Chapter 2
Chapter Two
LEO
“Can you—” Jacqueline gasped as I sucked on the pulse point between her shoulder and neck, she shivered underneath my hands as my fingers teased the warm skin at her waist, “Lead?”
“Lead?” I repeated against her neck.
“You know, like,” she removed one of her hands from my shirt as she flapped it in the air beside us, flustered as I teased her skin with my lips and tongue, “Take charge. Be in control. Tell me what to do—if you’re comfortable with that.”
I paused only momentarily before standing tall and pulling her flush against my front, more than comfortable with this goddess’ shy request, “I can, as long as we have a safety word. Do you have one in mind?” I cupped her jaw and tilted her face up toward mine.
Her lips parted as she locked her eyes with me and breathed, “…Glacier.”
* * *
“No.” My cousin didn’t even bother looking up at me as she deleted a line of code on her screen.
“Why not?” I pressed, sitting on the edge of her desk and twirling a pen in my fingers.
I was towering over her, clearly an authoritative figure, and yet when Mary Jiang gave me a look down her nose while sitting at her desk chair, scrunching it in irritation, she still felt taller than me.
“Because I have plans,” she replied, turning her dark eyes back towards her screen.
I grabbed a lock of her dark silky hair and tugged it once before her hand immediately swiped at me.
“You see Jamie daily,” I argued, “but we’ve hardly hung out since I moved here.”
“I hung out with you for like two weeks straight, when you first moved here.”
“That was to help me unpack.”
Mary rolled her eyes without bothering to look up at me as she replied, “Actually, no, that was for me to unpack for you.”
I rolled the pen between my fingers again, watching it glide back and forth over my knuckles, “You’re better at interior design than I am.”
“True,” Mary nodded, “but it’s no excuse to weaponize your incompetence. I have plans. Go away.”
“C’mon,” I adjusted my grip on the pen so that I could bounce it in between my thumb and middle finger rapidly, “Hold my hand while I make new friends.”
Mary scoffed.
I grinned.
“You have never needed help making friends since the moment you were born.” Mary tapped on her keyboard with her black-painted fingernails, locking her screen, then bent down to grab her bag, “You’ll be fine.” With that, Mary stood and started marching toward the lift. I tossed the pen I was fidgeting with on her desk and followed, undeterred by her dismissal. We turned the corner to where the front desk sat directly across from the doors, seeing Signe Lange and Jamie Hansen chatting.
For as long as I’ve known Mary, I never would have pictured Jamie being her type. Usually, Mary dated women who looked more like her. Women who wore a lot of black and had some tattoos, maybe facial piercings. Grunge clothing usually filled their wardrobes. One time Mary dated a woman whose hair was dyed the colors of the rainbow; eyebrows included. It was badass, which made sense because Mary usually dated badass-looking women.
Jamie was shorter than Mary, smaller, with medium-length pale blonde hair and blue eyes. I didn’t think I’d seen Jamie wear makeup once since I started working here, and today she wore a pale pink blouse with a cream-colored floral print, French tucked into her straight-cut jeans.
There must have been something special about Jamie, something that made her a badass in Mary’s eyes, because Mary seemed more at peace in this relationship than she had in any of her previous ones.
“You ready?” Jamie asked her girlfriend, before giving me one of her timid smiles, “Hi, Leo.”
“Hello,” I gave her my signature smile, the smile I crafted during my early twenties that generally worked on women, “Is there any way you could let me steal your partner for tonight? Actually,” I raised my eyebrows as if the idea had just come to me, “Would you like to join us, too?”
Mary was already shaking her head at Jamie, who just grinned and raised a blonde eyebrow at me, “What are you doing?”
“You see,” I leaned against the front desk, catching Signe’s eye who was giving me some raised eyebrows of her own, not bothering to hide her smile, “I’m starting on a new recreational rugby league, and I can be a bit shy at times—” Signe snorted nice and loud, and I held up a hand to cover her face from my view as I continued to plead my case, “and I would feel much better if I had my dear cousin there to help me break the ice.”
