Chapter Sixteen #2
She nodded. “He also tried to prove it. After I was fired, he made sure I couldn’t find another job.
For six months—the entire time leading up to working for you—I was doomed before I even walked into an interview, after the company verified my employment, alerting Hull that I had a potential job.
So he’d call ahead of the interview and told them lies about what a terrible worker I was.
Blackballed me from the entire industry. ”
My hands curled into fists at my sides and a muscle jumped in my jaw. “That fucking prick.”
“Yeah.” She exhaled heavily. “He really was.”
I pushed off the counter and crossed the kitchen toward her. She watched me approach, her expression guarded but not closed off. I stopped in front of her, close but not crowding her.
“I know you’re nothing like him,” she said quietly, before I could speak. “I know that, Simon. But that situation… it makes me wary. Even with you. Even though I want whatever is happening between us.”
I understood. I really did. She’d been burned badly, and the parallels were impossible to ignore—another boss, another complicated relationship, another opportunity for everything to go wrong.
But I wasn’t Hull. And I needed her to believe that.
“I want to see where this goes, Raina,” I said, my voice low but earnest. “This isn’t a one-and-done for me. I want… more.”
The word felt inadequate, but it was the best I had.
“We can take it one day at a time,” I continued. “Figure it out as we go. But now that we’ve crossed this line…” I shook my head slowly. “I can’t go back. I don’t want to go back.”
I held her gaze, watching the emotions flicker across her face—hope and fear and want all tangled together.
“Can you?” I asked. “Go back to the way things were?”
A long moment passed. Then, quietly, she replied. “No. I can’t. And I don’t want to, either.”
Relief surged through me. “Then we move forward. Together. And I promise you—” I stepped closer, eliminating the last of the distance between us. “—your job is safe. No matter what happens between us, I will never use my position against you. You have my word.”
She searched my face, looking for… something. Whatever she found must have satisfied her, because some of the tension finally drained from her shoulders.
“Okay,” she whispered. “One day at a time.”
I reached up and framed her face in my hands, tilting her head back so I could look into her eyes. Then I kissed her, pouring everything I couldn’t quite articulate into the press of my lips against hers.
She melted into me, her hands coming up to rest on my chest.
“Are you trying to distract me, Mr. Powers?” she murmured against my mouth.
I smiled. “Is it working?”
She gave me a flirty little grin. “Maybe.”
“Then I’ll have to try a little harder.”
I turned her around, pressing her stomach against the counter. Her breath caught as I brushed my lips against the nape of her neck, exposed by her messy bun. My hands skimmed up the outside of her thighs, sliding beneath the hem of her sleep shirt.
She shivered. I had her pinned between my body and the counter, and one hand slipped into her panties. She moaned when my fingers found her already wet, already wanting, and her head fell back against my shoulder.
“Simon…”
Her hand reached back, fingers twisting into my hair as she arched her spine and ground her ass against my erection, straining against the denim of my jeans.
I bit down gently on the curve of her neck and whispered filthy things in her ear—telling her how good she felt around my cock when she came, letting her know how much I wanted her and exactly what I intended to do to her in explicit detail.
She came apart just like that, shuddering and gasping, her release coating my fingers. I groaned, my self-control snapping.
I shoved her panties down her hips and she kicked them aside eagerly, planting her feet wider apart, wanting this as badly as I did. Good, I thought, as I tore open my jeans and freed my aching cock.
She leaned over the counter, arching her back and presenting that gorgeous ass to me—flushed and beautiful and mine—and I notched myself at her entrance from behind. My hands gripped her hips. One hard thrust, and I was buried to the hilt.
We both groaned at the sensation.
I didn’t go slow this time. I took her hard, driving into her with a raw, primal need that bordered on desperate. She met me thrust for thrust, grinding back against me, her moans growing louder with every snap of my hips.
My hand slid around to find her clit again, and she cried out—oversensitive, overwhelmed—her inner walls clamping down around me as she detonated for the second time.
Her reaction ripped my own release from me. I buried myself deep and came with a groan that felt like it was torn from somewhere in my chest.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. I stayed inside her as she lay pressed against the counter, both of us catching our breath. I didn’t want to leave her body. Didn’t want to break this connection, even temporarily.
I was in so fucking deep. Over my head. Drowning in feelings I didn’t know how to name, for a woman I’d never expected to want this much.
But there was no stopping it now. No going back to who I was before her.
I understood her concerns. They were all valid, and I would do everything in my power to address them. But I also knew, with a certainty that surprised me, that I wasn’t giving her up. Not as my assistant. Not as… whatever she was becoming to me.
I needed to figure out how to make this work. All of it. The job, the relationship, the complicated tangle of professional and personal. Because walking away wasn’t an option.
For a man who had been content being alone, who had built his entire life around independence and self-reliance, the realization should have been terrifying.
Instead, it felt like the beginning of something worth fighting for.