Page 4 of Boss With Benefits

‘We have to be quick,’ she said raggedly, her cheeks flushed, her chest heaving.

‘That’s not going to be problem.’ Thanks to his recent fixation with Helberg Holdings, he hadn’t had sex in months and was wound so tightly he was about to explode.

Stepping forwards and pressing up against her, he swept her hair to one side and set his mouth to her neck. Her skin tasted faintly salty. The coconut scent of her shampoo wafted into his head. He briefly thought of the many holidays that gruelling sixteen-hour days hadn’t allowed him to take, but then she shivered and moaned, grinding her bottom into his groin, and he stopped thinking about anything at all.

Compelled by the primitive need to be inside her slick welcoming heat, Adam unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers. He pushed down the clothing that was in the way and, gritting his teeth, rolled on the condom he’d fished out of his wallet. He wanted to touch her everywhere, slowly and thoroughly, savouring the experience, but that wasn’t an option under the circumstances. So he put his hands on her bare upper arms and then ran them down her body, over her soft curves, until he reached the hem of her dress. They shook as he lifted it and stilled completely when he found her naked where he’d expected underwear.

‘I thought I’d save some time,’ she murmured in response to the hiss of his breath through his teeth.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said, his blood pumping through his veins even faster as he slid one hand round between her legs, feeling the dampness there, and pressed his fingers to her core. ‘I’m way beyond thought.’

Ella groaned and bent forwards, shifting her feet wider apart to allow him better access. ‘Hurry,’ she breathed unnecessarily,because he was already there, the blunt head of him pushing at her entrance. She gave her bottom a quick wiggle of encouragement—not that he needed it—and with one smooth hard thrust he lodged thickly inside her.

His heart lurched and then began to pound. She swore softly, closed her eyes and threw her head back, her golden hair shimmering in the low light. Bewitched by the sight of it as much as the ferocious desire thundering through him, he was barely aware of his hand gliding up her back and into the glorious tresses as he began to move in and out of her with long steady strokes.

‘Yes,’ she breathed on a ragged pant, granting him the permission he hadn’t even known he was seeking to close his fist around the silky strands close to her scalp and tug on them lightly.

Gasping, instinctively arching her back, she took him in further, the penetration at this angle so deep he saw stars. She opened her eyes and their gazes once again connected in the mirror, with an unexpected intimacy that tightened his chest. But he didn’t have the wherewithal to wonder why that should be. His control was fast disintegrating. The exquisite tension inside him was intensifying, the muscles in his stomach, his back and his chest contracting. His fingers were tightening around her hair and his thrusts were quickening.

Her breathing was harsh and the look in her eyes was wild, desperate, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold on, when suddenly she tensed and clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her cry as she shattered around him. Everything inside him spiralled in, sucking into a single point, a black hole in the pit of his groin. He thrust one last time, hard and deep, and the whole universe collapsed into nothingness before suddenly exploding out the other side into colour and light.

When feeling eventually returned to his limbs and his head had stopped spinning, Adam carefully withdrew and dealt with the condom, his body still spasming with tiny darts of lingering pleasure. As he put himself back together and regained control, Ella slowly straightened, smoothed her dress and her hair, then turned to face him, flushed, glowing, still slightly tousled.

‘That was...’ She shook her head, looking dumbstruck. ‘I don’t even know what that was.’

Neither did he. He’d never experienced anything like it. He usually deployed far more finesse, although he usually had far more time and these days he favoured a bed. All hedidknow was that he wanted to take her home and do what they’d just done over and over again in every position under the sun all night long—and not just because it would obliterate thoughts of difficult boards and troubling share prices. ‘How about that martini?’

For a moment, she looked torn and his pulse spiked. But then she gave her head a regretful shake and picked up her bag.

‘Some other time,’ she said, hooking the strap onto her shoulder while a wrecking ball of disappointment thumped him in the gut. ‘But thank you.’

With the faintest of smiles, she dropped a quick kiss on his cheek as she brushed past him, then unlocked the door and slipped out.

CHAPTER TWO

Four weeks later

ADAMARRIVEDATthe office at 8:00 a.m. after a Fourth of July holiday weekend that had very muchnotbeen a holiday. In fact, the last forty-eight hours had been so frustrating and stressful they had given him a full-on tension headache that still nagged at his temples.

The trouble had started bright and early on Saturday, following a round of squash that he’d arranged with Zane deMarco and Cade Landry in response to the report he’d received from the private investigators he’d hired to dig into the Helberg Holdings conundrum.

Zane was a deceptively laid-back corporate raider from the poorer part of the Hamptons, who he knew from his Cambridge rowing days and considered a friend. Cade, a hard-edged lone wolf from Louisiana who’d worked his way up from construction worker to big-shot property developer in just over a decade, he’d become acquainted with since arriving in New York.

The three of them crossed paths at functions and met up occasionally to shoot the breeze or thrash the living daylights out of each other on the squash court. They were equally driven, equally competitive and had always operated in different spheres of business.

Until now.

Because both men, the report had revealed, were behind the Helberg Holdings share price surge. And neither, Adam had learned to his annoyance when he’d confronted them in thesauna to which they’d headed after the match, was prepared to step aside.

‘No can do,’ Zane had drawled at the same time as Cade had given his head a sharp shake and declared, ‘Not happening. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, y’all.’

Of course it was, and with hindsight, Adam didn’t know why he hadn’t considered their involvement sooner. The portfolio of heritage enterprises owned by Reed Helberg was vast and varied, and in business his so-called friends were sharks. But he’d had no time to process the implications of this unbreakable three-way dead lock because Cade had then delivered yet more bad news, the trouble this time brewing in the offices ofBlush, the women’s glamour magazine.

‘Did y’all know we’re the star players in their latest dumb article?’ he’d practically snarled, having just received a text from his PR consultant on the subject. ‘The Billionaire Bachelors Least Likely to Marry. Apparently, we three have been tagged as the One-Date Wonders—the guys with the longest odds—and they’ve already started a tally of how many dates we’ll have racked up by Labor Day... My PR team are freaking out about it. Personally, I don’t give a damn what a bunch of click-bait junkies and their enablers think of my dating habits. But no way in hell am I letting anyone make me look like a jerk who can’t keep his junk in his pants.’

Although he wouldn’t have put it in those terms, Adam had shared Cade’s sentiment. His integrity was everything, and this article, with both its inaccurate, unsavoury slant and the traction it was gaining, had sounded as though it had reputational damage written all over it. He, the board and the women he was regularly photographed with knew that his dating record wasn’t what it seemed—ninety-five percent of them were strategically selected by him to promote the company, and there weren’t even that many of them—but ofwhat use was that? The optics were disastrous and the fallout could be catastrophic. At the height of his father’s philandering, which by that point had become legally as well as morally questionable and therefore even greater fodder for the merciless tabloids, sales had plummeted by seventy-five percent.

That wasn’t happening again onhiswatch, he’d thought, his temperature soaring in a way that had had nothing to do with the heat of the sauna. He’d worked himself to the bone building up both his reputation and that of the Courtney Collection, and he was not having four years of blood, sweat and tears put at risk simply to fill gossipy column inches and collect social media likes.

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