Page 12 of Strength of Desire

‘What, do I have food on my face?’ he’d asked.

He actually did have a bit of mustard at the corner of his lip, but I was too flustered to tell him. Too busy staring at his soft lips, his strong jaw, his gorgeous brown eyes.

“Just… spaced out for a minute,” I managed, finally.

“Well now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he said. “Here I was thinking you were staring at my handsome visage, and it turns out I might as well have been a cardboard box.”

“What, exactly, did you think was interesting?” asked one of the women on the other side of the table, bringing me mentally back to the present.

Had Hasan been flirting with me that night? It almost felt like he was, but maybe that was just wishful—

“Cory?” prompted Jim from the front of the room.

God, my mind really was spacey these days.

“Just that women make up a bigger share of the monster truck rally audience than we thought,” I said, forcing myself to focus. “The whole point of this project has been to figure out how to pull more women in, and whether we need to shift our advertising approach. But if they’re already attending in greater numbers than we thought, we might be asking the wrong question. Before we ask how to get more of them to buy tickets, we probably want to find out why the current ones already do.”

“Hmm,” said the woman across from me. Nancy. Her name was Nancy. I knew that. So why did I feel like I’d never seen her before? “You might have a point there.”

She turned to the man at the head of the table—Rupert, I remembered now—and as they began discussing the company’s next shareholder meeting, my eyes shot wide open. There was something on my left thigh. And it was moving.

Fuck, wasn’tsomething, it was a hand, and it was moving towards my crotch under the table. And it wasn’t one ofmyhands, because they were both right in front of me on the conference table, fiddling with my pens. Which meant—

I inhaled sharply as I looked to my left. Hasan sat there, looking enthralled by Nancy and Rupert’s conversation, but his hand was sliding along my thigh.

Guess I wasn’t imagining the flirting, I thought.

Not that his flirting, or lack thereof, was the most important thing to be thinking about right now. No, the most important thing was that Hasan’s hand had reached my crotch. His fingers slid on top of my cock and squeezed it through my pants. My stomach turned a somersault. What the hell was Hasan doing?

And why, God, why was my body responding to it?

Under Hasan’s teasing touch, my cock had grown steadily harder, and was now tenting up in my pants as he stroked it through the thin wool fabric. Fuck, that felt good.

I shot him a look that was half anger, half helplessness. Hasan didn’t even look at me, but I thought he must have seen me from the corner of his eye, because his lips curled up in the beginnings of a smile.

My heart pounded. Any second now, Rupert or Nancy, or Eileen, Pete, or Gregor were going to notice what was happening. That Hasan’s hand was stretched out just a little too far—or that I looked like I was about to faint. Or, Jim would come sit down on my other side. There’d be no keeping it from him then.

Why was this happening now? I’d been lusting over Hasan in secret for weeks. It felt impossible that he could like me back. But what was he trying to do? Get us both fired?

Just move away,I told myself.Move away or clear your throat or cross your legs—do something to make him stop.

It was that simple. Instead, I bit my lip and dug my fingernails into my palms to keep from showing the pleasure on my face. And against my better judgement, I shiftedtowardsHasan, spreading my legs for easier access.

No doubt about it this time—he was smiling.

“What do you think, Hasan?”

The question came from Gregor, on the other side of the table, and all eyes in the room shifted to Hasan.

His smile went from self-satisfied to eager-to-please in an instant. He brought his hand away from my lap and set it on the table casually, as if he had all the time in the world. I swallowed hard and forced myself not to move, not to draw any attention to myself.

I was grateful for the reprieve—or was I? All I knew was that my cock was desperate for his touch again.

“I think it could go either way,” Hasan offered, spreading his hands before him. “Shareholders might spook, if you follow Eileen’s suggestion. But visionary moves are often seen as dangerous in the short run. It’s not until the next quarter or next few years, even, that they come to be seen as genius.”

I’d completely lost the thread of what we were talking about, but Hasan’s answer seemed to satisfy Gregor and the rest of the group for now. They went back to discussing the upcoming shareholder meeting intensely, and no one seemed to notice when Hasan’s right hand pushed my left off the tabletop.

Under the table, he grabbed my hand, his fingers soft but firm. My heart fluttered—it fuckingfluttered—as he drew my hand to his own thigh, before returning to stroke my cock again.

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