“You say you’re about risk and innovation and getting ahead of the curve, but you can’t adapt, Delilah,” he says. “That’s why this business isn’t made for you.”
He adapts well. I know this. He was my MBA cohort, understands finance as masterfully as I understand men’s naked bodies. But a random man with wild determination in his eyes, who’s tattooed from shoulder to wrist and down half his torso, isn’t welcome into elite boardrooms at first sight. He knows how to conceal his beast and when to cover his inner hellion.
I know how to bait the beast and call the hellion.
“I was born into this business, Joshua. What were you born into again? Oh, right…poverty.”
Beast baited. Hellion called.
Joshua stabs a code into the security panel, escorts me to the CEO’s door, and rams a shoulder to it, throwing it open.
My office. No…Emma’s office.
Traces of me are gone. The walls have been painted a calming lavender. An overstuffed sofa rests adjacent to the windows that overlook a night-shaded courtyard. An L-shaped workstation breaks up the space, and decorating the polished surface are photographs of those who matter to her. Family. Loved ones. People she respects.
I’m in none of the images. Erased.
Joshua approaches, and I can hear the rattle of my bullets in his pocket.
They’ve taken so much from me. Emma’s taken so much.
I whirl on Emma’s husband and slap him hard. “This window,” I growl, pointing. “Put me through it. You said you would.”
“I said I could, not that I’m fucking stupid enough to do it.”
Ah, and here it is. A fissure in his steel exterior. A flicker of humanity in his savagery. I’ll use it, and won’t step away from his office until I’ve taken from both Joshua and Emma.
“Then fix this. Get me back in as CEO. I heard about the lawsuit—”
“What the fuck? That’s not public.”
“I have eyes and ears in studios all over America. There are still people who see the benefit in keeping me informed. That’s beside the point. I’m Delilah Bishop. Give me an inch and I’ll conquer the motherfucking world. I can control the lawsuit. I’ll do everything—anything—to keep Devil’s Music on top.”
“The board would piss on the suggestion, Delilah.”
“Fuck the board. Think about me. Y’all fucked me in the ass, voting me out. Lo Grizz will do the same to the company with this lawsuit. Cut a deal with me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
The words aren’t enough to provoke an answer, so I grab his hand and start to pull off his wedding band. “Need your wife’s permission first? Tell me something. Did your balls shrink when she put this band on your finger?”
His jaw has reddened where I struck him, and still he hasn’t retaliated.
“Do something,” I insist, tugging the ring off his finger. I glance toward the windows, can see myself opening them and throwing the band into the night.
Joshua intercepts, prying it from me and setting it on Emma’s desk. “Stop, Delilah.”
“No. You took my gun and I’m going to take from you. I won’t leave here until I do.”
He barks an obscenity that should offend me all the way through, but there’s no impact as it reverberates in my ears. I feel nothing until his hands mold to my neck and he walks me backward to the window.
He doesn’t put me through the glass—but instead against it.
“Want to take from me? Take, then. Take this.” His tongue sweeps across my lips before his mouth opens me.
Thought shatters and reality tilts. His hands remain fastened to my neck, pressing, constricting—yet he coaxes me to draw my air from his mouth. Pressure fills my temples, compromises my carotids. I should be concerned, at least somewhat, that he’s moments from choking me out, but I can’t focus on that.
The night’s so warm, tight with heat, yet his lips are cool against mine. And then his tongue is hot, wet, insistent inside my mouth, and I shiver.
He responds with a groan that penetrates me.
I have it now, a weapon to draw Joshua and Emma apart. At an opportune moment I’ll tell her about this night, this kiss, and it’ll cause a ripple, the same as a skipping pebble disturbs calm water.
Except…he has to know I’ll use this information—that it’ll get back to his wife. Why is he kissing me if he suspects I’ll tell?
I’ll tell your wife and blow your marriage apart. I can release the threat in the sweet fragranced air of Emma Toledo’s office, and in moments I might be flat on the courtyard haloed in my own blood and framed by fragments of glass.
