Chapter 17 Olivia
OLIVIA
I can’t move if my life depended on it.
But Stefan doesn’t startle. Doesn’t even stop. His eyes lock onto mine, dark and knowing, like he’s been waiting. Like this was inevitable.
Like every move he made, every move I made, were just the bends in a road that was always going to bring us here, to this moment, this endless fucking second.
Shame floods my face as I process what I’m witnessing.
Stefan Safonov, the picture of cool, calm, and collected, is sitting behind his imposing desk while his hand moves rhythmically beneath it.
The cup I left him sits open on the desk’s edge, just in case there were any doubts about what he’s doing beneath the mahogany.
But that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is what I heard, just before he saw me here.
My name.
“Olivia.”
He moaned my fucking name.
I should back out, apologize, pretend this never happened. Maybe get plastic surgery and change my name and flee the country.
But I do none of that. My feet remain rooted to the spot, my eyes inexplicably drawn to the flex of muscles in his forearm, the slight flush creeping up his neck, the intensity of his gaze that never wavers from mine.
“I’m sorry, I— I didn’t— I came to say—” My voice sputters and fails.
I should leave. I came here to end this, anyway. I should end it now. Go.
“Tell me what?” His voice is rough, hitching in time to the rhythm of his arm. He doesn’t even attempt to hide what he’s doing. Somehow, that self-assurance makes my pulse race faster.
I try to open my mouth and justspititthefuckoutalready—but then he stands. Slowly, deliberately. I catch a glimpse of him adjusting himself before he steps around the desk.
I back up and up and up—until the door accidentally clicks shut behind me.
Perfect. Now, I’m trapped between solid wood and, if the bulge in his pants is any indication… solid wood.
“The c-cup,” I stammer. “I came for the— We don’t need the cup.”
His pupils are blown. “My thoughts exactly.”
“That’s not what I—” But his hand cups my jaw, and the argument falls away. “Tell me, Dr. Aster… In your professional medical opinion, which has the higher success rate: your clinical methods or the traditional approach?”
I swallow hard. “Our… our… m-methods are highly advanced. We don’t use… turkey basters, if that’s what you’re implying.”
His laugh is like a blast of desert wind, hot and merciless. “That wasn’t my question.” He takes another step closer, until I can feel the heat of him, smell the expensive cologne mingling with the musk of pre-sweat.
His hand slides from my jaw to my throat, not squeezing, just resting there, feeling my pulse race beneath his fingertips.
“The statistics show—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No hiding behind statistics. Tell me the truth. Man and woman. Flesh to flesh. Is anything better than the real thing?”
The wall is cool against my back, a stark contrast to the fire building inside me.
I’m a fertility specialist—I know the answer; I’ve recited it to countless couples.
But admitting it to Stefan feels like surrendering something vital.
It’d be waving a white flag, and then God only knows what spoils of victory he’d claim for himself.
“No,” I finally whisper. “Natural conception has higher success rates in otherwise healthy individuals. The… environment, the hormones released during intercourse… create optimal conditions for fertilization.”
His thumb traces my lower lip. I can’t help the small intake of breath. “And we’re both healthy individuals, aren’t we, Olivia?”
My body betrays me with a shiver. There are a million things I could say to argue back. But each and every one of those things is drowning in a sea of hormones screaming wordlessly at me, like Romans at the Coliseum pointing their thumbs to the earth and screaming for Stefan to finish it already.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs. I can feel his pulse hammering against my throat. Or is that mine? “Tell me you don’t want this.”
I should. God, I should. But my hands are already in his hair, and his mouth tastes like surrender.
The first kiss is nuclear—not gentle, not tentative, not at all. His tongue claims my mouth, and my body gives it up before my mind can even begin to mount a defense. I came here to escape him, not to fall deeper.
Whoops.
His hands are everywhere—tangled in my hair, sliding beneath my blouse, squeezing every curve harder than anyone’s ever touched me before.
The sperm sample cup—my reason for returning—lies forgotten on his desk. Ironic, I think through the haze of desire, that I’d come to prevent this exact outcome.
“Wait!” I gasp, pressing my palms against his chest.
Stefan pulls back just enough to study my face. “For what?”
“For— We— I’m a doctor,” I whisper, more to remind myself than him. “With ethics guidelines, professional standards—”
“And a racing heart.” His fingers trace the pulse point at my neck. “Should I be concerned?”
“That’s an involuntary physiological response,” I counter.
I keep trying to find my way out of this mess. Dr. Aster would never do this. Dr. Aster maintains perfect control.
But Olivia—the woman beneath the lab coat—knows she’s already lost. She’s just trying to delay the inevitable.
“Is this involuntary, too?” He slides his hand beneath the waistband of my skirt, finding me embarrassingly ready. I bite back a moan as his fingers stroke once, twice. They make his point for him.
“Yes,” I say hoarsely. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“Right and wrong are constructs.” His lips hover just above mine. “The body knows what it wants. Yours is screaming right now.”
I know exactly what I want. Do you?
His words echo in my head. Involuntarily—at least, that’s what I’ll testify if this matter ever went to a courtroom—I reach out to touch him. I gasp at the hard length of him against my palm.
