Chapter 23 Power Shift #2
I was so dumbfounded by what was happening, so mesmerized by those moles flashing into view, it took her reaching for the one underneath—the one that if she undid, would expose her upper half—for me to react.
I grabbed her wrists. “Sarah,” I growled. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m getting you to stop pretending, Jamie. Because I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re acting like you don’t like me. But you don’t get hard for people you don’t like. Or I don’t know… maybe you do?”
I clenched my teeth so hard my molars ground together painfully. But I didn’t let go of her wrists. I held them pinned to her collarbone. I knew if I let go, even if she didn’t keep going, I would.
“You work for me.” My voice was nearly a growl.
“Funny you seem to have forgotten that last night.” Her eyes dropped down to my crotch. “This morning, too.”
If she’d given me anything other than another one of those smirks, I’d have backed away so fast there’d be marks on the floor.
But her lips turned up. She knew exactly what she was doing to me. And in her eyes was a challenge, topped only by what she said next.
“I think you like me in your shirt, Jamie. Especially knowing I’m not wearing anything underneath.”
That’s when I lost all rational thought. I was driven by one thing and one thing only.
“Sarah fucking Cooper,” I growled.
I took a step forward, which made her have to take a step back. I took another. I didn’t stop until I had her backed up against the window, those gauzy curtains flattening behind her. The coolness radiating off the glass did nothing to bring me back to myself.
I came up close enough that there was no doubt as to what her eyes had dropped to a moment ago. It sat between us like a lead pipe. The soft heat of her stomach through the fabric separating us made it ache.
I wanted that fabric gone. The only thing stopping me was my hands, still wrapped around her wrists.
“You’re making it very difficult to do the right thing, Sarah.”
She didn’t back down. If anything, her pupils flared wider as she stared up at me defiantly. “Then maybe you should do the wrong thing, Jamie.”
It took everything—and I mean everything—not to crush my mouth to hers. Not to let go of her hands and grab her by the thighs, lifting her up against this window and ripping her shirt open with my fucking teeth.
But if the intensity of my need was this alarming to me, I knew I could easily scare her. And that was enough to give me the slightest bit of pause. Instead, I leaned in, forehead against hers, breathing through my nose like a fucking bull in heat.
But I felt her melt against me. I felt her bound hands draw down, dragging past the opening in my shirt. When my knuckles grazed the soft stretch of skin between her breasts, my cock leapt, straining against my zipper.
The little gasp that passed through her lips nearly wrecked me. An undignified sound rumbled from my throat. It was a curse. A threat to myself. A final, desperate warning.
My head angled on its own, my body in control now. It fully intended to trap her mouth against mine, to finally plunder those sweet cherry lips. To pull one between my teeth before letting go and telling her all the ways I’d dreamed of taking her.
But it was that, in the end, that ripped through me like a record scratch.
It was an email Cora had shown me. Gary, clearly drunk, had written her an email during our staff party, filled with just that: his perverted fucking fantasies.
Gary.
If I continued with what I was doing, how was I any better? Even if it wasn’t the same, Gary, who I knew was here, would know. I wouldn’t have to do anything for him to know. He’d see it all over my face when I confronted him.
And I had to confront him. Because that’s why he was here.
He’d never let it go. The day I fired him, he’d gone into his office to pack up his things and come out again shitfaced.
As I dragged him out by the collar, he hollered at me that he’d destroy everything and everyone in his path to take me down for what I’d done to him.
I’d grabbed him by the shirt and pulled his car keys out of his pocket. Then I told him I’d call the cops if he didn’t fuck off and slammed the door in his face.
When I’d tried to drop his keys off in his mailbox the next morning, he’d come stumbling out, and that’s when I’d threatened him, yelling the things I should have told him calmly.
I knew he still held onto this bitter, twisted lie that it was me who ruined his life, not his own actions. He’d do anything to get back at me, and would—I knew without a doubt—try to use this perfect, beautiful, brilliant woman before me to do so.
The woman who, in another timeline, was mine to keep.
That was the only thing that stopped me from doing what every part of me wanted, brain, body, and soul.
I let go of Sarah’s hands. I took a step back.
“I’m sorry,” I said gruffly. “For that, and for last night. I’ll—” What, I’ll see you? I prayed to fucking God I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t resist her again. I was way too fucking weak. “I wish you luck today Sarah. Not that you need it.”
Then I strode from the room, my chest filled with barely-contained pain of all kinds.