It’s not that I’m especially attached to the mortal world. I’ve traveled widely in my twenty-nine years, and no, I don’t have children to carry on my legacy, but I have no legacy to carry on anyway. The taste of success has faded on my tongue, and all I know now is the flavor of Joshua Drake’s brutal lust.
I’ve unfinished business here: in the land of the living, in the hip-hop world, in Atlanta…in the home of Devil’s Music.
And it’s only in the name of business that I peer past the mist in my eyes to Joshua. He’s taken his mouth from mine and is breathing raggedly as he debates where he might put his hands next if he were to remove them from my neck.
Splitting the difference, he keeps one vised around me and uses the other to pull down my zipper. Not just some inches to call attention to my self-inflicted wound. All the way, until my dress is nothing but two flaps of useless silk.
I can knock his hand away or high-kick his balls up to his throat, but I don’t free myself. I roll my shoulders, shrugging out of the dress. The glass is cool against my bare back now.
“Now you,” I whisper, as it’s all I can manage. Even after he releases me to tear away his tie and strip off his Armani, I can hardly breathe. I want to cough and gulp in air, but I’m almost afraid to move.
Friendship was our barrier, years before. I never asked for his kiss or wrapped my hand around his cock—never imagined I would—but now that the friendship has been executed as callously as he can murder me with a hard shove, sending me out the window, we see each other for who we are.
He’s only a man.
I’m only a woman.
And, suddenly, we’re both naked and what’s going to happen here is plain and unavoidable.
Joshua’s muscles leap under the work of art that is his skin. Ink dresses him from shoulder to hip on one side. The other is bare tanned skin. I start there, stroking with my fingertips before fastening my lips to his nipple. Tonguing him, I let my hands slide until one curves against his ass and the other circles the root of his hard cock.
Working him, I try to remember…
He’s only a man. A man who stole my company. A man who’s married to my best friend. A man who might shove me to my death the moment he decides he’s done with my body.
I get to my knees and place a blush-colored kiss to the tip of his penis.
He captures my chin, forces me to look up into his eyes. “I’m going to shut you up, Delilah.”
Opening my mouth, I let him.
He grips my hair, pulling me forward and backward as he fucks my mouth. He’s ruthless in everything he does, so this shouldn’t startle me.
But it does. When I gag, he ventures deeper. When I push against him to ask for gentleness, he thrusts harder. And when he withdraws, his cock so stiff and now slick with my saliva, I thank him by sucking his sac into my mouth and extracting his pleasured groan.
The sound tightens my nipples, and I’m on my knees wet for him.
Then he pulls me up, presses me to the window again, and I wonder if anyone can see my tangled hair and bare ass.
Can they see Forbes-featured Joshua Drake sinking down to my level as he sinks himself into me?
“You on something?” he asks, almost as an afterthought, and he barely acknowledges my nod as he slides a pair of fingers into me and tries for three. The resistance presents a c
hallenge, and he takes me to the sofa to conquer that challenge.
Manipulating my clit with his tongue, he proves he can control me. He controls my pleasure. He pushes and demands until I think he might break me. But I still exist after he stretches me to his liking, after he gets me to come against his mouth, and after he rage-fucks me into the cushions of the sofa.
This is more than a kiss. It’s sex. I tell him so.
“We can keep tonight between us, Joshua, if you get me back into my office. Emma’s a producer. I’m the CEO. That’s what we agreed to.”
“Before you tried to fuck with the wrong people.”
“Poaching’s part of the business.”
Dazed, I feel him swipe his fingers across the seam of my ass. Catching his semen as it trickles from inside me, he thinks he’s rescued his wife’s furniture. But my sweat has already seeped into the fibers of the sofa and my hoarse moans are embedded in the walls.
“Fire your therapist, Delilah. It’s been over a year and you’re still out of your fucking mind.”
“My guy’s prescription pad is well worth the five hundred an hour. Thanks for the concern, though.”
“Christ.”
“Don’t judge my personal choices while I’m lying here with your come between my legs.”
