One Week (HaleStorm) (12 page)

It was late. Most everybody had left early for the holiday. Still, they couldn’t—shouldn’t—be doing this. Not here. Not at all. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“What isn’t a good idea?”

“I know what you’re thinking. We agreed it was only one time.” Her stomach burned even as the words came out of her mouth. She thought of the encounter she’d had in the bathroom earlier that day. “What about your wife?”

“Ex-wife. Ex.”

“Not yet.”

“A matter of time.” He came forward and slid a hand around her waist.

“What if.... What if she doesn’t want to sign the papers?” She hesitated to touch back, instead keeping one hand poised right above the heat of his shoulder.

“Then lawyers get involved and it gets ugly. I don’t want it to, but trust me. That marriage was over before it began. We haven’t even lived together for more than a year.”

Elise exhaled a sigh of relief. She let her hand drop to his arm. “I wouldn’t want to get in the middle of anything. I can’t
.
”

He reached a hand out to touch her hair. “I wouldn’t do this with you, if I wasn’t certain. You can’t possibly think I would.”

She nodded, too overcome by the commanding grip of his other hand on her hip to think of much else. How could she have thought otherwise of him? All those years of carrying around that old hurt. Old habits that no longer served her.

His face hovered close to hers. “I had a big win earlier this afternoon.” His breath tickled her neck as he bent to her ear. “Through it all I couldn’t stop thinking of how much I wanted to celebrate with you. How much I wanted to be with you. Inside you.”

God.
God.

“Michael....” Her knees might have buckled if he hadn’t slipped his arms around her waist, the thickness of his erection pressing right between her legs. His hands slid everywhere, around to her ass, up her side, cupping her breasts. He pinched her nipples gently, then harder, sending shockwaves of pleasure straight to her core. It was like his hands completely short-circuited the part of her that wanted to stay insulated from his potential to hurt her again.

She kept trying to pull back, figure out her feelings. But when he touched her all she managed to feel was the electricity of his skin on hers.

“I want you,” he said. “I want you so badly that getting inside of you is all I’ve been able to think about since the last time. Wanted you five years ago. Want you now.” He spun her around, placing her hand on the edge of the conference room table. “Please,” he murmured in her ear. “Please.”

She nodded, not trusting her own voice. Hell, if she moved or spoke, the moment could be shattered. One of them would come to their senses. Her knees would collapse. The building would catch fire. God knew she might.

Cold worry shot through her. She needed to let him know she had a condom in her purse, but thank goodness he had one. He got as far as unbuckling his pants and pushing up her skirt, when.... “No underwear?”

She struggled for breath. “I’m a little low on clean clothes.”

He slid his fingers inside of her. “If I had known you’d been walking around all day in this gorgeous skirt with your long-as-hell legs and no...” He pumped his fingers in and out. “...underwear. Would have fucking killed me.”

She moaned at the heat, the strength of his hand. “You’re killing me now.”

He pulled back long enough to suit up and nudged her legs wide. When he pushed inside she nearly passed out from the ache and the pleasure. One of his hands cupped her breast and the other went lower, one finger circling her clit. He’d barely started making love to her and already she was on the verge of orgasm. “Oh, God....” She couldn’t do much more than steady herself on the table for fear of disturbing the documents she’d stacked so neatly. “Someone could hear us.”

“Nobody’s here. Only us.”

“Only us,” she whispered back. Lord, she hoped so.

He thrust deep and slow, undulating over her. Her nerves fired with a million sensations: his buttons and tie against her back, his lips and breath on her neck. The cool wood of the table under her stomach and fingers, and his hand on her breast. His fingertips and cock working her in concert and the gathering storm in her core, bringing her closer and closer to an epic nuclear meltdown.

“You feel so good,” he whispered in her ear. “You have no idea. Like coming home.”

Oh hell, he couldn’t say things like that to her. It made her want things she couldn’t have.

***

M
ichael wasn’t even sure what was tumbling out of his mouth. As he pushed inside Elise, his eyes rolled back in his head and all sorts of curses and promises fell from his lips. Things he couldn’t and shouldn’t want to give her. Things he’d wanted to give her since he’d first laid eyes on her all those years ago. Good things. Honorable things. Dirty fucking filthy things.

