Saving the CEO

by Jenny Holiday

  “I get it. It sounds…awful.”

  He shrugged. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Once it was diagnosed, I got some therapy and learned some strategies. And at least then I finally understood I wasn’t stupid.”

  She blew out a dismissive breath. “You are about as far from stupid as it’s possible to get, my friend.”

  My friend. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Well, my father took a different view of the matter.”

  “I’m sure he sees the light now.” She gestured to the projection.

  “He’s dead. And even if he wasn’t…” Jack trailed off. There was no point trying to make her understand his father when he himself had never managed it.

  “And your mother?”

  “Also dead. Before my father, in fact. My parents were in their early forties when they had me—they’d been trying for more than a decade and had resigned themselves to remaining childless.”

  “And then they had the miracle baby!”

  The “miracle baby” who disappointed them every step of the way. But judging by Cassie’s moony expression, she was charmed by the fictional version of his family she’d conjured. “Anyway,” he nodded at the numbers on the screen. “The truth is, I don’t really understand what I see.”

  “All the more amazing that you built such a successful company.”

  “Carl deserves a lot of the credit. He’s been with me from the beginning. He was…” God, he didn’t know what made him more angry, Carl’s betrayal, or the fact that he was so gutted by it. “He always covered for me—I thought.”

  She was looking at him with sympathy, but not, amazingly, pity. “Well, for what it’s worth, I thought he seemed like a complete asshole.”

  He startled a little. Cassie so rarely used strong language. It was almost like hearing one’s grandmother call someone an asshole. “Strong words coming from the woman who invokes pasta instead of swearing. What’s with the pasta, anyway? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  “I used to work in an Italian restaurant.”

  “No,” he said. “What’s with the granny-style cursing?”

  “I don’t know.” She dropped her gaze to the floor and sighed. “Well, I do know. My mother swore a lot. It embarrassed me when I was a kid.” She shrugged. “So I never really took it up myself. That sounds stupid.”

  Apparently he wasn’t the only one with family baggage. He could respect that. Time to change the subject. “Carl wants us to start a swear jar in the new year.”

  “What? So he can steal some more from you? I wish he was still here, I’d plant him a facer.”

  “You’d plant him a facer? What century is this?” In truth, though, it tickled him to hear her jump so indignantly to his defense, in her quaint, non-threatening way.

  “Anyway, the best revenge is doing this Wexler deal without him, isn’t it? Get Wexler to sell to you, and then get rid of Carl.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Okay then, enough chat.”

  Jack sat back and watched Cassie’s amazing mind click into some other mode. Sparks might as well have been raining off her head, so absorbed was she in her work. He clicked when she ordered him to, pulled up supplementary data when commanded. Although she was engrossed, she kept asking him questions. Not about numbers, but about the context.

  “This number seems high,” she would say.

  “Is that the May travel budget?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amy had to go to Mexico a bunch of times with very little notice. We had to charter a private jet—it was killer.”

  Then she would nod and sink back into her trance-like state, utterly riveted to the screen, so much so she hadn’t noticed the sun going down. She didn’t blink when he got up and switched on the lamps. She didn’t even notice when, the room having grown cold, he took off his blazer—she’d left hers in reception—and hung it over her shoulders. She held out her arms obediently when prompted, never once breaking concentration as she sat on the edge of her chair and stared at floor plans of the Mexico resort.

  Just when he started to wonder if he should start feeding her bites of one of the granola bars he kept in his desk, she snapped out of it, Sleeping Beauty coming to after a long nap. She yawned and looked around as if she was seeing the room for the first time. “It’s dark.” Her brow furrowed.

  “That’s enough for tonight,” he said, touching her arm, trying to draw her back to the material world. Another yawn while she nodded her agreement. Then she stretched—God help him. Before his very eyes she transformed from the avenging accountant back into the siren in the red dress. All the blood that had been working so diligently to nourish his brain as he took her through the financials suddenly hit the road for a more southerly locale. Stretching her arms over her head caused her breasts to jut out, and suddenly he hated that dress. Somehow it managed to be wanton at the same time that it was too modest, allowing him to see only the shape of her and none of…the actual her.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, looking at her arms and realizing the blazer she wore was not her own. “This is yours!”

  “Don’t,” he groaned, feeling like if he saw even an inch of her bare skin, he might combust. Too late—she stripped off the blazer and handed it to him. The contrast between the bare arms and the black-tights-clad legs did something to his already on-alert dick.

  As she tossed the blazer at him, her eyes grazed over his crotch. He should have used the blazer to cover himself. Instead he let his hands fall to his sides, the better for her to see what she did to him.

  “Ready to go?” she asked, smiling a little, though her tone was completely unreadable.

  Okay, so it was time to be prudent. “Yeah. You must be hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving,” she confirmed, letting herself be herded out of his office. In the reception area, he stooped to pick up her abandoned blazer and then retrieved her coat from the closet where he’d hung it, holding it out for her to slide into.

