The Boss (The Boss 1)

“Do you ever watch porn in here?” The word ‘porn’ makes me giggle. I can’t help it.

“Sophie, don’t be juvenile.” He sighed impatiently. “Of course I do. The picture is incredible and there’s no danger of getting semen on my laptop.”

I shook my head and covered my face with my hands, laughing as he got up from the bed and relocated the pizza box and wine glasses. “Is that something you’d be interested in? Watching porn and fucking in here?”

It felt like such a natural question, like he was asking me if I’d like pancakes for breakfast. “Yeah, I think it could be fun. You know... I’ve never been with someone who talks about sex the way you do. I mean, in my other relationships we could have sex, we just couldn’t talk about it like this.”

“If you can’t talk about it, you damn well shouldn’t be having it,” he observed, draining his glass in a heroic swallow.

“You’re right.” I got to my knees on the bed. It was made up with pillows and blankets that matched the burgundy velvet upholstery of the theater seating around it. “Is there any reason we can’t watch porn and do dirty stuff tonight?”

“None at all.” He walked slowly over the to bed, an uncertain expression on his face. “I’m a bit surprised, though. I thought women of your generation had a problem with pornography.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve seen women of my generation in porn,” I said dryly.

“Well, of course. I only meant...” he paused, and laughed. “You’re a feminist. I assumed that feminists... Didn’t care for that sort of thing.”

“We’re not a hive mind, Neil.” I rolled my eyes at him. “I like porn. Not like, the animated stuff with tentacles. And nothing super degrading. If you bust out a box of barely legal girls crying as a specific fetish, I’m probably not going to be happy about it.”

“No, nothing in the ‘barely legal girls crying’ genre, I’m afraid.” He sat down beside me and reached for the remote. He hit a button to open up a menu on the screen, selected “private” and entered a password.

“This is impressive.” I looked up at the projector. “Is there a hard drive in that?”

“Of course. Every porn-loving billionaire in his right mind is going completely digital these days.” He hit another button on the remote, and a gallery of thumbnail images popped up. “What are you in the mood for?”

I snorted as I looked at the pictures. There was a very similar theme going on there. “Looks like redheads are my only option.”

“Oh yes, um,” he looked over at me with an embarrassed, apologetic grin. “I like redheads.”

“I hate to tell you, but I don’t think I would look good as a redhead.” I lifted one long lock of decidedly brunette hair. “I could try it, if you want.”

“You’d better not,” he warned. “Don’t ever change your appearance solely to please me. I love you exactly the way you are.”

“As long as you don’t hire some new redheaded secretary to bend over your desk, I’ll be happy.” I pointed to the upper left corner of the screen. “What’s that one?”

“Excellent choice,” he said, his expression brightening. “Do you speak French?”

“Not even a little.”

“Well, the plot isn’t really important. The dialogue is atrocious.” He started the video.

I frowned. “Do you speak French?”

“I do.”

“Do you speak any other languages?” This was a fascinating side to him I’d never really considered before. He’d probably had a way better education than I’d had.

“Besides English? Icelandic is my second language, but I’d consider it almost native. I’m fluent in German and French, I speak some Dutch, a bit of Greek. I can do a tiny bit of Japanese, but I never quite get it right, and I’m reliably informed that my accent is awful.” He flashed me a smile and hit another button on the remote to dim the lights. “What about you?”

“Spanish.” I shrugged. “Not fluent, but I do okay.”

“That’s perfect then, isn’t it?” He sat down beside me and ran his hand down my back. “I can cover for us in Nice, you can help us get around Malaga.”

I snorted. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” A slight frown creased his forehead. “Sophie, I would love to go away on a holiday with you. To have you all to myself for more than two nights in a row, to spend all day with you and hold your hand in public without fearing someone from work is going to spot us. Just to relax with you, without work hanging over our heads.”

“We go to dinner together. We go running together,” I pointed out. But he was right, we were both silently rehearsing our cover stories the whole time. Oh, it was meant to be a business dinner, not a romantic, candle lit one, but the wait staff wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Maybe that’s something we could do in the future. Go some place warm and sunny, where I can wear a bikini.”