Before She Was Mine

by Amelia Wilde

  Even that thought doesn’t ring true, but the words in my mind are becoming jumbled, completely overtaken by the pulsing throb between my legs.

  I still want Dominic Wilder, and now that I’ve had the chance and ruined it for myself, I want him even more.

  I get out of bed, frustrated as hell, and stomp over to my dresser. There, in the top drawer, covered neatly with a layer of my going-out panties—most of those haven’t seen the light of day since I joined the FBI—is a sleek black vibrator, top of the line. I bought it for myself a few years ago, thinking it would make some of the lonely nights easier. Before Dominic, the lonely nights were seeming like a small problem.

  I hate that he has this effect on me.

  But I can’t deny it, not now, not this morning. The urge is too strong.

  I slip off my t-shirt and panties and slide back under the sheets, laying against the pillow with a sigh, and close my eyes.

  This time, I don’t fight it.

  I let myself linger on those deep blue eyes of his, on his low voice whispering dirty things into my ear, of his hands, so powerful yet so gentle, caressing my skin. I want to know what he would look like stripping off his clothes, coming to me with his cock already hard and ready. And me—

  Me, on the bed, on my hands and knees, ass pressed up into the air, exposed and open for him, waiting.

  I flip the switch on the vibrator and bring its silicon surface to my pussy. I’m already wet, and I trace over my folds and bite my lip.

  Me, on the bed, spread open wide, waiting, nipples hard even before he starts to trace his tongue around them, teasing me, torturing me, bringing me closer and closer to the edge of sheer, blinding pleasure.

  Me, bent over his desk, skirt shoved up around my waist, one of his hands evoking a gentle pressure there, one thundering down onto the bare flesh of my ass, the heat and pain turning me on.

  I gasp in the silence of my apartment. This is the part of me that’s filthy, that’s not professional, that’s not strong and independent, not like I am in the daylight, at my job, in the world. This is the part of me that feels the uncertainty of the earth beneath my feet and wants badly to have someone else take the reins for a while. The part of me that gets a dirty thrill to think of a man spanking me, punishing me, and how much I might enjoy it.

  I press the vibrator harder against my clit, circling it again and again. I imagine the punishment, the spanking, turning into pleasure, turning into this, the reward settling in while my ass still stings, and then Dominic thrusting into me from behind, taking me, filling me, his thighs pressing again and again into my punished bottom, the pain and the pleasure mixing into a sweet high that I ride over and over until I can’t come again, until he comes hard into me, and then I explode over the vibrator, my hips jerking away from the surface of the bed, rising with each wave until there are no more waves to ride.

  I turn the vibrator off and toss it to the floor, feeling the heat in my face, feeling the blush rising to my cheeks. These are secret fantasies, the kind Dominic can never know. The kind nobody can ever know.

  I roll over. It’s still two hours before my alarm is set to go off, before I have to get into the shower and get dressed and walk into Wilder Industries like nothing happened last night, like everything is fine. Now that I’ve come by thinking of him—and not for the first time—I can sense sleep settling down over me like a blanket, relaxing my muscles, carrying me away.

  I’m almost there, almost slipping into a peaceful dream, when the thought occurs to me, crystal clear and plain as day.

  I can’t leave things like this.

  What happened last night might not have been wrong, but I don’t like how we—I—left things. I don’t like how coldness crept into the moment, how Dominic turned away from me.

  It might not be professional. It might not be right. But I owe him an apology, and I’m going to give it to him.

  As soon as I wake up.

  12

  Dominic

  I tear through the morning’s paperwork and lead the meetings with more enthusiasm than usual. I want to get things done. I am sick of letting Vivienne Davis control my thoughts, and so I refuse to let her.

  Much.

  At ten o’clock, all the paperwork for the day is done, and we’re ahead of schedule on status meetings. Most of the afternoon is free. I can change that.

