MR. STERLING'S TERMS

Chapter Six

NOVA

He said it at seven forty-three pm.

I knew the exact time because I'd been watching the clock for the last hour the way you watch something you're trying not to watch — peripheral, compulsive, pretending you're doing something else. The Morrison contracts were open on my screen. I'd read the same paragraph eleven times.

His office door opened.

He stood in the frame. Jacket off, sleeves rolled, the end-of-day version of him that I'd been learning in increments — slightly looser, slightly more present, the composure still there but wearing it differently.

He looked at me.

"My place," he said. "Tonight."

Not a question. Not quite an invitation. Something in between — the Dominic Sterling version of asking, which was to state what he wanted and leave the decision exactly where it belonged.

"Address?" I said.

He wrote it on a card. Set it on my desk. Went back inside and closed the door.

I looked at the card.

*14 Voss Terrace. Penthouse. 9pm.*

I looked at the Morrison contracts.

Closed them.

---

Voss Terrace was in the Aldenmere district of Harlow City — old money neighbourhood, the kind where the buildings had names instead of numbers and the doormen wore actual uniforms. Number fourteen was pale stone and black iron, six storeys, a lobby that smelled like fresh flowers and something warm and expensive underneath.

The doorman called up without asking my name.

Apparently he already knew it.

The elevator opened directly into the penthouse.

No corridor. No door to knock on. Just the elevator opening onto his home like it had been designed to eliminate every unnecessary step between outside and inside, between arriving and being somewhere that mattered.

I stepped out.

Stopped.

The penthouse occupied the entire top floor and was almost entirely glass on three sides — Harlow City spreading in every direction below, the lights of the Vellum Quarter to the east, the dark ribbon of the Aldenmere river to the west, the business district's towers clustered to the south with their upper floors still lit from the day's late workers. Floor to ceiling. Corner to corner. The city laid out like something offered.

The space itself was spare. Not cold — spare. Every object chosen rather than accumulated. Books on low shelves along the only solid wall, ordered by size not subject. A long dark sofa facing the city view. A kitchen at the far end, clean surfaces, copper pots hanging above the island. Art on the walls — three pieces, each large, each the kind that looked simple until you stood in front of it long enough.

It looked like him.

Exactly like him.

He appeared from a hallway to the left. Changed — dark trousers, white shirt untucked, no tie, bare feet. The bare feet did something to me I hadn't anticipated. Something about the specific domesticity of it. Dominic Sterling in bare feet in his own home was a different version than any I'd encountered and it hit me somewhere that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with something more complicated.

"Wine?" he said.

"Please."

He poured two glasses at the kitchen island — something deep red, Aldenmere Valley label, the kind of wine that came from a place rather than a shelf — and crossed the room and handed me one and stood beside me looking at the city.

We drank in silence for a moment.

"You live alone," I said.

"Yes."

"It's very quiet."

"I like quiet." He looked at the city. "Offices are loud even when nobody's speaking. The decisions have weight. It accumulates." A pause. "Here it doesn't."

I looked at his profile. At the specific way he held himself here — differently than the office, differently than Caruso's. Something put down. Not the composure exactly — that was still present — but the professional intention behind it. Here he was just a man standing in his home with a glass of wine looking at the city he'd spent twenty years building a position in.

"Sienna grew up here?" I asked.

"Until she was twelve. Then her mother and I separated and she went to Westhill with her." He turned the glass in his hand. "She came back for university. Stayed four years. Then left again." A beat. "She does that. Leaves and comes back. I've stopped trying to predict the pattern."

"She loves you," I said.

He looked at me.

"Clearly," I said. "The whole lunch was about that."

Something moved in his expression. Quiet and brief and real. He looked back at the city. "She's the best thing I've done," he said simply. No performance in it. Just fact.

I finished my wine.

Set the glass on the low table in front of the sofa and turned to him and reached up and put my hand flat against his chest — his heartbeat under my palm, steady, present — and looked at him.

He looked back.

"This is different from the office," I said.

"Yes."

"You brought me here anyway."

"Yes." His hand came up and covered mine against his chest. Warm. Heavy. "I don't bring people here."

"But you brought me."

He didn't answer. Didn't need to.

He set his wine down and took my face in both hands and kissed me — different from every other time, slower, something in it that had nothing to do with strategy or deliberate patience but was simply him, actual him, the man underneath the CEO and the composure and the forty-six years of building walls in useful shapes.

I pulled his shirt open.

He walked me backward toward the hallway.

His bedroom was at the end — same glass, same city view, the bed enormous and low and made with the precision of someone who did everything with precision. He laid me down on it and stood at the edge and looked at me in the low light of the city coming through the glass and then he undressed me slowly, unhurriedly, like he was doing something that deserved time.

No desk. No window. No board call.

Just the bed and the city and both of us with nothing left to be professional about.

His mouth found my neck. My collarbone. Moved down my body with deliberate attention — every place he touched responding, every place his mouth landed making me arch up toward him — and I pushed my fingers into his hair and felt him work his way down and down until his mouth found my cunt and I stopped being able to think in complete sentences.

He ate me slowly.

Like he had the whole night and intended to use it.

His tongue moved in long deep strokes that wound me tighter and tighter until I was gripping the sheets and crying out at the ceiling and cumming so hard my whole body lifted off the bed. He held me down through it. Kept his mouth on me through every wave. Didn't stop until I was shaking and limp and completely destroyed.

Then he came up my body and pushed his cock inside me and I wrapped around him and pulled him deep and felt him exhale — real, genuine, the specific exhale of someone finally being exactly where they wanted to be — and he began to move.

Slow at first. Deep and thorough. His forehead against mine, eyes open, watching my face the way he watched everything — with complete attention, missing nothing. I looked back and didn't look away and something passed between us in the dark that neither of us named.

He made love to me.

That was the word for it. Not the desk. Not the window. Not the board call. This was something else — his cock moving inside me slow and deep and his hands in my hair and his mouth at my jaw and the city watching through the glass as we moved together with a rhythm that built gradually, inevitably, into something that broke us both open quietly and completely.

I came with his name on my lips.

He followed with his face in my neck.

After. The city. His heartbeat under my hand.

His arm around me.

Neither of us moved.

"Dominic," I said eventually. Very quiet.

"Mm."

"What is this?"

Long silence. The kind that had weight and shape.

"I don't know yet," he said. Honest. No performance. "But I brought you here."

"You don't bring people here."

"No," he said. "I don't."

I looked at the city through the glass. At Harlow City laid out below us, lights and dark and the river cutting through it all.

His arm tightened around me.

I stayed.