20. Jo
— ? —
Jo
Hiring a private investigator turns out to be the easiest thing I have done in months.
A few phone calls. A retainer that empties most of my savings and doesn’t make me hesitate for even a second.
A soft-spoken man named Dale Okafor who doesn’t ask why a junior architect wants her ex-husband followed, only takes the photos I give him and tells me these things usually take a week or two.
It takes nine days.
Nick knows about Okafor. I told him the morning after his mother’s visit, the way we promised, and he hated every word of it and didn’t try to talk me out of it.
The hearing keeps getting pushed, anyway.
His lawyers filed for a continuance the morning after Eleanor’s visit, and it has slid twice since, buried under motions and countermotions that buy me one thing only: time.
Your call, he said, and meant it, even though I could see what it cost him to keep his hands out of my fight.
He knows what I mean to do with whatever the man turns up, too, and he doesn’t love that part either.
But this is the deal we made on that couch.
We tell each other the dangerous things before we do them, not after.
The envelope he hands me is thick and ordinary, and my hands don’t shake when I open it, which surprises me. I expected to feel something. Triumph, maybe, or the old sick lurch I used to get whenever Matthias’s name came up. Instead I just feel certain.
The photographs are exactly what I had been hoping for and dreading in equal measure.
Matthias and a woman who’s not his wife and isn’t me, leaving a hotel that charges for discretion.
His hand low on her back. Her laughing up at him with the easy confidence of someone who has done this more than once.
The junior associate. My blind guess, right all along. Time-stamped. Dated. Undeniable.
I sit with them a long time on my kitchen floor, the same floor where seven years of my life began with three plastic sticks, and I think about all the ways I could use this.
I could give them to Nick’s lawyers. Add them to the file. Let the machine grind Matthias down slowly, properly, the controlled way Nick would want.
Or I could hand the match to the one person on earth who would actually light it.
I pull up Brittany’s number. We aren’t friends.
We will never be friends. But she and I have always had exactly one thing in common, and his name is Matthias Anderson.
I attach the photos. I type three words.
Thought you’d want this. Then I hit send before the careful, sensible part of me can talk me out of it.
By evening I can’t sit still. The photos are out of my hands now, traveling toward a woman I can’t predict, and the waiting is its own kind of torture. Rory is at Grace’s for the night. The apartment is too quiet and too full of everything I just set in motion.
The office is dark when the elevator doors open. Most of the staff left hours ago, the building settling into that particular quiet that only exists after business hours. But light spills from one doorway at the end of the hall.
Nick’s office.
He’s at his desk, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, surrounded by paperwork that probably has nothing to do with the Hargrove project and everything to do with destroying his own family. He looks up when the shadow falls across his doorway.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.
“Neither should you.”
“I couldn’t sit at home. Rory’s with Grace. I just...” The sentence trails off into nothing.
“I know.” He stands, pushing back from the desk. “I couldn’t sit at home either.”
The door is still open. The hallway stretches behind me, empty but exposed. Anyone could walk past, could see, could draw conclusions that would complicate everything. But the building is empty, has been for hours, and the tension that’s been building all day is suddenly unbearable.
“Nick...”
He kisses me.
The kiss isn’t gentle. It’s desperate, all the fear and frustration of the past weeks pouring out through lips and teeth and tongue. He backs me into his office, one hand reaching past me to kick the door closed, the other tangling in my hair.
“I need you,” he says, breath hot against my lips. “I need to feel you. I need to know this is real.”
“Yes.”
He lifts me onto his desk without breaking the kiss. Papers scatter, important documents that will need to be reorganized later, but right now they’re nothing compared to the heat of his hands sliding under my skirt.
“We could get caught,” I gasp as his fingers find the edge of my underwear.
“Building’s empty.”
“But if someone...”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
He drops to his knees.
The sight of him there. Nick Anderson, CEO, billionaire, the most controlled man I’ve ever met, kneeling between my thighs with hunger in his eyes does something devastating to my composure. His hands push my skirt up, bunching the fabric around my waist. His breath is hot against my inner thigh.
“Nick...”
“Shh. Let me.”
He pulls my underwear aside. His tongue finds me, and the gasp I make is too loud for an office building, even an empty one. My hands fly to his hair, gripping hard enough to hurt, and he groans against my center, the pain its own kind of pleasure.
The desk is hard beneath me, the wood pressing into my thighs. The city watches through dark windows, a million lights bearing witness to something they can’t see. And Nick’s mouth is working magic between my legs, his tongue tracing patterns that make my vision blur.
A knock on the outer office door.
The freeze is instant. Every muscle locks. Breath gone, heart stopping.
