Chapter 26 Olivia
OLIVIA
I fling a throw pillow around yet again, trying to decide if it looks better on the left or right side of my couch. Or maybe right in the middle? Which one says I’m A Cool Girl and I’m Totally Unbothered About This Impromptu Booty Call?
Flyaways stick to my sweaty neck as I frantically scan my apartment. I’m trying to see it through a stranger’s eyes.
Does the bookshelf with medical journals screaming “workaholic” send the wrong message?
Should I hide the framed photo of me receiving an award from my unsmiling mother?
Does showering beforehand make me look desperate? Does not showering make me look disgusting?
God, is that dust on the coffee table?
“This is insane,” I mutter, even as I start scrubbing the table with my sleeve. “He’s not coming over for a home inspection. He’s coming to—”
I can’t even finish the thought before heat rushes to my face.
I glance at my phone. It’s been nineteen minutes since his text. The rational part of my brain is screaming that I’m an idiot.
The other part, the one with a direct line of communication running between my legs, reminds me that my panties have been damp since his first message.
One is sliiightly louder than the other.
That being said, I’m horny, but not a complete and total moron. Not yet, at least. I could still lock the door. Turn off the porch light, close the blinds. I’ll claim my phone was hacked by spies and deny any knowledge of any “I’m too close”-esque messages.
I stop in front of the entryway mirror to run my fingers through my damp hair. “I’ll just tell him this was a bad idea. Yeah. That’s fine. Nice ‘n’ simple. ‘It was a bad idea, sorry. This deadbolt is staying deadbolted.’”
But even as the words echo off the walls, I’m turning towards the door. My fingers toy with the deadbolt, flipping it back and forth.
Unlocked.
Locked.
Freedom.
Fate.
I reach for my phone. “Better yet, let’s avoid this whole standoff on either side of the door. I’ll just tell him I’ve reconsidered. That my personal feelings can’t override the ethical implications of—”
Footsteps cut my internal monologue short. Heavy, measured, inevitable.
My heart immediately dives into a full gymnastics routine in my chest. Before my brain can veto the decision, my hand frees the deadbolt.
When I pull the door open, time freezes.
Stefan stands bathed in the amber glow of the light.
His hair is tousled, as if he’s been running his fingers through it—a rare glimpse of imperfection that makes my mouth go dry.
His charcoal sweater clings to his shoulders and chest, revealing the hard planes beneath that my fingers itch to trace.
His impossible blue-brown eyes are shot through with midnight.
They pin me in place, and I watch his pupils dilate as they take in my damp hair, my flushed cheeks, the thin robe barely cinched at my waist.
I should be embarrassed by my state of undress. I should be mortified by the naked want I know is written across my face. The Olivia of this afternoon—the ultra-professional version of me with self-control and willpower—would be both of those things.
But tonight, I’m someone else.
I’m someone who craves.
“Having second thoughts, Dr. Aster?” His voice sends ripples of awareness across my skin. The world beyond him blurs into insignificance—no traffic sounds, no neighbors.
Just us, suspended in this moment of electric possibility.
“Several thousand, actually.”
“And yet you opened the door.” He steps inside, not waiting for an invitation. The space between us evaporates until my back meets the wall. His scent—bergamot, gunpowder, power—floods my senses.
“This breaks every personal rule I have,” I whisper, fidgeting in place.
Stefan laughs. “We’re about to break a few you’ve never even heard of.”
I gulp. The sound is way too loud in the cramped space of my apartment entryway.
“Would you like me to leave?” His thumb traces my lower lip, feeling my involuntary tremor. “Say the word and I’ll go.”
“I could. I might.”
“But you won’t.”
“No,” I agree. “I won’t.”
Then he’s kissing me, and there’s no more negotiating left to do. His hands cup my face, tilting my head back to deepen the kiss, and I melt into him like I’ve been waiting for this my entire life.
Stefan kicks the door shut behind him. He walks me backward into the apartment without breaking the kiss. His hands tangle in my hair as we go stumbling and bumbling toward the couch.
Alarm bells ring distantly in my mind as his intentions become clear. If he gets me horizontal, it’s over. I’ll be gone.
“Wait!” I break away, breathless and dizzy. “The contract. We haven’t— I haven’t signed anything.”
I was pissed about him making such a big deal about the contract this afternoon, but now, it’s my last remaining lifeline.
