Chapter 16
Dylan
Avoiding her should be simple.
I've avoided harder things. Boardroom ambushes. My father's silence. The particular kind of grief that lives in a man who was raised to call it discipline.
Lexy Calder should be manageable.
She isn't.
Breakfast, she's at the far end of the table, laughing at something Samantha Pierce says.
I stop in the doorway.
It's a quiet laugh. Real one. Head tilted slightly, one hand flat on the table, like the joke caught her off guard and she's letting herself feel it anyway. No performance. No calculation. Just Lexy, unguarded for thirty seconds, and the whole room looks warmer for it.
Pierce says something else. Lexy's smile stretches wider, and she shakes her head like she can't believe it—genuine, loose, nothing like the version she aims at me.
Something moves through my chest that I don't have a clean word for.
It isn't desire, though that's there too. It's something sharper. More inconvenient.
I want to be the one who said the thing that made her laugh like that.
I want to be the reason her guard drops, not the reason she puts it back up.
That thought has no business being in my head at seven in the morning, so I do what I always do with things that have no business being anywhere near me.
I bury it.
I take my coffee to the window instead.
Eight o'clock briefing, she's across the conference table, one ankle crossed over the other, pen tapping a slow rhythm against her notepad. Not fidgeting. Thinking. I know the difference now, which is already a problem.
She catches me watching.
I look back at the documents.
By noon, I've redirected three separate conversations she walked into, reassigned a working group she was leading, and told Marcus to reroute the afternoon logistics so she'd be in the east wing while I worked the west.
"Anything else?" Marcus asks, expressionless.
"No."
He nods once and leaves. He doesn't ask why. That's why I pay him.
The whiteout starts at two.
No warning. No slow build. One minute the treeline is visible through the corridor windows, the next it's gone—swallowed whole by white. The lights stutter, drop, then kick back on at half strength as the estate switches to secondary power.
Someone in the east wing shouts something about the generator.
I'm already moving.
The small document office off the main corridor is the last place anyone will look for me. No heating duct worth mentioning, single north-facing window, used twice a year. I grab the file I need and get inside before the intercom starts buzzing with questions I don't want to answer.
Two minutes of quiet.
That's all I get.
The door opens.
Lexy steps in, folder under her arm, already reading something, and she stops when she sees me. One second of surprise—real, open—before the mask slides back into place.
"Wrong room," I say.
"Correct room." She holds up her folder. "Wrong assumption."
I should leave. I was here first, technically, but I should still leave.
I don't.
The door swings shut behind her.
The latch catches with a sound that's too final for the size of the room, and when she reaches back to try it—automatic, not panicked—nothing happens.
She tries it again.
Nothing.
Outside, the wind hits the north wall like it's trying to come through. The single window goes completely white. The temperature in the room drops two degrees in the time it takes me to cross to the door and try the latch myself.
Seized. Cold-swollen frame, old mechanism.
"There's a release," she says. "Bottom left panel."
I find it. The pin is locked solid.
The radio on the desk crackles—static, a half-word, then silence.
Dead.
I straighten up. Look at her.
Lexy sets her folder on the cabinet with the practiced calm of someone who refuses to be the first to say this is a problem. The room is twelve feet across at best. One desk, one chair, a cabinet, and a window that's showing us nothing but white.
And whatever this is between us, which has been building all day and takes up the most space by far.
"How long?" she asks.
"Until the storm passes or someone realises the radio's out."
"So." She glances at the window. Back at me. "A while."
"Yes."
The wind hits again, harder. The window frame rattles. Somewhere deeper in the estate, something mechanical groans under the weight of the storm.
Neither of us speaks.
The silence has teeth.
"We could—"
"Don't." Her voice is quiet. "Don't give me a professional alternative right now, Dylan."
The way she says my name does something I'm not prepared for.
She's looking at me the way she looked at me last night before I said the words that should have ended it. If we start this, I won't be gentle. I meant it as a warning. By the way she's looking at me now, she filed it differently.
"Last night—" I start.
"You kissed me first."
"You kissed me back."