“Nick? You in there?” A voice drifts through the walls. One of the architects, apparently working late after all. “I saw the light on.”
Nick looks up at me. His eyes are dark, challenging. His mouth is still pressed against my center, his breath hot and damp.
He doesn’t stop.
“Just a minute,” he says against my clit, the vibration making my hips buck involuntarily. “I’m on a call.”
“Sorry to interrupt. I just need the Hargrove file. Can you grab it?”
His tongue does something devastating, a slow circle, then a flick that sends sparks shooting up my spine. The whimper that escapes gets muffled by my own hand clapping over my mouth.
“I’ll...” Speaking is almost impossible. My voice comes out strained, barely recognizable. “I’ll email it to you. Give us five minutes.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Footsteps retreat down the hallway. The outer door opens and closes.
Nick grins against my skin, actually grins, the bastard, and redoubles his efforts. A finger slides inside me, then two, working in rhythm with his tongue. The pleasure builds faster now, sharpened by the danger, by the knowledge that someone almost walked in, that anyone could still.
“Oh god. Nick. I can’t...”
“You can,” he says against me, low and sure. “I have you. Quietly now.”
I come apart against his mouth with my fist jammed to my own lips, the cry trapped behind my knuckles, my whole body wringing tight around his fingers while the door stays unlocked and the city glitters on, oblivious. Wild. Reckless. Exactly what I need the morning everything could fall apart.
He works me through it, gentling his touch as the aftershocks fade, pressing soft kisses to my inner thighs.
“You’re evil,” I gasp when speech becomes possible again.
“You love it.”
He stands. Kisses me deeply. The taste of myself on his lips should be strange, but instead it’s intoxicating.
“Your turn,” I say, reaching for his belt.
“Jo...”
“Turnabout’s fair play.”
Sliding off the desk, dropping to my knees, looking up at him. The power dynamic shifts, and watching his expression change, from surprise to anticipation to raw need, is its own kind of pleasure.
“Five minutes,” I say. “Can you stay quiet?”
“Probably not.”
“Then bite your hand.”
Freeing him from his pants takes seconds. He’s already hard, straining against the fabric, and the sound he makes when my hand wraps around the base goes straight to my core.
Taking him in my mouth, slowly at first. Teasing. Learning what makes him groan, what makes his hands fist at his sides, what makes him curse under his breath. His fingers tangle in my hair, not pushing, just holding on, an anchor.
Deeper now. Hollowing my cheeks, swallowing around him. His hips jerk involuntarily, and the groan that escapes is definitely not quiet.
Pulling back just enough to speak: “Quiet, remember?”
He bites his hand. Takes him deep again.
The tension builds faster than expected, he’s been wound too tight, wanting too much for too long.
His thighs shake under my palms. His breath comes in ragged gasps.
And when he finally breaks, spilling hot and bitter across my tongue, the sound he makes against his own fist is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever heard.
After, he pulls me up into his arms. Kisses me deeply, thoroughly, memorizing the taste of us together.
“That was...”
“Insane,” I finish.
“I was going to say incredible.”
“Also that.”
Straightening clothes takes longer than it should, buttons that don’t want to cooperate, hair that refuses to look professional, a skirt that’s definitely wrinkled beyond repair. The papers scattered across the desk get gathered into a pile that will need sorting later.
Looking at each other in the aftermath, the absurdity of it all suddenly hits.
The laughter starts small, a snort, a giggle, and builds until we’re both shaking with it, holding onto each other in the middle of his corner office while the city watches and the Hargrove file sits unsent in some digital folder.
“We’re insane,” I manage between gasps. “Completely insane.”
“The best kind of insane.” He kisses my forehead, still grinning. “Let’s go home. Both of us. Together.”
“Home,” I agree.
The word has never sounded better.
It breaks two days later, and not the way I meant it to.
I only sent the photos to Brittany. One message, one person, a private little grenade lobbed at the one woman who deserved the truth. I didn’t send them to a newspaper. I wouldn’t have known how.
But somehow they’re everywhere. A gossip site first, then a business page that matters, then everywhere at once.
ANDERSON HEIR’S AFFAIR, the photos printed in full, the junior associate named, the timeline laid bare.
Matthias Anderson, partner at one of the most respected firms in the country, caught cheating on the society wife he left his first marriage for.
I stare at my phone and feel the ground tilt.
I don’t know how it got out. I only know that Matthias will never believe that.
He has spent seven years deciding that everything wrong in his life traces back to me, and now here’s proof in every paper in the country, with my fingerprints on the trigger.
I should be afraid. Some part of me knows exactly what he becomes when he’s cornered.
It’s the part I don’t listen to. Not yet.