“Then we’ll talk about your crazy-as-hell business tactics. The shit you tried to pull with Wild Lock Entertainment—that wasn’t poaching. It was a declaration of war.”
It was a declaration Wild Lock had answered with an assembly of men equipped with guns and orders to pin the entire Devil’s Music board. No bloodshed had come of it, thanks to a warehouse meeting and some good old-fashioned prayer, but I guess no one forgets the feeling of looking mortality in the eye.
“I’m not going to get Chelsea and Emma to let you back in, Delilah. I don’t want you here. Not in this company, and for damn sure not in this office.”
“You weren’t saying that when you had your cock in me.”
Joshua inserts his fingers into my mouth, shutting me up again. His essence is so warm, from his body and mine.
I suck the digits clean and he offers his cock for the same treatment. Then he leans down over me, and with a final flick of his tongue to each of my breasts, he’s done with me.
He dresses in silence, gathers my dress and panties, and drops them onto my belly. “Put your clothes on, get out, and don’t come back. Devil’s Music isn’t yours anymore.”
“I’ll tell Emma you banged me in this office. Her office. Swear to God.”
Joshua smiles and I decide I hate his smile. “That’s your leverage? It’s weak.”
How is infidelity weak leverage? What kind of marriage can’t be affected by unrepentant adultery?
I’m unnerved, and he knows it. He watches me dress. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Part of me is afraid to try.
“I want my gun back,” I tell him.
He kisses me. “We’ll negotiate that some other time. Maybe when I’m ready for another taste of your pretty pink pussy.”
I hazard a trip to the desk and pick up his wedding band. Since he’s got my gun, I should have this. But he boldly puts out his hand, daring me to disobey the silent command. Fear floods me, because what I learned tonight is that Joshua Drake is different, fundamentally so. I slip the ring onto his finger.
“Go home, Delilah.”
I intend to, because I need to retreat to the privacy of the Bishop estate to remedy the soreness he’s left around my neck and the painful strain in my voice. I need to think. I stare into his eyes until I find what I’m searching for: regret.
Good. Let him drown in it. He and his wife have been married exactly one year. Tonight of all nights, he should be with her, not balls-deep inside me. Tapping his gold band, I set my sights on the door. “Enjoy your party, jackass. Oh…and tell Emma I said happy anniversary.”
I make a careful getaway, ignoring the people who pause at my disheveled appearance or whisper as I stride past them with red bruises on my neck.
A business card’s forced into my hand. The messenger’s all ruthless muscle in a T-shirt, jeans, and a diamond-studded baseball cap, and he waits for me to glance at what he gave me.
Shatter Records. No point of contact. Just the name of Los Angeles’s fastest-growing hip-hop label—and Devil’s Music’s closest threat—printed on an otherwise blank business card.
“What about it?” I say, the tone of my raspy voice blasé, though I’m fascinated beyond reason.
“Remember this number.” He recites digits in my ear and I lock the sequence in. “Call. If you on the up-and-up, I got you on a jet to LA next week.”
“First class?”
“Complimentary candy dish, too.”
Candy dish, meaning a bowl filled with an assortment of pills. My appreciation for drugs is likely in bold type in dossiers on the desks of all my rivals from LA to New York.
“Considerate of you,” I say, “but I get plenty of candy in Atlanta and don’t need to board a plane for it. If I’m going to LA, it’s for a business conversation.”
“Understood.” He vanishes like a phantom, leaving the odors of gin and cigarette smoke in my nostrils.
Shatter Records wants to talk, but Devil’s Music is on my mind.
Instinct, sharp as ever, insists Joshua and Emma’s marriage is their vulnerability, but I have to be certain before I make my next move.
What I am certain of is Chelsea’s weakness—a man who’s my own flesh and blood. A phone call will bring the prodigal brother home, but I can’t handle him carelessly. When you summon Dante back to hell, you want to be sure you won’t end up burned.
This is a dangerous game. I know it.
Ask me if I give a fuck.
Chapter 2
TWO YEARS LATER…
Second in command. First to be hit with all the bullshit.
