Claimed By Desire

Primal Desires.

Amara

My apartment had never felt smaller.

I dropped my bag by the door and kicked off my heels, but the relief I usually felt coming home was nowhere to be found. Instead, the silence felt oppressive, charged with the same electricity that had followed me from Thorne Enterprises.

I couldn't stop thinking about his hands.

The way his fingers had covered mine on the phone. The heat of his palm, the deliberate pressure, the way his thumb had traced across my knuckles like he was memorizing the shape of them. It had lasted maybe thirty seconds, but my skin still tingled from the contact.

Professional boundaries, I reminded myself, heading to the kitchen for a glass of wine. He's your boss. This is exactly the kind of situation you've warned women about for years.

But even as I poured the Pinot Grigio, I could hear his voice echoing in my mind. Not the professional tone he'd used during our contract discussion, but the low, intimate sounds from that audio clip.

The way he'd groaned, the breathless words that had made my entire body flush with heat.

*"Oh God, yes... just like that..."*

I took a large gulp of wine and tried to push the memory away. It was a technical glitch. An accident. He'd said so himself.

Except for that text message.

"Forgive the interruption. Sometimes desire finds a way to make itself known. - L"

I pulled out my personal phone and stared at the message again. There was nothing accidental about those words. Nothing professional about the way he'd signed it with just his initial, intimate and possessive.

This was a game. And somehow, I'd become his unwilling participant.

Or maybe not so unwilling.

The thought sent another wave of heat through me, and I pressed my thighs together involuntarily. This was insane. I was a feminist. I'd built my entire platform on warning women about men like Lucien Thorne—powerful, controlling, used to getting whatever they wanted.

So why couldn't I stop imagining what it would feel like to give him what he wanted?

I finished my wine and headed to the bathroom, hoping a hot shower would wash away the day's tension. But as the water cascaded over my skin, I found myself remembering the way he'd looked at me through that glass wall.

The predatory intensity in his dark eyes, like he could see right through my professional facade to the woman underneath who hadn't been touched in months.

My hands moved without conscious thought, tracing the path his gaze had taken. Down my neck, across my collarbone, lower. I imagined they were his hands instead of mine, rough and possessive, taking what they wanted without asking permission.

Stop, I told myself. This is exactly what he wants. You're playing right into his hands.

But my body wasn't listening to my rational mind. It was responding to something deeper, more primal.

Something that recognized the dominance in his voice, the confidence in his movements, the way he'd claimed space in every room he entered.

I turned off the water with shaking hands and wrapped myself in a towel, but the ache between my thighs only intensified. I needed to think clearly, to figure out what game he was playing and how to win it.

Instead, I found myself in my bedroom, staring at the drawer of my nightstand.

No. I wasn't going to do this. I wasn't going to give him this kind of power over me, even in the privacy of my own thoughts.

But my hands were already opening the drawer, reaching for the sleek vibrator I'd bought during a particularly lonely stretch last year.

My body was making decisions my mind couldn't override, driven by a hunger that had been building since the moment I'd walked into his office.

I sank onto my bed, towel falling away, and closed my eyes. Just this once. Just to get him out of my system so I could think clearly tomorrow.

But the moment I touched myself, it was his voice I heard. His hands I imagined. His body I pictured moving over mine with that same fluid grace he brought to everything else.

"You're here because I chose you," his voice whispered in my memory, low and possessive. "Because of your fire."

My breath hitched as I remembered the way he'd said it, the way his eyes had darkened when he'd stepped closer. The way he'd made me feel both powerful and vulnerable at the same time.

"Most women want to please. You want to conquer."

The irony wasn't lost on me. Here I was, supposedly wanting to conquer, and yet I was completely at his mercy. Even alone in my apartment, even with just memories and imagination, he had me exactly where he wanted me.

The thought should have made me angry. Instead, it pushed me closer to the edge.

I imagined his hands replacing mine, his mouth on my skin, his voice in my ear telling me exactly what he wanted to do to me. The professional mask he wore during the day stripped away to reveal something raw and hungry underneath.

"Don't wear red lipstick to the office. Because I'll think about smearing it."

The memory of those words, combined with the rhythm of my own touch, sent me spiraling toward release. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, my body arching as waves of pleasure crashed over me.

For a moment, everything went white. Silent. Perfect.

Then reality crashed back in.

I was lying naked on my bed, vibrator still humming in my hand, having just climaxed to thoughts of my boss.

My feminist, independent, strong-woman boss who'd spent years building a platform around female empowerment and s****l autonomy.

The shame hit me like a physical blow.

I turned off the toy and shoved it back in the drawer, pulling my robe on with shaking hands. This was exactly what he'd wanted, wasn't it? To get under my skin, to make me question everything I believed about myself.

And it was working.

I grabbed my laptop and settled on the couch, determined to regain some semblance of control. If Lucien Thorne wanted to play games, I needed to understand the rules. I needed to know who I was really dealing with.

I started with the basics. Google searches, LinkedIn, Forbes articles. But every search yielded the same frustratingly vague results. Lucien Thorne, billionaire CEO. Private. Mysterious. No personal information, no photos except official corporate headshots, no interviews that revealed anything meaningful about the man behind the empire.

It was like he'd been scrubbed from the internet, his personal life hidden behind layers of corporate speak and legal barriers.

The more I searched, the more questions I had. Where had he come from? How had he built his fortune so quickly? Why was there no record of him before five years ago?

And why did every instinct I had scream that there was something not quite human about the way he moved, the way he looked at me, the way he seemed to command everything around him?

I closed the laptop with a frustrated sigh. Tomorrow, I will go back to that office. I would sit in my glass box and pretend to be professional while he watched me with those dark eyes that saw too much.

And somehow, I would have to find a way to resist whatever spell he was weaving around me.

Because the alternative—surrendering to whatever this was between us—felt like losing myself completely.

Even if part of me was starting to wonder if that might not be such a terrible thing.

My phone buzzed on the coffee table. A text from an unknown number, but I already knew who it was.

"Sweet dreams, Ms. Williams. Tomorrow promises to be... enlightening. - L"

I stared at the message, my pulse quickening despite myself. How did he know I was thinking about him? How did he always seem to know exactly when to push, exactly what would get under my skin?

I turned off the phone without responding and headed to bed, but sleep was a long time coming. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Felt him. Heard his voice promising things that both terrified and thrilled me.

Tomorrow, I promised myself. Tomorrow, I will figure out how to beat him at his own game.

Hopefully.