  The air between them was charged, heavy with something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He pressed his hand against her lower back as they made their way out of the office. He was supposed to be prudent, he knew, but he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

  Was it possible that she was walking inappropriately close to him? It wasn’t overt, like Droppy from the bar the other night—or like all of the other women he slept with. In fact, if it wasn’t all in his mind, if she was, in fact, listing slightly toward him, he didn’t think it was intentional. It was as if there was an invisible current swirling around them, drawing them infinitesimally but inexorably closer, like they were a binary star system, two burning nuclei rotating around each other.

  She exhaled a soft little sigh and ran her fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. Could have been exhaustion.

  Could have been desire.

  He wanted it to be desire.

  Rules, he reminded himself as he punched the button to call the elevator. His father had always said rules were not arbitrary but there for a reason. The older Jack got, the more he thought that might have been the one thing his father got right. Even as he chided himself, he strained to make out the sound of Cassie’s tights swishing against each other as she walked. The tights that hugged her thighs. The thighs he had lost himself between a few short days ago. It seemed criminal, all of a sudden, that she would cover up those thighs, that she would conceal from him what he had so gluttonously and freely enjoyed.

  “I’m hungry, too,” he said, trying to revive the conversation that had been carried away on a current of static-charged air. The elevator arrived, and he held the door for her. When she stepped from the corridor to the marble floor of the elevator, her heels clicked, echoing as the blood pounded in his ears.

  The back wall of the elevator was a mirror. Instead of turning and facing the front like most people did, she stepped in and stayed put, looking at her reflection in the glass. He stepped up behind her, hand still on her lower back. She hadn’t done
up her coat, so that damned red dress was still visible, and her gorgeous hair was messy and tangled—he’d noticed her habit of raking her hands through it when she was concentrating. She looked like a cherry against his staid dark jeans and brown blazer. A messy, gooey chocolate covered cherry.

  He found her eyes in the mirror. “You want to go somewhere or get takeout? Thai maybe? Pizza? What do you want?”

  Her eyes didn’t leave his as she smiled a slow, wicked Cheshire cat smile.

  “I want you to fuck me.”

  Chapter Seven

  The only thing that suggested to Cassie she hadn’t made a huge error in judgment—again—was that Jack started pounding the “door close” button. Other than that, there was no indication he even heard her. He only broke with her gaze in the mirror long enough to find the button, and then his eyes were back, blank, betraying nothing.

  She stared back—it was almost impossible not to drop her gaze in embarrassment, but since she’d blurted out her request so shamelessly, what could she do but hold her head high, keep meeting his eyes, and cross her fingers that his assault on the close button was a good sign?

  When the endless ride down finally ended, Cassie nodded to the security guard as her heels clicked across the empty lobby. Jack did not acknowledge the man, just kept up the pressure of a hand to her lower back, picking up speed so she had to as well. Preceding her out of the building, he had a taxi hailed before she’d made it fully out of the revolving door.

  There was the hand again, pressing her inside the car. He rattled off her address to the driver, his tone rough. He sounded angry. For the first time today, she was a little afraid. Not of him, but of the knowledge that she might have pushed him too far, might have jeopardized their deal. And if he was angry, didn’t he have every right to be? He’d told her outright—more than once—that there could be nothing between them. She had to be either an idiot or a slut—or both—to have kept throwing herself at him anyway.

  They passed the ride in silence. The hand that had been on her back had moved to her knee. Her skin tingled beneath it, despite the layer of wool between them. But to him it must have been an absent, unselfconscious gesture, for the hand lay completely still while he looked out the window at the scenery as it changed from the steel and glass of downtown to the low-rise storefronts of Queen Street, and finally, to the houses and small apartment buildings of her neighborhood. When they arrived at her building, she turned, intending to bid him good night with as much dignity as possible, but he ignored her, paying the cabbie in stony silence and getting out behind her.

  “Jack,” she began, once they were standing outside her building, “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Keys,” he said, holding out his hand. When she hesitated a moment, his tone became more insistent. “Give me your keys.”

  No sooner had she dropped the keys into his palm than they were in the vestibule. “Up,” he said, pushing her toward the stairs. As they climbed, her breath quickened. She was used to these stairs, so it wasn’t physical exertion making her pant. By the time they hit the third floor, she could hear his breath, too, and the pressure at the small of her back increased. He had the key ready when they reached her apartment. She didn’t bother asking how he knew which was the right one. She was beginning to understand that Jack Winter was the sort of man who just knew how to do things.

  By the time he clicked the deadbolt into place, they were both breathing heavily. He let his coat fall down his arms to the floor. “Take off that dress.”

  At first she thought he wanted her to change into something else—he’d objected to the dress to begin with. But then he stripped off his sweater and undershirt in one fluid motion, and they joined his coat on the floor.

  “Take off the dress. Now.”

  The command went right to her center, triggering a rush of wetness. As she struggled with the zipper, her face grew hot. He didn’t help, just stood there watching as she shimmied out of the formfitting sheath. Thank goodness she’d worn decent underwear. It wasn’t Victoria’s Secret, but the black bra and panties matched, which was more than she could say most days.