Stefan blinks. For a moment, he seems genuinely confused, like the concept of paperwork is foreign to him. Then frustration flashes across his face.
It’s his own stupid insistence on the dotted line that’s ruining this. He has only himself to blame.
“Fucking Christ,” he mutters, dragging a hand through his hair.
The look he gives me is almost accusatory. I’m the nerdy kid reminding the teacher about homework that he was hoping would be forgotten.
It’s kind of amusing, honestly, seeing a man like him brought to heel by his own choices. I bite my lip so I don’t laugh, but then he gives me a heated look that turns that laugh into a strangled moan instead.
He spots the manila folder on my coffee table—the same one he pressed into my hand in my office two days ago. Bending gracefully, he snatches it up and guides me into the kitchen.
“Let’s fix that then,” he murmurs, plucking a pen from the cup beside my fruit bowl.
In one fluid motion, he lifts me onto the counter and steps between my thighs. The cold granite against my overheated skin makes me gasp. Although, on second thought, his hands sliding up beneath the hem of my robe might also play a role in the gasping.
He sets the contract beside me and offers the pen. “Sign it.”
“Is this coercion, Mr. Safonov?” I manage to sound almost composed, despite his hand sliding higher beneath my robe. He’s about an inch away from discovering my absolute lack of underwear.
“I prefer ‘informed consent.’ So you know exactly what you’re getting into.”
My laugh turns into a moan as his fingers find the slick evidence of my arousal. Without breaking eye contact, he lowers himself to one knee, presses my knees apart, and kisses up the inside of my thigh.
“Stefan, I—”
But the swipe of his tongue devastates any hope I have of speaking. Or protesting. Or keeping a cool head. He kisses my core the same way he kissed my mouth—like there’s not a damn thing else in the world he’d rather be doing.
Then he stops. Looking up at me, he grins—his lips wet and shining—and asks, “Are you going to sign, Doctor?”
“You’re cheating,” I manage between moans.
I feel his chuckle against my inner thigh. He does something with his tongue that makes me see stars. “I’ve barely gotten started. Sign that contract, and I won’t hold back.”
He plunges his tongue into me. My eyes roll back in my head.
This is holding back?
I blindly fumble for the pen and scrawl my signature across the dotted line—or what I hope is the dotted line—just as he scoops two hands under my butt and pulls me onto his mouth.
“I’m— I’m— I’m—”
Coming is what I would say if I could speak. Since I can’t, I just curl my fingers through his hair, arch off the counter, and moan as an orgasm rips through me like a sonic fucking boom.
I’m hot. I’m shivering. I’m melting. I’m drifting through a faraway land made of clouds and cotton candy.
I’m still trembling, gasping as I come down, when Stefan lifts his head. He rises, gazes down at me, and says, “Now, we can start.”
“I’m not ready to start,” I protest. “I’m finished.”
Stefan laughs and tilts my chin up toward him. My legs wrap around his waist like it’s second nature. As if we’ve done this before, countless times. I loop my arms around his neck and fall against his mouth, kissing him with my eyes closed.
We’re up and moving, I think, though I’m sort of losing track of time and space. I just hear doors opening and closing, things shifting, and I’m vaguely aware of Stefan’s heat and solidity carrying me from one room to another.
It’s only when my back hits the mattress that I blink my eyes open. Stefan looms above me. He’s half-shaded, half-lit, fully beautiful.
“You’re unreal,” I breathe. Then I wish I hadn’t said that out loud, because it’s extremely embarrassing.
It’s not wrong, though. This entire night is unreal. How are we here? Why am I doing this? Who am I? Who is he?
Then Stefan leans back and pulls his sweater over his head in one fluid motion, and that’s why I’m doing this. His tanned skin is a canvas of ink and scars. Twisting, turning, faded, stark. I could spend days touching every inch of him.
He gives me a few seconds to trace the lines of a tattoo that curls around his collarbone and over his shoulder before he brushes my hand away and tugs at the belt of my robe.
“You have too many clothes on,” he scolds.
I lift an eyebrow. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Pretty sure we passed that exit a few miles back.” His fingers brush along my neck as he teases the robe off of my shoulders. “Face it, Olivia: We’ve been heading here since day one.”