“You just don’t want to look like a loser with no friends.” Mary rolled her eyes and looped her arm through Jamie’s, tugging the smaller woman toward the lift.
“Maybe we can—” Jamie started, but after Mary punched the call button, she cupped each of Jamie’s cheeks and turned her face to look her in the eye.
“No,” Mary shook her head once, “Don’t fall for it. He’s a grown man in his mid-thirties. He doesn’t need us to hold his hand. Do you want to go watch a bunch of men in booty shorts get all dirty and sweaty while they wrestle with each other under the guise of sportsmanship?”
Jamie grinned between her squished cheeks, “Do you want an honest answer?”
“Why do you think I even signed up?” I added.
“Wait,” Signe chimed in, pulling my hand down with her own so I would look at her again, “Are you meeting at Laguna Field?”
I lifted a brow at her, “Yes…”
“Zaid is going tonight,” Signe grinned, “I’ll be there, too.”
“Oh excellent,” I high-fived the office manager, before flipping off my cousin, “Enjoy your date night.”
“I will.” Mary grinned while Jamie giggled and allowed herself to be tugged into the lift.
“Mr. Turner,” a feminine, alto voice echoed towards us, and I felt something zing down my spine from the sound of my name on her lips. I turned, noting the way Signe immediately put her hand up over her mouth to smother her smile as I saw the woman who suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“Ms. Williams,” I replied, with a formal nod. I was standing taller, a reaction I usually had when Sun Steer’s Director of Human Resources referred to me by my last name.
“Need I remind you that vulgar gestures like that go against Sun Steer’s code of conduct?” Jacqueline raised a dark eyebrow at me as she approached the front desk Signe sat behind, “Something the CTO should know already?”
I took a moment to drink her in because when it came down to it, I was a simple man. A man who still struggled to wrap my head around who was standing in front of me, versus the woman who approached me at a bar all those months ago.
Jacqueline’s hair was up in a tight bun, not a hair out of place. A bun that I immediately wanted to undo because I knew how beautiful her dark brown hair looked hanging loose at her back.
I knew how her deep, dark eyes looked without the shield of her thin gold glasses, hooded and glassy and utterly hypnotizing. I knew how her skin looked flushed and the sounds she made when I angled my hips just right. How her eyes widened after she came, looking adorably surprised every single time her body pulsed erratically around me when she reached her pleasure.
I knew Jacqueline Williams’ body intimately, and I was confident those memories would forever be seared into my brain.
Today she wore an outfit that was somehow both my favorite and also my least favorite.
Because it included a pencil skirt.
Even though the skirt was perfectly modest for the workplace, I couldn’t help but get stuck on how each step she took teased the outline of her soft, smooth thighs. Her arse that I knew for a fact fit perfectly in the palms of my hands.
“Mr. Turner?” I snapped my eyes up from her legs, grinning on instinct even though Jacqueline was all but openly glaring at me. Her brows were lowered, her lush lips were turned down in disapproval, clutching an iPad to her chest as if to shield herself from me.
Were those dark circles under her eyes?
I hadn’t seen Jacqueline Williams smile at me since that one night we shared, and every day that I went to work and failed to see her lips pull back in that joyful expression, I felt like the biggest failure.
“My apologies,” I placed a palm over my heart, looking her in the eye, “No more vulgar gestures in the office.”
Jacqueline raised a dark eyebrow at me before turning towards Signe, dismissing me without a word.
I tried not to flinch from her cold shoulder.
“Cheers.” I nodded to the two women and started to walk back toward my office, shoving my hands in my pockets in an attempt to still them. I was always fidgeting, but around Jacqueline, my hands physically itched. The constant restlessness inside me burned hotter in her presence.
It wasn’t until I made it back to my office, leaving my door wide open so that the hum of the other Sun Steer employees in the building would filter in, that I opened my drawer and pulled out another pen to twirl in my fingers.
I slumped in my desk chair, clicking my monitor to life.
