Chapter 31 #2
“You did not want to have a conversation about a pay raise,” Honey said.
“How do you know?” Nikos asked, taking a step closer to her. “Isn’t that what bosses and employees usually discuss?”
Honey said nothing, wary of the distance he was closing between them.
“Unless we’re more than boss and employee,” Nikos said, taking another step closer. Honey wanted to remain poised without fear, but she found herself taking a step back in retreat, not wanting to be too close to him, afraid of what it would do to her.
“We are,” Honey said, looking him in the eye. “We’re friends.”
“We are friends,” Nikos acknowledged as he disregarded all social rules of personal space, standing close enough to her that if she even moved a millimeter, they would touch.
This was definitely not the appropriate amount of closeness that should be between friends, let alone a boss and their employee.
But Nikos had already made it very clear to her that whatever lines she wanted to draw between them, he would cross over them every single time.
Now that she thought about it, it had been that way since the beginning.
Honey swallowed thickly, before taking a step back to try to create some distance between them.
“Now that you mention it, even if we are friends, we’re still boss and employee,” Honey said, smirking. “And according to Allison, you have a new policy with your employees. You don’t touch them.”
Honey looked at him triumphantly, feeling like she had won the argument. But Nikos’s expression had not changed. If anything, he looked more amused.
“Don’t you know you’re different from the other girls?” Nikos asked, and Honey rolled her eyes.
“Not anymore,” she said bitterly, not being able to hide her disdain ever since she realized she had now joined the long list of women that Nikos had fooled around with at the Gentlemen’s Club, and the list was quite long.
A few months ago, she thought she would never be a part of it, and now she was like every girl at this club, lured into Nikos’s good looks and charismatic charm. It made her feel foolish.
“Is that why you’re denying me?” Nikos asked, just as easily closing the gap between them with a simple step. But this time, Honey didn’t budge. They stood face to face, chest to chest with Honey not wanting to back down, and Nikos not wanting to back down either.
“Denying you?” Honey snorted. “Do you even deserve me?”
“No one deserves you,” Nikos said, and as she looked into his blue eyes, she was startled by the fact that he seemed serious. “But I want you.”
Honey gasped, feeling her heart thunder in her chest from his words. She had never heard a man express so much desire for her and genuinely mean it.
“I desperately want you,” Nikos said as he stepped even closer to her, pressing his chest against hers.
His nose brushed her cheek as she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop her heart from beating so loudly; it rang like bells in her ears, and if she could hear it, she was positive Nikos heard it too.
She barely felt like she could breathe, trying to tame her riled-up emotions from the heat burning between them and from Nikos’s words that had set a fire in her chest and between her thighs.
“Nikos,” Honey breathed as she felt his breath against her cheek. Nikos’s right arm slipped around her waist, pulling her even closer as if he wanted to sink into her skin, and his left hand cradled her neck.
“Honey.”
The call of her name caused her eyes to flutter open, and immediately, Honey was assaulted by his alarmingly blue eyes.
She felt like he had cast a spell on her because the fight-or-flight position she had been assuming the moment she stepped into the Gentlemen’s Club tonight had completely disappeared, and now she didn’t want to be anywhere else but here.
He leaned forward, and Honey felt herself leaning forward too, ready to reward him and herself with a kiss. Just as his lips brushed hers, causing her to shiver, someone knocked on Nikos’s door.
“Damn,” Nikos cursed against her lips. “I really wanted to kiss you.”
Honey stood in stunned disbelief before stepping back and dislodging herself from Nikos’s hold.
The spell Nikos had cast on her had disappeared immediately; she was grateful to whoever had knocked on the door because if they hadn’t, she was sure she would have let Nikos kiss her, and if he had kissed her, she didn’t want to imagine what compromising position she would have been in on top of one of the surfaces in his office.
“Come in,” Nikos said, looking disappointed as he took a step back himself, creating an appropriate amount of distance between them that should have been there in the first place. A second later, Christos, Nikos’s right-hand man, stepped through the door. Honey took that as her cue.
“Thank you,” Honey said as she snatched her pay from Nikos’s hand, who hadn’t made sure to keep it out of her reach this time.
“Really?” Nikos said with a bemused expression on his face.
“I’ll be taking my leave,” Honey said as she quickly left his office, not giving Nikos time to throw any one-liners at her or excuses to make her stay longer so they could have another private discussion.
She was scared that if she stayed a second longer in Nikos’s presence, she would give in, and that was something she couldn’t afford to do.