"I know." She doesn't flinch. "I've been thinking about it all day."
The room is very small. The distance between us is smaller.
I cross it.
Not slow, not careful. I'm done with careful. I take her face in both hands and she's already reaching for me — her hands go to my jacket, not clutching, not holding on. Opening it. Deliberate. She looks up at me while she does it and doesn't pretend she isn't.
I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth—half surprise, half relief—and it breaks something loose in my chest.
I walk her back into the desk. She doesn't protest. She pulls me closer, fingers twisting in my lapels, and I feel the edge of the desk hit the back of her thighs and she uses it, uses the leverage to get closer, and I am absolutely done thinking.
"Dylan—"
"I know."
"I'm not—" Her breath is uneven. "I'm not asking you to stop."
I pull back just enough to look at her. Her mouth is slightly swollen, her composure cracked clean open, and she looks—for the first time since she walked into my boardroom—like someone who isn't running a calculation.
She looks like she wants me.
Just me. Not the heir. Not the leverage. Not the legacy.
I don't know what to do with that, so I kiss her again instead.
It starts with heat and ends with honesty.
I don't do soft. She'd see through it anyway. This is the only honest thing I know how to give her.
I get her jacket off and she pulls mine open and when I get my mouth to her throat she tilts her head back and grips the desk edge and says nothing, just breathes—sharp, careful, like she's deciding whether to let herself have this.
"Stop thinking," I tell her.
"Stop telling me what to do."
But she's smiling when she says it, and then I'm smiling, and it is so disastrously unlike anything I've done in this building that I almost don't recognize myself.
That smile does it.
Not the desire—I've been managing desire for days. It's the smile. The real one. The one she doesn't aim at anyone in this building except, apparently, me, right now, in a locked room with a dead radio and nowhere left to retreat.
I close the distance between us.
She meets me halfway.
The kiss turns hard fast—not violent, but hungry, the kind that happens when two people have been holding something back for too long. Her hands go to my chest, not pushing, just gripping, like she needs something to hold onto.
I get her blouse untucked with both hands and she pulls back just long enough to read my face.
Whatever she finds there, it's enough.
She reaches for my belt.
Her fingers find the buckle and she looks down as she works it open—takes her in, all of it.
The dark leather. The way my shirt is half-open now, the line of my stomach, the tension in my body that I'm not bothering to hide anymore.
Her hands don't shake. But they slow—just slightly—when the belt comes loose and her palm presses flat against me—and her breath catches.
Audible. Involuntary. Her eyes drop, then come back up to mine, and what's in them isn't hesitation.
It's hunger.
She looks up at me.
Says nothing.
Pulls the belt free anyway.
We don't fumble. We don't apologise. We just move, like this was always going to happen and we were both tired of pretending otherwise.
I get the blouse off her shoulders.
She's wearing a simple white bra, nothing elaborate, and it undoes me more than anything deliberately provocative could. She didn't dress for this. Neither did I.
I reach behind her and unhook it. She lets me. Chin up, watching my face while I look at her—and she is stunning, the kind of stunning that makes me slow down when I should be speeding up.
"Dylan."
"I know." I trace my thumb along her collarbone, across the swell of her breast, and watch her exhale. "I've got you."
Something shifts in her expression at that. Something I don't have a word for yet.
She pulls me back down.
I get her skirt up and off. She works my shirt open button by button, like she's unwrapping something she's been thinking about, and when her palms slide flat against my chest something short-circuits behind my sternum.
I back her against the desk.
She sits on the edge without being asked, wraps one hand around the back of my neck and pulls me between her thighs, and the sound she makes when I get my mouth to her throat—low, open, real—is the sound of someone finally putting something down they've been carrying too long.
I know exactly how that feels.
I take my time even though she's already impatient, even though her hips are shifting against me and her free hand has moved to my waistband with clear intent.
That's the only version of winning that matters right now.
I want the one underneath.
I get my hands on her thighs and push them wider.
She goes completely still.
