“Have I mentioned how much I admire how dedicated you are to your job?”
Liam reaches for me, and just like that, it’s on. We’re all over each other, our mouths fused together as our clothes come off in a frenzied tangle. My dress gets flung over the bookcase. Liam almost trips over a chair. We shove a stack of files off the desk in our mad dash for the closest available flat surface, papers raining down across the carpet like so much accounting-related confetti. It’s not the most graceful foreplay of my life, certainly.
But it’s definitely the hottest.
Liam yanks the cups of my bra down without bothering to unclasp it, his mouth fused to one nipple while he catches the other with his fingers. I moan, my head dropping back in pleasure while I sift my hands through his thick, dark hair. I can feel how hard he is already, his cock pressing against my stomach, and when I reach down to stroke him through his boxers he growls, low and dangerous, in my ear.
“Take these off,” I gasp, plucking at the thick elastic waistband. “I want—I need—”
“Need what?” Liam asks, teasing even as the thrust of his hips against my palm gives his desperation away. He shucks the boxers as I slip out of my panties. I hear the ragged sound of our breathing and the crinkle of a condom wrapper and then he’s burying himself inside me in one smooth, hard stroke. I gasp at the hot, delicious stretch of it, the feeling of Liam filling me all the way up.
“Need you,” I tell him, our gazes locked as he starts to move.
I’m wound so tight I know it’s not going to take me long like this—how long and how impatiently I’ve been waiting, how wet I already am between my legs. Liam reaches down between us to rub at my clit, drawing expert circles with his thumb, and my entire body lights up. “Please,” I say, or maybe I only think it. I feel like I’ll never get enough.
Liam surprises me then by collecting both my wrists and pinning them up over my head against the cool wood of the desk, holding them tight as he thrusts against and again. “You like that?” he asks, low and commanding, but I can’t make the words to answer him because I’m already coming, wave after wave of it radiating out from the center of my body. I feel like the heat of it could light up the skyline. I feel like the force of it could power Manhattan for days.
Liam comes himself moment later—his whole body tensing and relaxing, his expression as open and vulnerable as I’ve ever seen it. I wrap my arms and legs around him, hanging on tight.
Once it’s over we stay where we are for a moment, draped languidly over the desk as our breathing returns to normal. “So,” Liam murmurs. “I guess Verity is the best for a reason.”
And all I can do is laugh.
16
Liam
I wake up the next morning in the best mood I can remember since…
Well, ever, actually.
I wave a hello to the doorman in the lobby of my building, smile at the woman walking her annoying, yappy dog on the sidewalk, and tip the barista at my coffee shop 200%. “Somebody had a good night,” she teases, raising her pierced eyebrow, and while normally I’d bristle at that kind of overfamiliar presumption, today I can’t help but grin back at her over the espresso machine.
“I guess you could say that,” I admit, and raise my cup in a salute before strolling out the door.
My mentor Aisling is in town this week, overseeing a hostile takeover at a law firm downtown. It’s a bloodbath, apparently, but she manages to get away long enough to meet me for lunch at a restaurant near the office.
“How’s it going?” I ask, once we’ve ordered—well, once I’ve ordered, at least. In all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never actually seen Aisling eat anything. I have a sneaking suspicion that she survives solely on air and the thrill of corporate cost cutting.
“Oh, it’s fantastic,” she says excitedly. She takes a sip of her seltzer, which doesn’t have so much as a lime slice floating in it. “We’re going to be able to increase redundancies by nearly fifty percent.”
Normally that’s the kind of talk that would really get me going, honestly, but today I can’t help but think about the inconvenient fact that those redundancies are actual people, with families and mortgages and lives. “How many layoffs?” I ask, bracing myself without entirely meaning to.
“Two hundred,” she reports gleefully.
I nod, swallowing down a vague wave of nausea. God, what is going on with me? “That’s… a lot.”
“It is!” Aisling agrees, full of cheer. She folds her pale, skinny hands on top of her empty plate. “But I don’t mean to sit here bragging. What about you?” she asks. “How’s it all going at Sterling?”
“You know, I have to say, I’m enjoying my work there more than I thought I would,” I confess. As the words come out of my mouth I realize they’re true, and I don’t just mean everything that’s been going on with Eliza. “The people who work there really care about what they do. And about each other.”
“Uh-oh.” Aisling looks at me skeptically. “You’re not getting soft on me, are you?”
“What? No, of course not.” I nod my thanks at the waiter as he delivers my club sandwich. “I’m more than capable of doing what needs to be done, if it should come to that. I’m just wondering if possibly there’s a way to preserve the bottom line without making cuts that are unnecessarily drastic.”
Aisling shakes her head, openly dismayed. “You are getting soft,” she accuses.
“It’s not like that,” I insist. “I just—”
“I’ve seen it before,” she says, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms. “And I understand. It’s why I was skeptical about you taking this job on to begin with, remember? It’s your late father’s company. It would make sense for there to be… feelings involved.” She says feelings like perhaps the word is synonymous with cockroaches or Gonorrhea. “But just remember: all those people you say you like so much? You’re doing them all a disservice if you let your head get clouded with feelings. Someone needs to take charge and make the hard choices. Otherwise, the whole company will go down.”
I nod, squaring my shoulders. Aisling may not exactly be the warm and fuzzy type—in fact, the warm and fuzzy type is usually the first type she fires—but she’s my mentor for a reason. She’s steered me on the right path over the years, and I know she’s looking out for me now. “You’re right,” I tell her. “I know you’re right.”
Aisling smiles. “I know I am, too.”
I’m planning on heading back to the office once we say our goodbyes, but instead, I find myself taking a detour through the park, just walking to clear my mind. My upbeat mood from earlier has burned off like so much morning fog, and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. After all, fog keeps a person from seeing clearly, right? And clarity is the name of the game.
At least, it always has been in the past, before…
Before Eliza.
I stroll past sunbathing co-eds, elderly couples, and children making the most of the last days of summer with a noisy romp through the splash pad. I try to lose myself in the city life unfolding all around me, but the truth is I can’t stop thinking about what Aisling said. Something about spending time with Eliza lately has made me feel like a different kind of man—a better one, maybe, and I can’t deny that I want him to stick around for a while.