After-Hours Heir

Chapter One

W HEN S YLVIE J ONES walked into her apartment she toed her high-heeled shoes off—thank God—then set her briefcase and swept it toward the wall with her bare foot as she took her phone out of her pocket and walked into the narrow galley kitchen.

It was almost time.

Almost.

She was angry and edgy. Work had not gone well. She could feel the board turning against her, their hostility getting more and more open by the day.

She wasn’t her father.

She wanted to remind them that it was her father who had been at the helm when the ship had sunk the first time.

Her father had been attempting a merger with Culver Books which had been torpedoed by RedMedia, who had flagged them for antitrust violations.

They’d been “streamlining” the publisher beforehand and what had remained had been little more than spare parts.

Then Culver Books had gone on to acquire Martin & Burke which had created a mammoth publishing house that had effectively eaten its competition alive, including Jones & Abbott.

Who had already been bite-sized at that point.

He’d only just begun to rebuild the publishing house when he’d died and she’d been working toward getting everything back into the black as best she could, and now she felt…something ominous looming.

Mainly, something to do with RedMedia and its tall, dark and devilish owner.

But that didn’t matter right now. Safe in her little walk-in closet of an apartment, with leftover takeout in her future, it didn’t matter.

It mostly didn’t matter because…

Ding!

Baby: Sometimes I find schedules inconvenient.

She saw the banner on her phone screen, and her heart nearly burst through the front of her chest. It was him.

The man she knew only as Baby. The man she’d been texting with for five months. The man she was falling in love with, sight unseen.

Kid: Schedules can go to hell!!!

She laughed as she sent the text and opened up her fridge. Her phone dinged again, and she abandoned the open fridge doors.

Baby: But you’ll keep yours. Tomorrow, and the next day and the next…

She sent him a middle finger emoji and began to heat up her leftovers. He was right, of course. Because she was saddled with keeping this company afloat while she basically existed as a legacy CEO even though the publishing house carried her actual name.

Baby: Did I offend you?

She scoffed at her phone.

Kid: You don’t care if you offended me.

Baby: I absolutely do care, Kid.

She called him Baby , he called her Kid . A song reference that had come up when she’d first called what they were doing an illicit affair, and she’d thought it was hilarious at the time, but now it made her stomach get unbearably tight.

Kid: You care because you’re afraid I won’t send you sexy words later. Though to be fair, you could get an AI chatbot to sex you up.

Baby: It wouldn’t be you, would it?

She bit her lip and squeezed her thighs together as she turned to the microwave—the weirdest combination of activities known to man—and got her leftovers out. Then she carried them to her couch, along with the phone, her laptop and a glass of wine and settled in for the evening.

She switched to her laptop so she could type faster.

She imagined him doing the same.

Would they ever talk on the phone? Video call? She was so reluctant to disrupt this thing they had, and she ignored the little alarm bells that went off that they hadn’t.

This felt so fragile, whatever it was.

She’d found a cell phone on the street after the worst publishing event she could remember attending, and she’d been huffing out of the building, stressed and angry, when she saw a phone lying there on the wet sidewalk, all lit up.

The rain had kept the screen from locking.

She’d picked it up and had turned back toward the hotel to hand it in, and something had…stopped her.

It was a totally generic phone. The lock screen and wallpaper were default. She hadn’t snooped or anything, but she had pulled up the texts, and started a new one:

This is from the girl who found your phone, hope you get it back.

She’d sent it to herself from that phone, just to see.

The next day, she’d gotten a text.

Unknown Number: This is definitely the most interesting way I’ve gotten a woman’s number.

And so it had begun.

It was like sending words into a safe void. She told him nothing about herself, and yet she told him everything.

No identifiers, only deep philosophical discussions. And…virtual sex. Which was something no one would ever believe given Sylvie was a sad midtwenties virgin.

But on this text thread? She’d done lots of things. Scandalous things.

The “sex” was great. But so was everything else.

Kid: Sometimes I wonder if I hate my job. Do you ever wonder that?

There is no pause on his end.

Baby: No. I live it. Which isn’t the same as loving it, I suppose, but it is the thing that gives me purpose.

Kid: I get that. It gives me purpose, or I guess it’s like, I was born with it as my purpose and now I don’t know how to live without it but some days I want to burn it to the ground and start over. Reasonable?

Baby: Arson is always reasonable.

He said nothing for a moment.

Baby: If you hate it why do it?

Kid: I don’t know who I’d be without it.

Baby: You have never told me what you do, and yet I feel like I know you. Which means you don’t need your job to be who you are.

That made her feel so much warmer than it should.

“I wish you were here.” She said that into the silence of her apartment instead of texting it, and she was surprised to discover how quiet her apartment was.

When they talked she heard his voice in her head.

Or what she had decided it was. Smooth and pleasant.

She imagined him in the same way. For some reason, with light brown hair and glasses, tall with a slim build.

The kind of intellectual handsome like a character from an old nineties cartoon she’d watched where they searched for a lost underwater city.

Childhood crushes on cartoon characters died hard.

Instead of being maudlin, she finished her dinner and pushed her bowl to the side. Her heart fluttered and she pulled a blanket over her lap as she scrunched up and pulled her laptop close like she was a child who might get caught doing something bad.

Kid: If you were here I’d kiss you for that.

That was better than a sad, wistful Wish you were here .

Baby: I’d do more than kiss you.

She arched her hips up slightly, a response to restlessness between her thighs.

Baby: Or perhaps it’s more about where I’d kiss you.

