“Uh… you… you won’t. I promise.”
“Good.”
“Go home. Go to bed,” he repeated the order as much for her sake, as for his. The last thing he needed was to get caught in some kind of ill-advised tryst with an MBA who should be interning in the mailroom as far as he was concerned.
Chapter 8
“Oh my god,” Sandy hissed the next morning on their way into work. “You were called into Alex’s office? After dark!?”
“Yes. Why is that a gasp thing?” Sophie smiled in a worldly, devil-may-care sort of way.
She was pretending it didn’t hurt to sit down. She was pretending she hadn't been bent over and punished like a little girl. She was pretending a lot of things. And it seemed to be working.
Sandy’s reaction made her feel like a bad girl. Alex had made her feel like a bad girl too. After she’d gotten home, and taken a shower, she’d been left with a wetness between her thighs which demanded to be sated into the small hours of the morning.
But ‘fucked myself stupid with my vibrator’ was not a valid excuse for missing work. And she was figuring Alex would notice if she skipped today. He'd probably notice if she missed any day.
Thinking that gave her a strange, squirmy feeling low in her belly. Big brother was watching, and it was sexy. If she messed up again, she might find herself over his desk again. And this time, he might not stop right when she was on the verge of…
Sandy lowered her voice as they made their way toward the elevators. “I heard… I mean, what he does to women. He’s… he has a reputation, Sophie.”
“He’s really not that bad.”
“Don’t let that rumor get around, Miss Pierce.”
A casual voice behind her made her spin around to face Alex. Where the hell had he come from? He moved like a… well, he moved like an ex-Marine, because that’s what he was. She’d spent most of the previous night looking up anything and everything to do with Alex Roth. Decorated military hero, divorced and now single according to stalkerish gossip sites, reputation for being harsh, but fair. Nothing she didn’t already know. She hadn’t found out the one thing she had told herself she wasn’t really looking for: was he single?
He looked, as usual, incredible. The term daddy leaped to mind and then hid beneath years of shame. Sophie rarely blushed, but she did color a little now. Sandy let out a high-pitched stifled squeal, and Alex continued on his way with that same sexy non-smile he had given Sophie in the company restaurant. He took the stairs. Of course he did. He liked to make everything harder than it needed to be.
Sophie breathed a sigh of relief.
“That guy scares me,” Sandy whispered when they were both sure he was gone.
“I think that’s his M.O,” Sophie replied. “I don’t buy into it. He’s just a guy like any other.”
But he wasn’t, and she knew it. Alex was dangerous, specifically to her, in specifically the wrong way. He triggered every secret aspect of herself she was trying to hide, all the needs she’d locked away, all the most deviant and shameful parts of her. Even in his absence, she could feel the electricity of their brief conversation coursing through her.
“You look tired.” Alex found her at her desk.
“Huh?! Fuck!” She cursed when she realized who it was. She’d been half asleep behind her computer terminal. “Sorry, I mean, hello, Mr. Roth.”
He smirked, amused at her obvious flusterment. Her office was less than a quarter the size of his, and when he stepped into it, it felt barely big enough for the two of them.
“Are you tired, Miss Pierce?”
“Late night,” she agreed, hiding a yawn.
“I told you to go to bed.”
She looked up at him and shrugged. “I have way too much work to go to bed. My bed is covered in files from the last three years. I don’t know what my predecessor was doing, but it wasn’t work.”
“Embezzling,” Alex said.
“Oh. Well. That explains the backlog.”
He put his hands on her desk and leaned down over her. She felt his proximity like an animal might. She could smell the freshly laundered scent of his shirt, and the musk of his body, not quite overpowered by expensive cologne. When he spoke, it was in a deep, low, dominant tone which held a plausibly deniable note of kindness.
“If I tell you to go to bed, young lady, you go home and you go to bed.”
A tingle ran through her, a frisson of excitement and desire and confusion and softness and fear which made every part of her react, especially the last place that should have reacted, the tight place between her clenched thighs.
Sophie swallowed, wishing she could come up with a reply that wasn’t just a demure yes, sir. But she couldn’t.