She started to wriggle out of the skirt but he didn’t let her. He had her on her ass and tugged her to the bed’s edge. Wrapping one trembling leg and then the other around his waist, he put on a condom.
“This is going to be extremely impersonal.” He hooked a thumb into the crotch of her panties and another into his mouth.
“Great.” She laced her fingers behind her head and cleared her throat. “I’ll close my eyes and pretend I don’t know your name.”
“And I’ll pretend to miss the targ
et two or three times so you can think I’m truly that excited.” He slid his moistened thumb down her slit and teased her open.
Her eyes weren’t closed. They were open wide and her expression, despite her words, was far from impassive.
“Shall we keep talking?” he asked her, sliding out his thumb and replacing it with two fingers. Then three. “Do we need the verbal volleys or can two masters such as us convey our meanness in silence?” He turned his hand and spread his fingers apart inside her heat.
“Silence,” she hissed.
Her lower back arched off the bed, searching for the fingers he’d withdrawn.
She couldn’t have them back because he had more in store for her. He angled himself in past the head and gripped her hips to keep her greed in check.
“You don’t get to rush me,” he warned.
She murmured something low and incomprehensible under her breath and stilled the clenching of her inner muscles.
“That’s better. I promised you silence. I won’t speak again.”
She nodded.
He proceeded.
He hadn’t truly expected that she would let him have his way. In fact, he’d expected she’d resist. She may have asked for a hard, emotionless fuck, but evidently her intention had never been to be passive about it.
As he rammed into her hard enough to make the headboard knock against the wall, she gripped his forearms, renewing her consent with a squeeze every time he slowed. Arching toward or away from him when his angle didn’t suit her. Keeping her gaze pinned on his.
She wasn’t floating away. She wasn’t going to close her eyes and endure, and she certainly wasn’t going to forget who was there fucking her.
Oddly, he found himself awash in satisfaction over that. Perhaps he thought she’d owed it to him for pushing every single one of his buttons in five years and continuously seeking to seek out new ones to jab. Or perhaps it all meant nothing and he simply wouldn’t refuse an opportunity to screw a woman so sensual and intriguing, even if for years, he hadn’t been able to stand the thought of her.
She was a usurper. Privileged. Undeserving.
And he was territorial.
He despised the idea that he shared a flaw with so many ordinary men, but the encounter had been made intensely personal by the fact they’d shared an attraction to the same person.
Maybe they weren’t so different, except for the fact that they let people use them in different ways. He suspected that at the moment, as his mouth crushed hers and he swallowed her moans as he plunged deeper, that she was using him to some end.
He didn’t care, because when he was done, he was going to put on his clothes, catch a train, go home, and pack for Christmas. Nothing else was going to change except their respective body counts.
“Raleigh...” she whispered, and he thought that was it and he withdrew a bit.
Her mouth shaped a silent word—something she couldn’t quite express. She gave her head a shake. Swallowed. Slid her hands down to his forearms and looked away.
In all that time, she hadn’t looked away.
“Never mind. Wasn’t important.”
He’d promised not to speak, but he hadn’t made any agreements that he wouldn’t respond.
Gritting his teeth at the awkward angle of their bodies as he moved her, he got her in line with the bed so her head was atop the pillow.
The panties were annoying him so he got rid of them.
That’s better.
The view was far more personal and too intimate a sight for a coworker to be kneeling in front of. He certainly shouldn’t have acknowledged that he was even paying attention to it, but there he was, licking her fingers and guiding them down to her clit.
He didn’t know how long he sat like that watching her play and squirm, only that it wasn’t enough for her and she guided him back.
The tension in her body fled as his weight settled on hers. He’d been trying to hold it back, but her arms around his torso precluded distance.
She wanted him closer and he didn’t see where he had a choice. He wasn’t going to say no. He wanted to be closer to her lips, not farther away. Close enough to smooth down her hair at the sides and to track his thumbs across her flushed cheekbones.
Then she was struggling to keep her eyes open just as he was finding increasing difficulty and keeping the fire in him low. With each slow thrust, she blinked too long. Moaned even longer. And then her eyes stayed closed and she turned her face into the open hand he had beside her cheek, startlingly nuzzling against it.
He didn’t understand why she would want that from him, but he didn’t refuse her.
He got down lower, so he could play at one ear with his lips while stroking the other side of her face with his hand.
