8. Dominic
Dominic
She whimpers into my mouth, hands fisting my lapels, running through my hair. The sound is low and wild, the kind of thing she’d try to smother if I wasn’t pinning her against the bathroom sink with most of my weight.
“You’re insane,” she says, tearing her mouth from mine, eyes blazing. “There are people—”
I crowd her against the cold porcelain. “It’s locked.”
“Someone could get a key,” she hisses, but her voice is already going hoarse, and her hands are dragging me to her, not away.
“I don’t care,” I say, and mean it. My hands are on her hips, dragging up the fabric of her skirt.
I find the line of her thigh and the wet heat at the center of her.
She’s already soaked through the slip of her panties.
The feel of her, hot and slick under my fingertips, ignites every feral, reckless instinct I ever pretended I didn’t have.
“Jesus, Jen,” I mutter, sliding two fingers along her swollen seam, not even bothering with patience. “You were planning to torture me, weren’t you?”
She makes that sound again, but this time it’s a gasp that gives way to a laugh—embarrassed, a little crazed, pure Jenna. “You deserve it,” she says, but her knees go soft the second I circle her clit.
She moans.
“Keep your voice down, Pemberton,” I say, dipping my head to her neck, biting where I know she’s sensitive and breathing in the sharp bergamot perfume I could identify anywhere. “You don’t want the whole office to know I’ve got my fingers in this pretty cunt of yours.”
Her fingers dig into my shoulder, hard, and for a second her expression says she’s about to snarl at me—I wouldn’t put it past her, not for a second—but then I press my thumb just right and her head thunks back against the mirror.
Her mouth opens, silent, all her arguments evaporated like water on a hot sidewalk.
“That’s it,” I whisper. “Let it go.”
“You’re such an asshole,” she says—but her hips buck into my hand, hungry and involuntary. “I hate you.” I savor how thick the arousal is in her voice.
“I know.” I pin her tighter, the sink edge biting into her ass. My cock is throbbing, straining against my zipper so hard it fucking hurts, but I want her in pieces before I put myself inside her again. I want her to break and remember who did it for the rest of her life.
I shove her skirt higher, fingers working fast and sure, then tug her panties down her thighs. She’s dripping onto my hand, clenching and desperate, and when I slide two fingers inside her she nearly chokes on the moan.
“You planned to walk around like this all day?” I murmur, letting my lips find her earlobe, knowing from experience what it does to her. “All turned on? Ready for me to bend you over and make you scream?”
“Dominic—”
I work her faster, my fingers sliding through her wet heat until she’s fluttering around me, her whole body pressed to the mirror for leverage. She makes this helpless hitching sound with every breath, like she’s trying not to let herself go but can’t stop from wanting it.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” she hisses, as if that’s a defense.
I lock my eyes on hers. “I’m not the one about to come on the hand of a man I hate.”
Her glare could strip paint. Her body is less convincing. She clamps around my fingers when I curl them, hips pushing into my hand as she keens.
“That’s it,” I murmur against her ear. “You can hate me again in a minute.”
“I already—”
I flick my thumb again and her whole body locks up, trembling, the heat in her going nuclear in a single, perfect moment.
She comes for me, hard, her jaw slack, eyes wild, a sharp cry that barely makes it past clenched teeth.
Her nails bite into my shoulder, the pain as clean and concentrated as the orgasm wracking her body.
I ease her through it, pumping my fingers slower, gentler, until her thighs quake and her forehead thunks forward onto my chest.
She’s panting. I fix her underwear and skirt, then hold her to me, wrapping one arm around her and cradling her, just for a beat, letting her ride it out.
I tilt her chin up, thumb streaking under her jaw, and bring my forehead to hers. The bathroom is so silent, my own breathing sounds criminal. Her lashes flutter, refusing me at first, then lifting in stages until I see her eyes, wide and shining.
“I know you like to tell yourself this isn’t real,” I murmur. “You get nervous when feelings get involved. I think you like the idea of us hidden in the dark instead of out here, in the daylight, when it’s real and there’s nowhere to run.”
She lets out a sound, half a sigh, half a laugh. “There’s always somewhere to run.”
“Maybe for you.” I stroke her cheek, gentle now, the way you’d touch an injured animal who might break for the window. “But I’m not letting you sabotage this just because you’re scared.” I kiss her, slow and careful, all the menace out of me for a second.
“I’m not scared. I’m realistic. You and I are—”
I stop her protest with another kiss.
