Chapter 9 #2
The elevator opens. I go to the kitchen and set out the lunch order. I send a quick message to the conference room that it's ready. Then I walk to the women's bathroom on the far end of the floor and lock the door behind me. I stand at the sink with the cold water running over my wrists.
I breathe. Thirty seconds. A full minute. I look at myself in the mirror. I look exactly the same as I did this morning, which seems like it should be wrong somehow.
Logan is at a client lunch. The conference room team is eating. Nobody needs anything from me for the next twenty minutes. I turn off the water and I dry my hands. I go back to my desk and I work.
He's back by 2:30. I hear him before I see him — his footstep in the corridor, the specific way the space reorganizes when he enters it.
I'm at my screen. I don't look up. He pauses briefly in the corridor the way he sometimes does, taking stock before moving forward.
Then he goes into his office and the afternoon resumes.
The conference room team reconvenes at 3:00.
The afternoon is brutal in the way only the third week of a sustained crisis can be.
Everything takes longer than it should. The pressure compounds.
Solutions reveal new complications as fast as the old ones get resolved.
I'm running on very little and holding it together through sheer discipline.
Today is not the day. This is not the place.
By 9:45 the conference room team has packed up. Logan released them an hour ago — go home, we pick this up tomorrow. The floor has gone quiet around us. We are the only two left.
I'm at my desk finishing the updated spreadsheet — the client's revised timeline mapped against the integration phases, every dependency flagged, every risk annotated.
It's thorough. It's correct. I want it on his desk so I can get my coat and go home.
I save it. I print it and then I pick up the papers and walk into his office.
He's at his desk with his jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tie loosened — the specific state of a man at the end of a day that has taken everything. He looks up when I come in.
"The revised timeline," I say. I set it on the desk in front of him.
He picks it up and starts reading. I wait for the nod that means I'm done for the evening.
It doesn't come.
"The phase three dependencies," he says.
"You've flagged them as medium risk."
"They are medium risk. We have a two-week buffer."
"A buffer that disappears if the client pushes back on the revised go-live." He sets the document down and looks at me directly.
"Flag them high."
"Flagging them high triggers an escalation protocol that pulls resources from phase two. The client hasn't pushed back yet. We'd be creating a problem preemptively."
"We'd be managing it preemptively," he says. The tone is final. He's already decided.
"The data doesn't support that call," I say.
He tilts his head slightly — the specific gesture of a man who is choosing to be patient and finding it a stretch.
"The data supports whatever the situation requires. Right now the situation requires high flags on phase three. Change them."
"I disagree."
The room goes quiet. Logan sets the document on the desk with deliberate care. He leans back in his chair and looks at me with the full, unblinking attention he gives things that require management.
"I'm not asking for your opinion on the call, Sutton. I'm telling you what needs to happen. Change the flags."
"You're asking me to misrepresent the risk level because—"
"I'm asking you," he says, his voice dropping in that way it does when he's done being reasonable, "to do your job."
Something hot moves through my chest.
"I am doing my job. I've been doing my job every day for three weeks, at every hour you've needed me, with every resource I have. What I turned in tonight is correct and you know it's correct."
He stands. Not aggressively — just fully. All six-foot-three of him behind that desk, and his expression has shifted into something harder.
"Is there a problem here?"
"Yes," I say. "There is."
He stares at me. I don't think he expected that answer.
"I don't have time for this tonight," he says.
And something in me — some last thread of composure that has been holding all day, through the cold sidewalk and Caleb's clean efficient exit and three more hours of a crisis that isn't mine and a day that has taken everything — simply lets go.
"Of course you don't," I say.
"You never have time for anything that isn't a deliverable. You don't have time for a conversation, you don't have time for basic acknowledgement, you don't have time to treat the people working themselves into the ground for you like they're actually human." My voice is steady. I don't know how.
"You communicate in corrections and commands and you wouldn't recognize a well done if it walked in here and sat across from you. You just raise the bar. Every time. Without a single word that suggests you notice what it costs."