  But first, I’m going to go for a walk. There’s a café at the end of the block that makes delicious iced coffee and I’ve never been able to get anyone at the Wilder Building to duplicate it. It’s so relentlessly beautiful outside my window that I can’t resist. Now that I’m back on track, it’s fine to indulge for a few minutes.

  I go out past Emily’s desk, and she looks up at me when I stop in front of it. “Mr. Wilder,” she says with a smile. “You’re ahead of schedule today.”

  “Thanks to you.” Her cheeks go a little pink. Emily is unwaveringly professional, but sometimes she can’t quite control her reactions when I’ve done something to please her. “Is there anything on Monday that we could move up? I have a gap in my schedule.”

  She swivels her chair toward her computer screen and deftly navigates to next week’s calendar. “I’m not exactly sure. I can make a few contacts and follow up with you. Will you be gone long?”

  “I’m walking to the café.”

  She nods at me and smiles again. “I’ll have a list of options for you to review when you get back.”

  Since I’ve come out this way, I decide to take the public elevator down to the lobby. If I can move some of those meetings to this afternoon, it could free up time Monday morning to explore some of the options I’ve been meaning to get more intel on in terms of new energy patents we might want to acquire before they get too far into the process. This is an area in which my father unquestionably failed. He didn’t go after new tech aggressively enough. He didn’t go after anything aggressively enough, but his distractions were the things that undid him in the end.

  The elevator stops, and I look up at the floor indicator, forgetting for a second that I’m not in my private car.

  The doors slide open.

  And in steps Vivienne Davis.

  She’s looking down at the contents of a folder in her hands and gives me a cursory glance for long enough to step out of my way, and then she does a double take and blushes a deep red.

  “Oh, I—” She turns automatically toward the doors, but they’re already sliding shut. To her credit, she doesn’t try to pretend that she was about to bolt. She squares her shoulders and turns to face me. “Mr. Wilder.”

  “Ms. Davis.”

  It’s there already, sizzling between us while we stand together in this relatively confined space. It’s hard to look into her eyes, but I’m not going to let her see that she kept me up half the night.

  One corner of her mouth turns up. “You can call me Vivienne.”

  The sound of her voice, softening like that, makes my chest go tight, and I can’t keep up the pretense. “I don’t know, Ms. Davis. We’ve been through this before, and it didn’t turn out very well.”

  She bites her lip. “I know. I was hoping—” The elevator starts moving downward, and she steps farther in and turns to face the doors. We’re shoulder to shoulder for a moment, and then she turns to face me, green eyes locked on mine. “I was hoping to run into you.”

  The sentence comes out in a rush, like she’s been holding it in for a long time. Maybe she has.

  “What for?”

  I can’t look away from her. I don’t want to look away from her.

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  “You don’t owe me an apology, Ms. Davis.”

  She flinches, only a little, but I see it. “Please,” she says quietly, and there’s something there in her voice, something open and honest. “Call me Vivienne.”

  “Vivienne, don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Clearly, something I did last night made you uncomfortable.” I clear my throat, not dropping
her gaze. “And it was wrong. It was inappropriate, unprofessional, and—”

  “It wasn’t wrong.” She breaks in so suddenly that I’m taken aback. Her cheeks are still pink, flushed, and she’s clutching the folder to her chest. “It’s not wrong to—feel attracted to someone.” Her eyes are on the floor indicator, which is ticking steadily down to the lobby. “I’m sorry I reacted that way. Something you said—it reminded me that I’m supposed to be professional, I work for you, and—”

  “And it doesn’t matter, does it?” It’s her turn to look a little shocked, and I step closer. She takes a single step back and hits the wall, her back pressed against the shining surface. “It doesn’t matter, because even though it’s not appropriate, you still can’t stop thinking about me.”

  “I can’t,” she whispers.

  “Do you know how I know?”

  “How?”

