Chapter Ten
Desk Sovereignty
His name was Callum Reid.
He was thirty-two, a junior analyst on the commercial acquisitions team two floors below, and he had stopped by her office on Wednesday morning with a question about a development brief she had routed to his team the week prior.
He was tall, easy in his own skin, the kind of handsome that didn't require a room to adjust itself around him.
He had smiled at her like a man who hadn't spent years engineering her entire life.
It was, she realized, startlingly refreshing.
They had talked for twenty minutes. About the brief.
About a project she had consulted on in her previous role that turned out to be adjacent to work his team was doing now.
He had asked if she wanted to continue the conversation at lunch.
She had said maybe, which wasn't yes but wasn't no, and he had left the way men left when they thought they might be welcome back.
She hadn't thought much of it.
Jeremiah had.
She knew something was different the moment she came back from a meeting at three and found his office door—which was always open when she was on the floor, which had been open without exception for five weeks—closed.
She sat at her desk. Worked. Told herself it meant nothing.
At four-fifteen his door opened and he appeared in her doorway, and one look at his face told her that the meeting, whatever it had been, had done nothing to improve his mood.
He was in full control—he was always in full control—but there was a quality to the control today that was tighter, the way a fist was tighter than an open hand.
"A moment," he said.
She followed him into his office.
He closed the door behind her.
She stood in the middle of the room. He crossed to his desk but didn't sit—stood behind it, hands flat on the surface, the posture of a man who was keeping the furniture between them for reasons she understood were as much about him as about her.
"Callum Reid," he said.
She looked at him. "He had questions about the Meridian brief."
"For twenty minutes."
"It was a thorough brief."
"He asked you to lunch."
"He suggested it. I didn't commit." She tilted her head. "Are you surveilling my office now as well as my phone?"
He held her gaze. The jaw was tight. The hands on the desk were still. "The security cameras on this floor are part of the building system. I don't review the footage routinely."
"But you reviewed it today."
A pause. "Marcus flagged it."
She stared at him. "You have Marcus watching my office."
"I have Marcus watching this floor. For your safety. That was the arrangement."
"The arrangement was a stalker situation. There has been no contact in two weeks. The situation may already be resolved."
"The situation isn't resolved until I say it's resolved."
The words landed with a weight he hadn't intended to let them carry—she could see it in the slight shift of his expression, the almost-invisible recognition that he had said the quiet part aloud. He didn't take it back. He wasn't a man who took things back.
"Say what you mean," she said, her voice low.
He came around the desk.
He crossed the space with his usual unhurried certainty, claiming the room without seeming to try. She held her ground because she had learned that with Jeremiah Youngblood, the moment she stepped back, the balance shifted in his favor. He stopped in front of her.
"You're mine," he said. Low. Even. The voice of absolute conviction, not performance.
"I understand that you haven't fully arrived at that conclusion yet.
I understand you need time and I told you I would give it.
But Callum Reid standing in your doorway for twenty minutes asking you to lunch isn't something I'm capable of being rational about, and I think you know that, and I think you let it happen anyway to see what I would do. "
She looked up at him. "Maybe I did."
Something flashed across his face—sharp, dark, and fiercely alive, the force beneath his control breaking through at last.
"Then you have your answer," he said.
* * *
He kissed her first this time.
No corridor alert. No two a.m. adrenaline. Just his hand on her jaw and his mouth on hers in the full light of a Tuesday afternoon with the city blazing behind the glass and the security cameras running and the door closed.
She kissed him back without hesitation, without the half-second of hesitation she had allowed herself the first time, because there was no hesitation left in her where he was concerned.
That was the thing she had been thinking about for three days—not the act itself but the absence of conflict when it happened, the way her body had simply known.
He walked her backward until her thighs hit the edge of his desk and then his hands were at her hips and he lifted her onto it in one clean motion, settling her there, stepping between her knees, his hands pressing flat against the glass surface on either side of her and his face close to hers.
"The cameras," she said against his mouth.
"Run to my access only." He pulled back just enough to look at her—those gray eyes dark and sure, the control stripped to its thinnest layer. "No one sees this but me."
