Chapter 1

AT THE OFFICE 

The air in the office was electric with sounds that could create a spark, it was thick with lust. Within the padlocked room, the moaning blended with the ripping of fabric and the naked gasp of skin on skin. The male held the hip of his lover and insistently yet gently worked a path to release. Her breath catching with every spasm of pleasure, her fingers tightening as she clutched the edge of the table hard, her eyes flaming as she took a deep gasping breath to freeze the moment in her head. Desire fills the air like perfume going through the process of diffusion, heavy and inescapable. It was an unbridled, primal dance of need that was the catalyst. A moment that was an absolute one of secrecy.

"Shh, shut up!" Daniel ordered grittedly, his hot breath in her ear as she screamed even more loudly, trembling beneath him. "The hall is not that big, everyone heard you."

Her eyes flashed with impertinence and, when she looked at him, mischief was etched on "Who cares?" she breathed softly, her voice hardly more than a whisper, warm air slipping out between her lips. "Maybe I should scream—let Aria hear every last minute of it. Looks like you could use a little kick to wrap things up with her." Her lips formed a Shameless smile.

Daniel shut his eyes, pulling at the shame growing in his head and pushing it into the burning churning in his belly, the orgasmic high coursing through his skull. This was not the time to be thinking about his wife—not when he was deep inside his secretary, requiring a high he could not comprehend.

Her grip on his arm constricted, her eyes burning with hope and desperation and rage as she stared up at him. "Why do you still stick with her, then?" she spat, her voice trembling with the fury driving it. "You have me—I give you everything, I am everything. And yet you still keep this worthless woman on the grounds like she's something.".

She gasped, her words raw with emotion. "Is she that hard to let go of. or am I not good enough?" Daniel withdrew his length from Bella slowly, his eyes on her body as it convulsed in need.

With only his head still on her clit, he stopped and drove back into her in a wild, violent stroke, wrenching a harsh, gasping breath from between her lips.".

Her fingers grip the desk, nails scratching into wood as he started pumping harder and faster, with a brutal beat. 

Her head jerked back, eyes closing on spasms of pleasure that rippled through her stomach, mouth drawing in hot, steam-scented air. Good, he growled, his eyes dropping to the melting shape of her. She chattered too much—always inquiring, always wanting answers he wasn't prepared to offer. But like so, her struggling beneath him, she was silent. Breathless. Obeying. Nothing could placate her tempest better than immersing it in the only language he knew to utter—raw, unyielding need. Ann's laughter shattered with joy as ecstasy engulfed her, her fingers closing tight about the tabletop in a savage born fist. "That's it Daniel!" she screamed, losing herself, her cries infusing need.

Aria strode into the firm she was so proud to work for, her heels tapping solidly on the polished floor, but her head elsewhere, elsewhere - her eyes tightly shut, replaying the emotionally draining trial she had just won—a sordid adultery case with a husband, in which a wife had exposed years of deceit behind saccharine platitudes. Her eyes flared, watching the woman's world dissolve piece by piece.

She was still able to feel the burn as she stepped into the same shop whose commerce she had helped establish for her own husband. She put aside the feeling of the test that had come before, but Aria wore a false smile that rapidly lost its fight as her heart began thumping within her chest. There was a strange sound within earshot—a muffled, stifled one which did not fit in entirely.

She tried to write it off initially, thinking she was hearing things after the emotionally draining case she had just finished dealing with. But the sound continued, clearer now and unmistakable—a faint despairing breath and then urgent whispers. Her heart pounded, fear creeping up her spine.

She raised her legs to step but in mistake there was the sound of an opening door creaking in the silence that stopped her. Something was occurring behind that door.

something she shouldn't hear or see.

This was her husband's room, jubilant moaning was emanating from the room, her hand clapped tight over her own mouth, she remained frozen, her heart pounding agonisingly within her chest. She knew the moan. She was familiar with it. She rolled her eyes and moaned on a note of bitter irony, as though endeavouring to shove aside the asphyxiating spasm of emotion that would possibly choke the life from her. Each time she had a conflict, she thought his late homecoming was not always because of work but she loved to give him the doubt. The sound and hearing voice of his voice, the feeling of security and trust that she had and which was shattered into bits. Frozen with fear, her heart pounding, she stood there not able to move forward and not to retreat. The anger simmered just beneath, but along with it, something else, a hollowness, a space that grew larger by the second. She would spin and go, before she allowed herself to slide further, when she heard it again—louder, more insistent. "Oh my God, Daniel.".