Stefan Safonov absolutely knows what he wants.
And somehow, it’s me.
His lips find the sensitive spot below my ear. It might as well be a button to power me down. With one touch, my resistance crumbles like sand.
I don’t know how it happens, but his desk is suddenly beneath me. Papers go everywhere as he lifts me onto it. I glimpse a document with my clinic’s letterhead at the top, a quick reminder that this moment has a purpose and Stefan wouldn’t be here if it didn’t make financial sense.
Then he sweeps everything onto the floor, and none of that matters anymore.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I lie as his teeth graze my collarbone.
“Wrong. This changes everything.” His fingers trace the edge of my lace bra. “If it takes, you’ll be carrying my heir. My blood. My legacy.”
The word “heir” sends an unexpected jolt through me. It’s a stark reminder of what this is really about. Not just sex, not just pleasure, but potentially creating life. The actual purpose of our arrangement all along.
“You knew this would happen,” I whisper as he unclasps my bra.
That’s a loaded statement, half-true and half-not. There’s no way he could know—no way he could anticipate decisions I didn’t even know I’d make. But somehow, it still feels like he knew this would happen.
“It’s my job to know things.” His eyes, when they meet mine, are feral with desire. He cups my breast. Tweaks my nipple enough to make me moan. “I knew you’d agree. But how good you feel right now? That exceeds all expectations.”
My laugh turns into a gasp as his mouth replaces his hand. This is madness—complete professional and moral suicide—but I can’t stop my fingers from fumbling with his belt buckle. Can’t stop the way my back arches, offering more of myself to him.
When he pushes into me, the feeling is so overwhelming that I cry out. Not from pain—though there is some; it’s been so long since I last did this—but from the sheer intensity.
My body stretches to accommodate him, and something about the burn of it, the fullness, feels like a metaphor for how he’s invaded every aspect of my life.
He growls—an actual growl—when he’s fully seated inside me. His pupils are dilated wide.
I get it now, how the clinic could never recreate this. What beaker could contain him? What test tube could bottle up the way he’s looking at me right now? It took tens of thousands of years of evolution to bring him and me here together right now.
It’d take another ten thousand to rip us apart.
His fingers dig into my hips hard enough to bruise. My body responds with a shudder of recognition: Yes, this is what we are beneath the veneer of civilization.
We’re animals. Just fucking animals.
“Look at me,” he commands.
I didn’t even realize I’d closed my eyes. When I open them, the fire in his gaze takes my breath away. He’s barely moved, just joined our bodies, and already, I feel the precipice approaching.
“I want to see your face,” he snarls. “When you come apart for me, I want to fucking see it.”
“Someone is confident,” I gasp.
That dangerous half-smile appears. “Should I not be?”
Any answer I’d give goes up in smoke when he starts to move. Each thrust pushes me further across the desk, scattering pens and papers, until his hand cradles the back of my head, protecting me from hitting the wall.
The gesture is unexpectedly tender. The first thing he’s done that wasn’t pure, violent Viking behavior. It undoes me more than anything else that’s happened.
“What did you come here to tell me?” he asks, his rhythm never faltering. “You never finished.”
The fact that he can form complete sentences while I’m coming apart at the seams seems cosmically unfair. I struggle to remember why I returned, what important revelation brought me storming back to his office.
I gasp as his thumb finds the sensitive bundle of nerves at the apex of my thighs. “I came to r-refuse you. To walk away before this gets—gets—ohmyGod—out of hand.”
He laughs as he fucks me. “And how did that work out?”
“It’s… in progress… You— OhmyfuckingGod.” He hits a spot that makes stars burst behind my eyelids.
“That’s what I thought. All those big plans, and yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” I agree, and the honesty of it—the admission that I’ve failed spectacularly at saving myself from him—pushes me over the edge.
The climax crashes through me like a tidal wave, obliterating thought and reason and, embarrassingly, causing me to stutter so hard that drool pools on my lips.
I’m dimly aware of crying out, of my body arching against his, of his grip tightening almost painfully on my hips as he follows me into oblivion.
One stuttering jerk. Another. He fills me.
And then, just like that, it’s over.
My breath comes down to earth. Stefan’s either calmed faster or never got worked up in the first place, because he looks and sounds as composed as he ever does.
He steps away from me and straightens his cuffs while I stare up at the ceiling, panties askew, skirt hiked up, dazed and confused and helpless to do anything but inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
I don’t let myself think. I can’t.
“You planned this,” I whisper again. It’s not quite an accusation. Just a statement of fact.
His laugh is cool once again, not that cruel, primal, heated rasp it was before. “I plan everything.”
I close my eyes. There’s no going back now. No more choices, no more pretending this is just business.
My entire life has been spent chasing perfection. Yet here, in the aftermath of something so reckless, so unprofessional, so unbelievably stupid, I feel a strange peace. As if I’ve been swimming against a current my whole life and finally just said, Fuck it, and let it take me wherever it wants.
Eventually, I peel myself off the sticky desk and try to rearrange my outfit and my dignity.
But the woman who walked in here thirty minutes ago is gone. The life she thought she was living is no longer available.
For better or worse, I belong to the monster now.