Page 20 of Boss With Benefits

She tightened her legs around his hips and dug her fingers into his back, her blood on fire, her breathing rough. Then somehow, he slipped his hand between them, skilfully finding the spot where she pulsed and burned, and she shattered, gasping, panting, crying out his name. A second later, with a muffled roar, he buried himself deep inside her one last time and collapsed.

‘Well, that was worth waiting for,’ she murmured once she’d regained her breath and he’d lifted his weight off her.

‘That’s just the start of it,’ he muttered raggedly, staring down at her, his glittering gaze filled with promise. ‘We have days to make up for, and as you know, my imagination’s been hard at work.’

‘So’s mine,’ she said with a delicious little shiver.

‘Show me.’

While Ella lay sprawled on the bed beside him, the midnight moonlight giving her skin a silvery glow, Adam reflected that she had been bang on with her observation about delayed gratification.

The last week in the office had been insanely tough. Never had his self-control been so tested. He lost count of the number of times he’d been forced to remind himself of his commitment to the bet and the significance of the audit for his takeover in order to stop himself from buckling beneath the overwhelming crush of desire and taking her where she sat. And he’d evidently developed masochistic tendencies, because he could have drummed up any number of meetings to spare himself the torment of having her constantly in his line of sight, but he hadn’t. He could also have let her move downstairs as she’d wished, but he hadn’t done that either.

So much for the assumption that arranging an affair would ease what remained of the audit, he’d thought every time he’d stepped into the shower and flipped the dial to cold. In practice, the unbearable week had crawled by so slowly it had frequently felt as though time were going backwards. The plane ride down here, during which he’d let his imagination run riot and caused himself a whole lot of pain in the process, had seemed to last years instead of hours.

And yet he’d undergo every single second of it all over again if it meant the kind of sex they’d spent the afternoon having. What they’d got up to had far surpassed anything his feeble imagination had managed to conjure up. One minute it was feverish, frantic and explosive. The next it was slow and thorough, though nonetheless earth-shattering. There was barely an inch of her he hadn’t explored at length, and she’d spent a good hour tormenting him with her hands, mouth and hair while he simply lay back and surrendered. Her insatiability—and his—would be the death of him. Not even in his wildest days as a reckless teenager had he lost it so hard and so often. And best of all, they had an entire three weeks of it.

The intensity of the experience was greater than he’d been expecting. Greater than anything he’d come across before, in fact. But he had no doubt that it would soon fade. It invariably did. And most likely it was caused by a five-day run-up that had been as hot as it could be without physical contact anyway.

Nor was he overly concerned by the efforts he’d made to arrange the affair. Practically speaking, all he’d had to do was make some calls and get out his cheque-book. Annabel, who’d been intending to spend the summer at an Austrian health retreat before he’d asked her to escort him around the city, had had no problem reviving that plan. It was the work of a moment to instruct the house to be opened up and another couple of hours to purchase the plane.

Telling Ella about the bet had not been difficult either. He wasn’t remotely concerned he wouldn’t win it, despite what she’d said. He’d briefly checked out theBlushmagazine website for the latest tally, and it was true that Cade and Zane had gone rather quiet on the dating front, but it was early days.

Furthermore, as he’d suspected, revealing the bare bones of his interest in Helberg had been fine too. She hadn’t pushed him further on why Montague’s was so important to him, whichwould certainly have been a trickier conversation to navigate, so on the whole, he was extremely satisfied with how everything had played out. And there was no denying that a plane for personal use would come in handy once the takeover was complete and he had more time on his hands.

The only thing he didn’t much like was the fact that she believed herself to be his dirty little secret. Despite the planning he’d done, he’d failed to consider the possibility she might think that. It disturbed his already compromised principles and left the hint of a bitter taste in his mouth. But if she could get over it, then so could he.

The crucial thing was that they were singing from the same hymn sheet. They were both in this just for the sex. Why that was important to her didn’t matter. All he needed to know about her was which position she fancied trying next.

CHAPTER NINE

SEVERALDAYSLATER, although quite how many she couldn’t be sure because she’d lost all sense of time and space, Ella woke late in the afternoon to an empty bed and the sound of the shower being switched off.

What a time she and Adam had been having, she thought with a languid stretch that eased the delightful ache in her muscles. There’d been so much sex. So much pleasure. He’d followed through on every one of the promises he’d made to her on the plane and she was delighted and relieved she’d suppressed her misgivings and agreed to come. She could not get enough of him. Which perhaps didn’t bode all that well for getting him out of her system, but this fling of theirs was still in its infancy.

With desire once again fluttering, Ella was wondering what was taking him so long when her phone beeped to alert her to an incoming email. Lazily, she rolled over and picked up the device. She unlocked it and opened the app—and sat bolt upright when she saw that the message was from her boss.

For a moment, she didn’t dare click on it, because this one message held her entire future in its hands. She thought the audit had gone well, but what if it hadn’t? What if something had gone wrong? What if somehow the conflict of interest she and Adam had both been so keen to ignore had been uncovered, the audit rendered invalid, and she was being fired?

Ella swallowed hard and pulled herself together. She took a deep breath and shook the tension from her shoulders. She was being ridiculous. Why would something have gone wrong?

Nevertheless, her stomach was tumbling and her chest was tight as she opened the email. With her heart in her mouth,she read it once, twice, a third time—and then punched the air in triumph, because she’d done it. She’d actually done it. The promotion was hers. All that hard work had paid off. She was back in from the cold with a twenty percent pay rise and assigned to a great big fat audit starting in September. Her career was back on track. Her future was secure. She could finally put the last horrible year behind her and move on. And, God, it was arelief, because she could now admit that she’d been more than a little nervous waiting for the verdict.

‘You look happy,’ said Adam, walking into the room, naked but for a towel around his waist and another around his neck.

Ella broke off the victory dance she was doing on the bed and beamed at him. ‘I just got that promotion I was after.’

She thought she saw a tiny frown crease his brow, but it was there and gone so fast she realised it must have been a trick of the light. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, flopping back against the pillows and admiring his broad, hard chest, which was glistening alluringly with water droplets. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am. It’s been long overdue.’

He pulled the towel from his neck and began to rub his hair dry. ‘I remember you saying you screwed up. What happened?’

Ella stilled for a second, the bubble of happiness bouncing around inside her deflating a fraction, because, damn, that had been careless. She’d inadvertently piqued his interest, and now she was in a spot because there were only two ways in which to respond—prevarication or confession.

Since she abhorred the first—to her it seemed not only weak but also a monumental waste of time—that only left the second. Which, most likely, meant telling him everything that had happened, everything she’d been through, when the whole sorry episode was behind her and she had no intention of ever thinking of it again. Because would he be satisfied witha dismissive wave of the hand and a vague muttering about ‘stuff’? She didn’t think so. He was all about the minutiae. Some responses to her emails during the audit, she recalled, had run to pages.

Quite honestly, the thought of reliving the ill-judged affair with Drew brought her out in a cold sweat. She’d never shared the full story with anyone. Not even her friends knew all the details. Admitting how stupid she’d been and exposing her fallibility to a supremely confident man like Adam, a man who’d likely never put a foot wrong in his life, appealed even less.

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