Chapter 11
Marco
Iwas moving furniture like a man who had something to prove.
I dragged the second leather chair from the study across the hall and wedged it through the office door at an angle that would have made the hinges weep if I’d been less careful.
Set it opposite mine. Squared it. Pulled my desk out from the wall six inches so the lamp could live in the middle of us instead of hovering at my shoulder.
Two laptops. Two glasses. A carafe I filled from the filtered tap.
On a small white plate I arranged slices of pear in a half-moon and two wedges of manchego beside them.
I stepped back. Looked at what I’d made.
A war room. A flat, clean, two-person operation table where the only weapon was a keyboard and the only casualty would be her brother’s credit on a decade of stolen work.
My phone buzzed on the desk. Dante.
Nero tonight?
I thumbed back: Out today. Call if you need me.
Three dots. The dots hung. Dante was composing something and deciding not to send it, which was his signature move, and I watched the screen until the dots disappeared and a single Copy came through and I put the phone facedown on the desk.
I had not told him what I was doing. I had not told him why.
I had cancelled a workday at the club to sit in my home office and help Sera.
If Dante had asked, I would not have had a clean answer.
I would have had a true one. The true one was that she had slept in my bed last night with her back against my chest and my hand on the dip of her hip, and when she woke up she had said, quietly, into the dark, I don’t know how to write it as myself, and I had decided before I finished my first coffee that I was going to clear the day and the desk and whatever else needed clearing until she did.
My cock had an opinion about her sleeping in my bed. My cock had had an opinion for three hours now. I had been ignoring it with the dedication of a man in church.
My cock had an opinion about everything at the moment.
I heard her in the hallway at six-forty.
Bare feet on the hardwood. The soft swish of her moving past the kitchen.
I sat down at my side of the desk and opened the laptop and did not look up when she came through the door, because I had decided on the way to the study with the chair that I was going to be a professional today, and a professional did not turn his head toward every sound a woman made the way a dog turned its head toward a door.
I lasted three seconds.
She was wearing my Henley. The brown one.
Soft from a thousand washes, long enough on her to reach the middle of her thigh, loose at the collar so the line of her collarbone ran out of the fabric like a word on a page.
Leggings underneath. Bare feet. Her hair was up in the pencil-twist—a single long pin holding the whole thing coiled at the back of her skull, dark and deliberate, the hairstyle I had learned meant she was about to do something difficult with her whole attention.
No makeup. No armor. The legal pad under her arm.
And at her ankle, catching the low lamp-glow from the desk, the fine gold chain I had put there yesterday.
My mouth went dry.
She had my shirt on and my chain on and nothing between them, and the part of me that had been ignoring my cock for three hours folded like a bad hand.
I wanted her on the desk. I wanted her on the floor.
I wanted the Henley pushed up to her ribs and her leggings down at her ankles and my mouth on the soft skin of her stomach and my hand in her hair while I —
“Good morning, baby girl.”
My voice came out level. I would take the small victories.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
She crossed to the desk. Set the legal pad down. Looked at the two laptops, the water, the pear, the manchego, the squared chairs, the single lamp in the middle.
“You moved the furniture.”
“I did.”
“That was kind of you.”
“No, no. It’s all part of the service.”
Her mouth did the small soft thing it did when she was trying not to show me something. She reached out and touched the rim of her water glass with one finger. Straightened it by a degree it had not needed.
“Sit,” I said.
I stood up to pull her chair out for her.
It put me closer to her than was strategically sound.
I could smell the cedar and the sleep on her skin.
I kissed her temple—once, clean, a boundary I was drawing on my own mouth—and she leaned into it for half a breath and then sat down and I went back around to my side of the desk and sat and put my hands flat on the wood where I could see them.
“Here’s how today goes.” I waited until her eyes came up to mine.
“You draft the recommendation. All of it. I will not write a word. I will not suggest a phrasing. I will answer questions if you ask me questions. I will ask you questions if I think you’ve missed something.
But the report is yours. Your analysis, your voice, your conclusions. Your name at the top.”
