by Melinda Minx
I’m tempted to look up at Elise now, but the image of her is still fresh and too tempting in my mind. I’ll let her stew a bit longer.
“Well,” Hugo says, “we’ll do whatever you want us to.”
“So trained monkeys?” I ask.
“It’s an unpaid internship, man,” another guy’s voice breaks out from the back. “Free labor for you.”
I look up at him, and Elise is now in the corner of my vision. It takes every last ounce of my willpower to not look at her now. But not yet.
“So you think you’re going to just get coffee?” I ask. “Make copies? Do bullshit grunt labor in exchange for a pat on the back and a good letter of recommendation? You know why I’m here, don’t you? Sencorp is failing. The ship is sinking. How many of you just want to get off right before it goes under, and how many of you want to help me save it?”
Silence.
Now.
I look right at Elise, and I lock eyes with her.
She’s fucking shivering, trembling. Why is she this shaken? I don’t care why, I grin and move closer to her. I have to pretend to read her nametag before I call her by name.
I lean closer in. I start to move my lips to form her name, but then I see her actual tag.
Celia Haze.
Celia. Nadine’s daughter. My fucking stepdaughter.
I freeze mid-stride.
Elise’s voice from last night rings through my mind—clear as a bell—”Everyone calls me Elise. Except my mom.”
Holy shit. I couldn’t have asked her what her Mom called her before I buried my cock inside her? Before I took her virginity?
I realize I’m just standing there, my mouth hanging wide open. I force myself to regain my composure.
I can’t deal with her right now. I have to get through this. I look at the nametag of the girl sitting right next to Elise, and pretend I was moving toward her.
“Haley,” I say. “Are you going to try to save this ship from sinking?”
Haley looks up at me and licks her lips. “Yes, sir. I’ll be right by your side, ready to do whatever you tell me.”
She flashes me a look. A look I know all too well. I ignore her completely.
I was going to drag this out a lot longer, but I’m too shaken. I fucked my virgin stepdaughter. Well, technically she wasn’t my stepdaughter yet. I realize I have to let her go. I have to pretend it never happened. I have to tear her memory out of my brain. Excise it. But I’m close enough to smell her now, and forgetting her taste is going to be a tall order.
“I’ll cut right to it,” I say. “I want all of you to give me an idea. You have an hour.”
“An idea for what?” someone at the table asks.
“To save the company,” I say.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Hugo asks.
“Yes,” I say. “But I don’t do this on my own. I manage the resources available to me to reach that goal. You are all my resources. And unpaid or not, you eat up company time. If the idea you bring me isn’t good, I’m letting you go.”
“You’re going to fire us from an unpaid job?” someone asks.
“Yes,” I say. “So give me your best ideas if you don’t want to get shit-canned.”
I walk right out of the conference room door, forcing myself not to look back at Elise. At Celia.
I’m still reeling when Nadine takes hold of my arm.
“How’d it go?”
I steady my breathing before looking at her. I can’t let her see that I’m shaken.
“Good,” I say. “They know the stakes.”
“Did you introduce yourself to Celia?”
I inhale deeply through my nose, then say in a calm voice, “I will after work. Like you said, no special treatment.”
I gave the interns full access to everything. It’s totally against protocol, but the company is going to fail anyway, and I need people who can quickly process large amounts of data to come up with solid solutions.
I pour over everything again myself, mostly to get my mind off of Elise. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do, all I know is that I can’t fuck her again.
I can’t…right?
I always told myself I liked a challenge, but this is a bit more than I bargained for.
I rub my eyes and bury myself into analyzing the information on my screen.
China is the most obvious problem I can see. Given a full hour, I’d expect at least some of the interns to recognize that.
I bite my lip and make a decision. If Elise can’t identify that, I’ll cut her. Fire her. It would make at least part of this situation easier.
The hour passes by quickly, and when I step back over to the big tables where the interns and their laptops are all situated, I see Elise buried in her screen, typing furiously. She looks up at me as I approach, and smiles at me seductively. The white-faced shock and horror has disappeared, and she’s eyeing me up and down like she wants my cock in her. It makes me want to throw her onto the table and bury myself into her from behind, to—
I look away. I have to stop thinking like that. There’s no way I can have her again, not now that I know.
“I’m going to call you into the conference room one by one,” I say. “You each will have two minutes to pitch your idea to me. I recommend you get straight to the point. I’m not your fucking philosophy professor. I see straight through bullshit. Who’s first?”
“Me,” Elise says, shutting her laptop and standing up. “I’m ready, sir.”
My throat goes dry. Me and Elise alone in a room for two minutes. The things I could do to her in just two minutes. Could I make her cum in that time? I bet I could.
No. She needs to pitch her idea to me. Or she’s gone.
I wave her into the conference room. Her hips sway as she walks, and she stares me down as she approaches me. I hold the door for her, and when she steps past me, I smell her hair, and every moment of last night flashes through me in a rush. It’s like heroin going straight into my fucking system, and I squeeze the door handle until my veins bulge. Her scent lingers as she passes, and I shut the door behind me.
