Chapter 6 Challenge Accepted
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
brYS
I jolt awake, eyes flying open, and my heart crashing in my chest.
For a moment, I'm utterly discombobulated; I know I'm not at home, but where am I?
Lying on a man's chest, his heart thudding gently under my ear, his hand slung over my hip to rest on my lower belly.
But…I broke up with Charles.
Which means this isn't Charles.
Charles is a wonderful man. He's smart, successful, kind, driven, and handsome.
Our breakup was mutual and relatively painless—as much as a breakup can be—because we simply realized we weren't compatible, romantically.
We're excellent friends, we're supportive of each other, and we’re happy to celebrate each other's successes, but our competitive, Type-A, hard-charging personalities just do not mesh romantically.
The sex was hot and cold, also. It was either passionate and quick or lackluster and performative. There was no in-between.
I can honestly say without any prevarication or pretense that Charles is one of my nearest and dearest friends.
That said, I do sometimes think that perhaps Charles may, deep down, still harbor some kind of feelings for me.
My position on that topic is to ignore it and hope it never comes up, because that ship has long since sailed and shall never return to harbor.
Since that breakup, I've been far too busy with work to date.
I did scratch the itch, so to speak, with a hunky young buck from the temp pool—he brought me my coffee and mail for a few weeks, and shot me white-toothed grins and flexed his gigantic, rippling, twenty-four-year-old biceps at me.
I rewarded his valiant, if rather obvious, attempts at flirtation and seduction with a couple of brief but satisfying after-hours trysts in my office.
I have a standing brunch date with several other high-ranking female execs, one of whom runs the temp agency that supplies my office with grunt-work drones, which made it easy enough to make sure Shawn F.
got assigned elsewhere on the down-low without him being any the wiser.
It's best for everyone that way, you see.
No point in making anything awkward for the guy; he was nice, pleasing to look at—especially naked—and fun to fool around with a couple of times to relieve the tension, but that's all it was going to ever be, and I just don't have time for that conversation, so I had Alicia finesse his assignments away from my office.
Such is the train of my thoughts as I lie with my cheek on Jakob's firm, bare chest. And my god, what a chest it is.
For a man who must be nearer fifty than forty, he's in better shape than twenty-four-year-old Shawn F.
, and that's really saying something. Shawn F.
is only moonlighting as an office temp while his career as a fitness influencer takes off, or so he said…
repeatedly. The sexy young lad did have a set of abs so deliciously sharp and shredded you could cut your finger on them, you might think.
Jakob is built differently. His shoulders are broad and thick, his chest is dense and hard—it isn't the bulging, rounded chest of a bodybuilder, but the flat, hard-as-steel chest of someone whose fitness is functional versus aesthetic.
His abs are defined, certainly, but they're thick and hard blocky rather than ridged and sharp.
His arms are thick and dense.
His thighs are corded with muscle.
I feel my cheeks flaming as I think about the far-too-brief glimpse of his body I got last night before he collapsed into bed and promptly passed out.
Tight black boxer-briefs left very, very little to the imagination—his bulge was prominent, the outline of his penis pressed clearly against the stretchy material…and imprinted vividly on my brain.
Shawn F. was several months ago, and while I may cultivate the reputation of being a cold, hard, demanding, sharp-tongued, venomously sarcastic ice queen to my employees, I am an intensely sexual woman.
I need sex regularly, and I haven't had any in so long my vagina is considering a permanent shuttering of the offices, so to speak.
The tension within me is intolerable.
Jakob is ferociously attractive. Those glittering, hard, cold brown eyes that pierce and scrutinize, razor-sharp with intelligence, boiling with cunning. Thick, black hair perfectly and expensively cut, and even the silver at his temples does something to me.
His body.
His hands.
But more than anything, it’s the mystery of him that has my attention. His arrogance—confidence, yes; the inevitable assurance of self that comes from being the master of all you survey, yes. But it's also just arrogance.
And it's hot.
Mainly because so far, he's proven that he can back the arrogance up with action.
Being defended and protected is sexy.
