Chapter 31 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I want you to notice / When I’m not around”
— “Creep” by Radiohead
Oh.
This.
Motherfucker.
He’s got me pinned against the wall, the sick fuck, and I know he’s loving it.
I can feel the evidence of exactly how much he’s loving it hard between us.
I want to tell him where he can stick that—spoiler: not anywhere near me—but I can’t find the words.
It’s like they’ve all gone flying out of my head.
No. No, no, no! I didn’t come here to go blank; I came here to rip his damn throat out.
I duck under Kir’s arm and shove past him, putting the desk between us. I need distance or I’m going to do something extremely stupid.
“You’re a voyeur,” I accuse. “That’s what this is. You put a camera in my bedroom. In my bedroom, Kir. Where I sleep. Where I get dressed. Where I—”
“Where you what?” he asks, way too calm.
“Don’t you dare try to finish that sentence for me.
” I point a quivering finger at the camera sitting on his desk.
“We had a deal. Very clear rules. You remember those? No names, no faces, no falling in love. Nowhere in there was install surveillance equipment in my fucking air vent so you can watch me undress when you’re not around. ”
He perches on the edge of his desk and folds his arms across his chest. He looks almost bored. That makes it so much worse.
“You’re a stalker,” I continue. “You’re messed up and you need help. Professional help. The kind with a couch and a prescription pad. And maybe a straitjacket.”
“Are you done?”
“No!” I cry out. “I’m not even close to done! You lied to me. This is a complete and total violation. How long have you been doing this, huh? A week? Two weeks? Since the first night?”
“No.” He shakes his head. I start to breathe a sigh of relief, until he says, “Since the second night.”
“The second—” I press both palms over my eyes until I see stars. “Oh my God.”
“Jillian—”
“No. Shut up. I’m talking.” I drop my hands and glare at him. “This is over. Whatever this was or wasn’t, it’s done. I’m out. This was a bad idea from the very start and I should’ve known better, and I did know better, and I did it anyway because I am apparently the dumbest woman in the universe.”
He doesn’t react. That’s the thing about Kir that drives me absolutely up the wall. When I yell, he goes quiet. When I escalate, he settles. It’s infuriating. I want a fight and he keeps giving me a chess match.
“You done now?” he asks again.
“I… Yes.”
“Good.” He uncrosses his arms and puts his hands on his knees. “Then let me remind you of a few key facts. My father sent me to kill you. You already know that. I told you myself.”
“I’m aware, yes, thanks for the recap—”
“And what do you think happens if I don’t do it?
” His brow furrows. “Think, Jillian. You’re a smart woman.
Think about this for more than five seconds.
If Kir doesn’t kill the reporter, what does Lukas do next?
Does he shrug and move on? Does he write it off as a loss?
Send a fruit basket and his heartfelt condolences? ”
I don’t answer.
“No. He sends someone else. Someone who will actually do it. And that someone doesn’t climb through your window and politely ask you to kneel.
That someone kicks your door in at three in the morning and does things to you that I—” He stops and covers his mouth with his hand for a moment.
“That camera isn’t me getting off on watching you change clothes.
Well, not just that. It’s also me making sure you’re still alive when I can’t be there to keep you safe myself. ”
I’m not actually calmer. I still want to take that laptop I just destroyed and beat him over the head with it. But I can’t, because what he just said makes a horrible, twisted kind of sense.
“That doesn’t make it okay,” I say.
He shrugs. “We’re long past ‘okay,’ Ms. Pierce.” Then one corner of his lip quirks up in the beginnings of a grin. “Besides,” he says, “I don’t think you hate it as much as you claim to. The red underwear suits you, by the way.”
I feel heat crawl up my neck before I can stop it. “You watched me get dressed?”
“I watched you do a lot of things.” He hasn’t moved from the edge of the desk.
His arms are still folded. He looks completely at ease, which makes me want to throw something else at him.
“You take your time in the mornings, you know that? Most people just grab whatever’s closest and throw it on.
Not you. You stand in front of your closet and think about it.
You hold things up. You put them back. You change your mind.
And then—” He pauses. “And then you drop the towel.”
“Stop.”
“You dropped it and you stood there for a second. Naked. Just looking at yourself in that little mirror you’ve got on the back of the closet door. And then you reached for the red ones.”
My mouth is dry. I swallow, but it doesn’t help.
“I watched you pull them on,” he continues. His eyes haven’t left mine. “And then I locked my office door and jerked off at my desk to the sight of it. Came so hard I couldn’t see straight for a little while there.”
“You are disgusting.”
“Maybe.” He grins. “But here’s what I think, Jillian: I think if you’d known I was watching—if I’d told you beforehand, if you’d known that on the other end of that little blinking red light was a man who couldn’t tear his eyes away from you—you wouldn’t have closed the vent.
