Chapter 10
“Electric Touch” - Taylor Swift ft. Fall Out Boy
Maeve
My heels click on the glossy tile floor as I head to the elevator.
The only thing on my agenda at the office today was the staff meeting, which Pierce already handled, and the longer I think about it, the more convinced I become that he fumbled it.
How can you expect to get anything done if you just let people talk about their problems the whole time?
Shifting my purse higher on my shoulder, I press the down button. Footsteps sound behind me, but I don’t turn to look, just inwardly sigh at having to share the lift. Is it too much to ask for a little peace and quiet occasionally? God. Maybe if I’m fast enough—
The doors open with a ding, and I step on, then quickly smash the button for the lobby. But before the elevator can close, Pierce jogs in.
I frown up at him. “I thought you left.”
“Forgot my phone on the table,” he says, wiggling it back and forth.
I ignore him and face the front, grateful we only have five floors to descend.
His scent is filling the car and making it hard to think about my plans for the rest of the day.
There’s no way he’s always smelled this good.
I would have noticed. I notice everything.
If one of my best friends smelled like an expensive fuck, trust me, I would have noticed.
“So, did you try it?” His voice is low and rumbly, like a train on the tracks.
“Did I try what?” I scowl, because I can’t help it and because he deserves it.
He scoffs under his breath. “Evidently not.”
“What are you talking about?” I say, pushing the emergency stop button before I can think better of it. It’s time we dealt with this, once and for all. The elevator comes to a grinding halt, rocking us both where we stand.
Confusion flickers across Pierce’s face, quickly chased away by amusement.
His arms are crossed over his chest, and he’s leaning against the back wall.
One foot is propped up behind him, revealing a herringbone-patterned sock.
He looks impossibly relaxed, like he has nowhere to be and nothing to do.
“Sex,” he says. It comes out so easily, as though we’re talking about the weather. “Did you have sex, then?”
My mouth drops open. How dare he ask me that? “That is the furthest thing from your business—”
“It obviously didn’t work.”
I want to beat the smirk off him so badly my hands twitch. “How would you know?”
“Because you’re still wound as tightly as a vegan at a barbecue.”
White spots flash across my vision, and I briefly wonder what the chances are that I would be the prime suspect if Pierce St. James suffered a suspicious death in an elevator. “I am not wound tightly,” I hiss.
He leans forward and pokes my arm with a single finger. I gasp and jump backward, swatting at his hand. He chuckles. “Yes, you are.”
“Because I’m due for a visit to the spa,” I sputter, the sensation of his touch still tingling on my skin.
“Sex is faster and way more fun.”
I sniff. “Then you’re not visiting the right spa.”
A slow, sexy grin—not sexy, I didn’t mean sexy.
More like smarmy—stretches across his face like a cat before a nap.
“Or maybe, just maybe,” he says, dragging it out, because he likes the sound of his own voice or because he knows the exact effect it’s having on me—which is none at all, if we’re being honest here—“it’s because you’re not doing it with the right person. ”
I imagine my face looks the way it would if I had stepped in dog poo. “Sounds like you think you could do better.”
His chuckle is deep and dirty, ejaculating through my bloodstream. “Oh, I know I could.”
Have you ever had one of those times right before you actually truly fall asleep when you feel like you’re falling?
There’s this weird sensation of time halting, but then you realize too suddenly that you’re plummeting to the ground.
It’s the scariest sensation in the world—death waiting to claim you—but then you blink awake and realize the whole thing was just a dream.
This feels a little like that. One minute I’m furious at Pierce for implying he knows anything—anything at all—about my life. The next I’m reeling, absolutely reeling, from what he said. It’s like it takes my brain a full minute to process everything that has just transpired.
I’m positive that had he reached out and grabbed me, it would have affected me less than those five words. It wasn’t even the words themselves. It was the way he said them. Oh, I know I could. Such certainty. Such confidence.
And this whole time I’m staggering for breath, do you know what the man is doing? He’s just standing there watching me, arms still folded. Waiting for me to say something.
My heart is pounding as though I’ve raced up the entire five flights of stairs. My skin feels clammy and is covered in goosebumps. There are a million things I could say, that I want to say, but I settle on: “I am done having this—”
He doesn’t let me finish. He pushes off the wall toward me, too fast for me to react. Then his hand is on my waist, pressing me against the wall, the other wrapping around my throat.
I can’t breathe.
He hovers over me, his breath coming as hard as mine, and our eyes connect with an intensity they never have before. Have his always had a dozen shades of brown in them, or is that a trick of the light? His hand scoots upward and clasps both of my wrists, then pins them above my head.
I am completely at his mercy, and we both know it. The scary part is, there isn’t a single part of me that wants to escape.
He inclines his head, and I know what’s coming, but I am unprepared for it.
His lips touch mine, and that’s it. We’re over.
Done. Complete. Our era as separate entities has come to a close, not nicely wrapped up with a bow and a few souvenirs, but with a crash, like a plane hitting water and plummeting below its surface.
Fatal wreckage everywhere you look, because this fusing of us together means that everything that came before was wrong.
If this is right, then all the rest was wrong.
He tastes like sweet peppermint, better than any candy I’ve ever tasted. If I had to pick a flavor to taste for the rest of my life, I’d choose this one.
I’ve already told you how perfect his lips are, but that was just their appearance. They are even softer than they look. They nip at my mouth, barking orders without a word, chastising me when I don’t cooperate quickly enough.
And teeth. Holy fuck, the man uses teeth like I’ve never experienced before. He bites my lips, my tongue, anything that gets in his way.
He still has one hand wrapped around my throat—not nearly enough to mess with my airway, but enough to signal his power. If he wanted to, he could end me right here, and I’m not sure I’d object.
As he kisses me until I’m completely chafed from his stubble and my lipstick is far beyond redemption, a single thought becomes crystal clear.
He was right. I’m confident now that he was entirely right, much as it pains me to admit it. There is no doubt in my mind that this man could chase away every single demon keeping me from fully relaxing.
His grip on my wrists tightens, and a tiny whimper slips past my lips as he changes the angle of the kiss. An answering growl comes from his throat. The sound raises my libido to its breaking point, and I press up against him. He meets the movement by grinding against me even harder.
All I can think is, what would it feel like to have this man’s hands and mouth on my entire body?
“Fuck, Maeve,” he says, and it comes out strangled, making me wonder if I somehow did that to him.
He drops my arms slowly back to my sides and removes his fingers from around my neck. A single step backward is all it takes to separate our bodies, but it will take much more than that to separate us now that we’ve been joined in this way.
He reaches for the emergency brake, and then we’re descending again, almost as though nothing has happened. The lift dings, alerting us right before the doors whoosh open. Pierce doesn’t say a word, just gives me one final look before walking into the foyer and then out through the exit.
I lift a shaky hand to my smudged lipstick, a single thought swirling through my brain.
What the fuck just happened?