by Ella Miles
She laughs. “I’m not worried about myself. I’ve done interviews countless times. I know what to say and what not to say. I know how to say charming things to distract the audience from what they should be worrying about. How do you think I got this far? But what I can’t put up with is you two bickering. I thought I was being smart when I hired both of you, but now, I realize just how much of a mistake that was.”
She takes a deep breath and then looks back to me. “I’m going to the salon to get my hair colored and get my nails done. Give me the interview questions.”
I slowly walk over, handing her my notebook of questions.
She snatches them out of my hand. “I’ll prepare for the interview on my own. And, when I get back, you two had better have worked out whatever shit is going on between the two of you. And, if I hear one more stupid argument, then I’m going to fire you both. I don’t need this stress right now.” She looks at Carter, who is still blocking her path to the exit. “Now, move.”
He opens his mouth to say something but thinks better of it and steps out of her way. She stomps out of the room, leaving Carter and me alone in the meeting room.
“Great job,” Carter says, snarky.
“You’re an ass,” I say, gathering my things.
I take Lily’s lead and walk out. I know it is going to do nothing to solve our current predicament, but I can’t let myself stay trapped in the same room with him for another second.
I march quickly out of the building, not caring that, by doing so, I’m probably losing yet another job and my best shot at starting my own firm. My head is already spinning with how I can salvage this, but my ideas all start with me strangling Carter to death because he is the root of all my problems. Every problem I’ve ever had started with him.
“Tori, wait,” I hear Carter yell behind me as I continue down the sidewalk to my rental car.
I freeze. Don’t engage him. Just walk away. Give up. Let him deal with Lily. I can find a new job. I don’t need this one client in order to start my career. That’s what I should do. Just get in my rental, go back to Logan’s, pack up my things, and get on the first flight back to California.
But I can’t give up so easily. I’m too stubborn for that.
I turn around. “What did you just call me?”
He cocks his arrogant head to the side. “You aren’t running away, are you, Tori?”
I can’t control myself anymore. I stomp over to where Carter is standing on the sidewalk, and I slap him. Hard. Across the face.
It’s not one of my better moments as far as judgment goes, but I can’t let him just get away with being the biggest jerk on the planet anymore. I’m tired of him hurting me even though I should be used to it by now.
He doesn’t seem shocked that I hit him. In fact, he seems like that is exactly what he wanted. “I thought I couldn’t hurt you anymore.”
My nostrils flare, and my face turns bright red as I try to keep my breathing even and cold. “I lied.”
He nods, putting his hands into his pockets, as he walks closer to me. “I know.”
I take a step back. I don’t want him anywhere near me.
“I’m sorry.”
I pause at his words before walking backward, and he takes another step forward, gaining on me.
“You aren’t capable of being sorry. At least, not toward me.”
He nods. “You’re right. I probably don’t deserve your forgiveness, but does it make you feel any better to know that the past two hours have just been me goading you, trying to get you to break, so that I could prove to you that I’m still capable of hurting you?”
“No, it doesn’t make me feel any better that you purposefully hurt me to prove a point.”
He bites his lip, and I find myself staring far too intently at his damn lips. How can I find a man I hate so sexy? It shouldn’t be possible.
He takes another step toward me until he’s only a foot away from me. “I needed to know.”
“Why?” I throw my hands up. “Why did you need to know that you could still hurt me?”
He reaches his hand out and lightly touches me on my bottom lip. “Because, believe it or not, I care about you.”
I laugh. “You can’t care about me. It’s not possible.”
His hand goes to the back of my neck before I realize what he is doing. He pulls me hard toward him. Our lips crash together in a hungry kiss. My eyes close the second our lips touch. My hands wrap around his neck, and my body responds to his. The kiss makes me forget about all the pain he’s caused me. It makes me want him. It makes me ache for him. He takes complete control over my body with just one single kiss.
“No,” I say, pushing him away from me. “I won’t let you control me. You don’t get to just kiss me and make everything better.”
“How am I controlling you if this is what you want?”
“You think I want this?” I motion between us.
“I know you do. You can’t kiss me like that and not want this.”
I laugh. “I can. You can kiss me a million times, and I will never want anything more. There is nothing you can do to make up for the past. Nothing.”
He narrows his eyes. “Even this?”
He scoops me back into his arms and kisses me again. My breathing stops as he kisses me. His tongue pushes deep into my mouth, begging me to let go of our past. To let him in.
I shouldn’t. I know that, if I do, nothing but pain will follow. But, with his hand tangled in my hair, my body in his arms, his lips kissing me like I’ve wanted him to since the second I saw him again, I forget about the pain.
He gently pulls away, looking deep into my eyes, now asking for permission for a kiss that he just took from me again.
I slap him across the face again, but he doesn’t let go of me. He just holds me tighter.
“I’m not yours. You don’t get to control me. No one controls me.”