You would’ve slowed down. Taken even longer. Let me see even more.”
“That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then why is your pulse going crazy right now?” He nods toward my throat. “I can see it from here.”
I clap my hand over the side of my neck, which is the most obvious tell I could possibly give him.
“I think,” he muses, “that you liked being watched. I think you liked it before you even knew it was happening. And I think the part of you that’s screaming at me right now is the same part that chose red lace on a quiet morning when nobody was supposed to see.”
“You’re wrong,” I tell him.
He just smiles. “Oh, no, I don’t think I am.”
He’s off the desk before I can blink, closing the distance I fought so hard to put between us. My back hits the wall again, but his hands don’t cage me this time. Instead, one lands on my hip, fingers digging in through the denim, and the other presses flat against my stomach, right above my belt.
“I think you’d be soaking wet and dying to touch yourself if you knew,” he whispers, low and close. “You like being on display, don’t you?” His thumb drags a slow line across my hip bone. “You like feeling my eyes on you. Showing off for me.”
“I wasn’t showing off for anyone. I was getting dressed.”
His hand on my stomach pushes down half an inch. Not enough to be anything, but just enough to be everything. “Who were you wearing those red panties for, Jillian? For me?”
“Myself.”
His brow curves upward. “Liar.”
“I wear whatever I want. It has nothing to do with you.”
“No?” he says again. “Well, then I guess it was just my luck. That didn’t stop me from getting off, of course.
I saw your ass in red and it was like all the blood in my body rushed straight to my cock.
You’ve felt it—you know how hard it gets for you, little fox.
” His thumb dips just inside the waist of my jeans and strokes the frilly edge of today’s black thong.
“I was pumping and moaning your name. Right in this office, actually. I came for you, and I think, deep down, you knew it. You felt it, right… about… here.”
On here, his hand shoves down inside my underwear just far enough to graze my clit and confirm that, like he suspected, I am in fact insanely wet. I feel my cheeks go nuclear and I shove him back.
Or at least, that’s what I intend to do.
But the message gets its wires crossed somewhere on the way down, so instead of wrapping around his wrist and yanking his hand out of my pants, I wrap my fingers around his strong, muscular forearm, and just…
stay there. Not pulling him away or telling him no.
The opposite, in fact—I’m keeping him from going anywhere else at all.
It’s almost like I do want this.
“Kir, I—”
But we never find out what I was going to say, because before I can, we’re interrupted by three sharp knocks on the door.
“Mr. Lazarev? Is everything all right in there? I heard some, um… sounds.”
It’s his assistant, the feisty little blonde thing who tried to bar me from coming in here in the first place.
Kir’s hand tears out of my pants so fast it’s almost funny.
He steps back and reaches up to straighten his tie with both hands.
The transformation is instant and makes me jealous.
One second, he’s got his fingers on me, and the next, he looks like he’s about to chair a board meeting.
Not a hair out of place. Meanwhile, I’m standing here with my jeans unbuttoned and my face the color of a fire truck.
One of us is much better at changing masks than the other.
“Everything’s fine, Madison,” he calls toward the door. “Ms. Pierce was just leaving.”
“Okay! Just checking! Let me know if you need anything!” Madison’s heels retreat down the hallway.
I fumble with my jeans button, but my fingers aren’t cooperating.
Kir watches me struggle with the button for another second, then looks away.
Not out of politeness—I don’t think the word exists in his vocabulary.
More like he knows that if he keeps looking at me right now, neither of us is leaving this office with our dignity intact.
“You need to go,” he says. “Before someone else decides to check on the noise and finds you here.”
“You mean the noise of you throwing my professional boundaries into a wood chipper?”
He glances at the wreckage behind his desk. “You caused the bulk of it. That was a twelve-thousand-dollar machine, by the way.”
“Bill me.” I grab my bag off the floor where I dropped it and sling it over my shoulder. My legs feel unreliable. Everything south of my belly button is throbbing and I am having a hard time walking in a straight line.
I’m halfway to the door when his hand catches my elbow. I spin around, ready to snap, but he’s not pulling me back. He’s pressing something into my palm.
It’s the camera, with the attached battery pack still dangling from it.
“Keep it,” he instructs. “Put it back where you found it.”
I look down at it, then back up at him. “You’re joking.”
“I sleep better when I can see you.”
His face is dead serious, though. And instead of doing the sane thing and telling him to shove it up his ass… I reclaim the camera and tuck it in my purse.
I don’t say a word. Neither does he. I just put my back to Kir and walk out past Madison, who gives me a bright smile and a little wave that I don’t return. I don’t stop walking until I hit the street.