And he’s right. This has been inevitable since that first night at the gala. Maybe even before that—as if all the choices I’ve ever made were really just roads leading me here, to this man, to this bed.
To what’s about to happen.
His hands are everywhere. When he touches me—really touches me—I close my eyes and let the sensations swallow me whole. His lips trace paths of fire down my neck, across my breasts, over the sensitive skin of my stomach.
Every kiss is like I’m signing away my life all over again. Which contract is this one, hm?
He kisses between my breasts—that’s a deal for me to carry his child.
He sucks one nipple into his mouth while he toys with the other—that’s my promise that I’ll bear his baby and never tell anyone how this happened.
I start to feel that familiar nervous tingle, the voice in my head screaming at me, What are you doing, you lunatic? Don’t you know what this will cost you? Don’t you know he’ll throw you aside as soon as he’s done with you? Don’t you—
“You’re thinking too much,” he murmurs against my hip bone.
I hate the way he can read my mind.
Or at least, I did hate that.
Until he does exactly what I’m hoping he’ll do and kisses my pussy. A soft, bearded kiss that sends goosebumps surging up and down my body.
My fingers tighten in his hair as his teeth graze the soft flesh of my inner thigh. “Professional hazard.”
“Then let me help you focus, Dr. Aster,” he says, “in the most unprofessional way imaginable.”
He lowers himself down on top of me, sandwiching me against the mattress.
His mouth falls over mine, soft and firm and dizzying.
I’m so lost in the ease of tasting him, of exploring his tongue with mine, that I don’t feel his hands slip lower or his body settling between my thighs until he’s right there.
I don’t know where his pants went, but they’re gone now, and I couldn’t be more glad. Because it means his hardness is so fucking close to filling me, to giving me the thing I need more than anything else in this world.
He strokes himself over my center. I groan and whimper, but he doesn’t relent. Again and again, he teases me. The dragging of his tip against my clit.
I feel his smile as I whine against his lips, pleading. “Please, Stefan. Please, please, pl—”
When he finally enters me, I almost scream.
It’s like the world narrows to this one point of connection. I stretch around him, taking him deeper and deeper. I’m achingly full, but I still buck up from beneath him, rolling our bodies even closer.
“Look at me,” he commands.
So I do. I melt into his eyes and give him all of me. Maybe even more than I intended, actually, because I feel like something opens up between us, some link, some chain, and it drags something out of him that he maybe didn’t intend to give me, either.
That’s what makes me come. Well, yes, his dick inside of me helps, obviously, but it’s the feeling that we’re pouring into each other that sends me tumbling over the edge.
My breath stutters and catches in my throat as the orgasm rips through me. Stefan fucks me through it, though he’s clamping down on his lip, too.
He opens his mouth and says my name—just that, just “Olivia,” so softly that I’m not sure he wanted me to hear it.
I hear it, though. I reply in kind.
“Stefan!” I gasp, his name streaming from my lips, no possible way I could keep it hushed.
That’s what makes him come, I think. With a guttural roar, he buries his face in my neck and unleashes. He fills me and fills me and fills me until, little by little, his thrusts slow, and we end up lying tangled on the mattress, neither one of us daring to breathe.
We stay there—until we don’t. Until, without a word, he rolls me onto my stomach and enters me again.
“Stefan—”
“Hush. I’m not fucking done with you yet.”
I’m not sure what happens after that. I’m a blur of oversensitized nerves, of gasps and moans and pleas and whimpers. He responds with roars and grunts and the frenzy of our fucking. It’s endless hours of coming together and coming apart and coming up and coming down.
Finally, mercifully, our bodies quit on us. The silence that follows the last orgasm is the heaviest yet. Like a weighted blanket smushing out all of the anxieties that want to spring up in my head.
I look up at the ceiling. In the daze of my exhaustion, the shadows in the popcorn stippling rearrange themselves into an imaginary shape.
The shape of my name, actually. It says Olivia Aster on my ceiling, scrawled in my own handwriting.
Just like it says at the foot of the contract we left marooned on my kitchen counter.
Tomorrow, there will be a price to pay for what I just did. There will be consequences to face, ethical lines to redraw, rational explanations to formulate.
But tonight, sleep beckons.
The second-to-last thing I register before consciousness slips away is how his hand comes to loop across my waist in the darkness.
The very last thing is the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my back.
For something so dangerous, it’s strangely comforting.