The real Jen comes out in pieces. Half-asleep. Off guard. I met her in Tokyo, after midnight, when she forgot to sharpen every word before it left her mouth. She let me see her then, and every morning she tried to take it back, act like it never happened.
But I remember.
I remember all of it.
“I’ll call you later,” I murmur, pressing a kiss against her forehead and stepping back to reach for the door. “Answer this time.”
She nods, and it takes everything in me to turn, unlock that door and walk out of it.
Mercer Capital’s executive floor hums like a living thing the moment I step into the corridor.
Phones. Low voices. Keyboards. The sound of money being moved by people pretending spreadsheets are not a form of blood sport.
I straighten my jacket, roll my shoulders once, and head back toward conference room three, hoping my erection is as contained as I think it is.
At the conference room door, I pause, get my breathing under control, and step in, already talking. “Sorry. Phone call.”
Bennett’s at the head of the table. Caleb’s got his feet up on the chair beside him. Logan’s in the corner with his laptop open, energy drink beside him, which means he’s either solving something or waiting to.
All three of them look up when I come in.
All three of them go silent.
“What?” I say.
Caleb’s mouth twitches. “Nothing.” He laces his hands behind his head. “Just. That must’ve been some call.”
“Whatever, man.”
I have no idea what he’s enjoying and I hate it. I pull out a chair. “Can we please just—”
“Dominic.” Logan pushes his glasses up his nose as he watches me over his laptop screen. “Your mouth.”
“What about it.”
“The color. Dark plum, matte.” He says it like he’s reading it off a spec sheet. “It’s the one Jenna wears. And your hair . . . It’s what Audrey likes to call the ‘just fucked’ style.”
Crap.
I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth. It comes away streaked with a color I’d recognize in the dark, on the moon, at the bottom of the sea. I drag my fingers through my hair.
Too late. Obviously too late. These men have known me since college, and every one of them can do arithmetic.
Bennett leans back, laces his fingers over his stomach, and regards me with the serene satisfaction of a man watching a rival fumble a merger he warned him about. “So,” he drags out the sound, “I take it Tokyo went well after all.”
Every stupid, dangerous, beautiful memory of Tokyo lights up at once.
“I need all of you to leave Tokyo alone.”
Caleb barks a laugh. “Not a chance.”
“I mean it.” And I do. More than they understand.
But the reasons belong to Jenna, and I won’t offer up pieces of her simply because they want answers.
“Jenna is already halfway to the exit. If all of you come at her with commentary and theories and the exact face Caleb is making right now, she’ll bolt. She needs time. She needs space.”
Caleb tips his head. “Space,” he repeats. He gestures, vaguely, at the entirety of me—the mouth, the hair, the general dishevelment. “You seem to be giving her outstanding space. Genuine master class. They should film it.”
“That was unrelated.”
“Was it.”
“It was a separate matter. And this,” I announce to the room at large, “is harassment. Actionable, well-documented harassment, and I’d like it on the record that I’m facing it entirely without counsel.
” I look at Bennett. “You’ve got a Kingsley sitting right there with his shoes on the furniture. Where’s mine?”
Bennett doesn’t miss a beat. “Caleb isn’t here as my lawyer. He’s here as our friend.”
“He has a retainer with your name on it and a billing increment measured in seconds. He’s here as both.
” I point at Caleb. “I want David. I pay his retainer fee and I paid the designer to fix your firm’s ugly decor.
And somehow Bennett gets a Kingsley for backup and I get publicly dismantled with no representation at all. ”
“David’s stuck in a deposition till two,” Caleb says. “You’ve got me. I bill the same either way.”
“You’re on his side.”
“I’m on the side of whoever’s more entertaining, and right now, Dom, it’s you. By a distance.”
Logan abruptly closes his laptop. “I’ll back you up,” he says.
I look at him. “You’re an engineer.”
“I’m aware of the limitation. But I have two PhDs and you’re my closest friend. So . . .” He shrugs. It lands somewhere uncomfortably warm behind my ribs. Logan hates arguments involving feelings and has volunteered anyway.
“Thank you, Logan.”
“I’ll be useless.”
“I know. It’s the gesture.”
Bennett clears his throat. “If we’re not allowed to discuss Tokyo, can we at least discuss actual business before my day gets hijacked by this re-enactment of middle-school gym class?”
Caleb snorts, but moves his feet off the chair. “You couldn’t pay me enough to relive middle school. All set—what’s on the agenda?”
