I am not exaggerating; I am desperate for him. But considering we’re on a dance floor, I hardly expect my wish to come true. So I am surprised when he grips my arm and steers me toward the back of the club, then tugs me into a small elevator that he calls with a card key.
Despite the fact that I’m in a haze, I can’t help but notice the tension in his face. The hardness of his eyes. Not to mention the fact that he has yet to speak one word to me.
“Damien? What is it?”
The elevator opens and we are in an office. One wall is entirely glass, and I remember seeing it from below. It is made of reflective glass and surrounded by lights so that anyone who looks up sees only the distorted reflection of dancers surrounded by the glare of colored lights.
But from up here, we have a perfectly clear view of the club.
It is to that wall that Damien pushes me, until my back is to the glass and the dancers writhe beneath us and there is nowhere else for us to go.
The heat in his eyes is unmistakable, and I feel the corresponding pull inside of me. I don’t know what has happened or why he needs this, but right now it doesn’t matter. I am his, and he can take me however he needs.
How he needs, is rough.
He shoves my skirt up and rips off my panties, making me gasp. He lifts my leg and hooks it around him, so that I am completely exposed. The air against my hot sex makes me tremble, but it is the rub of his jeans against me as he tugs me toward him that sends tremors running through me.
His erection strains under the denim, and I gyrate my hips, stroking myself along his denim-clad cock, wanting to feel it inside me, needing him to fill me.
I meet his eyes, and he stays silent, but the need I see on his face is as potent as my own.
I practically dive for the buttons of his fly, then watch enraptured as he springs free. I want to touch him, to stroke him, but I have no time. He holds me by the hips, shifts my weight, and impales me on him so hard and fast that I swallow my scream.
He thrusts us both backward, slamming me against the glass, and for a moment, I imagine us tumbling over, falling to the dance floor, still connected, still fucking, while the whole world looks on. The fantasy only makes me more wet.
His gaze locks on mine as the intensity of his thrusts builds. I see his release growing in his eyes, and tighten my leg around him to pull him closer at the moment he goes over.
He shudders, still deep inside me, and I reach between us, my fingers rubbing his cock as I stroke my clit, faster and faster until I come, too, and my muscles tighten around him, pulling from him the last waves of the orgasm that still rocks through both of us.
Finally, we sink to the ground, breathing hard, our clothes and limbs tangled around us.
When the ability to move returns, I prop myself up on my elbow to look at him “Do you want to tell me what that was about?” I ask softly.
He reaches for me, then cups my face, his thumb stroking lightly over my chin. “Nobody fucks with what is mine.”
I frown, not understanding. “What’s yours? You mean me?”
He doesn’t answer, but the darkening intensity of his eyes tells me what I want to know.
“What happened?”
“I paid a visit to Giselle earlier. You won’t be working with her again.”
His words propel me to a sitting position. “What the fuck?” I think about her text. “Goddammit, Damien, quit talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.”
He lifts his hips so he can readjust his clothes. Then he stands. I scramble to do the same, and follow him back to that glass wall. “She was in the ATM footage. I confronted her, and she confessed she leaked the story about the portrait so she could get cash to help keep her business going after she and Bruce split. She also sold the story about Jamie and the Ferrari, not to mention the bullshit about our little love nest in Malibu.”
“What? No.” But even as I say it, I think about the intensity of her expression when I told her Jamie was staying in Malibu. And I think about all the financial trouble that she told me she was having as a result of her divorce.
Most of all, I think about that text. It was a confession, I now realize. A confession and an apology.
“But she’s the one who told me about the article in the Business Journal.”
“Camouflage,” he says. “She sells the story, then tells you. You’re both surprised together, and she looks innocent.”
My head is spinning. “Wait a second. You fired her? She was doing my walls in my office. If anyone was going to fire her, it should have been me.”
“I told you,” he says. “No one fucks with what’s mine.” There is an edge to his voice that I rarely hear. The edge that reminds me that, yes, Damien has a dangerous side. A ruthlessness that helped him win game after game of tennis in his youth, and then claw his way to the top of the corporate ladder without even breaking a sweat. He is not a man to be fucked with.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t him Giselle was fucking with. Maybe the articles were about the two of us, but she’d slipped her way into my office, into my life.
Damien is studying my face, and he’s obviously seeing my temper rising. “It’s done,” he says. “It’s over.”
“How is it done?”
“I explained to her that my lawyers were more than capable of dragging out multiple actions for defamation and invasion of privacy. She’s a businesswoman at heart, so she understands that I can keep a litigation going forever, but she’s going to have trouble finding a lawyer whose hourly rate doesn’t break her. We came to terms.”