  My face is inches from hers. I breathe in the light scent of her perfume. “I can’t stop thinking about you, either. I’m not supposed to have you, Vivienne Davis, but I want you.” Her breath is shallow, fast. “I wasn’t lying when I said it last night, and I’m not lying now. I want you, and I don’t give a shit that you work three levels below me.”

  “Two,” she blurts out. She’s caught between a smile and a frown.

  “What?”

  “Two levels below you,” she says, nodding down at the folder. “I did such a wonderful job on the Mumbai meeting that I got promoted. I’m going to be Mr. Overhiser’s chief executive assistant.”

  Closer and closer and closer. Somehow, she’s getting closer to me with every day. Chief executive assistants attend meetings in place of executives when they’re double booked. They coordinate with Emily to make sure any individual meetings work with my schedule.

  I don’t want to fire her.

  I don’t want to derail her career.

  And I can’t let her go.

  It’s in this moment, right now, that I make up my mind.

  “Two levels. Is that all?”

  “Yes,” she says, her voice dropping as I lean in closer, my lips next to her ear.

  “Somehow that makes it more inappropriate, don’t you think?”

  She can’t speak. She only nods.

  “I have a solution.”

  Her eyes go wide and bright, and she’s holding very still, like it’s all she can do not to turn her head and kiss me right now. “What is it?”

  “I want to spend time with you, Vivienne Davis. I want to spend time with you alone. I want to spend time with you in places where we can talk about anything, because I have to know more about you.”

  “But how—”

  “I’ll keep a secret,” I whisper, and then I lean in and take her earlobe between my teeth so gently that it won’t leave the hint of a mark. She gasps, hands going tight around the folder in her hands. “We’ll keep it a secret, and nobody needs to know.”

  “Yes.” She breathes the word and a jolt of satisfaction fills me, warms me, threatens to burn me up.

  I step away from her. There’s an instant of confusion on her face, and then the elevator dings, and the doors slide open.

  I turn and move to step out, to act like nothing has happened. It’s all part of the game now.

  “Yes,” she says after me, her voice clear and strong. “Yes.”

  13

  Vivienne

  The weekend is agony, a blur of thinking, over and over again, what the hell am I doing?

  There are a million reasons not to go near Dominic Wilder. This job, for one. My entire career, for two. And beyond all that—beyond the humiliation I would likely suffer if anyone breathes a word of this to my boss—there’s the fact that Dominic and I live in different worlds. He’s like some of the guys I dated in college—rich and arrogant. Clearly, if what transpired in the elevator is any indication, he’ll pursue what he wants.

  No. He’s different.

  The argument brewing in the back of my mind is a quiet one, but part of me wants to believe it’s true. After that horribly disappointing ride back to my apartment the other night, it’s not like he had any regrets and decided to get out of the car and follow me upstairs to make it right, demanding what he wanted from me.

  What we both wanted.

  Still…

  I fill the weekend with as much activity as I can. I run for miles in the mornings around Central Park, coming home with sweat beading on my skin, my tired legs cramping and achy, and my mind still wrapped up in sultry thoughts of Dominic no matter how loudly I blare the music from my iPhone hoping to drown out the vivid images. I always play music while I run, even though I know better than to block out my surroundings like that, but today I turn it up.

  I know better than to feel giddy about getting a secret shot at hooking up with Dominic Wilder. I know so much better than that, but I can’t help myself.

  He doesn’t call or text over the weekend, so I go back and forth puzzling to myself about what this means like I’m a love-struck high schooler. He has to have my cell number…or maybe he doesn’t. He could probably look it up any time he wants since I’m sure he has access to my personnel file, and it is the work mobile the company assigned to me. I spent hours memorizing the number, and I never carry my real phone with me for safety. But it never rings, never buzzes with an alert from him or anyone else. Over the weekend, my real phone hums with alerts seemingly non-stop. My best friend, Margo, knows something is up when I ask if she wants to go to a museum on Saturday afternoon.

  “Which museum?” Her voice sounds skeptical over the phone.

