Claimed By Rival

Chapter Five

Adrian's POV

Wilbert's voice came out of the phone low and flat.

"Harriet. Are you with a man?"

I did not stop because hearing him did something to me, and my hands tightened on her hips while I thought about the two years he had spent grinning at me across the boardroom table. All that time he had been taking my fiancée apart behind a door that turned out to be wide open the day I finally walked in.

Harriet shook beneath me and tried to answer him, but only a broken little sound escaped her mouth because I pushed deeper at that exact moment. I wanted him to hear it and understand that his wife was no longer sitting at home crying over him.

The line went dead and she dropped the phone onto the sheets as if it had burned her. I pulled out slowly and let myself fall onto my back beside her, and we both stared at the ceiling and listened to our breathing. Anger and pleasure had knotted together so tightly inside me that I could not tell where one of them ended and the other began.

I met Claire three years ago at Wilbert's house when he invited me over for dinner after a brutal day of closing a deal. Harriet was busy in the kitchen fussing over the food, so it was Claire who opened the door, younger than her sister and smiling at me as though she already knew what that smile did to men. She laughed at every joke I made and listened to my answers as if they mattered, and by dessert I was gone.

Within a few months her things were in my apartment, and within a year I had bought her a ring.

Wilbert was my partner, but that word never came close to covering what he was to me. He was the nearest thing to a brother I had, and we had built the company from nothing and shared everything, even the money and the secrets.

All that time he was sleeping with the woman I planned to marry. She told me she loved me every night while he shook my hand every morning, both of them wearing the same easy smile, and honestly that part bothers me more than the s*x.

Harriet shifted and I turned my head to look at her, lying flat with one arm across her stomach and her dark hair spread over the pillow. Yesterday I had found her on the side of the road soaked through and looking wrung out, but now she was warm and flushed, and I wanted to ruin her all over again.

I was already hard from looking at her. The thought of rolling over to pin her down until she forgot her own name grew so loud in my head that I almost missed her next breath, because this had stopped being about the plan a long time ago. I wanted to know whether she would look at me the same once the anger wore off. I stayed exactly where I was and did not touch her.

I could not stop wondering how a man could have a wife like this and still go after her sister. Harriet was not pretty in the way that hits you at the door but in the way that sneaks up on you through the soft eyes and the way she answered every touch without thinking about it first.

Nothing about her was staged, whereas Claire always knew where the audience was even in bed. Wilbert had to be either blind or cruel and probably both, because for years he treated Harriet as though she were the problem while the real problem sat in his office wearing a secretary's smile.

She turned and caught me looking, and neither of us spoke. I could still smell her on my skin and feel the way she had tightened around me at the end, and my body answered whether I wanted it to or not.

"He knows," she whispered in a voice that sounded small and tired.

"Good." It came out rougher than I meant it to. "Let him carry it around the way I carried it for three weeks, and let him picture exactly what I just did to his wife."

She sat up and pulled the sheet over her chest while her hair slid forward to hide half her face. My hand twitched to push it back, but I kept it where it was.

"What happens now?"

I looked back at the ceiling because looking at her had stopped being safe. The deal had sounded so simple at the time, since all we had agreed to do was use each other and hurt them and walk away clean. But lying there with her scent on me nothing felt clean at all, and something inside me had already shifted a few degrees in a direction I did not like.

"Now they suffer," I said. "Starting tomorrow Wilbert gets no peace at the company and Claire gets none anywhere else. When they come crawling back they will find the two of us together."

She went quiet for a long while and lay down with the sheet bunched in her fist. I listened to her breathing slow while the pull toward her only grew stronger.

I shut my eyes and made myself picture Claire on that desk and Wilbert's face every morning. It helped a little because it reminded me why I was here and that this was only ever supposed to be revenge.

Then I looked at the curve of Harriet's shoulder under the sheet, and what rose in me was not anger at all but something that felt a lot like ownership.

I sat up and reached for my pants."Where are you going?"

I glanced back at her swollen lips and her eyes still hazy from what we had done, and for one second I nearly stayed.

"Shower," I said. "I need to think."I shut the bathroom door before I could change my mind and stood under water so cold I barely felt it, with both hands braced on the tile. The bed creaked once in the next room and went still. I pictured her lying there staring at the ceiling the way I had, trying to work out what we were now, and I had no answer for her because I barely had one for myself.

This was supposed to be revenge, so why did it already feel like she was the one who had claimed me?