“Hunter,” she says.
“Mr. Thorn,” I say, my back pressed against the door.
Elise leans back onto the conference table. She sticks her chest out and presses her hands back onto the table. Her whole body leans back, as if she’s ready to submit to me.
“What if you fucked me here,” she says, “on this table—”
“I’m your stepfather now,” I say, my voice tense. “We can’t do that. Ever again.”
“I figured it out,” she says. “There’s no way you actually have feelings for Mom. I already have a father, Mr. Thorn, so there’s no reason you have to be anything more to me than what we were last night.”
She licks her lips and undoes the top button of her blouse.
I’m tempted to reach out to her. To take her up on her offer to fuck her raw on the conference table. She is wearing black stockings—I could just tear a hole in them to save time.
“You don’t mean it,” she says. “You know we have to do it again, Mr. Thorn.”
I look up at the clock. “You have one minute left, Elise. If your idea is bad, I’ll fire you.”
“You’d fire me?” she asks, undoing another button.
“I will,” I say. “I hope you didn’t waste your hour trying to figure out why your mother married me.”
“That only took me about five minutes,” Elise says. “I made good use of the rest of my time.”
“Your idea,” I say. “Give it to me.”
“Oh,” she says, flashing me an evil grin. “I’ll give it to you alright—”
“Forty-five seconds.”
“It looks like several upper-level managers, and even some of the board,” Elise says, “have kickback deals with Chinese manufacturers. As far as I can tell, the factory owners in Shenzhen use part of the money to bribe our people, then they pocket another fat chunk, and finally they use the remaining
ten to twenty percent to ship us shoddy, substandard garbage. We’ve had one factory ship us steel beams with welding so bad that we had to redo the order three times—”
“Enough,” I say. “What is your solution?”
She’s good. Really good. She dug deeper than I expected any of the interns to. She not only identified China as the problem, but the assholes within Sentech who are profiting while the company goes under.
“Sack the offenders within Sentech,” Elise says.
“And where do we get our steel beams from?”
“Estonia.”
I laugh. It’s the exact solution I came up with. And it took me much longer than an hour.
“What?”
“Good girl,” I say. “Very good.”
She starts to undo another button, but I look at the clock.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Time is up, you have to get out. You can’t let anyone think I’m giving you special treatment.”
She grins wide. “Not in the office, at least, right Mr. Thorn?”
“Out,” I say. “Now.”
The moment her last button is fastened, I grab her arm and pull her off the table.
Her scent overwhelms me, and she falls into me, pressing her full breasts against me. Her hair grazes my forearm.
I push her away.
“Don’t be so mean, Mr. Thorn,” she says, pouting.
“Out,” I say, though I can barely breathe after touching her. “You’re safe. Send in the next intern. And get me a list of people you’d sack.”
“Yes, sir,” she says.
I open the door, and when she steps out, the tension in the room lingers. It’s so thick it’s almost vibrating.
Fucking hell. There’s no way I can keep my hands off her.
4
Elise
Hunter is my stepfather.
I should be mortified. I should be repelled. I should be ashamed. When I first saw him swagger into the conference room, I was in shock. Every emotion in the world shot through me at light speed. But when I’d recovered, when I’d caught my breath, I realized that nothing had really changed. Mom has never in her life put anything before Sencorp and her rise to the top. Could it really be a coincidence that she married the one guy known for saving failing companies?
I’ve already heard the buzz around the office about how big of an advantage it is that they are married and that Hunter is Co-CEO, rather than just having him brought in as a freelance King Midas.
Mom is cynical enough to have foreseen that and married him for that sole reason. There is no way that Hunter would have fucked me like he did if he loved my mom.
And seeing him in that suit and tie--seeing him boss me around--I just want him even more than I did this morning.
So nothing’s changed about my feelings toward him. Nothing has made me want him any less. It’s just going to be a lot harder and more dangerous to have what I want with him.
But Mom was never willing to sacrifice anything for me, so why should I sacrifice for her? Hunter is mine.
I sit back down at my laptop and get to work. This internship has turned into a game of Survivor, and as much as I would have hated to lose this internship, now that Hunter is my boss, nothing will stop me from staying here. I need to work hard if I want to stay under him--under him metaphorically and literally.
Every few minutes another intern exits the conference room. Some come out angry--others in tears. Hunter is firing interns without mercy, though some do emerge from the room with relieved expressions or wide smiles on their faces.
I see Haley burst out in tears--she’s gone. She looks at me with sudden hatred, but she doesn’t say a word as she gathers up her things and storms toward the elevator. I’ll never see her again, so I don’t really care if she hates me.
Maria is the next one to come out. She lets out a huge sigh, then smiles up at me as she approaches.
“What was your idea, Elise?”