I push his arms off of me, and I start walking down the sidewalk again although not as fast as before. I need to get out of here before I agree to do something stupid that would only leave me more broken than ever before.
He runs after me until he catches up with me. I expect him to grab my arm again and force me to stop, but he doesn’t. He just walks next to me. Maybe he’s tired of getting slapped.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t good enough.”
“Why not? I know you want this as much as I do. I’m not saying that you should marry me. Just give me a clean slate to start over. Let me take you on a date. Let me fuck you. Give me a chance.”
“You want to date me? Seriously?”
“Maybe.”
I shake my head. “Why would I let go of everything that you have done to me when you give me no confidence that this is even what you want?”
“Because we can’t keep doing this. Whatever is going on between us, it has to stop. We are destroying Lily and hurting our careers, all so that we can deny this sexual tension. If nothing else, at least maybe we should just fuck whatever this is out of our systems, and then we can move on and finally do our jobs.”
“Fucking you won’t get the time you cut my pigtails in kindergarten out of my system,” I say, stopping as I glare at him. “Fucking you won’t get the time you convinced my brother that girls were gross and wouldn’t let him talk to me for a year even though I needed him.” I take a step toward him as I let my anger through.
He doesn’t take a step back even though I’m more than likely going to slap him again.
“Fucking you won’t take away the time you shoved me off the playground and broke my arm.”
He stands frozen, taking it all. Every horrible thing he has ever done to me hits him.
“Fucking you won’t take away the time you said you would drive me home when it was freezing cold outside, and instead, slept with some girl while I had to walk home in a snowstorm without a coat.”
I let all the horrible things he’s ever done to me out. Every single one. Exc
ept one. I keep the worst for myself. If I told him, he would realize how much I cared about him when we were teenagers. If I tell him the worst thing that he’s ever done to me, then he might try to ask for forgiveness. I might let go of the pain and actually forgive him. And I can’t do that. He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.
“Are you finished?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Why? You want to do something else to hurt me?”
“No, I want to tell you how truly sorry I am. I was fucked up as a kid. I had my own problems to deal with, but rather than deal with them, I took them out on you. Can you forgive me for what I did as a kid?”
“Yes, but I can’t forgive you for what you’ve done as a man.”
He swallows and looks like I slapped him even though I didn’t.
“You’re right. You shouldn’t forgive me for hurting you now.”
I nod, hating how silky and deep his voice sounds when he speaks. Because, if I listen to his voice too long, I will do anything he says.
I look into his damn eyes before I realize that it’s a trap. His eyes are full of sincerity and lust. A deadly combination.
“What do you want, Victoria?”
And then he has to say my real name.
“Do you want me to let you have this job? Do you want me to go away and never see you again? Do you want me down on my knees, begging you for forgiveness for the rest of my life? What do you want?”
I bite my lip. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but I never expected this. I could ask him to let me have Lily as a client. It would make my career if I did. But I won’t. Unlike him, I want to win the job fair and square. I don’t want to know that my whole career was made because Carter let me have it.
“Kiss me,” I say.
His eyes search mine for just a second, as he’s not sure if he actually heard the words that fell from my lips.
“Fuck it out of me. Fuck away all the pain. All the sexual tension. Fuck it all away.”
8
Carter
Victoria just told me to fuck her.
It’s what I’ve been wanting to hear since the moment I saw her again. But, somehow, it feels like both the biggest mistake I could ever make and the best thing that I could ever do.
I gave her a chance to choose her career over me, and she chose me. She’s putting her trust in me. A man who has hurt her more than any other person on this planet. I could use this to finish her for good or make her mine forever.
Or I could just fuck her. No emotions. No promises of anything more. Give her the best sex of her life. That’s how I want her to remember me when this is all over. The best damn sex of her life. That’s what I can give her.
I grab her face as I press my lips against hers. Her lips are the softest lips I’ve ever felt. When her tongue tangles with mine and her body presses against me, I know I just made the best damn decision of my life.
She’s beautiful. But then she’s always been beautiful. She’s more than that now. She’s hot. Her body fit and curvy. She’s smart and stubborn. She’s ambitious and ruthless. She’s exactly what I want.
She pulls away, and I can feel her slipping away again. I can’t handle not having her.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to compose myself so that I don’t let you fuck me right here, on the sidewalk.”
I kiss her again, pulling her lip back into my mouth, as she moans. “I think you would like it if I fucked you right here.”
She blushes. “You’re probably right. But then we would both get arrested for indecent exposure, Lily would fuck up her interview, and we would both get fired, our careers over.”
I raise an eyebrow. “It would be worth it, don’t you think?”
She cocks her head to the side as she stares at me.
“Fine. We’ll find a more suitable place to fuck.”
“Thank you,” she says, happy with her win.
I can see the wheels turning in her head. She grabs my hand and begins pulling me down the sidewalk, desperately trying to get to wherever we are going as fast as possible.
But she isn’t the only one with ideas.