She was very still.
“Gianni will forward it,” she said. “Papa will read it and think —“
“I know what Papa will think.” I kept my voice low.
“I also know you. And I know that when your father reads this report, he is going to feel something he has not let himself feel in eight years, which is the exact shape of your mind in your own sentences. What he does with that feeling is not our problem today. Our problem today is the sentences.”
Her hand went to the gold chain at her throat.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
She opened the laptop. The blue light came up on her face.
I watched her create a new document—Scordato / Caruso Alliance: Preliminary Recommendation—and then I watched her type her name under the title, S.
Scordato, Lead Analyst, in the clean italicized byline that Gianni’s reports had been wearing for eight years under the wrong initial.
The cursor blinked at her.
She wrote three paragraphs in forty minutes.
I pretended to read shipping manifests.
I was not reading shipping manifests. I had been staring at a column of Pakistani cotton prices for twenty-five minutes without processing a single number.
The numbers had been replaced, in my brain, by a loop of what the Henley was doing at the small of her back when she leaned forward to type, which was riding up by about an inch, which was exposing a thin strip of olive skin above the waistband of her leggings, which was—
She stopped typing.
I did not look up.
I felt her look at me. The weight of her attention landed on the side of my face and stayed there, and after a long moment I heard her inhale, slow, and I heard the creak of her chair as she arched her back, and I heard—God help me—the small soft sound she made when she stretched, a half-hum at the back of her throat, the kind of sound a cat makes when it has decided that the sun is a personal gift.
My cock responded like it had been spoken to by name.
I kept my eyes on the screen.
“Daddy.”
“Mmhmm.”
“I think I have worked out the opening.”
“Mmhmm.”
“It’s good, I think.”
“I’m glad.”
She was fishing. She was beautiful and tired and restless and she had been writing for forty minutes without a single interruption from the man who had been watching her like a hawk for three days, and she was fishing for my eyes.
I kept them down. I scrolled through cotton prices I had already not read.
The chair creaked again. Bare feet on the hardwood.
She came around the desk.
Slowly. The soft slap of her heel, then her toes, the deliberate unhurried pace of a woman who had decided to test something and was giving me time to watch her decide it.
She stopped at my shoulder. Leaned across me.
Her hair smelled like my shampoo. The loose curl at her nape brushed my jaw.
She put one hand on my desk, the other on the back of my chair, and pointed at a figure on my laptop screen—a figure, I realized with what was left of my mind, that had nothing to do with anything she was writing.
“Can you check this,” she said. “I think there is a discrepancy.”
Her breast grazed my shoulder through the cotton of the Henley.
Not by accident. The Henley was too big on her and she had not put a bra on under it, and when she leaned across me the soft weight of her settled against the top of my arm for one breath and then pulled back by a fraction and then settled again, and I could feel the shape of her through the shirt, the warm give, the unmistakable peak of her pressing into the fabric, and my hand tightened on the edge of the desk hard enough that the wood dug a line across my palm.
I could have had her on the desk in three seconds.
I could have stood up and cleared the laptops off with one motion and turned and lifted her by the hips and set her on the wood with her legs around my waist. I could have dragged the Henley up over her head.
I could have peeled the leggings down her thighs with my teeth.
I could have pushed into her right there, fucked her with my hand over her mouth to keep the soft sounds she made from leaving my office, watched her eyes roll back while the report sat half-written in a laptop she was no longer looking at.
The image arrived whole. My brain served it to me in full color, with sound. My cock said yes. My cock had been saying yes since she walked into the office in my Henley. My cock was, at this moment, making a credible argument that it ran the organization.
“Sit down, Sera.”
My voice came out low. The floor-of-me voice. I kept my eyes on the screen and did not touch her.
She did not sit down.
She tilted her face toward mine and kissed the corner of my mouth. A clean, deliberate provocation. Her lips barely brushed the edge of my lip and then retreated, and her breath was warm at my ear, and she whispered—
“Come on, Daddy. Fuck me. Let’s get it out of our system. I know you want to.”
Her hand dropped to my lap.