You're the best…" The words hit her, raw and biting. She couldn't breathe. Walls of the hallway shrunk on her as she stood stiff and immobile, trapped by the bitter truth that had shattered her heart once more. It was indeed her husband but with whom? Her heart in her bosom hurt her, its rhythm beating in her ears with each thump as Aria waited outside her husband's office door. The hallway was deafeningly silent, but inside, she heard something—albeit muffled but distinct—sounds. She placed the heel of her hand on the coldness of the door handle, trembling fingers twining around it.

The heaviness of what she believed clung to her, but nonetheless, she could not fully persuade herself to.

Not altogether.

Not yet.

"You like that, huh?" Her husband's voice was low and coarse, heavy with the same craving she had heard whispered in their love days.

The phrases iced shivers down her, a cold that ran deep into the very bones of her. Arai's mouth was dry, her hold on the door handle tightening as the familiar masculine voice sent a shock of surprise and incredulity through her. This is not occurring. It can't be him. It can't be. And then the second sound—a voice she knew instantly. Breathy and soft and on the verge of hysteria.

His secretary, the woman who'd sat at her own desk for months taking calls for Daniel, the woman Aria l had exchanged brief smiles with during office functions, was now the embodiment of a low, drawn-out moan that reverberated through the walls. "Yes! Oh my… ohhh…" Ann's voice broke, and then a whining noise wrapped around something deep in Arias' stomach.

Air was forced from her lungs in a gasp of mind-boggling exhalation, her head spinning at what she heard and saw, paralyzed, unable to move, unable to tear her gaze from the door long sustained as the symbol of protection—of faith. But now it was a dividing line to madness, a chasm between the world she thought she knew and the hard, acid reality that insidiously seeped in. Her husband… and his secretary. "No…," she breathed, her voice broken by shock. Her grip on the handle clenched into a vice, white-knuckled as the realization of what she was witnessing struck her like a punch to the solar plexus. Something within her would not allow it.

Her heart was sobbing No, her mind hurt to think that it was a dream and she would wake up fast, but she was not waking up, it was her reality-a reality which she needs to believe.

But the voice returned—louder, more enticing. Daniel's secretary, her breathing shaking and pathetic, breathed softly, words cutting through the air like a knife.

"I can do for you all that she cannot, Daniel. Let her go." Aria's head ached with the word "Divorce" suspended within her. Her eyelids would not close, as words hovered in suspension, heavy and loaded, giving life to her worst nightmare. It was not a blink of falsehood. It was a decree of something worse. The one she trusted and loved most, her husband to whom she had devoted her life, was Picking someone else over her Aria stepped back, her head racing with a feeling of nausea that overwhelmed her. She didn't budge, the need to move into the room and question him appears to be in her head alone. Her nostrils flared wide. Her world was in ruins- the pillar of her world was in ruins, all that labor and effort spent building it up was for nothing, and she could not prevent it from occurring. Daniel's voice sank, but Aria heard him. "I said I'd do it, Ann." His voice cracked, strained, as though he struggled to hold himself back. Ann answered immediately, her voice desperate and angry. "You've been saying that for ever." Her voice trembled, but was now stiff in a manner. "I will not share a man. If you do not leave her, I will make her know what we have been doing." The threat hung in the air, thick with threat of devastation. Aria's legs were like lead as she sprinted along the corridor, every desperate gasp searing her chest. She barely sensed the cold under her, the world maddening in her tear-filled eyes. Her gasps were harsh and uneven, tears flowing like rivers down her face. The door that she had stood before was now seared into her mind, the betrayal a scream that rang incessantly in her mind. Every sob, every cry that shredded her body, she escaped with the fervor to mollify the pain she felt so agonizingly in her heart.