Chapter 14
RAFFAELE
She’s close.
I can already tell. She’s bent forward over the cabinet, my hand still clamped over her mouth, and every thrust I give her is one she’s trying not to let me hear. Her whole body is working against itself.
I slide my hand off her mouth. Slip my fingers between her legs instead.
She breaks.
Her thighs shake. Her forehead drops forward onto the cabinet with a small, dull thud.
She clenches around me so hard it almost takes me with her, and I have to hold still for a second, teeth set, to keep my own body in line.
The sound she makes when she comes is low and wrecked and entirely involuntary.
She’d be mortified if she could hear herself.
I want her to hear herself. I want her to listen to that sound all the way home tonight. Whatever apartment she thinks she’s going back to, whatever bed she plans to lie in, I want that noise to be in her ear when she closes her eyes.
I don’t move. I let her ride it out around me. Beautiful is a clean word. It isn’t the word I’m thinking of. Not anymore.
Mine.
That’s more like it.
For a second, there’s nothing but breath. Hers, uneven. Mine, deliberately slowed. Somewhere outside the closed door, the floor is winding down—a voice in the hall, a drawer sliding, the distant chime of the elevator.
Knock.
Bea goes rigid.
Her eyes fly open. Her head comes up off the cabinet. The panic moves through her in one clean wave—shoulders first, then down the spine, and I feel her try to push back off the cabinet and up, out, away.
I keep her exactly where she is.
One hand on her hip. One flat against her back between her shoulder blades. I don’t move inside her. I don’t let her move off me either. I just hold her there, folded over the cabinet, still connected, still mine.
“Raffaele.” A whisper. A plea.
Knock, knock. Louder this time.
She pushes at the hand on her back. She gets nothing. My grip on her hip tightens until I see her flinch, and then I ease off a fraction, just enough to remind her it’s a choice.
“Someone’s at the door,” she breathes.
“Let them wait.”
“Raffaele—”
“I said let them wait.”
She turns her head. Her hair is everywhere. Her face is flushed, her lipstick has smeared at the corner of her mouth, and she stares at me, searching for the version of me that might let her go.
He is not in the room.
I hold her gaze so she understands that.
The knocking stops.
A voice outside, muffled through the door.
“Mr. D’Amico? I have those documents you requested.”
Marcy. She’s filling in for the file runner tonight because Castellano dragged the kid to a meeting. Of course.
I shift my hips.
Small. Barely a thrust. Just enough.
Bea’s whole body jerks. Her mouth falls open on a sound that would absolutely carry through the door, and I get my hand back up over her lips before it leaves her.
She shakes her head, tiny and furious.
“Also,” Marcy continues, absolutely oblivious, “the Martinez arraignment got moved to Thursday. Judge Harrison’s clerk called. Said you’d know what that means.”
I move again. All the way out, almost, and then back into her. She whimpers into my palm. Her fingers come up and wrap around my wrist—not pulling it off her mouth, not quite, just holding on.
Judge Harrison’s clerk. Good. That means Harrison got the message about the procedural timeline and made the right call.
The arraignment moves to Thursday, which means I have a full seventy-two hours to move three witnesses, fix one deposition, and make sure Antonio’s bail stays intact despite the fact that I knocked him down in my own office an hour ago.
I think about all of that clearly while I fuck my assistant against a cabinet with her boss’s deputy standing six feet away behind a locked door.
“And there’s a new file that came in,” Marcy says. “Marked urgent. I’ve left it with the others.”
Bea’s nails dig into my wrist. She’s rocking back into me now, the tiniest movement, not something she’d ever admit to later.
Her body has made the choice her mouth hasn’t.
She is going to come a second time and it’s going to happen in the next thirty seconds whether either of us wants it to or not.
I want it to.
“I’ll just leave everything here. Let me know if you need anything else tonight, Mr. D’Amico.”
The soft whisper of paper. A folder sliding under the door.
“Have a good evening.”
Footsteps retreat. Measured. Unhurried.
The elevator chimes. Doors open and slide shut.
I wait another two seconds. Just to be sure. Then I take my hand off Bea’s mouth and grip her hip with it instead, two-handed now, and I stop being careful.