"Sutton." A warning in his voice now.
"I'm not finished." I don't raise my voice. I don't need to.
"I have given this job everything I have.
Every day. And I know you've noticed because you're not a man who misses things.
But you won't say it. Because saying it would make me a person and not a resource, and that would require something from you that you've apparently decided you can't afford.
" I stop. I breathe. The next words come out quieter and hit harder.
"The Drake men have a remarkable lack of human decency."
The room goes absolutely still. I watch it land. I watch his jaw set. Something behind his eyes shifts — not anger exactly, but something more layered than anger, something that moves through him and changes the quality of his stillness entirely.
"What did you just say?" His voice is low. Quiet.
"You heard me."
He looks at me for a long moment. Something working behind his expression that I can't fully read.
"You want to talk about decency." It isn't a question.
"You've been walking around here for three weeks carrying something you won't say out loud and taking it out on a risk assessment at 10:00 at night." He moves around the desk. Not fast but deliberate.
"You think I haven't noticed?"
I hold my ground. My heart is slamming.
"This isn't about—"
“—It's about something," he says. He stops in front of me.
Close. Closer than the desk ever allowed.
I can feel the heat coming off him. His eyes are on mine and they are not the controlled, contained eyes of my boss at the end of a workday.
They are the eyes of a man who has run out of the thing he's been using to keep himself in check.
"Say what you actually mean, Sutton."
The air between us is electric. My chest is rising and falling too fast. I should take a step back. I don't.
"I don't know what you want from me," I say. My voice comes out lower than I intend.
"Yes you do," he says.
He reaches up. His hand comes to my face — his palm warm against my jaw, his thumb at the edge of my cheekbone, tilting my face up to his. His eyes drop to my mouth for one suspended second. Then he pulls me in.
His lips crash against mine. The kiss is nothing like I've experienced before.
It's fierce. Possessive. A sharp inhale of need, like he's been starving for days and finally gets to taste again.
I moan softly, my arms sliding up around his neck, pulling him closer as I melt into it.
He presses his body against mine, and I feel his broad shoulders.
I grip at his shirt, rubbing my hands up and down his chest, but I can feel the muscles underneath the fabric.
His hands slide down my sides and grip beneath my thighs, and in one smooth motion, he lifts me — hoisting me up onto the edge of the desk.
My legs spread open and wrap around him instinctively.
My back arches, my breath sharp against his mouth.
The feel of him between my legs, the hardness of his bulge pressing against the center of me — it's all too much — and not enough.
His kiss deepens as his fingertips graze my skin — cool, deliberate — as he lifts my dress, sliding it higher and higher until the fabric bunches around my hips. A rush of air kisses the bare skin between my thighs. His touch is slow, teasing, his fingers squeezing into the flesh with such purpose.
I let out a shallow breath, dizzy from both adrenaline and frustration.
Then his mouth finds mine again. Then he pulls back, his blue eyes filled with hunger.
Without a word, his fingers continue to drag slowly up the inside of my thigh until they reach the edge of my panties.
He presses against me, rubbing through the thin lace, and I gasp — because I'm already soaked.
He must feel it too. His eyes lock on mine as his fingers pause.
Then, with one calculated move, he slides the lace to the side and runs his finger through the wetness slicking my folds.
"You're soaked," he growls. His voice is low. Almost feral.
His finger teases the length of me once, twice, then he pushes inside — just one finger at first, but the stretch is maddening. I gasp as he adds a second, the thickness of both curling, probing, reaching. I throw my head back, my hips arching forward, my body giving itself over to the feel of him.
"Oh… god…"
He grips my panties with both hands and yanks them down, his movements rough.
The lace slides off my ankles and lands in a soft heap on the floor.
Then his head is between my legs. Before I can even catch my breath, I feel his face press against my heat, his nose dragging through my arousal, his stubble scraping just enough to make my thighs twitch.
Then his tongue flicks across my clit. I nearly cry out.