  “I don’t know, the MoMA? Maybe a different one?”

  “You never want to go to a museum.”

  “I want to today.”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s got you all riled up?”

  “No.”

  It’s not that I don’t want to spill my guts to Margo, but she’s not FBI, and I’m already pushing the boundaries with this job too far.

  She sighs. “Fine. But I don’t want to look at art forever. Let’s get sushi afterward.”

  “Deal.”

  She spends the entire time we’re touring the museum—none of the art seems to be making any kind of impression on her—giving me the side-eye and trying to guess what it is that’s made me so desperate that I’d go as far as planning a cultural afternoon in New York City.

  “Did you get fired?”

  Not yet. “No, I’m still gainfully employed.”

  “Did you…meet a guy?”

  Yes, but I can’t tell you about him, and I’ll probably never be able to tell you about him, because after this… “I meet guys at work every day, but no, that’s not it.” The lie tastes sour on my tongue, but I can’t let this discussion build any further.

  When Sunday night comes, I lie awake for hours, flipping and flopping in my bed, wondering if I imagined everything that happened between us in the elevator, wondering if all this tossing and turning is only meant to distract me from something that never happened at all.

  The white envelope is sitting on my desk when I arrive to work on Monday morning at eight forty-five. It’s early enough to make a good impression, yet late enough to let anyone who might be the least bit curious know that I’m not desperate to get back to the Wilder Enterprises offices, like I didn’t masturbate at least twice a day with my vibrator, like the heat between my legs doesn’t increase with every step I take toward the imposing skyscraper, all because of Dominic Wilder.

  It looks like a normal envelope at first glance, but the moment I touch it, I know it’s from him. It’s of even higher quality than the high-end office supplies used at Wilder Enterprises.

  I anxiously glance back over my shoulder, once, twice. Marie isn’t here yet, or else she’d have poked her head around the cubicle wall and demanded to know what I did all weekend. Ms. Lillianfield is probably here—she’s never late, always too early—but she makes it a habit not to start her rounds until 9 a.m. The woman might be terse, but she�
�s fair. I can pretty much guarantee that she’s not involved with any in-house espionage.

  Focus on that, I tell myself. That’s your real job. Then I sit down and tear open the envelope.

  Something shiny and silver falls out of the envelope into my lap, and I pick it up before I even have a chance to read the words on the notepaper tucked inside. It’s a delicate necklace, and after another moment I don’t think it’s silver after all. I think it’s platinum, or something even nicer. Hanging from the fragile chain is a teardrop diamond.

  A sunbeam shining in through the window catches the diamond and casts a rainbow over my desk, and I gasp at the delight that floods my chest.

  It was real, then. This necklace is expensive—too expensive for anyone I know to have bought it—but discreet enough that I can wear it in the office and not draw too much attention.

  I look down at the note.

  V—

  I didn’t want to invade your privacy for your cell phone number, but rest assured that I thought of you all weekend. I’d like to see you wearing this as your only accessory. Wear it for me today and meet me at Rouge at nine o’clock tonight. A car will pick you up at your place at eight forty-five.

  —D

  The Vivienne Davis who’s spent the last few years clawing her way up the ranks at the FBI would never fall for this, but maybe I’m not that Vivienne Davis, because my hands tremble with excitement as I put the necklace around my neck and hook the clasp. Rouge is a new high-end French restaurant that’s impossible to get into, and all I can think about is what I’m going to wear. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m going.

  I hear footsteps heading down the row of cubicles toward my desk, and before anyone can discover what I’m doing I tuck the note back in the envelope and slip it into one of my desk drawers. I’m sliding it shut when a bright, beaming face framed by bouncy red curls bursts around the corner into my work space.

  “Viv!” She cries my name like we haven’t seen each other in a hundred years. “What did you do all weekend? I had dates with two different men—I know, I’m taking such a big risk. I’m living on the edge. What about you?”