Page 40 of When Hearts Ignite

Keeping my stare on her, I palm my aching erection, giving it one hard tug, my teeth biting back a growl. Look at what you do to me. Then I slowly adjust my raging hard on, watching her eyes widen and flare as the pink on her face deepens. She lets out another soft whimper and I swallow my groan.

Fuck me.

“Grace.” My voice is husky and thick. “See you at the meeting.”

After retrieving my laptop bag, I step out of her cube and walk toward my office, feeling the heat of her stare on my back. Every step is torture, my body wanting to turn around and stride back to the woman behind me.

But the growing distance is a cool breeze to my fevered thoughts and rash impulses, and eventually, the haze of lust and a heady emotion I don’t want to name slowly clear my mind.

Friends, Steven.

Emotions are liabilities. Don’t forget.

This time, the warnings stick, the adhesive barely clinging on, and I clench my fists and step inside the room.

My eyes jolt open from the sound of a chime from my phone.

For a moment, I’m disoriented and the world swirls around me, a kaleidoscope of confusing bright lights and colors. My lungs heave in breaths of air as the cobwebs slowly clear from my mind.

The smell of eucalyptus hits my nose.

The blue light from the computer monitors in front of me.

Faint sounds of telephones ringing. Muted conversations. Cabinets opening and closing.

I’m in my office.

I must’ve fallen asleep—the late nights and early mornings are getting to me, my body protesting at the consistent three hours of sleep. But my mind lingers back to yesterday morning, when Grace licked my finger, giving me an experience more intense than any blow job I’d ever received, and a renewed heat travels through my veins and I groan.

This morning, when I showed up at her desk with her coffee in hand, she looked so flustered, her cheeks pinkened. She repeatedly gnawed on her lip, and I kept trying to make her squirm with low murmurs and raspy comments.

A perverse need to elicit a reaction from her.

God, I’ve regressed to being a teenager. Fuck.

Every nerve in my body is primed and zeroed in on her, this petite woman so resplendent, I wonder how the world doesn’t see it. Despite my best intentions to stay friends, those restraints fall away under the cloak of the darkness, and I just want her at my mercy.

Every graze of my hand on hers when I give her the drink, my fingers brushing a stray lock of hair fallen loose from her ponytail, my muscles clenching when I temper my need to wind those luscious strands around my hand before I plunder her lips.

It’s reciprocated. I can tell by her dilated pupils, her quickened breaths, the way her tongue keeps swiping at her lips. Despite my mind telling me to stop, my body disobeys and continues to perform this intimate dance with her.

Knock. Knock.

Straightening up in my chair, I holler, “Come in.”

My boss, Pietra Capital’s CEO, Sean Andrew Henry, III—if there’s a contest for the most pretentious name, he’d win it—strides in and takes a seat in front of me to have an impromptu meeting.

“Steven, this should be quick. Thought I’d get it out of the way before I forget.”

Cocking my brow, I clasp my hands in front of me. The way he’s shifting in the seat, his finger fiddling with his blue suit jacket which barely covers his waistline, is making me uneasy as my bullshit radar turns on. “What’s going on?”

“How do you feel about our crop of interns this year?”

My mind snags on Grace, the shining star out of the group. Her insights are sharp, and she frequently identifies issues or trends others don’t notice. It hasn’t escaped me how some analysts would huddle around her cubicle, asking her questions when they thought no one was looking.

“They’re decent, but one of them is stellar.”

Sean nods absentmindedly. “Good, good. Who’s the stellar one?”

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