She gasps out something that isn’t a word.
“You were quiet,” I tell her. “Good girl.”
I drive into her. Her hands search for purchase on the cabinet.
A pen rolls off the edge and hits the floor.
I watch the back of her neck, the flushed skin there, the damp strand of hair curling against it, and I think about the fact that Bea didn’t make a sound because she didn’t want to be heard—which means she could have, which means somewhere in her head she chose me over a scream.
That thought runs through me like a current.
I bend forward. Put my mouth against her ear.
“Tell me you wanted them to hear you.”
She shakes her head, furious.
“Liar.”
She comes again before I’m done with the word. Her knees give out and only my grip on her hips keeps her upright. She bites her own forearm to keep the sound in, and that’s when I go, too. With my forehead against the nape of her neck, my breath completely out of rhythm for the first time in a day.
For a second I can’t think at all.
That’s the part I don’t get from anyone else.
Then the thinking comes back, and it comes back wrong.
Not the guilt I keep waiting for. Not the cost-benefit calculation I’d usually be running by now.
Just a cold, clean satisfaction and a kind of stupid, unfamiliar amusement at myself—and, ridiculously, the beginning of a smile I can’t quite get rid of.
There’s a stretched, quiet beat after.
Then she moves.
Her hand finds my chest and pushes.
I let her.
She straightens up, off the cabinet, off me, in one clumsy motion. She catches herself on the corner of the desk on the way. One of her heels has come half off. Her skirt is a mess. She pulls it down with shaking fingers, turns her back to me, and starts on the buttons of her blouse.
I lean back against the edge of the desk and watch her.
Her fingers miss the first button, and she has to start over. Her hair is catastrophic—and when she reaches up to deal with it, she gets distracted and starts on the blouse again instead.
Cute isn’t the word either. But it’s closer.
I fix my own clothes at half her speed. Belt.
Zipper. Shirt tucked back where it belongs.
I was never really out of mine; it’s a three-second operation.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the darkened window—hair mostly in place, suit mostly in place, face mostly in place—and nobody walking past this office would guess a thing.
She, on the other hand, could not walk past her own reflection right now without knowing.
She won’t look at me.
I wait for the speech.
The professionalism one. The boundaries one. The this cannot happen again one.
She finally meets my eyes.
“I’m going home tonight.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“My apartment.” She doesn’t flinch from me. “Not yours.”
That’s it?
No speech. No lecture. No line about mistakes or standards or what we owe ourselves as adults. Just a small, precisely aimed sentence and her coat over her arm.
I consider her.
“Fine.”
She blinks. “Fine?”
“Fine.”
I push off the desk and walk past her to the door. I unlock the bolt.
On the other side, the floor is empty. Just the hallway and the low evening lights.
Bea walks past me.
“Bea.”
She stops.
She doesn’t turn around. Smart girl.
“See you tomorrow, assistant.”
She doesn’t answer. After a moment, she keeps walking. She reaches the elevator with her spine straight and her head up, and she doesn’t look back.
Then she’s gone.
I close my office door and turn the bolt again, this time out of habit.
The room still smells like her. There’s a palm print on the dust along the top of the cabinet. Her lipstick is on my shirt cuff where her mouth dragged across my wrist.
Christ.
I find I’m smiling again, which is, frankly, the most insane part.
I push off the desk and walk over to the window. Lift two of the slats with a finger.
Sixty floors below, a figure in a coat too thin for the weather steps out of the lobby and onto the sidewalk. She pauses at the curb. Doesn’t look up. Lifts a hand for a cab.
My apartment. Not yours.
A yellow one pulls over. She leans forward to tell the driver something through the passenger window. Gets in. The taxi sits at the curb another beat, indicator on, waiting for a gap in traffic.
The smile thins out.
Right. I just put her in a cab. Alone. With Nico’s men in the city somewhere, nursing whatever bruises they drove home with, and Antonio’s people driving a man with a split lip back to a house where he’ll spend the night thinking about me.
I watch the taxi ease into traffic.
A reasonable man would close the blinds, finish the folder of urgent paperwork, and call her in the morning.
I’ve been a reasonable man for most of my adult life.
Right?