Bennett pulls the Nakamura file up on the screen.
“Ah.” Logan raises his hand.
“Put your damn hand down. We just said no to middle school,” Caleb teases.
“Yeah,” Logan starts. “And we also said no to Tokyo. That, right there, is Tokyo.” He points to the screen where the Nakamura timeline is laid out.
“Business Tokyo is fine, man,” I tell him.
“Right,” Caleb adds. “It’s just lipstick-all-over-the-face Tokyo we can’t discuss.”
“You are such a child,” I say, flipping the bird at him as he laughs.
Bennett just rolls his eyes and continues. “If I may . . .”
We walk the Chicago end of the deal. The board still has to bless the revised terms, and Nakamura’s people are already testing every inch around the five-percent concession—pushing on audit timing, pressing for flexibility in the distribution calendar, looking for proof that holding governance meant we’d gone soft everywhere else.
Caleb takes notes. Logan flags two dependencies nobody else caught, because Logan is a certified genius, which is precisely why we keep him within reach.
Caleb’s the first to break the work trance, spinning the pen between his fingers and giving me a look that’s as close to sincere as he gets.
“By the way, tell Jenna her contract work is the only reason Nakamura can’t reopen the entire price schedule every time a component cost moves.
She boxed the five percent into one line, made disclosure reciprocal, and left governance untouched.
It’s ruthless.” He grins, almost proud. “Can’t believe I thought you’d be the shark in this deal, Cruz.
Turns out you’re just the mascot. She’s the actual predator. ”
Logan nods. “That’s correct. If Nakamura claims another variance, they have to open their own cost data. She turned their leverage into an audit trail.”
I smile to myself as I look at the screen. “She really is something special.” I don’t miss the looks that are exchanged around me.
Still, I’m tempted to text her right now, to tell her she just got called a predator by the most aggressive legal mind in Chicago, but I know better.
I know there’s a whole facade she has to rebuild before she can face us all again.
That for every moment she let herself be wild and open, she’ll double down on being cool and contained as soon as she sniffs oxygen.
A lesser man would find it exhausting. Me?
It just makes me want to fuck her on every horizontal (and vertical) surface in the Loop until the habit sticks.
We grind through two more hours of contingency planning before Bennett taps out and leaves Caleb and me to dissect every possible regulatory tripwire in the next phase of the joint venture.
Logan sits in, but after an hour of listening to us barter over default triggers, deadlock provisions, and audit rights, he zones out entirely and starts writing code.
The man is so comfortable in his own brain he can just leave a room whenever he wants and take the best parts with him.
It’s almost noon when we finally break.
Caleb’s phone lights up while he’s gathering his things. He reads it, and his face does the thing it does when the universe hands him ammunition.
“Serena wants to know if I’ve ‘seen Jenna today,’” he reads aloud, “because the girls have ‘dragged her out to brunch and she’s being weird.’” He looks up, delighted. “Do you think she showed up with ruined lipstick and a fucked-up hairdo as well?”
I feel my entire morning’s worth of Jenna-related effort depreciate in real time.
“They took her to brunch?”
“As we speak, apparently.” He pockets the phone, at peace with all creation.
“Layla, Serena, and Audrey. Apparently Nora’s getting away from the school long enough to join them.
Lockwood, one booth, mimosas, and a topic none of us are permitted to raise.
Which, for the record, the women were never actually told about so you know they’re grilling her. ”
The math isn’t in my favor. I’ve spent the entire morning managing this.
Managing the room, managing Bennett, managing my own face, and failing at that last one badly enough to land us here.
And none of it matters, because the one variable I can’t touch is the group of women who love Jenna, can smell a story from a great distance, and have her outnumbered over day drinking and pastries.
“This is a disaster,” I say, mostly to myself.
“I agree,” Logan says without looking up from his code. “It’s unwise to bet against the girls in an information-gathering context.”
“Thank you, Logan.”
“I’m supporting you emotionally and contradicting you factually. Both can be true.”
I take out my phone. Think about calling her.
Maybe showing up at Lockwood and rescuing her from the situation before she retreats so far into herself I’ll never drag her back out.
But neither of those seem like a good idea.
Jenna likes control. She doesn’t want to be rescued.
And she sure as hell isn’t about to answer a call from me in front of witnesses.
Shit.
Caleb claps me on the shoulder on his way past, the absolute traitor, grinning like it’s the best day he’s had in months.
“Relax, Dom,” he says. “What’s the worst that could happen over brunch?”