I let her lead me down one block before I can’t take it any longer.
I grab her hips, and I push her against the brick building while I kiss her again.
“We. Have. To. Keep. Going,” she says, kissing me between every word.
“No, we don’t.”
“We do if we are going to get to my car,” she says as I kiss her neck.
I laugh. “We are not going to make it to your car.”
She tangles her hands in my hair as she nibbles on my lip.
“Sure we are.”
I kiss down her neck again and listen as she gasps.
“There is no way you will make it the two blocks to our cars,” I whisper into her ear as my fingers dip inside her pants and beneath her panties to find her pussy already dripping for me. “You will come before I even get inside you. And I can’t have that happen.”
I pull my fingers back out and lick them while she breathes heavily.
“Fuck me. Now,” she breathes.
I grin. I grab her hand, pulling her to the next door. She grabs my face as soon as we enter the building, and her lips kiss me. She can’t get enough of me, and I can’t get enough of her. She thinks one fuck is going to be enough to get whatever is going on between us out of our systems, but she is wrong.
It’s going to take more than one fuck.
It’s going to take more than one day.
More than one night.
I’m not sure if I can fuck her enough to get over her.
I keep kissing her as we walk. My hands do naughty things to her body. One hand grabs her ass, and the other pushes her shirt up, needing to feel her smooth skin. We are ridiculous. At least half a dozen people see us as we walk, but neither of us cares.
We continue to act like horny teenagers until we get to the elevators. I press the button, and the doors open automatically. I push Victoria inside and then stop a man who tries to walk onto the elevator with us.
“You don’t want to be on this elevator with us, trust me,” I say with a wink before the doors close.
I turn to Victoria, expecting her to be blushing from embarrassment but her eyes only deepen.
“Fuck me, Carter.”
I press the emergency stop button on the elevator. “I plan to.”
I walk toward her, taking my time, while she breathes in and out, in and out. She’s terrified—that’s what her breathing tells me—but she wants this anyway. She’s willing to take the chance. And I’m going to make it more than worth the risk she feels she’s taking.
I stop just as my body touches her. She’s leaning against the elevator wall for support, like she can’t even stand another second on her own.
“I won’t hurt you.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t keep that promise.”
“Sure I can.”
“No, because I haven’t even had you yet, and I already know that it’s going to hurt like hell to have to stop.”
“Then, we won’t stop.”
I grab her arms and push them high over her head as I kiss her against the wall, holding nothing back. She doesn’t either. Whatever fear she has disappears the second I kiss her again.
She clutches my jacket and pushes it off my shoulders. I shake it off to the floor. I grab her blouse and rip it open, watching as the buttons pull apart.
“You owe me a shirt.”
I laugh. “I think I owe you a lot more than that.”
I lower my mouth to her breasts, which are peeking out of her red-hot bra. I kiss over the soft mounds as she pulls at my shirt. She rips my shirt apart, making it known that she is going to fight back with everything she has.
I reach my hands under her damn skirt, find her panties, and tear them down. She grabs my belt, undoes it and my pants, and roughly pushes them down.
Her eyes devour my cock while she licks
her lips in anticipation.
“Like what you see?”
Her eyes burn into mine. “I’ll like it better when you’re fucking me with it.”
I grin. “My pleasure.”
I grab her bra with my teeth and rip the thin piece of material in the middle of her breasts before I take her newly freed nipple into my mouth.
“Damn it, Carter,” she moans as I tease her nipple with my tongue. “That was my favorite bra.”
“It might just be my favorite, too,” I say before I take her other nipple into my mouth.
She arches her back. Her skin tastes salty from the sweat of being trapped in a tiny elevator with me.
I reach into the back of my pants and pull out a condom. I roll it onto my cock while I continue to tease her. The second I have the condom on, she jumps into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist while she bites my neck.
I growl as she bites hard, paying me back for the pain I’ve caused her. I push her hard against the wall as my cock rests at her entrance.
She pulls her head back, so she can look me in the eye as I push my cock just a little into her pussy.
“More,” she demands. “Please, God, more.”
“I’ll give you more than you can ever imagine.”
I bury my cock deep inside her as her nails dig into my back.
I growl.
She grins and digs in further. Her mouth grabs my lip and pulls it into her mouth as I fuck her. Her eyes are devious with a gleam of how bad she knows this is but doesn’t care. I could stare into her eyes all day if it wasn’t for the rest of her body trying to fight for my attention.
Her skin glistens with sweat. Her breasts are swollen, and her nipples peaked. Her stomach is hard, and her pussy is tight as I fuck her.
I try to move slower so that this can last longer, but I can’t. Because, every time I do, her moans beg me to move faster. Her nails dig into my back harder. Her pussy pulls me in deeper.
I can’t slow down, but I’m going to make this the best sex she’s ever had.
I push her harder against the wall as I fuck her.
She gasps before biting her lip.