I stepped into my office minutes after coffee with Tasha. The café was close enough that I made it to my desk with time to spare. It was good starting the day with a little girl’s talk, even though Tasha kept fishing for what was actually going on with me. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t even know how I would start — hey, so I’m addicted to my boss’s son’s d**k, so I just let her think I was tired from work.
My inbox had forty-something unread by the time I sat down. I went through them fast, flagging the ones that needed real attention, replying to the easy ones on autopilot.
Files were stacked on my desk from Friday, half of them notes I needed for the 9AM board meeting. I flipped through the quarterly numbers one more time, double-checking the slides I’d built, running my thumb down the projections until I was sure every figure matched what was in the report. My leg was bouncing under the desk the whole time. Not nerves about the numbers.
Nerves about him.
At 8:55 I gathered my laptop and the printed decks and headed for the boardroom.
His eyes were on me the second I walked in. Not a glance but a full look, slow, like he had all the time in the world to take me even with eight other people already seated around the table. I felt it land somewhere low in my stomach and hated how fast my body answered for it.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed him noticing. Priya caught my eye for half a second too long before looking down at her folder. Greg, who never missed anything, glanced between the two of us and then back at his phone trying to mind his business.
I had caught the assistant, Delia, whispering something to another executive last week when he walked me out of his office a little too late in the evening. Nobody said anything out loud. Everybody had a theory.
I’d been up since 3AM finishing this deck. Every chart rebuilt twice, every talking point rehearsed in my head while my mother slept two towns over and I sat at my kitchen table with cold coffee, running numbers until they made sense out loud. I needed this presentation to land clean. My job depended on plenty of things I hated lately, but I wasn’t going to lose my actual job because of it.
I stood at the front of the room and walked them through it — quarter-over-quarter growth, the softening in one region, the plan to shore it up in the next quarter. My voice held steady even though I could feel his eyes on me the entire time, never quite on my face. I caught him twice, gaze dragging down to where my blouse gapped slightly when I leaned toward the screen to point something out. I straightened up a little more after that, tugged my blazer closed, and kept talking like I hadn’t noticed. He didn’t even try to hide it. A couple of the others definitely saw it too.
I finished in twenty minutes. A few nods around the table, one question from Greg I answered without stumbling, and then it was over.
Chairs scraped back. Laptops closed. Everyone gathering folders and heading for the door in that loose, relieved shuffle that always follows a meeting that’s finally done.
“Stay behind a minute Claire,” he said.
I froze halfway into packing my bag. A couple of people glanced my way but nobody said anything.
“Delia, shut the door on your way out,” he added.
The door clicked shut. It was just us.
He stood up slowly, rounding the table toward me while I stayed rooted by my chair, heart going harder than it should’ve for a boardroom that was supposed to be empty of anything but paperwork now. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, and put a hand on my waist, pulling me in until there was nothing between us.
“Have you forgotten your second duty here?” he asked.
My legs clenched on instinct. “Someone could walk in.”
“No one’s walking in.”
“What if your father—”
“My father isn’t showing up today.” He said it flat, already sliding his other hand up to cup my jaw, tilting my face toward his. “So that’s not a problem you need to worry about.”
I should’ve pushed him off. I didn’t.
He kissed me hard, one hand still on my waist, walking me backward until I hit the edge of the boardroom table — the same table I had just presented projections on twenty minutes ago. He spun me around without breaking the kiss, bent me slightly over it, and started working the buttons of my blouse open one by one.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said, even as I let my head fall back against his shoulder.
“We have exactly as much time as I say we do.”
He got my blouse off, then my bra, tossing both somewhere onto a chair, and closed his mouth over my n****e before I could get another protest out. I gasped, fingers gripping the edge of the table behind me, and he took his time there, licking and sucking until my back arched and every thought about the meeting we just had evaporated completely.
His hand slid down meanwhile, working my skirt up until it was bunched at my waist, his fingers finding me already soaked through my underwear.
“Already this wet,” he said against my skin, “and I haven’t even touched you yet.”
“Shut up,” I breathed, no heat behind it at all.
He pulled my underwear down and pushed two fingers straight into me, curling them until my knees nearly buckled. I grabbed his shoulder to stay upright while he worked me like that, slow at first then faster, thumb finding my c**t and circling it until I was rocking against his hand, chasing it shamelessly.
He didn’t let me finish there, pulling his fingers out right when I was close enough to feel it building, and I actually whined at the loss.
“Not yet,” he said, already undoing his belt.
He turned me fully around, bent me over the table, and pushed inside me in one slow, deep stroke that had me gasping his name into the wood grain.
He set a pace hard enough that the table shifted a few inches with every thrust, one hand gripping my hip, the other tangled in my hair, and I stopped caring about anything — the door, the meeting, the fact that I was completely naked from the waist up on the same table I’d just built projections on. I came around him with a cry I didn’t even try to muffle.
He didn’t stop.
“You think I’m done with you?” he said when I tried to shift away, oversensitive, legs already shaking. He pulled me right back onto him, deeper this time, and I moaned instead of arguing.