  “Everything off.” He didn’t stop watching her, but he unzipped his jeans and stooped to shuck them off, along with a pair of black boxer briefs.

  And there he was. Oh God—there he was. His shoulders all lean muscle, his sculpted torso covered in a dusting of dark blond hair that trailed down over a flat, muscular stomach—and beyond. His penis stood at attention, suddenly commanding all of hers. She’d only ever seen two others before, but she felt fairly certain his was uncommonly large. Of course it was. Why would Jack Winter be anything other than hung like a porn star? Her skin prickled all over.

  “Is this what you wanted?” he said, his voice sounding a little choked.

  Yes. She knew then without a doubt this is what she wanted when he first kissed her outside Edward’s. This is what she’d been wanting ever since, as rash and ill-advised as it was. He was clearly waiting for an answer, so she nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “Then take off your fucking clothes, Cassie.”

  She took off the rest of her clothes.

  The rush of cold air pebbled her aching nipples—or maybe it wasn’t the air at all, but the heat coming from his gaze. The ache between her legs sharpened into a pain that was almost unbearable.

  Then his hand was there—how could he have known? He dragged his fingers across her folds and groaned. “Oh, God, you’re so wet.” A finger slid in, and she threw her head back and gasped. “You’re ready,” he rasped. She didn’t know if it was a question, but she replied with a “yes,” that could have been an answer, or maybe just an exhortation.

  He was gone then, and she let out an involuntary cry of frustration. But then he was back, behind her, all-encompassing, hands clamping down on her hips and propelling her forward until her hands hit the door. His chest behind her might as well have been a brick wall, firm and unyielding when it hit her back. Suddenly there was no space between them or between her and the wall. A rustling sound drew her attention and she craned her neck to see over her shoulder. He was rolling a condom onto his erection.

  Then it was pressing against her lower back, in the same spot his hand had been all afternoon. “Is this what you want?” he said again, his hands reaching around to cup her aching breasts. His fingers raked over her nipples, and she moaned at the delicious torture.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “yes.”

  He pushed in then, and oh, the feeling of fullness was exquisite. He made a strangled noise and went still for a moment, their labored breathing the only sound. “Christ, Cassie, you’re so tight.” There was no mistaking the lust in his voice. He might not “do” relationships, but he wanted this, here, now. He wanted her. Triumph surged through her, along with desire, and she arched her hips back, encouraging him to move. His lips came to her ear. “Cut it out, or I won’t last.”

  “Don’t last,” she breathed, rolling her hips again. “I’m not going to.”

  It was true. She was already close. When he settled his hand over her clit, leaving the other kneading her breast, she moaned. He started pumping his hips and she turned her face, resting her cheek against the door and letting it all wash over her. It had never been like this. Danny had been tentative—for obvious reasons, she later learned. Mark had been kind of clumsy and sweet. But this. They were rattling the door, and she didn’t care. She just wanted more, harder, faster, as she careened toward the cliff.

  “Is this what you wanted?” he choked out as he slammed into her again and again. She could only gasp and nod, and then all her muscles seized as pleasure exploded inside and all around her.

  “Christ,” he ground out, only a few pumps behind her.

  His body, flush with hers, was the only thing keeping her upright. Her bones had turned to mush, and when he took a step back, her legs began to quiver.

  “I’ve got you,” he whispered, and scooped her up, startling her into laughter as he carried
her across the room to the bed and dropped her onto it.

  She scrambled under the covers, the cold air causing gooseflesh to rise—she was a little bit nervous now that the wave of mindless lust had receded. What did he think now that he’d seen all of her—her soft belly, her thighs, which, although they were nicely shaped, would never be called slender? She’d never wanted to be a ballerina, to use the term he’d invented, but she was aware that she deviated a bit from what most men would consider ideal. He’d gone back to his clothes. She didn’t expect him to stay the night, but was he really going to leave now?

  “Ah,” he said, hand emerging from where it had been rifling through his jeans pocket. He’d fished out his phone. The alcove that held the bed was exactly sized to accommodate the double mattress, so getting into bed meant mounting it from the foot. He hurled himself up and executed a belly flop that made her laugh and roll out of the way.

  He scrolled through his phone. “Still hungry, I presume?”

  “I could eat an entire cow,” she declared. It was true. She started thinking about what she had in the house.

  He put the phone to his ear. “Hi. I’d like to order a pizza for delivery.” Mmmm. Pizza sounded perfect. He rattled off her address. “Extra large. Now, might you have a pizza that comes with an entire cow?” She threw a pillow at him. “No? Really?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “Amateurs. What do you want?”

  “Pepperoni,” she said. “And mushrooms.”

  He repeated her preferences into the phone. “And extra cheese?” He raised his eyebrows at her questioningly and she nodded. “Anything else?” he whispered. “Salad?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Tiramisu?”