7. Jenna
Jenna
Chicago.
Two Weeks Later . . .
Dominic Cruz walks into Mercer Capital at nine seventeen on Monday morning wearing a charcoal suit, a clean shave, and the expression of a man I would happily shove into traffic if Chicago had fewer witnesses.
I look up from my screen.
“Good morning, Mr. Cruz.”
The venom in my voice seems to drip into the office of our head of operations, Vicky. She stops typing and glances up. Then she looks between Dominic and me, and promptly closes her door.
Silence.
Dominic stops in front of my desk.
His eyes move over my face. Slowly. Deliberately.
“Nice to see you made it back to Chicago safely.”
I give him a tight smile. “Is there something you need?”
He smirks. “I simply wanted a moment with my—”
“Don’t you dare say it,” I interrupt. “We’re at work.”
He grins, undeterred. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.” The voice is low, just north of unprofessional.
“I haven’t.”
“And yet, still radiant.” He tucks his hands in his pockets, leans a hip against the metal trim of my desk like he owns it. Which he sort of does, in the sense that he owns half the building. “Kind of miss the Tokyo version of you.”
“She’s dead,” I say. “Buried in the unspeakable expenses section of the code of conduct.”
He laughs. “You say that like there’s not an entire graveyard of behaviors you’d resurrect if it came with plausible deniability.”
“You must be dying to tell Bennett about your heroic contract-wrangling.” I close my laptop with the kind of carefulness I reserve for people trying to read over my shoulder. “If you sprint, you can probably catch him mid-scone.”
Dominic’s eyes flicker. He’s trying not to let the smile fully break. For all his billion-dollar confidence, his ego can smell competition at a hundred meters.
“I don’t take credit for other people’s work,” he says. “I’m here to see you.” He lowers his voice to a register that could make an HR manager materialize from thin air. “You’ve been ignoring my texts.”
I look at him for exactly long enough for it to be interpreted as a threat. “I was busy forgetting you exist.”
He leans in. Close enough that the intoxicating scent that only exists on his skin invades my personal space. “Any luck with that?”
“None,” I say, my voice steady but my pulse ticking faster. “Your afterimage lingers. Like carbon monoxide or a design flaw.”
That earns me a flash of teeth. “Pretty sure I’m still in warranty. Want to file a claim?”
I arch an eyebrow. “At this point, it’s more efficient to cut my losses.”
“Ten days together and somehow you’ve gotten funnier,” he says, but there’s an edge under the words. “Did I rub off on you? Or is it the jet lag?”
“It’s the jet lag. And the jet, come to think of it. The environmental damage from your existence is nontrivial.”
His smile doesn’t flag, but his attention shifts to the aggressive buzzing of his phone.
“Please forgive the intrusion, sweetheart. We can get right back to your evisceration of my personality once I see who this is.” Pulling it from his pocket, he glances at the screen, the lines of his mouth sharpening.
“Damn. I have to speak to Bennett. Unfortunately, I’ll have to suspend our courtship until after my nine-thirty.”
“Don’t strain yourself,” I say.
“Pemberton.” He tuts at me as his thumb flies over a reply. “You of all people should know how much I enjoy breaking a sweat where you’re concerned.”
My ability to respond stalls when my mind unhelpfully supplies the image of our sweaty bodies in tangled sheets. All I can do is press my knees together and breathe.
“Think about my mouth while I’m gone,” he says, his voice laced with amusement and overconfidence, as he pockets the phone.
I open my mouth to toss some sort of cutting remark back but nothing comes out.
The bastard smirks, straightens his lapel, and throws me one last look before setting off toward Bennett’s office like he’s been summoned by God Himself. I watch the back of his suit and imagine all the surfaces in this building we could fuck on.
We’re over.
Tokyo was a blip in time.
A mistake.
He needs to get that through his head.
“Bennett’s on a call,” I lie, stopping him in his tracks just because I can. “You can go and wait for him in conference room three.”
Dominic’s mouth does that tiny, lethal thing it does when he wants to smile and knows better.
“Conference room three?”
“Yes.”
“Not Bennett’s office?”
“No.”
“Not the sitting area?”
“No.”
“Have I been demoted?”
“You’ve been categorized.”
His eyes sharpen.
Good.
I shouldn’t enjoy that. I enjoy it anyway.
“What category?” he asks.
“Obscene inconvenience.”
Dominic’s eyes don’t leave mine as he reaches up and slowly runs his thumb over his bottom lip as though he’s performing thought.
“Conference room three it is,” he says.
He turns.
I hate that I know his walk. I hate that I know the exact breadth of his shoulders under that jacket and the size of the tattoo hidden beneath his shirt. I hate that my body, traitorous and idiotic, tracks him all the way down the hall like it has no memory of consequences, only heat.
The conference room door closes behind him.
The office noise returns.
I stare at my monitor and realize I have typed the same letter seventeen times.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Perfect.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
My cell buzzes against the desk.
DO NOT ANSWER:
Are you thinking about my mouth? I’m thinking about yours.
Well, now I am!
Every time I look at him, I remember exactly what his mouth can do—which is why I can no longer stand looking at him.
DO NOT ANSWER:
I can see you reading this, Jen.
I need to be inside you again.
The messages keep appearing, and apparently my hands have forgotten how to remain steady. I want to throw my phone out the window. Instead, I do what any self-respecting professional would do and shut off the screen.
Two more messages light up my phone in quick succession.
DO NOT ANSWER:
I can see you ignoring me.
