Epilogue
SUTTON
The conference room emptied out slowly.
Partners filed out shaking hands. The head of strategy came over to thank Joss in person.
Two junior PMs from the platform team caught her at the door and asked if she’d grab coffee with them sometime, and I watched her say yes.
She’d said yes to a hundred things in the five years since she’d walked out of my office on a Friday in June carrying nothing but her notebook and the start of an idea.
She’d built the idea into a company.
She was small still. Eight employees. A clean little consultancy that helped enterprise tech companies think about consumer engagement at the feature level, founded on the spine of the same argument she’d made to me five years ago.
Her clients included three of the top fifteen names in the industry. One of them was Myrror.
She’d taken that contract on her own merits.
She’d taken it after a competitive pitch process I’d recused myself from before it had even been scheduled, and after the head of product had brought the recommendation to my desk with the words, “This is the right firm, and I want you to know I would’ve picked them even if you’d never met her. ”
I’d signed the contract without comment.
Mira left for another opportunity just before all that happened.
She’d come to dinner at our apartment the week before her last day at Myrror and held our daughter on her lap for an hour.
She’d told Joss, when she’d thought I wasn’t listening, that watching her build her own thing had been the proudest professional moment of her career.
I’d been listening.
The conference room was empty now except for Joss at the head of the table, gathering her things. She was in the blue suit she always wore for these. Hair back in the same low knot. The notebook on top of her laptop, the way it always was.
She caught me watching her from the doorway. “You’re staring.”
“I am.”
“You always stare during these.”
“I do.”
She smiled. She zipped her bag. She crossed the room to where I was standing, and I held out my hand, and she took it.
“My mother has Elyssia until five,” she said. “We have an hour and a half.”
“I know.”
“We should pick her up early.”
“We could.”
She tilted her head up to look at me. There was something in her face I recognized from a long list of mornings and a longer list of nights, and I felt my pulse change the way it had been changing in her presence for five years.
“Or…” she started.
“Or.”
“We could take the long way.”
I’d already texted my driver before she finished the sentence.
The car was waiting at the curb when we came out of the Myrror lobby—the same lobby I’d met her in on a Monday morning five years ago with a coffee from Bitstream in my hand.
Eric held the door for us both, the way he had for the last few years, and he didn’t look twice at the way my wife slid into the back seat with a small private smile she’d only ever shown me.
I got in after her.
I closed the door.
The partition between the back of the car and Eric’s seat went up the second I tapped the controls beside me.
“Mr. Randall,” Joss said quietly, as soon as the partition clicked into place. “I just finished a presentation.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m in a suit.”
“I noticed that too.”
“My hair is back.”
“Joss.”
“Yes?”
“Come here.”
I pulled her across the seat and into my lap the moment the words left my mouth. Joss came willingly, knees sliding to either side of my thighs, her lips already parted mine.
I kissed her hard, the way I’d wanted to since she’d stood at the head of that conference table commanding the room.
She tasted like the mint she’d slipped into her mouth after the presentation and like the woman I’d been starving for since the day she stood in my office five years ago.
My hand slid up her thigh, under the hem of her skirt, and she shivered when my fingers reached the lace edge of her panties.
She was soaked.
I groaned into her mouth as I slid the fabric aside and dragged two fingers through her slick heat. She was swollen, slippery, and so ready that the first slow circle over her clit made her hips jerk against my hand.
“Fuck, Joss,” I breathed against her lips. “Always so wet for me.”
She whimpered, rocking into my touch. I pushed two fingers inside her, curling them just the way she liked, stroking that spot that always made her lose control while my thumb worked her clit in tight, firm circles.
Her hands fisted in my shirt as she rode my fingers, breath coming in sharp little gasps against my neck.
I kept kissing her—deep, filthy kisses—while I fucked her with my hand until her thighs started to shake.
She came with a broken moan, clenching hard around my fingers, her whole body trembling in my lap. I stroked her through it, gentling my touch as she shuddered and panted.
Before she’d even caught her breath, she was reaching between us, tugging her panties down her legs with frantic little movements. I helped her, sliding them off one ankle. She shoved her skirt up around her waist and straddled me again, bare now, her slick pussy hovering just above my aching cock.
I freed myself from my trousers with one hand, gripping the base of my erection. The other hand held her hip, steadying her as she sank down onto me in one smooth, greedy motion.
“Christ—” The groan tore out of me as her tight, wet heat swallowed every inch. She was still pulsing from her orgasm, fluttering around me, and for a second I had to close my eyes and breathe through the overwhelming pleasure.