Her blouse had come open, praise be to the gods of amazing office sex. He slid his fingers into her mouth and then inside her bra, slipping that nipple between his fingers, letting it harden, rolling it around.

He thrust slow and steady, in time to her moans, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, as they both picked up speed, he decided he wanted to draw this thing out, just... a... little....

“What...?” She gasped and whimpered when he pulled out and stayed poised, not quite inside her. She pushed back and he gripped her ass, massaging and walking his fingers around toward her hips. He pressed that sensitive clit of hers again with his index finger, moving in tiny circles.

“Oh, come on, what are you doing?”

He smiled. “Savoring.”

She turned her head to the side to give him a nasty glare, but then bit her lip and lifted up onto her toes when he stroked faster. “Damn you!”

He pulled her hips back to meet him. “Well you didn’t seem to like the idea of my savoring,” he whispered.

“I want you to get back inside me, and finish.” This said with a fierce stare and gritted teeth like maybe they were facing off over an intense negotiation and not making love.

His fingers stopped. “Oh. You do?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Are you being serious with this? Because listen, you can’t always be the one in con—”

He groaned and dug his fingers into her hips, his dick poised and hungry to push back inside her. “God, you’re fucking gorgeous, the way your chest and face are all flushed. I love to see your body blush as deep red as your hair.”

“Michael....”

“Yes. What?” Her breath came deep and heavy, and when she gave him the long, hard stare, he knew he’d won. He thought he even picked up a tremor in her body when he started to ease in. “Yes, please,” she ground out.

Fuck yeah.
He thrust forward like his life depended on getting her an orgasm. Steady. Fast. Hard.

His pace increased, matching his strokes with the force she used to push her ass back against him. Buttons popped when he pulled her shirt the rest of the way open. His hands slid over her stomach, and back to where to the magic happened, because she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and he wanted to make her feel amazing.

“Come for me, Elise.” His three fingers strummed her faster, guided by her moans and her high-pitched whines. He kissed her neck and her back, he put his bite marks all over her shoulders. When she cried out and her slick walls clamped down around him, he groaned out his release as well. She wrung it out of him, reaching back to grip his hip and keeping him close until the very end. Michael honestly thought he might explode.

They breathed together for a minute or two, until finally he pulled out and they both set about getting themselves straightened up. Her blouse wouldn’t fasten entirely, but they were alone in the building and the offices were closed for the night.

She jumped when a knock came at the door. “You said we were alone.”

Okay, they were alone except for security.

He turned to open it, shielding her with his body. The night guard stood outside. “Everything okay Mr. Hale? I thought I heard shouting.”

He cleared his throat. “Just great, thank you. Celebrating a victory. Sorry to make you worry.”

“Not a problem. Just doing my job.”

When he turned back, Elise was checking messages on her phone. “Everything okay?” He picked up one of her shoes and handed it over.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. But the look on her face suggested otherwise.

“You’re certain?”

“Sure. Just an ex who can’t take the hint. I’ve been ignoring the calls.” She seemed flustered, and whether that was from their victory lap on the table or the message she’d gotten, he couldn’t know.

He shrugged. “None of my business who you used to date.”

At that, her shoulders relaxed and her wide smile returned. “Let’s talk about something different. So your meeting went well?”

“Exceptionally.”

“I guess that explains why you came in here in such a frisky mood.”

He laughed. Inside though, he got quiet. He’d wanted her not because he’d come in the room and seen her bent over a table, but because he’d spent the whole drive back high from wiping that smug look off of Anya Evans’s face. The night before he’d nearly lost his shit after sitting in a pub with his brother and he’d wanted her then, too. He’d wanted to return to her warmth, her certainty. Leaning on her this way could not become a habit.