Maybe I’ll just jerk off in here thinking about you.
I drop my cell in my desk drawer and turn back to my work.
Fuck. What was I doing?
Imagining the way Dominic’s eyes go dark when he looks up at me from between my thighs . . .
Shit! No!
Expense reports. Yes. Super-boring, not-at-all sexy expense reports.
Bennett’s office door opens and I jolt in my seat like I just got caught watching porn on the office computer. He glances down the hall Dominic went down, then back to my desk.
“Did I hear Cruz out here?”
“You did.” I glue my eyes to my screen, but I can see the way he hesitates in my periphery.
“Why didn’t he come directly to my office?”
“He wanted to use the conference room,” I lie, not even feeling bad about it after those texts he sent. My panties are ruined now.
“OK.” He drags the last syllable out.
“How was your honeymoon, Bennett?” I lift my eyes to meet his and force a smile, desperate for a subject change. “Is your wife well?”
He frowns. “You mean your friend Layla?”
“Of course.”
He looks around as if expecting to find a hidden camera somewhere. “Why are you making small talk? You loathe small talk.”
“Perhaps I’ve realized my social engagement skills are poor and I’m trying to correct it.”
Bennett steps in front of my desk, folds his arms, and stares me down. “What happened in Tokyo?”
“Business.”
“Cut the shit, Jenna. We’ve all been watching you and Dominic circle each other for years.
If the rumors from Layla’s and my wedding are to be believed, that circle has become smaller and smaller.
You just spent ten days in close quarters together, and now it feels like that circle has become a blast radius.
Something happened.” He narrows his eyes.
“Did he hurt you? He’s one of my best friends. But, Jenna, if he—”
“He didn’t,” I say quickly, holding up my hand.
As furious as I am with Dominic, that isn’t a possibility I’ll let sit between us for even a second.
“I assure you, nothing happened in Tokyo except a signed agreement, a consolidated governance clause, and several metric tons of professionally managed jet lag.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m summarizing selectively.” I pick up a stack of folders and align them against the edge of my desk.
“Dominic is in conference room three waiting to talk to you. Then you have a ten o’clock with Landon, an eleven-thirty call with Robert Carmichael, and a lunch you will attempt to cancel but shouldn’t because it’s pertinent to your next acquisition. ”
Bennett frowns. I can tell he wants to question me more, but he lets it drop.
“OK. I hear you,” he says, pushing away from my desk. “But if you need anything. Even if it’s just to talk—”
“I won’t.” The answer lands harder than I intend. I soften my voice by a fraction. “Thank you, Bennett. But I promise you I’m OK.”
With a curt nod, he disappears into the conference room where I sincerely hope Dominic isn’t making good on his promise to jerk off over me.
Actually, it’d serve him right if he was.
I try to get back to work. I open an expense report at random and stare at it intensely.
The numbers settle into categories I understand: airfare, accommodation, client meals, ground transport.
It’s the most soothing thing I’ve seen in a week.
I flag a duplicate charge, question why compliance has rejected a legitimate client dinner, and for a minute, everything is fine.
There’s an answer to every question as long as you remember that context is everything.
Even the train wreck that was Tokyo can be rendered into sensible blocks, with the punchlines turned down to footnotes.
My phone vibrates in the drawer.
I ignore it. But it buzzes again.
DO NOT ANSWER:
Wondering what your hair looks like with my hand in it.
Wait. I don’t need to wonder.
All I have to do is close my eyes and I see it.
You on your knees.
My hand in your hair.
My dick in your . . .
I can’t breathe, or maybe I just can’t see straight.
I can’t even read the words. Just memories burning behind my eyelids—his hand in my hair, my knees on the floor, my mouth full and busy—and now I’m reading the expense report as if it’s written in Cyrillic.
I power my phone off, needing to break the connection and regain some sort of self-control.
When a few deep breaths don’t work, I get up, cross the hall, and power-walk into the women’s bathroom like a woman fleeing a crime scene.
In the mirror, my face is red enough to violate several codes of internal conduct. I turn on the cold tap and splash water over it, focusing on the shock.
It doesn’t help. I can still feel his hand in my hair, the scratch of his stubble against my jaw, the low sounds he made when he got close. Ten days of evidence my body refuses to let me file away.
I brace both palms on the sink and breathe.
The door swings open.
Before I can tell myself to hide in the last stall or dissolve into vapor, Dominic strides in, moving like the bathroom has been his destination all along. He locks the door behind him with a click—so deliberate it’s like a punctuation mark—and leans against it, arms crossed, gaze locked on me.
“What the fuck, Dominic?” I demand, but my voice betrays more than annoyance. I can hear my own pulse in it, jackhammering up my throat.
“Exactly,” he says, in a voice that should be illegal in places where decency is still a social norm.
“You left Tokyo without speaking to me. Then you screened my calls for four days, ignored my messages, and now you’re still refusing to have a real conversation with me. I thought we had something, Pemberton.”
“In Tokyo,” I hiss. “We had something in Tokyo. Now we’re in Chicago and it’s over. I left you a note.”
“You left me a Post-it stuck to a legal document. And it didn’t say goodbye. Come to think of it, it didn’t say we’re over, either.”
“Well, we are.” I fold my arms across my chest as though it’s going to hide the hammering in my heart. “Emphatically.”
He steps closer. “Forgive me, Jen. But emphatically, no.”
Then he wraps his big hand around the back of my neck and kisses me.