“How did she look afterward?”
“Shaken up a little but otherwise okay.”
Fucking Jake Whitehurst. After finishing with Moe, Ben called Bataar.
“You want daily reports on Jake,” Bataar guessed before Ben had said anything.
“I don’t want the fucker anywhere near Kimani,” Ben said. “Make sure your guys are in communication with each other so that what happened today doesn’t happen again. The dipshit knows he can’t touch me, so he’s going after her instead.”
“I’m on it, boss.”
Ben hung up, but he didn’t feel mollified. Part of him wanted to confront Jake, even let the wanker come at him if it meant he would leave Kimani alone. He could threaten Jake, but that would only make Jake more passive-aggressive, and that kind of blustering and chest thumping was for men whose brains weren’t large enough to command their penises.
The screen on his desk phone indicated he had an incoming call from the Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Ben let it go to voicemail so that he could continue his thoughts on Jake. He had never like the guy, but unlike Kimani, he’d underestimated what Jake was capable of. What was it going to take to get the guy to leave Kimani alone?
Leaning back in his chair, Ben closed his eyes to slow the swirl of thoughts and emotions. Bumping into Kimani had kicked up a sandstorm of conflicting desires.
It had not been an easy weekend.
After deciding he was going to The Lair, he had told Eumie he was going to put her up at a hotel or, if she wanted, he would fly her back to Hong Kong.
She had not received it well.
“What’s the matter with you men?” she’d asked while she threw her things into her suitcase. “I thought we had a nice arrangement, but too much sex and you freak out that we’re in a relationship?”
He didn’t say anything. It was better she believed that than the real reason he didn’t want her around anymore.
But even if she wasn’t especially astute, she had a woman’s intuition.
“Or is it someone else?” she had realized, narrowing her eyes at him. “You planning to go pussy-hopping?”
“None of your business if I did,” he replied.
“Who is she? Don’t tell me it’s that black girl I saw you talking to today? Does your father know you’re banging a black person?”
“I don’t care what my father does or doesn’t know.”
She had given him a look of disgust, and he’d left her to finish packing on her own.
He hadn’t planned on having sex with Kimani when he’d arrived at The Lair, but he’d known he wanted to. The thought of her submitting to another man was too much.
She. Was. His.
The sex hadn’t satiated him at all. He wanted more. He wanted to keep her.
When he had stopped her from leaving at first, he had been tempted to say something to that effect. But the moment had passed, and he had allowed it to. He didn’t want to be rash. While pounding into her had been cathartic and diffused his anger, it had only amplified his desire for her. And knowing, seeing, smelling, hearing her responding to him, wanting him as much as he wanted her, was the headiest aphrodisiac.
I want to fuck you.
While he had insisted on being the one doing the fucking, no words had ever sounded hotter or sexier. There was so much more he wanted to do to her. If he’d had the whole week with her that he’d paid for...it still wouldn’t have been enough.
The desk phone beeped, indicating he had a new voicemail message. Opening his eyes, he glanced at the screen to see the transcription. The dean had tickets to an upcoming Stanford football game, 50-yard line, and was offering them to Ben, whom he was soliciting for an endowment for a new faculty position.
Ben immediately thought of Kimani. She hadn’t mentioned if she liked football, but he imagined she might, imagined how her eyes might light up if he invited her to the game.
It would be a date. Though their evening at Ishikawa West had looked like a date, they had had to have dinner somewhere, so why not a Michelin three-star restaurant? But a football game would say something different.
Picking up the phone, he decided to call the dean back to accept the tickets.