She let out a hard breath and laid her head back on the couch arm. He was going to kill her. She didn’t know why it was like this. She didn’t know why typed-out words from a man she’d never seen got her hotter than any guy she’d ever known in real life.

Her twenties had been hijacked by her family’s financial issues and her dad’s death, but she knew if dating had been really important to her she would have found the time, probably. She’d found the time to knit, after all.

This wasn’t knitting.

Baby: First on your lips, of course. But then I would kiss your neck.

She slipped her hand between her thighs.

Baby: I would strip you naked and kiss your breasts, down your stomach, right to the center of your thighs. I wouldn’t be able to get enough.

How did he know? He didn’t even know if he thought she was pretty. The idea of meeting him terrified her for that reason. What if he didn’t like her? What if midsized redheads with frizzy hair weren’t his thing?

What if…

Baby: I’d push two fingers inside of you as I ate you.

Kid: Yes. Yes. Yes.

It had embarrassed her at first. But now she got consumed by it. By him. By all the dirty things he said to her. And she said them back.

Kid: I want you. Please.

And he told her exactly how he’d take her, in detail.

Her release came hot and fast and if anyone had been there to see how easy it was for him to get her there with a few keystrokes she’d have died. But this was her secret. Their secret.

In the aftermath, she sat there, breathing hard.

Baby: I don’t do things like this.

Kid: And you think I do?

Baby: I don’t know, maybe you have ten men on retainer.

Kid: Very gendered speculation, Baby.

Baby: Ten people.

Kid: Just you.

She sat there and stared at the text box. Dots appeared: he was typing again.

Baby: I’m a very powerful man, you know. That I’m sitting here typing these things out when I could simply take a woman to bed… I don’t understand it.

Something about his words hit her, hard and square. Made her heart beat faster.

Kid: A very powerful man? Is that something that gets a response out of women?

Baby: Very gendered, Kid.

Kid: Women. Men. Anyone.

Baby: No, usually I do. I don’t engage in months’ worth of conversations only to type out fantasies I could just as easily be living.

She couldn’t hear any of this in the voice she’d created for him, and she didn’t understand it.

In her mind, it felt hard now. Had an edge.

She didn’t fantasize about him having an edge.

Kid: In deference to your power, why don’t I get on my knees and serve you?

Christos Onassis had not taken himself in hand so many times since he was a green boy. And yet he found himself chasing his release as he read the words coming in fast on his computer screen.

This was an anomaly. An atrocity.

A…

He pictured a woman he did not wish to imagine.

With her wild, riotous, intrusive red hair a mess falling all around her shoulders as she knelt before him, her angry eyes looking up at him.

He didn’t mean to imagine it, and perhaps that was why it was so damned hot. Perhaps it was why all of this was.

Christos was denied very little in life. At least at this stage. He had wealth and power, he was tall, and had the kind of good looks that guaranteed him access to any woman’s bed he wanted to be in. After a childhood of fighting for survival, all of this ease verged on boring.

He’d lost his phone after a publishing event—which he’d found mind numbing—had spent far too long locating it, and had been in a rage when he finally had. Then he’d had seen that outgoing text. Out of uncharacteristic curiosity, he’d sent another one directly to that number.

It had felt like a harmless diversion. And so had all of it, really. He hadn’t expected this anonymous exchange of thoughts and ideas to turn into this. A sexual relationship that was taking place without them ever having exchanged photos.

Something that was dangerous, in his opinion, because of moments like this.

When it was so easy to imagine her .

Defiant, until she got to her knees before him to give him everything he wanted.

His release was hot, sudden. Powerful.

If he paused to consider the absurdity of this, he might feel shame. But he didn’t find himself absurd, and he never felt shame.

It always felt so real and vivid when they talked. It was only afterward that it felt too quiet and she felt distant.

Kid: Did that work for you?

She sent that with a winking emoji. She was truly so… He didn’t know what to make of it. Of them. She didn’t know who he was, and that made her treat him completely differently than anyone else ever treated him.

She had no idea who he was, how rich, how tall.

Though he’d told her he was powerful. And she’d laughed at him.

Baby: It nearly killed me.

He had no reason not to be honest. It was a rare thing. To just speak to someone like this, without any investment in hiding a part of himself.

He could meet her.

It would ruin things.

She would know who he was. As the owner of RedMedia and one of the richest men on earth, his image was quite recognizable.

And it wasn’t a very good image. Not that it made women want him less. He was dangerous, forbidden in an era when so many wanted to believe they despised the wealthy, when in truth they simply wanted to be among them.

He didn’t do relationships. He didn’t sleep with the same woman twice. They’d been doing this for months, and if he brought it into the physical realm she would be subject to the rules of his life, and he found he had no appetite for that at all.

Kid: You really are so powerful, Baby.

Baby: And you’re a brat.

Kid: You could spank me.

He felt his body stir. He could go again. And she wasn’t even here.

Baby: If I spanked you, you wouldn’t be able to sit for a week. You’d have to think long and hard about how badly you wanted your job since being at your desk would be torture. Or perhaps I’d just come visit you at your job and take you, bending you over your desk.

He wondered if he was pushing it, but for some reason he felt on edge tonight with her. More than he had.

Kid: I’d be okay with that.

But as the fantasy took shape, it was clear he was imagining one woman. And one woman only. Was that who he saw every time he spoke to Kid?

Because as he typed to her, spinning out a whole new fantasy, it was impossible to deny that the woman he had bent over the desk in his mind’s eye, the pale, glorious ass he was riding, belonged to the woman currently making his life a living hell.

The woman whose business he was about to take over.

The woman whose life he was about to destroy.

Sylvie Jones.