His Terms

What annoyed him was this attraction he had toward her. He knew he was a difficult man, but that was how he had gotten to where he was in life. A weak man wouldn’t own and run what he did at only thirty-seven, and he wasn’t about to change to appease anyone. He walked over to his floor to ceiling window and stared at the bustling city of New York below. Sorcha had been working for him for less than a year, and even though he had been romantically involved with a few of his secretaries in the past, that had always led to disastrous situations.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he stared at the sight before him. There was an overcast sky, and it matched his fucked-up mood. After some minor drama with some news tabloids he was in a pissy ass mood. The buzzer on his intercom went off, but he didn’t turn around.

“Mr. Hartford, Lawson Trainfore is on line one,” Sorcha said, and when he didn’t respond the line clicked off. He turned and faced the phone, knowing that if his PR rep was calling him this early then it was because of the paper and the article he had read about himself this morning. He sat at his desk and picked up his phone.

“Lawson, hello.”

“Rian, have you see the paper this morning?”

Rian breathed out and rested his head against the back of his chair. “Yes, unfortunately.”

“Seems like another one of your past lovers leaked incriminating information about you.”

He rubbed his eyes. “There were only a few that were disgruntled, Lawson, and that wasn’t because I was an asshole to them. They knew what I wanted, and that a relationship was not in the future for us. It is hardly my fault that they grew attached after only a few nights of sex.”

“Rian, I’m not worried that Miss Virginia Harrison is claiming that you made her ass so red she couldn’t even sit down for several days after that…”

Rian grinned.

Lawson cleared his throat. “Well, I won’t get into the specifics, but having your name splashed across the newspaper because you like spanking your sexual partners with fervor is bad for your image.” So Rian liked a little smack on the ass of the women he fucked here and there. It wasn’t like he was a fiend for it, and he certainly didn’t do it every time he had sex. “Maybe I shouldn’t have spanked the ass of Senator Harrison’s daughter, but she was so prim and proper that I couldn’t help myself.”

Lawson started speaking about technicalities, and Rian looked out his window again. “Anything I did with any of my sexual partners in the past, present, or in the future, was and always will be consensual. I only skimmed the front page, but is Miss Harrison claiming otherwise?” Maybe Rian should have cared more, or been more concerned that yet another one of his past partners had gone to the media. But he wasn’t. This wasn’t the first time someone he had fucked had come out and said what they had done, and most likely wouldn’t be the last either.

“No, she says everything you two did was consenting—”

“So she did it to garner attention, like the rest of them, because they were pissed I didn’t want anything more than a few hours of fucking.”

Lawson cleared his throat, and Rian could picture the elderly man adjusting on his seat from what was probably a very uncomfortable conversation for him. Rian scrubbed a hand over his face.

“It’ll blow over like it always does.”

There was a knock on the door, and then Sorcha was pushing it open and walking in. She held his tablet that would have all of his pertinent information for the day loaded on it. He enjoyed actually looking at hard copies of what he was to do for the day, but it wasn’t because he was trying to make things harder for her. There were a lot of things that could go wrong with technology, and he was definitely old fashioned when it came to that aspect in his life.

“How do you want to proceed? We can fire back with a public statement—”

“No, let Miss Harrison have her day, and tell the media and public whatever the fuck she wants.”

“Rian, I would suggest we not proceed that way. I think we should make a formal announcement—”

“No.” He cut off Lawson again and kept his gaze trained right on his secretary. Sorcha set the tablet on the table in front of him, and they made eye contact briefly. “She can’t do much harm. Besides, it isn’t like a few women I fucked in the past haven’t told the public.” He stared right into Sorcha’s eyes as he said the words. Although he knew being so blunt about the women he had screwed right in front of her was a douche-bag thing to do, there was this side of him that liked getting a rise out of her.