He gave a vague gesture with his chin. “How about your afternoon?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Not bad.” But another frown crossed her face. Did he know her well enough to know for certain she was holding something back? He thought he did. “Tell you what though,” she said with a yawn. “No offense, but I hate these mission critical projects. I come in while it’s still dark and when I leave it’s still dark. I don’t know when I last saw the sunrise or the sunset.” She propped her chin on a fist. “It can be hell on a girl’s good nature.”

“Maybe you and I should have dinner somewhere tomorrow,” he said. “Neither of us have other plans for Thanksgiving, right? We could see the sunset.”

She blinked. “You don’t mean like a date, do you?”

Careful, Michael. Here be dragons
. “Look, where are we on the Justice documentation?”

She pointed to her stack of spreadsheets, now slightly off-center due to their lovemaking. “I’ve actually made really good progress. Tom was able to help a little while you were gone after all. For the policy stuff I went to your software team, pretended I was a new employee, played dumb until they got tired of answering all my questions.” She grinned. “Worked great.”

“Plan C?”

“Plan C.”

The steady ache Michael had been carrying in his shoulders eased slightly. “You’re good at problem solving. I do appreciate all your hard work.”

“It’s my job.” She fixed her steady stare on his while still trying to do up her shirt. “Which is why we shouldn’t be going out on something that feels like a date. It only confuses things further. We shouldn’t have done what we just did, either, but spilt milk and whatnot.” She made a frustrated face and gave up on the button.

Michael stepped forward. Carefully, he slipped the barely-hanging-on button into its hole. “We’ll both be here all day tomorrow glued to our damned computers. God willing this project will successfully be in the bag soon. Might as well celebrate together, right?” He took a half step back, hands in his pockets now. “Come on. Just dinner. Like we used to do all the time when you worked under me.”

He smiled slightly at the extremely Freudian slip, and she blushed. Again. Fucking adorable.

“Just dinner?”

“I swear.”

“Okay.”

H
e found a nice Chinese restaurant in Tysons Corner to share an early Thanksgiving meal. They arrived just as the sun dipped low in the sky, and Michael couldn’t resist the urge to grab Elise around the waist as they entered and turn her toward the horizon. “There’s your sunset,” he whispered in her ear.

Her sigh and body language indicated contentment and relaxation. Something he hadn’t quite seen from her all week. “It’s gorgeous. Thank you.” She smiled up at him. “You’re being unbelievably sweet. I’ll be sure to enjoy all of this while it lasts.”

She’d worn a long coat with fuzzy trim that tickled his throat. He used that as his excuse for the number of times he swallowed. “While it lasts.”

She turned toward him with one hand on either side of her face. “I’m so sorry, that came out all wrong. It’s only that.... I mean, we both agreed this wasn’t going to go anywhere. I want to just enjoy this for what it is. Don’t men hate it when women have unrealistic expectations?”

Michael frowned, thinking back to the things he’d said the night before while they’d made love. Yes, they’d been in the heat of passion. But when he’d gone home alone and lay awake in bed, he’d replayed them all again. When he’d held those words up to test them for truth, they’d passed.

He’d wanted her the day of that first kiss they’d shared five years ago. No. Long before. Did he even know when it had started? Was it the night she’d stayed in the office with him until four in the morning to help troubleshoot a support ticket, or the night after when they’d celebrated with foosball in the break room and she’d shocked him by swearing enough to make a sailor blush? Perhaps it had been the day he’d heard her arguing with her mother at her lunch break, and the idea that he’d found a kindred spirit touched something undefined deep inside him.

Now? Her kiss still set him on fire, making love to her even more. He shook his head. “Soon this project will be over and my divorce will be final.” He gripped her chilly hand. “I’ve been thinking I’d like us to keep seeing each other.”

She seemed thoughtful as she hugged her arms against her body, pulling her coat around her tighter. “You know, it’s shaping up to be a really gorgeous evening. I heard on the radio this morning that it might even snow.”

He rested his chin on the top of her head, waiting. Whatever reason she had for refusing to answer, Michael refused equally to cave to fear simply because she held out on him. “Sky’s nice and clear,” he said instead. “Perhaps we can go in there, have a nice dinner, and there will be a sky full of stars when we come back outside.”