He grabbed her wrist and halted her, his forehead gently weighing down on hers as he dragged in a haggard breath. She was panting, breathing through her mouth, and the sounds made him raise his head and tempted him to push his wet finger into her mouth.
She licked him mindlessly, recognizing her taste from yesterday, and his eyes flashed green fire as he watched.
“If I stay, every single one of your employees out there will know I’m fucking you. Is that what you want?”
She released him and shook her head, swallowing, hating at this very moment the very image she had tried her entire life to create. One that never erred. Hardly human. The paparazzi would never find anything in Monica Davenport to soil, to hurt, or to try to destroy. The first stabs of physical desire denied struck her with painful force, and she could barely look up at the source of her desperate wanting without aching all over.
“Thank you,” she murmured, reaching out to cup his jaw, but she caught the motion and dropped her arm before another touch ignited the uncontrollable fire again.
As the door shut behind him, Monica sat down in the one chair, trembling, aching for him to come back, her body out of order. Haywired. She massaged her temple and talked to herself inside her head, saying that this was only a sexual thing, like hunger, and there was no need to panic. He would be hers tonight again. He’d said so. He’d be in her bed tonight, and she’d feel him inside her. She had over a week to get this matter resolved before her talk with Roland, and by then, she’d better get this situation under control.
It took her long minutes of deep breathing to try to get her emotions under grips. Then she put on her Botox face—the one devoid of emotion—and her clothes, and headed upstairs to the boardroom.
He was the first one she saw. As always, his presence dominated the entire room and the rest of the eight members of her board. She greeted and smiled softly at everyone, but especially softly at Daniel, and in her eyes she knew he could see the words I want you. I want you inside me again.…
As the reading of the minutes from the previous board meeting was underway, Monica could still feel that telling dampness between her legs, so creamy that it slid down the inside of one thigh. Her body didn’t even allow for the normal workings of her brain. It astounded her when she couldn’t follow the conversation. She’d never had thoughts about anything other than Davenport’s during a board meeting before, but now her mind scrambled and only seemed to focus on him, across the table from her.
She wanted to slide her fingers down his body and over the thatch of blond hair where his sex began. She wanted to see if he was still hard, if he still wanted her like she wanted him.
Her assistant poured coffee for the gentlemen, and Monica envied her nearness to Daniel. Every meeting, Monica would always watch him more than anyone else, noticing whether something that was said would make him tilt his head, narrow his eyes, or look down at his pen with a bored expression.
She rarely openly asked for his advice, and yet her ultimate decisions always, always, weighed in Daniel’s reactions. Today, he seemed about as interested in the conversation as she was.
His attention seemed solely for her, and his eyes were so hot she felt seared by them. His eyes repeated his previous words in the cashmere throws, all that and more, reverberating inside her as he looked at her. I could eat you up alive. I’m going to lick you. Bite you. Fuck every little part of you.
She trembled in her seat and almost moaned. She wanted his mouth, his hands, his skin. It was foreplay at a boardroom table and Monica knew it was wrong, wrong, wrong, but she’d been pressed against Daniel only moments ago, surrounded by him and cashmere, and she had never, ever, wanted anything like this.
Even her assistant, Kristy, who’d only admired him from afar, had been gushing for minutes about Daniel’s body, his face, how hot he was. And she hadn’t gotten to feel his erection. Hadn’t had to listen to him tell her that it was for her. She had not had his fingers inside her, his mouth behind the stage, melting into hers.
Envying her proximity to him, Monica watched her assistant as she went to refill his cup. She saw how she pressed her breast into his shoulder as she poured his coffee, and Monica’s insides suddenly froze.
A surprising sensation snared her in a deathlike grip, tightening around her stomach as Kristy’s breast remained there, lightly brushing against his shoulder. She bent her head in an unmistakably seductive move and asked if he liked the coffee today, and Monica boiled in silent anger. Daniel didn’t move, but his eyes flicked up to Monica. He smiled mischievously at her.
Seething, Monica pulled her eyes free and stared at her own steaming coffee. She didn’t know what Daniel answered, but she heard the rumble of his voice say something in response.
Jealousy spun round and round inside her. Jealousy which, although thoroughly confusing, was also totally unfounded. He was her friend. They weren’t monogamous. He might, and could, have tons of other fuck buddies at the moment. They were friends. Friends. With a temporary arrangement.
That was the logical explanation, she kept telling herself.
But the illogical was the sticky, icky, awful roiling sensation taking hold of her. The fact that she was sleeping with him made her feel incredibly, strangely proprietary, and suddenly Kristy could have been her father’s stewardess pressing her breasts into his hands during a flight, and Daniel could’ve been her father letting her, and Monica could have been her mother … slowly dying when she found out what else had happened next.
Her eyes blurred, unexpectedly, at that memory.
They had been so happy as a family. Her father would raise her in the air and she would be an “airplane.” Her mother would teach her to bake every Saturday because a woman had to be a “complete” package and know a little of everything. They had called each other dear and my love and honey, and they had called Monica their baby. Then they had started calling each other bitch, asshole, and whore, and Monica had stopped getting hugs and kisses from them for months before their end.
She had been so careful not to let anything like this come inside her.
And now she sat here, in her very own boardroom of the very company she had dedicated the last decade to; here she was struggling to push out all the emotions she had stupidly let in by asking Daniel Lexington to sleep with her.
Why, oh, why, had she sought Daniel out?
She’d thought it would solve her problems with Roland and help her unearth her strange lack of affection for her romantic partners. She’d thought she would begin a healthy relationship with her own body, not believing that a woman who could have made such a success with Davenport’s could have such a lousy private life to begin with.