"That's not as reassuring as you think it is."
"I know."
He kissed her throat. The necklace first, metal warm under his mouth, then the skin below it, and she tipped her head back and let him because she was done pretending she wouldn't. His hands moved up under her blazer, over her blouse, reading the shape of her through the fabric with that focused patience that undid her more than urgency would have.
"Jeremiah."
"Tell me to stop," he said against her collarbone. "Tell me and I will."
She pulled him up to her mouth instead. He made that sound—the low, sharp sound she had filed away from the first night, the sound of the controlled thing letting go—and his hands moved to her blouse and worked the buttons with a precision that was somehow more erotic than impatience would have been.
He spread it open and looked at her and the expression on his face did what it always did to her, that complete and private reverence, and then his mouth was at her throat and moving down and her hands were in his hair and Manhattan went about its indifferent business forty-eight floors below them.
He laid her back against the desk.
Cold glass against her spine. His warmth above her.
The city upside down in the windows behind him.
She pulled at his jacket and he shrugged it off without looking away from her face, dropped it somewhere, and then there was just the shirt and her hands at the buttons and his hands at her skirt, sliding the fabric up her thighs with a slowness that made her dig her nails into his shoulders.
"Impatient," he said.
"You were going to make a point about Callum Reid," she said. "Make it."
His eyes went dark. His hands moved. She gasped at the contact—his fingers finding her through the thin barrier of her underwear, pressing, reading her the way he read everything, with complete attention. Her hips rose.
"Look at me," he said. Same words as before. Same register, low and absolute.
She looked at him. His eyes were on her face while his hand worked between her thighs and she couldn't have looked away if she had tried, held there by the gray of him, the intent of him, the way he watched her come undone like it was the thing he had been alive for.
"Who does this pussy belong to?" he asked.
She shook her head, not defiance—she genuinely couldn't form words.
He pressed harder. She arched. "Ariah."
"You," she said, breathless and furious and entirely sure. "It belongs to you. You know it does."
"Yes," he said. "I do."
He pulled her underwear aside and she felt the blunt heat of him and wrapped her legs around his hips and he pushed inside her in one slow devastating stroke that had nothing accidental in it, nothing rushed, the stroke of a man who had decided this was his and was taking his time reminding them both.
She came with her hands fisted in his shirt and his name breaking off the back of her teeth and his face above hers watching every second of it with those gray eyes open and present and full of something that wasn't triumph—too quiet for triumph, too old for triumph.
More like completion. More like the final piece of something vast and patient finally settling into place.
He followed her over with his forehead dropped to hers, her name in his mouth, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave the ghost of his fingers on her dark skin.
* * *
After, he helped her off the desk with hands that were as steady as they had been before, buttoned her blouse, smoothed her skirt.
She let him. She sat on the edge of his desk and watched him remake himself—jacket back on, tie straightened, the full armor of him reassembled in under a minute—and felt something that wasn't quite amusement and not quite tenderness but lived in the neighborhood of both.
"The cameras," she said.
"Time-stamped to my access. I'll clear the segment."
"You can do that."
"I built the system."
Of course he had. She looked around his office—the dark wood, the glass, the city—and thought about all the systems he had built, the visible ones and the ones she was still finding. The design of her life for the past several months, how many walls of it his hands were in.
"I'm not going to lunch with Callum Reid," she said.
"No," he agreed.
"Not because of this. Because I don't want to."
He looked at her. The almost-smile, the one she had catalogued from the very beginning, the one she now understood was the closest his face came to joy.
"I know the difference," he said.
She slid off the desk. Found her shoes. Put them on.
"Jeremiah."
"Mm."
"The next time Marcus flags something from my office—"
"You'll be the first to know," he said.
It wasn't the answer she had been going to ask for.
It was better and worse than what she had planned to say, and he knew that, and the almost-smile confirmed it, and she shook her head and went back to her office and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to work with the pleasant deep ache of him still present in her body and the knowledge, settling in like something final, that she wasn't going to be able to keep calling this something she could still walk away from.
She wasn't sure, anymore, that she wanted to.