I started working at Sun Steer Technologies almost five months ago, needing a change. Packing my life up in London and moving to Orange County, California. There were perks of doing this, of course. Being closer to my cousin and childhood best friend, Mary Jiang. Living in a place where the weather was nearly perfect at all times. The thrill of starting over in someplace new.
The fact that my one-night stand was the Director of HR was just a small con, a teeny-tiny awkwardness to my day.
We never spoke about it.
Even when I showed up at the office to interview for a new position the night after she made me see gods, I saw in real time how she threw her professional mask in place.
The message was clear; never speak of that night again.
So, I haven’t.
Though I was confident she thought about it as often as I did.
Because, as Americans say, Jacqueline Williams was constantly on my ass.
As soon as I spoke out of turn, or made an inappropriate joke, Jacqueline was there to scold me. Even if I was in a conference room speaking to my team, she would go out of her way to shake her head at me through the glass wall and glare.
I hadn’t seen Jacqueline behave so strictly to anyone else in the office.
It felt personal.
Thankfully, everyone else seemed to accept me into the fold. I established a good relationship with my team early on, making them feel comfortable approaching me with questions or concerns regardless of how busy I was. I never wanted to seem too superior to anyone else. I wanted to be one of the guys, so to speak.
Jacqueline was the very last person at Sun Steer I needed to win over, and I was confident that as soon as I did that, my daily stress levels would be reduced.
I wouldn’t feel the need to look over my shoulder every time I threw the word “cunt” around, because apparently, that word was severely more offensive here than in London.
I wouldn’t feel the need to grab anything—literally anything—to keep my hands busy whenever she stood in my presence.
Maybe we could even be friends and socialize with the others after work.
Even if I was sure I would never be able to get the expression she made when she clenched around my fingers out of my mind.
I was such a prick.
That problem of mine was probably the exact reason why it was important for Jacqueline and me to keep our distance from each other. For her to throw up this prickly wall between the two of us. She was a gorgeous woman, probably used to men not taking the hint.
I didn’t want to be that kind of man.
The kind of man who couldn’t be professional after knowing how it felt to be intimate with her.
The kind of man who felt entitled to her smiles or flirting simply because she had consented to intimacy with me the one single time.
The kind of man who constantly got a hard-on any time she bent in one of those torturous fucking pencil skirts.
No, I knew I wanted to be better. That I was capable of being responsible and mature. Safe. I never wanted her to feel unsafe because of what she shared with me. I understood that certain things she consented to with me had been immediately revoked as soon as we shook hands and pretended that we were meeting for the first time during my interview with her and Signe.
I wasn’t expecting to feel personally targeted by her wrath as often as I was, but I desperately tried to cut her some slack.
I was a man.
She was a woman.
Things were different for us.
Things weren’t as safe for her as they would be for me.
I understood the dynamic, especially in my managerial position.
I dropped my head in my hands, massaging my temples before scrubbing a hand down my face, desperate to pull myself out of those tempting memories that sometimes still haunted me in my dreams.
The sound of her voice.
The feel of her skin against mine.
“Shit,” I grumbled, then immediately lifted my head to double-check that Jacqueline wasn’t walking past my door at the exact moment I released a curse.
I bent down and opened the mini fridge I had installed under my desk on day one of working here, pulling out a can of espresso and flipping the top open, before I took a healthy chug. I had meetings today, and I didn’t want to be tired or distracted.
I pretended that the caffeine would last this time. That it wouldn’t burn out within thirty minutes of me consuming the beverage. That I wouldn’t be capable of taking a three-hour nap within an hour of drinking it.
I drummed my fingers on the can for a few moments while I tapped the space bar on my work laptop again, seeing the large number of unread emails that I needed to attend to.
Then I checked the time on my phone, seeing a few interesting headlines on the local news apps I had downloaded—
“No,” I grumbled to myself, turning my phone over face down on the desk, “Focus, mate.” I settled into my seat, sitting straighter as I forced myself to open the first email and read.
The caffeine started to hit, and I used that temporary high to help motivate me to check off as many tasks as I could that day.