It’d been too long since he’d concerned himself with the softer things. No one really expected them of him and he rarely thought anyone deserved them. Especially him.
He wasn’t sure if Everley deserved them, either, but the fact that she’d wanted them was enough to convince him that he may have been wrong about some things. She’d wanted him. With any other person, he would have read the signs. He would have read their attraction and proceeded accordingly.
There hadn’t been anything different about the way Everley had responded.
The only broken thing had been him. He hadn’t wanted her attention.
Perhaps he still shouldn’t, but for that moment, he reveled in the ownership because he liked winning. If he put aside her nepotistic career ambitions, she was certainly a prize. One he couldn’t keep due to the changing nature of their association, but a prize all the same.
He may have ignored her attraction, but he couldn’t ignore the change in her body as she reached her tipping point. She couldn’t stop squeezing him and couldn’t keep breathing. She was holding everything in until finally, she let it all out. Grinding against him, gritting her teeth, and groaning as she gathered the longer hair at the top of his head into her fist.
He chuckled and whispered, “I like it, too.”
He couldn’t hold on any more. That little gasp undid him.
She didn’t move.
Neither did he.
They lay there atop her bedclothes with her fingers still clenched around his hair and his hand against the side of her face.
The radiator clicked on.
Way down below on the street, someone leaned on their car horn.
Somewhere in the apartment, a phone rang.
His, hers, he couldn’t guess.
Neither seemed to care.
The stillness was nice.
Not having to say anything was nice.
It didn’t really matter what they said, anyway, because they were certainly going to pretend none of it had happened.
Chapter Seventeen
“I need your phone. Give me your phone. I don’t know where mine is.”
Arnold notched his glasses up his nose and sniffed. “Do you understand the security risk there is in losing every bloody phone you buy?”
“I don’t buy them,” Bruce rejoined. “My manager does. Or...did. Fired him.”
Arnold’s skin went white as a sheet and eyes seemed to enlarge to owl-like roundness. “You fired your manager? In all this time you’ve been here, you haven’t said anything about that.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It absolutely does matter that the person who coordinated your whereabouts and arranged for you to have staff is no longer on your payroll.”
“He didn’t give a damn about me.”
“I—” Growling, Arnold threw up his hands, then shoved them into his thick black hair. “Christ, he’s going to give me a stroke.”
“And they say I’m the dramatic one,” Bruce murmured. He wished he could throw one good tantrum just to burn off some of the anxiety t
hat had been clinging to him like creosote since he’d started his trip of undesirable errands. Somehow, he’d lost the knack for it.
Arnold paced in front of the overturned chairs in their parents’ back garden. They had a sheen of frost on them, and the moisture in the air warned that London might be about to get a dusting of snow. Bruce was barely feeling the cold. His heart was beating too fast and all that suffusing blood certainly had his body temperature at a spike.
“Did your manager...wipe your phone contents remotely every time you tell him you lost track of the things?” Arnold asked through clenched teeth.
“I don’t know.”
Arnold lifted his glasses back up so he could drag a hand down his weary face. “Going to have to call the phone company, whoever it is, and sort that out. For God’s sake, Bruce.”
Obviously, he was tired of interacting with his older brother, and the feeling was growing more and more mutual by the moment.
Bruce hadn’t asked his brother to follow him out to the garden, though. Arnold had done that on his own volition. Bruce had wanted a bit of air, even if it was cold London air. It was better than that tea-scented smog inside his parents’ ancient townhouse.
They’d been throwing around phrases like “power of attorney” and “guardianship” because Bruce had said he was done with it all.
They’d thought he’d lost his mind and had been nattering about it for the whole week since he’d flown in from South Africa.
Only Arnold had gotten worn down enough to accept that perhaps Bruce wasn’t being unreasonable so much as just overwhelmed. Arnold was trying his hardest, for whatever reason, but he didn’t really understand Bruce and Bruce didn’t know how to fix that.
Bruce took a breath and let the chill soothe his lungs. He didn’t know if he could explain, but he always tried. “Listen. I keep track of the things that are important to me. Okay? I understand that in this day and age, I have to have a phone, but I don’t want one.”
“I suppose that’s fair, even if it’s ridiculous.” Arnold handed his phone over with tentative consent, pulling it back to ask, “You won’t lose mine?”
“I’m not moving from here for the next few minutes, and even I have never managed to lose something while standing still. That’d be quite a fuckin’ feat, wouldn’t it?”