Joss didn’t wait. She braced her hands on my shoulders and started riding me immediately, rolling her hips in that slow, devastating rhythm she knew would wreck me. The slick heat of her pussy slid down my cock until I was buried to the hilt, her walls gripping me like velvet fire.
“Fuck, Joss,” I whispered against her ear, my voice rough. “You’re so damn wet. I can feel you dripping down my cock already.”
I reached for her blouse, fingers working the buttons open one by one while she moved on me.
The moment I tugged her bra cups down, her breasts came free—full, flushed, and heavy, her nipples tight little peaks begging for my mouth.
I leaned in and dragged my tongue over one, then the other, sucking them deep into my mouth, flicking my tongue across the sensitive buds until she cried out, her pace faltering for a second.
I pulled back just enough to look at her as I cupped both breasts in my hands, squeezing them, thumbs brushing roughly over her nipples.
She was riding me harder now, faster, her hips snapping down to meet every upward thrust I gave her.
The car filled with the obscene sounds of our bodies—the wet, rhythmic slap of her ass against my thighs, the slick squelch of her soaked pussy taking every inch of my cock.
She looked completely wrecked and impossibly beautiful. Her hair had fallen halfway out of its neat knot, dark strands clinging to her damp neck and flushed cheeks. Her lips were parted, eyes heavy-lidded with lust, that perfect professional composure completely shattered.
Her hand slipped between her legs, fingers rubbing tight circles over her swollen clit while she chased her next orgasm. I could feel her pussy tightening around me, fluttering and clenching in that telltale way.
“That’s it, baby,” I growled low in her ear, thrusting up harder to meet her. “Rub that pretty clit while you fuck me. I want to feel this tight little pussy come all over my cock.”
She moaned, loud and broken, her rhythm growing frantic.
“You feel so fucking good,” I whispered, voice strained as I pinched her nipples. “So hot and wet and greedy. No one else gets to have you like this. Just me. Come on, Joss—let me feel you squeeze me when you fall apart.”
That pushed her over. She shattered with a sharp, desperate cry, her head falling back, breasts bouncing in my hands as her pussy clamped down on my cock in rhythmic, pulsing waves. The pressure was devastating—hot, silky pulses milking me relentlessly.
The sight of her—head thrown back, mouth open in ecstasy, riding me through her orgasm—was too much.
Pleasure slammed into me like a freight train.
I buried my face in her neck, inhaling her scent, and came with a deep, guttural groan, pulsing hard inside her as I filled her with thick, hot spurts.
Her walls kept fluttering around me, drawing out every last drop as we rode the aftershocks together.
Afterward, she sat against my chest with my arms around her and her cheek against the open collar of my shirt, and the car moved smoothly through the late-afternoon traffic toward her mother’s house.
She’d already pulled her panties back on and smoothed her skirt, and I’d zipped my trousers.
We looked, almost, like people who’d spent the drive talking.
“That’s going to be the one,” she said.
“You said that last month.”
“I have a feeling.”
“You said that last month, too.”
She tipped her face up to mine. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, the way they sometimes were after, and her mouth was a little swollen, and there was a piece of hair that had come loose from her knot and was clinging to the side of her neck.
I tucked it behind her ear.
“If it’s not this time,” I said, “we’ll try again next week.”
“And the week after.”
“And the week after.”
“Sutton?”
“Yes?”
“You really think we’ll have another one?”
“I know we will.”
She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she was looking at me the way she’d looked at me on a rooftop on the first night I’d ever spoken her name out loud.
The way she’d looked at me across my desk on the morning she’d told me she was leaving my building to figure out who she was without me, and the way she’d looked at me when she’d come back.
“I love you,” she said.
“I’ve loved you,” I said, “since you said hi on the rooftop.”
She made the small sound she always made when I said it—half laugh, half exhale, like the line still surprised her even though she’d been hearing it for five years.
The car turned the last corner toward her mother’s house.
Elyssia was on the front porch with her grandmother, waiting for us, her dark hair in two small lopsided pigtails and her face already lighting up the second she saw the car.
She was three. She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s love of notebooks, and she’d been the best surprise of my life from the moment Joss had shown me the test on a Sunday morning at our kitchen table four years ago.
I helped my wife out of the car.
She tucked the loose piece of hair back into her knot. She straightened her blazer. She took my hand.
We walked up the path toward the porch where our daughter was already running down the steps with her arms out, and I thought the thing I’d been thinking on and off for five years and would, I suspected, be thinking for the rest of my life.
Everything I’d built, I’d built for this.
Did you enjoy this book? Then be sure to check out the other books in the Alphas in Charge series, where powerful, take-charge bosses know exactly what they want…
and won’t stop until they claim their happily ever after.