Bound By One Night With The CEO

Chapter one

Marlowe's POV

I was three steps down the corridor before I let myself admit where I was actually going.

Five words, “Mr Winslow wants you now”

It was enough to make me switch off the project I'd been telling everyone I would finish tonight. I rationalized it as he was my boss.

I told myself it was professional. I was getting worse at lying to myself with every step.

There was a version of me, a version most people at Winslow Pharmaceutical Group had never once met, who would have laughed at how easily I'd folded.

That version had a different last name, a corner office waiting for her three states away, and zero patience for men who thought a title made them interesting. I'd buried her the day I walked into this internship wearing a badge with a plain first name and nothing else, and most days I didn't miss her at all.

Today was quite different from the other days.

Before the elevator doors even opened, I saw myself reflected in the mirror and, just like recently, I found myself analyzing my appearance as if I was looking for clues for some kind of a thing that I couldn't quite grasp. My image in the mirror was unchanged since that morning.

My pulse did not agree.

This quickening beneath my skin whenever his name was mentioned, way beyond what a normal crush could make you feel, had been going on for two weeks now. It was such a new and different feeling that I had mistaken it for nerves the first few times. I had almost exhausted my explanations for it.

His office door was open when I got there, so he must have been expecting me, or at least hoping.

Callahan Winslow didn't look up right away. He rarely did, some habit of making people wait a half-second longer than comfortable, and I used the half-second to catalog him the way I always did without meaning to — black suit, tie the color of old wine, sleeves rolled to the forearm like he'd been fighting the day rather than running it.

"Marlowe." He said my name like it belonged to him already. "Come in. Shut the door."

"I'm almost finished with the quarterly report," I said, because it felt safer to lead with something true. "Ummm, I only need until tomorrow morning."

"That's not why you're here."

"No?" I let my voice go light, despite my heart doing something considerably less composed.

We both knew exactly why I was here. We'd both known for two weeks, ever since the night he'd walked me to my car after a work event neither of us needed to attend together and stood there a full minute too long before saying goodnight.

He rose from behind his desk, and the room seemed to shrink around the space he crossed to close between us. Up close, he smelled like cedar and something colder underneath it, and my stomach did that same violent, unreasonable lurch it always did around him, more violent than attraction alone should have accounted for. I noted it the way you note a strange ache in a tooth. Not now. Not yet.

"Well, If I'm correct, of which I am. I told you last week that I wanted more than this," he said.

"You never gave me an answer." He added.

"Maybe I wasn't sure the question was that serious."

"Ask me again and find out."

I should have laughed that off.

I could have told him and also myself too. four years of work building a life where I will never again be a convenient distraction for anyone around me. But I simply looked at him and uttered the one honest thing I had to say: "I don't want to be a regret that you wake up with, Callahan."

Something shifted behind his eyes at the sound of his first name in my mouth. "Then don't give me a reason to."

His hand came up slowly enough that I could have stepped back. I want to be honest, if nothing else, about that single detail. I could have stepped back, and some small, sane part of me was screaming at me to.

I didn't listen. His fingers gently touched my jaw with the lightest stroke, and the unfamiliar sensation in my chest immediately changed to pain as if a tugging was going on deep inside my body that my mind hadn't yet realized the source of.

I told myself it was just want and nothing more than that. It was easier that way.

"Come to my place tonight," he said against my temple. "No academy, no titles. Just this."

A voice in the back of my head, the voice of the woman with the last name hidden, recounted how the story typically ended for girls like me in rooms like this. I told her to shut up.

For once in four years of careful hiding, I wanted to want something without calculating the cost first.

"Mmm, Eight o'clock," I said. "You better not make me regret it."

Callahan's POV

She got here at 8 sharp, and I figured if my thoughts had helped somehow, I would have thought that being on time was not even the thing that demolished me. Still, it was not the time really. It was her coming out of my room as if she had made up her mind daring me to change it.

I had assured myself constantly,all afternoon that this would be simple. One night, contained, forgettable by the standards I usually held myself to. Never have i been so wrong about anything in my life.

She wasn't going to let me make the first move a second time. That in itself, should have been a big warning to me as to what kind of night it would be.

I won't lie to myself or anyone that the next few hours were quiet.

They weren't. But there are things better left folded into memory than laid out on a page.

The low sound of her laugh against my collarbone somewhere near midnight, the way she said my name like she'd practiced it in private, the two of us finally exhausting two weeks of restraint neither of us had wanted to keep.

In the midst of darkness, I experienced that peculiar force again which I had observed the instant I touched her jaw, but this time it didn't disappear. If anything, the feeling grew stronger, as though it lodged itself in the area of my ribs, never to be removed.

I told myself it was nothing. I have always been excellent at lying to myself when it's convenient.

The morning was much too bright and much too fast.

It was a surprise to me that she was still there when I woke up, one arm casually resting on my chest as if it was understood between us, hair of hers dark and loose on my pillow as if it was quite natural. My heart was aching in a completely different way - it was not the feeling that usually comes with regret; this time it was an emotion I was willingly ignoring.

I got out of bed without making any noise so that she wouldn't wake up and instantly started coming up with the new "me" who wouldn't feel small after such mornings like these.

When I got back from shower, I found her lying back on the headboard with a purposely disheveled look. She was wearing my shirt, and was totally relaxed in a place that should logically have at least made her a little uncomfortable. That fact disturbed me more than anything.

"You have to leave, " I said, since it was the easiest response among all my true ones that were holding back the words.

In case it pained her, she had no outward sign of it, and that calmness of hers was stabbing me much more than tears would have done. "And a great morning to you as well, " she smiled slightly, adjusting the collar of my shirt as if it was a piece of battle gear she had intentionally put on. "I didn't have a back-up. I just took yours."

I didn't answer immediately. I couldn't.

Some part of me was still turning over the pain beneath my ribs that hadn't gone away with the morning light like it should have, the one that was less like a memory and more like a chain. I have never, in twenty-seven years, waking up feeling physically changed after one night with anyone.

I told myself that meant nothing.

That morning, I mentally argued with myself over many things.

I decided to use my checkbook instead of my mind, as it was the only language I trusted myself not to mess up. I wrote down a figure which I didn't allow myself to deliberate over too much and presented it to her while avoiding eye contact.

She accepted the check, glanced at it, and froze.

"Ten million dollars, " she uttered, as if hearing the number spoken aloud was the only way to convince herself that it was not a dream. "What exactly are you offering?"

I wanted to give her my response but realized, for the first time since she entered my office yesterday, that I was utterly speechless and so I turned my back on her.

Without even looking at it a second time, she placed the check on the nightstand and went for her clothes. The composed serenity with which she did it ticked me off even more than if she had cried.

Most women I'd handed a check like that to had either taken it gladly or thrown it back in my face. She did neither.

She dressed very plainly leisurely as if the number meant nothing to her at all, and this disturbed me more than I was willing to admit.

"For the record, " she said steadily, fastening her blouse, "last night, I didn't come here for money, Callahan. I came because I wanted to." She left the words hanging between us very sharply.

"You can keep your f*****g check."

She left it exactly where she'd set it and walked out without waiting for my reply, and I stood there long after the door clicked shut, staring at ten million untouched dollars on my nightstand, feeling more unsteady than I had any right to feel over a woman I'd sworn, less than twelve hours ago, would mean nothing to me by morning.