Chapter 4: After Hours

He texted at seven forty-three.

Still here.

She looked at the message and then at the brief she was finalising and then at the clock. The floor had emptied an hour ago. The cleaning crew had come and gone. She was sitting in her glass office with her heels off and her hair twisted up with a pen holding it and three empty coffee cups lined up like evidence of the hours she had put in.

She typed back: So am I.

Three seconds.

Come here.

She put her heels back on. She did not question the instruction or perform reluctance about it. She had spent years moderating her own desire, packaging it into something reasonable and measured and easily explained. She was done with that. She picked up her phone and walked down the corridor to his office and knocked once and pushed the door open.

He was at his desk but not working. Leaning back in his chair, jacket off, tie gone, the top two buttons of his shirt open, and he was looking at her the way he had looked at her across his kitchen that morning, with that specific hunger that made no attempt to disguise itself.

She closed the door behind her.

"The Valen brief is done," she said.

"I know," he said. "I read it an hour ago. It is exceptional."

"I know," she said.

Something moved through his eyes. Heat and amusement together. He stood and came around the desk and she did not move toward him or away from him, she simply stood and let him come to her, because she had learned already in less than forty-eight hours that the approach was one of his pleasures and she had no interest in taking it from him.

He stopped in front of her and reached up and pulled the pen from her hair and let it fall down around her shoulders and stood looking at her for a moment with the pen in his hand.

"You worked fourteen hours today," he said.

"So did you."

"I own the company."

"I am trying to," she said.

He dropped the pen on his desk and put both hands in her hair and kissed her with a thoroughness that undid the last of the day's tension in her body, deep and slow, his thumbs tracing her jaw, and she pressed into him and put her hands flat against his chest and felt his heart going faster than his composure suggested.

"I thought about you all day," he said against her mouth. "In between everything. You kept interrupting."

"Good," she said.

He walked her backward until she met the edge of his desk and lifted her onto it without ceremony, stepping between her knees, and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer by his shirt and kissed him harder. His hands moved down her sides and found the hem of her dress and pushed it up slowly, his palms warm against her thighs, and she exhaled against his mouth and tipped her head back.

His lips moved to her throat. Her collarbone. The neckline of her dress, which he pulled aside with his teeth while his hands moved between her thighs and found the edge of her underwear and slipped beneath it.

She gripped the desk.

"Dominic." His name came out low and fractured.

"I have you," he said against her skin. His fingers moved with the same deliberate patience he applied to everything and she stopped being able to think in complete sentences almost immediately. He learned her responses with the focused attention of a man treating this like the most important information he had encountered all day, returning to what made her gasp and building on it until she was shaking and her knuckles were white against the desk edge and the entire city was blazing silently through his windows.

When she came it was with his name clenched between her teeth and her whole body arching against his hand and his mouth pressed against her jaw absorbing the sound of her.

She was still catching her breath when he straightened and looked at her sitting on his desk, dress pushed up, hair dishevelled, cheeks flushed, and his expression was dark and unguarded in a way she was beginning to recognise as the version of him that existed only here.

"Your turn," she said, when she could form words.

She reached for his belt. He let her. She undid it slowly, watching his face, and he stood completely still with his hands braced on the desk on either side of her, his jaw tight, his composure doing its very best and losing. She freed him and wrapped her hand around him and heard the specific sound he made, low and involuntary, and felt a deep satisfaction move through her.

She stroked him slowly. Deliberately. Watching his face come undone with the same focused attention he had given her.

"Jade." Her name in his voice at that register did something to her she was not prepared for, something that went well beyond the physical, that lived in her chest rather than lower.

She pulled him toward her by his open collar and looked him in the eye from two inches away.

"I want you," she said. Plainly. Without performance. "Right now. On this desk."

He reached into his drawer without looking away from her face and a moment later he was pressing into her and they both went very still for one suspended second, adjusting to the reality of each other, and then he began to move and she stopped being still entirely.

It was different from the boardroom. Slower. More consuming. He watched her face the entire time and she let him, kept her eyes open and on his because she had nothing left to hide from this man and no interest in hiding it. They moved together with a rhythm that felt older than two days, like something they had already known and were simply remembering, and she dug her fingers into his shoulders and pressed her mouth against his neck and said things she had not planned to say.

He drove her up again with a patience that bordered on cruelty and when she broke the second time he followed immediately after, shuddering hard, her name one more time in her ear, his arms wrapped around her like she was something he had no intention of releasing.

They stayed like that for a long moment.

His desk. His darkened office. The city going about its endless anonymous business forty floors below.

"Stay again," he said. His voice was rough and quiet.

She thought about Celeste Harrow in her cream dress and her territorial smile. She thought about how fast and how deep she was already in with this man. She thought about all the reasonable, sensible reasons to slow down.

She pressed her lips against his jaw.

"Feed me first," she said. "I worked fourteen hours."

He laughed. She felt it against her skin, real and unguarded, and it was the most intimate thing that had happened between them yet.

She was in serious trouble.

She decided she did not mind at all.