“The best sex I have ever had,” Zayden completed.
“Me too,” I said. “Tonight was perfect.”
“You say that like it’s over.” He grinned. “I bet you are dying to find out what my bed feels like.”
“Yes, I am. Let’s go.” I grinned back, feeling happier and more content than I could ever remember. “Boyfriend,” I added softly, but did not dare meet his eyes when I said it.
THE BOSS #4
Chapter One
Zayden
Her use of the word “boyfriend” made me feel all kinds of things that I had been resigned into believing I was rendered forever incapable of feeling. Was that what I had become? Aria Roberts’ boyfriend? I thought back to the past few days – months, even – and all the things I had willfully done for her. Maybe I was her boyfriend. Either that, or I was very, very messed up in the head.
To think that I had my entire balcony decorated for her. I didn’t even think people did such things outside of movies. Here I was, holding a naked 20-year-old girl in the shower, after showing her what I presumed to be one of the best nights of her life.
After all that I had been through in my life, I could not quite believe how I had become so drawn to this woman. After Gina and all the things she represented, I was convinced that I had sworn off women forever. How could I not? My mother had done to my father what Gina had done to me; there was no room for me to ever consider a woman possessing any real character. I simply had never met one that wasn’t always after something else, money, usually.
Oddly enough, even though I had been paying a lot of money to keep Aria around, she never struck me as somebody who would want me for my money. To think of it, I had offered to pay the hospital bills without any financial returns on her part, but she had pretty much rejected the contract without a clause that stated she would pay me back after college. How many women – people in general, at that – would do that? She knew I didn’t need to be paid back, but somehow the idea that she would be taking my money for free made her so uncomfortable that it was very charming.
The closest she had come to “using” me in some sense was for my intellect, and what a revitalizing change that was! She wanted to learn from me, so that she could use that knowledge to expand her own intellect and advance her own career. She hadn’t even given me a straight answer when I offered her a real job at the bank, which had really surprised me. How many college students would give an arm and a leg in order to have a guaranteed job at the end of their college careers? Yet Aria had hesitated, perhaps because she felt that she needed to do it on her own. Little did she know that she had, in fact, done exactly that.
She had impressed me greatly with her spark and intelligence – much like she would have to in order to impress any other employer for any other kind of a job – which is why I had wanted her so badly on my team.
That, and she was always a pleasure to look at, but really many, many women were, and I didn’t go around offering jobs unless I was attracted to their minds. Which, in Aria’s case, I undoubtedly was. After all, I had made myself a promise a long time ago that I would never do many of the things I had ended up doing since Aria came into my life. The disaster that was my marriage had convinced me that I was not made for monogamy, and women really only served one purpose. Never again was I supposed to see a woman after sleeping with her, let alone repeat the act. Yet with Aria, somehow, I had wanted more and more every time and been completely unable to stop myself over and over again.
No matter what she did, she blew my mind, and made it impossible for me to give her whatever she needed in order to be in my presence.
I was also not supposed to date again – not in the sense of exclusivity. After Gina, the whole idea of taking someone out on dinners and pleasing them into bed while seeing nobody else had seemed so ludicrous, yet when it came to Aria I had been completely fine with having an entire clause regarding exclusivity. Hell, I couldn’t even remember the last time I had been exclusive even for a day – yet Aria had compelled me to do so for over three months.
I couldn’t quite believe the effect she had on me sometimes, yet I understood where it all came from. She was intelligent far beyond her years – and far beyond most women I had met, much older and more successful – and that didn’t simply stick to her textbooks and papers. She exuded charm and wit regularly, in everyday conversations, in her sarcastic retorts to me, in almost everything she said and did.
And then, there was the way she defied me. Hell, that frustrated me endlessly, so much so that sometimes I just wanted to rip my hair apart and shred the fucking contract. At the same time, it was completely enthralling. Nobody stood up to me like Aria was capable of doing. Since the very first day when I proposed the contract, she had refused to take shit from me and convinced me that the best way to do it was her way, adding in her own clauses, bargaining with me. Then, when I had tried to control who she spoke to, alluding to the contract, she had straight up told me off and threatened to quit even though deep down I knew that she wouldn’t actually be able to pull it off because she really needed the money for her mother’s bill. The fact that she temporarily believed that she could and demonstrated her stubborn attitude was just as endearing as it was maddening.
The fact that she could exasperate me so very much and yet I was completely mesmerized by her meant that I had done one more thing I had promised myself I would never do again; I had fallen in love with Aria Roberts. As soon as the thought hit my mind, I began feeling a jolt of raw excitement, combined with joy, in every vein in my body. I grabbed Aria, who was getting ready to go out of the shower and into my bedroom, and shoved her back into the tub and looked deep into her eyes.
“Zayden,” she said nervously.
“No. Don’t say anything,” I said, not wanting to ruin this moment with words. Instead, I bent down towards her and kissed her gently across the mouth, more gently than I had thought I was capable of. Then, I slowly parted her mouth, trying to ignore my urges to devour her, so that this moment somehow demonstrated the love I was feeling erupting inside me, without actually saying a word. Very lightly, I put my tongue inside her mouth and felt her nipples begin to harden beneath my palm. Rubbing them gently, I began to explore her mouth softly, then sucked on her lower lip.
I broke off and pulled her up. “Bedroom,” was the only word I said. She nodded, her eyes glinting with the very desire I felt in my veins. As soon as we got there, I threw her into my huge bed. I leaned down to kiss her breasts from the side of the bed, which had a surprisingly strong effect on her, as she looked at me with her hand slightly shivering.
“Touch yourself,” I groaned into her right breast, then took almost all of it into my mouth and sucked on it as hard as I could.
“What?” She sounded confused and disoriented and very much pleasured.
I took my mouth off from her tightening nipples, looked her in the eyes and repeated, “I said, touch yourself, Aria. Touch your pussy and moan for me. I want to see you make yourself come while I devour your perfect little breasts.”
“I’ve – I’ve never,” she said nervously. “I have never really done that.”
That genuinely took me by surprise. I had yet to meet a woman who hadn’t at a very young age discovered how to make herself feel sexual pleasures. Girls often just offered to put on a show for me that involved a striptease followed by a self-induced orgasm. I had just assumed every single girl did that. Of course, Aria was different. In a flash of inspiration, I grabbed her hair tightly and spanked her
lightly on the ass.
Looking sternly into her eyes, I said in a very low voice, “Are you going to defy me in bed too, or are you going to make yourself come? Now?”
As I had hoped, Aria was significantly more open to the idea of being controlled in bed than she had been in other aspects of her life, for I could see her pussy getting wetter upon hearing these words. Without any further protests, she began rubbing herself at her clit, and her eyes looked like she was confused yet delighted.