I slide two fingers inside her, curling them to find that spot that makes her entire body jerk. Her pussy clenches around me, hot and impossibly wet. The sound of my fingers moving in her is obscene, slick and hungry. I add a third finger, feeling how she opens for me even as she tries to resist.
She tries to stay quiet. She fails.
Her breathing comes apart above me in short, unsteady pieces, all that composure dissolving one by one. I learn her. Every place that makes her gasp, every rhythm that makes her grip tighten, every time I ease back and make her wait—until she stops being too proud to say it.
"Dylan." Tight. Breathless. "Please."
There it is.
Her cheeks are flushed, lips parted, chest still heaving. She looks at me like she's deciding whether to thank me or resent me for it.
I wait.
She takes my cock gently with both hands, her touch sending electricity through me. I watch her face, the way her lips part as she studies me, the concentration in her furrowed brow.
Then she guides me to her entrance, positioning me at that still-pulsing, wet heat. I push in slowly, watching her face as I stretch her, fill her. Her mouth opens in a silent O, her hands coming up to grip my shoulders.
"Fuck," I breathe, burying myself to the hilt. She's so tight, so wet, so perfect around me. Her pussy clenches, milking my cock, and I have to hold still for a moment.
Just a moment. Just the two of us adjusting to the reality of this—that it's happening, that it's been building to this since a boardroom in Vale Tower, that neither of us stopped it, that neither of us wanted to.
She exhales slowly against my jaw.
I press my forehead to hers.
Her legs wrap around my waist, pulling me deeper. "Move," she demands, but there's no force in it—just need.
She says my name once.
Just Dylan. Nothing else. Like the word itself is the confession she won't make any other way.
I feel it everywhere—chest, gut, somewhere I don't usually let things reach.
I bury my face in her neck and stop trying to manage it.
When she comes apart I'm right there with her. Her whole body tightens around me, and I follow her without a fight.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Her breathing against my jaw. My hands flat on the desk on either side of her. The storm outside pressing white against the glass. The dead radio. The twelve feet of room that just became the only room that exists.
My father's voice—the one that never stops cataloguing, directing, warning—is completely silent.
I hadn't known how loud it always was until right now.
She sits on the edge of the desk, barefoot now, blouse half-buttoned, and I'm leaning against the wall watching her and trying to remember what my father's voice sounds like in my head.
I can't find it.
For the first time in recent memory, that particular frequency is quiet.
I should be disturbed by that.
I'm not.
Lexy reaches up and pushes her hair back, slow, then starts rebuttoning her blouse with the same focus she gives every other task. I watch her hands. I've watched her hands since the first day—they always give her away.
They're not steady right now.
I note that.
Outside, the storm has shifted. Quieter now, the whiteout pulling back to heavy snow, the grey sky starting to differentiate from white.
The door release will work in another few minutes—temperature rising, pin will free.
Neither of us mentions it.
I pull my jacket on. She smooths her skirt. We are, on the surface, perfectly reconstructed.
Underneath, something has changed shape permanently.
"Lexy."
She doesn't look up.
"Look at me."
She does. Eyes clear, expression arranged, but there's a residue of something underneath—something she's trying to sort back into its category and failing.
I know that look too. I've been wearing it for days.
"Whatever you're about to say—" she starts.
"I'm not going to say anything." I hold her gaze. "I just want you to know I remember everything."
Her breath shifts. Barely.
"Every single thing," I add. "In case you were planning to file it under 'mistake.'"
She says nothing for a long moment.
The door makes a small sound—the pin releasing, the latch giving.
Neither of us moves.
Then she stands, picks up the folder from the cabinet like we were only ever here for documents, and crosses to the door.
Hand on the handle.
She stops.
Doesn't turn around.
"You can't know who I am," she says.
Her voice is low. Not a threat. Not a confession. Something worse—something that sounds like the truth escaping before she could stop it.
She opens the door and walks out into the corridor.
I stand in the small office, jacket buttoned, composure in place, and I hear my father's voice come back—a hired conscience, contain her, she's here for something else—
And for the first time, I think: maybe she is.
Maybe that's not the part that should worry me.