“I’m really not interested in hearing what you have to say.”
Pause.
“Please don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Promise me you won’t tell him. That’s all I ask.”
Pause.
“Yeah, well, I have a job to go to. Bye.”
She stood up. I pretended I didn’t see her, pushing the door open and waltzing to the open elevator. She was a few feet behind me, so when I turned around, our eyes met. She hurried to catch my elevator—of course I didn’t push the hold button—and sneaked in at the last second. There were two more people inside. Two assholes who went to the second floor. HR.
“Hi,” she breathed, turning around to give me her back and ass. Not a bad deal.
I nodded solemnly.
Silence. Silence. Silence. She didn’t act shy or awkward. Something about this morning told me she had more pressing issues to deal with than sucking her boss’s dick, and I decided on a whim that I needed to know what was on her mind.
Naturally, talking to her was out of the question. She sassed way too much and always nagged me about my behavior. No. I fired a quick text message to one of my reporters, Dan, with her name and address while the elevator made its way to the sixth floor in record negative time.
Célian: Judith Humphry. Her file is with HR. I want to know everything there is to know about her, from her education to her favorite color. Who she fucks, who she lives with, who she talks to.
I fingered my chin, watching my message and firing off another one immediately.
Célian: And how many pairs of Chucks she has.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t any of my business. But Judith was shaping up to be such a trainwreck—stealing from her boss, then fucking him, then avoiding him, then sucking him off, then having public fights with people on the phone outside her work building—I wanted to make sure she was on the sanity spectrum.
When we got to our floor, we walked straight into the newsroom. The first rundown meeting was in ten minutes. She walked over to her desk with that damn notebook clutched to her chest.
“Humphry, join us in the conference room,” I heard myself say.
She perked, bit down a smile, then opened the notebook and scribbled something into it. Fast. Lord. She was so fucking thirsty for the job. I let Brianna dispose of the iPad in my palm and shooed her away.
“You’ll be taking notes, Judith, not making suggestions,” I said.
I was careful to treat her exactly as I would any other reporter in her position. I was already an insufferable prick, so I wasn’t particularly awful to her. But I was also fair, and after a week, she’d earned the right to sit, listen, and absorb.
She kept her eyes on her notebook. “A girl can dream.”
“Happy to fulfill your other fantasies.” Good thing Brianna had started working on her cardio and was already on the other side of the floor. We were almost alone, early, eager fuckers that we were.
“I actually have one you could help me with.”
“Unless it involves me tying you to a bed, I’m not really interested in hearing about it,” I said, setting fire to the entire conversation we’d had last week about my dancing on a red line. I sprinted through that fucker all the way to the finish line of sexual harassment. Not that I was harassing Jude, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which she sucked my dick, but if she wanted ammo on me, I’d stupidly given her that.
“It actually involved me tying you to a bed.” She batted her lashes, and for an unknown reason, didn’t look annoying doing so.
Normally, I liked being the one doing the tying, but for Humphry, I could make an exception. She stepped toward me, her tongue sweeping over her lower lip.
“Then I’ll strap a ball gag to your mouth…”
I curved a brow, raking my eyes slowly over her body and undressing her item by item. She was high if she thought I’d put anything in my mouth that wasn’t a part of her body. By the time she was in front of me, she was stark naked in my head, her voice dripping honey and sex all over my fucking loafers.
“Then,” she whispered, her pillowy lips moving against my ear. “I’ll set the whole damn thing on fire, with you in it.”
I smiled. Judith Humphry was a massive pain in the ass. Not only was she a natural blond, shit-hot, and the owner of the best pair of lips in the tristate area (both pairs, if we’re perfectly honest), but she was also sharp as a razor—the opposite of my usual pushover flavor of the night.
“If you ever had the pleasure of getting in bed with me again…” I narrowed my cold eyes on hers. “You would be the one to catch fire, and we both know it.”