I know, I know: I wouldn't need protection in the first place if it weren’t for him, but I also recognize that it wasn’t his fault I got sucked into his orbit; it was pure chance.
Jakob shifts beneath me, making a small, soft, growly noise in his throat that is oddly endearing. His shifting rolled me against his chest, and his hand slips away from my belly and rests on my thigh.
I'm in my T-shirt and panties, because I can't sleep in jeans. Which means his hand is hot and rough against my bare thigh. My stomach tightens and my heart pitter-patters.
It's nothing, I tell myself. But it doesn't feel like nothing. It feels like I'm being held by a strong, powerful, attractive man who has literally killed to protect me; that's not nothing.
I rub my nose. Stretch and yawn; Jakob remains asleep through my yawning and stretching.
The yawn is prodigious, the kind where you shudder, and something flutters in your eardrums, the world goes black, and a frisson of energy ripples through you, leaving you momentarily helpless and spastic.
My hand, as the yawn ends, comes to rest on his belly.
My eyes open and roam his bare chest. I like the coarse black body hair coating his chest and abs.
It's masculine. Speaks of brawn and power and a lack of concern for the opinions of others.
This is a man with no time for shaving or waxing for aesthetic purposes, and to me, that's sexy.
I can't help but trail and swirl my fingers over his chest and stomach.
My lower lip catches in my teeth at the warmth of his skin, the firmness of his muscles.
I swallow hard. For a moment—or maybe two or three—I forget our circumstances.
I forget how and why we met, why we're in this hotel room together—very easily the cheapest hotel I've ever stayed in.
For a moment or two or three, I'm just a horny girl in bed with a hot guy…
A horny girl who hasn't gotten laid in almost an entire fiscal quarter.
As I feel the roiling of my libido in my blood and gut and bones and organs and brain and soul, Jakob stirs again.
He makes that soft, growly, grumbling sound again.
His eyes flutter, close again. The hand that's not clutching my thigh skitters to his belly; pauses, scratches compulsively.
And then dives under the waistband of his underwear to grab his—oh. Oh my.
Wow.
He has an erection.
A very, very impressive erection. The length and breadth and girth of his penis boggles my mind—it stretches his underwear to a comical degree, and the tip protrudes, pink, above the elastic.
Sleepily, unthinking, he squeezes and shoves his erection this way and that—adjusting, seeking relief from the tension.
My teeth tighten on my lip as I stare unblinking at the beautiful beast within his boxer-briefs.
My god, what a lovely penis that is.
I want to help him relieve the tension.
I want to touch him.
I squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself no.
No.
Absolutely not.
But…why not?
Why on earth should I not enjoy what’s on offer here? I don't think he'd reject me if I were to make a move on him. Obviously, we both know it wouldn’t be a thing, or what-have-you. Just a mutual enjoyment of each other's bodies. Scratching an itch. Dealing with stress and adrenaline.
I've heard that adrenaline can make you horny; maybe that's all this is between us—adrenaline.
My hand rests on his abdomen, palm covering his navel. His breathing is uneven, now deep, now shallow, now fast, now slow.
He stirs. Shifts. His hips drive upward, relax back down, thrusting against nothing.
Arousal burns inside me like wildfire—my belly is hot and tight with need, my panties soaked with the leaking essence of my desire to touch and be touched. To be seen not just as a CEO and boss, but as a female. A woman. Someone to be touched, caressed, teased, taken.
Shawn was fun, but I was in charge—and let us be crystal clear, here: I seduced him.
I allowed him to think it was his idea, naturally; rutting young bucks like that need to think it's their idea or they get weird about the power dynamic.
Let him think it's his idea, and you can lead him around by the balls.
Get him wanting you so bad he's damn near feral by the time the office is emptied out, and he will all but attack you when you haul him into your office and tint the electrochromatic glass. It’s fun and hot.
Distracting and bad for productivity, so best reserved as an occasional treat rather than a regular habit.
But sometimes, a girl just wants to be ridden hard and put away wet, as it were.
Used.
Dominated.
Taken.
Controlled.