The title chief operating officer carried an air of importance, looked intimidating on paper, and was a title she never would’ve seen attached to her name had her former label not dissolved into Devil’s Music years ago, but sometimes Chelsea Coin hated what being a COO in the music industry really meant.
It meant acquiring a taste for blood, because if you didn’t feed off the competition first, they’d for damn sure suck you dry. It meant monitoring direct reports with suspicion and tightening social circles until you could count on only one hand the number of people you truly trusted to have your back. It meant constantly maneuvering and sacrificing—and on this particular morning it meant receiving an alarming call from your attorney and rolling out of a stranger’s bed at five in the morning for a taxi-ride-of-shame to headquarters for an emergency meeting.
The driver wasn’t conversational, and Chelsea was relieved that he didn’t expect her to respond to his muttered rambles, which drifted from state politics to hedge funds to the temperature of the coffee he got at the drive-through. She sat in the backseat trying to rub sleep wrinkles from her cheek. Club Promoter, the man from last night’s launch party at Halo Lounge who’d attentively replenished her glass with top-shelf liquor before his well-timed smile convinced her to drop her dress, was still asleep in his hotel suite. The sex was secondary, a casual release of tension—and God, did she have plenty of that. Club Promoter accepted what she could spare and had given her what she’d allow: three-position, two-orgasm, one-time sex. There wouldn’t be a repeat—he had a flight home scheduled for tomorrow, and she didn’t keep a steady. It was why she mentally replaced Miguel Ortega’s name with his occupation. It was neater, more organized, and more efficient to log men in terms of their potential benefit or contribution to Devil’s Music. What mattered in the pale light of this ninety-degree morning was business. She had Club Promoter’s contact info stored in her phone, and after she handled the shit storm that had summoned her to work at dawn, she’d call him…
But only in a professional capacity and only if a partnership with his company would be a sensible risk for hers. The record label came
first in Chelsea’s every decision. It was a promise she’d made to herself seven years ago when she and Delilah Bishop had been caught orchestrating a merger between South Sounds—may it rest in peace—and Devil’s Music. The Bishops’ company had ravaged South Sounds. It was a smaller label that had cultivated a unique sound since the 1990s. Stripped of its talent and staff, it had bled out until the only alternative that let the top execs slink away with any pride was the appearance of an amicable takeover. After Jude Bishop’s suicide had left the company to his heirs and the son had turned over his stake to the daughter, Chelsea’s first order of business as Delilah’s COO had been to release all personnel who’d defected to Devil’s Music from South Sounds.
They screwed one employer. What’s to stop them from screwing us, too? Cut them loose.
Not that Delilah was incorrect in her belief. If Chelsea could muster the courage to fire the people she’d persuaded to quit (and thereby cripple) South Sounds, then she’d always had it in her to do the same to Delilah herself.
A bitch move, Delilah had called the majority-vote force-out that had extracted the last Bishop from a company that had sustained generations of one of Georgia’s richest families. Chelsea, playing Brutus to Delilah’s Caesar, had acted with finesse and a compassion that she doubted her friend would ever realize.
As she’d learned when Jude Bishop had cornered her and told her what he thought of her underhanded machinations to put South Sounds’ Marquis Redd on his client roster, and when Dante Bishop had broken up with her at her most vulnerable moment—during sex, literally, while he was inside her—once you deceived a Bishop, you made a stone-cold enemy for life.
Delilah wasn’t slinking around the streets of Atlanta shooting deadly looks; in fact, she was in Los Angeles pulling strings for an underground rap label, Shatter Records. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t pop up unannounced and start shouting obscenities, as she had the night of the CEO and CFO’s first wedding anniversary two years ago.
Chelsea’s cheek began to sting, and she stopped rubbing her skin, which had become sore under the harshness of her hand. She almost instinctively reached for her purse. A rubber band rested inside it, but she’d be damned if she slipped it onto her wrist and started snapping again because of residual guilt over a corporate move that had been necessary to rescue the company.
Sin for Me Page 2