“To fire a bunch of corrupt old geezers,” I say.
“Nice,” Maria says. “Mine was to move manufacturing to Vietnam.”
I nod. “Vietnam was my second choice.”
“What did you go with?”
“Estonia.”
“Vietnam will be cheaper in the long run,” Maria says.
“Estonia costs more now, but the risk of delayed orders is lower. Sencorp is teetering on the edge; one delay could push it right over.”
“So...your stepfather. What do you think?”
My throat goes dry. “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, like, whatever.”
Maria laughs.
I try to keep my emotions in check, but I can feel my face burning.
“Oh, come on,” Maria says, squeezing my forearm. “It’s not creepy if you think he’s hot! It’s not like you’re actually related.”
“He’s our boss,” I say, pretending to focus on my screen. “It’s best to not get distracted.”
“So you admit he’s distracting? Did you see the tattoos coming up through his collar? I bet he’s got ink all over. I’d love to get those clothes off him and see it all--”
“Maria, ewww,” I say. But images of Hunter’s naked body flash through my mind. I know what all of his tattoos look like. I know what they taste like.
“Sorry, Elise, I’ll lay off.”
“Thanks.”
The last of the interns steps out of the conference room. It’s Hugo, and he’s got a smug grin on his face.
Hunter walks out after him. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing his tattooed, muscular forearms. I notice Maria is nearly drooling as she rakes her eyes up and down his strong frame.
Normally I’d be jealous, but I know Maria has no chance with him. When Hunter looks over at me, the lust blazing within his eyes confirms it.
“Did you see how he just looked at me?” Maria whispers.
I nod, keeping my lips sealed. Let her think he was looking at her and not me. I really don’t care.
I make it through the rest of the work day--skipping lunch--without running into Mom. Hunter disappeared after hearing all the interns’ pitches, and I don’t see him again. I hope he’s not avoiding me.
I stay “late,” which at Sencorp is normal and expected. I go through all the files Hunter opened up for us, and more and more I can attribute a huge part of Sencorp’s problems to one man: Gideon Fleischmann.
He’s on the fucking board of directors, though, so I’m not sure I should put him down on the list of people to sack. I can’t imagine Hunter actually meant that I should list everyone I suspected.
As the last of the sunlight falls behind the Manhattan skyline, I see Mom approaching, and I decide to write Gideon’s name on the list just in case. I can always remove it later.
“You think staying late cancels out arriving late?” Mom asks, her expression neutral.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t cancel it out. I won’t be late again.”
“Because Hunt will fire you if you’re late,” she says. “Don’t think you get special treatment, Celia. This isn’t some little summer vacation in the city, you actually have to--”
“I know, Mom,” I say, grinding my teeth. “Trust me, I know. You think I’m going to act spoiled and entitled because you’re rich? I’m not like that, because you didn’t even raise me.”
She rolls her eyes at me.
“I’m not trying to guilt trip you,” I say. “Just trying to explain why you don’t have to worry about me being a spoiled brat. Dad did a good job raising me.”
“Well,” she says, “your stepfather will as well, just remember that.”
I let out an audible scoff.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom asks.
“Do you really have to call him ‘stepfather’ to me?”
“I married the man, why wouldn’t I call him that?”
“Because you and I both know this is a marriage of convenience. It’s about the company--it’s always about the company with you.”
She says in a measured voice, “Hunt and I have known each other a long time, Celia.”
I laugh. “If you really loved him, you’d just have said as much. I’m not going to tell anyone else, but I know this is fake, Mother.”
“Legally, there is nothing fake about it.” She leans in closer to me. “All of the ways this marriage benefits Sencorp are intangible. We’re not exploiting any tax loopholes, we’re not committing insurance fraud, we’re not--”
“Not having sex,” I cut in.
Her face flares red with anger, and she backs away from me suddenly. She takes a few deep breaths, and then says, “You’re still a child, Celia.”
“No one calls me that.”
“I’ll call you what I want, Celia.” She turns her back to me. “I want to have dinner with you and your stepfather. You two need to get to know each other outside the office.”
I look down at the desk, avoiding my mom’s gaze. Hunter and I have already gotten to know each other quite well outside of the office.
“I thought you didn’t want me getting any special treatment from him,” I say.
Mom turns back toward me. “Fine, Celia, the reason I need you to get to know him--at least a little--is to keep up appearances. If a child like you is suspicious of our marriage, then think about who else may be doubtful. We need to be seen together, as a family.”
I hate the way she’s using him, and I’m angry at Hunter, too, for going along with something so damn stupid. Is Mom blackmailing him? Why would he ever go along with something so ridiculous? And if he hadn’t, I could have my way with him without all of these complications.
I’m tempted to refuse the dinner invitation, but I can’t turn down a chance to be near Hunter. So I simply nod.
“Do we need to go home and change?” I ask.
“No,” Mom says. “We’ll go straight there.”
5
Hunter
