by West, Jade
I was trying to memorise them as well as possible on my journey up the corridor, aiming to avoid any awkward silences if Mr Hart quizzed me on any single one of them.
I was so engrossed in my efforts that I didn’t even register the swing of his office door as he stepped on out with his own paperwork in hand.
I registered too late to even think of stopping. My belly somersaulted over itself and my coffee did too, slamming right into his chest as I did.
I felt the burn on my tits, hotter even than the burn on my cheeks, but that wasn’t my first sense of urgency. His shirt was soaked right through, and worse, so was the crotch of his suit trousers. It was instinct that saw me gulp in air and send my hand out to brush the mess away. I managed one smear of the brown liquid on his chest, my eyes opening wide even as my fingers travelled instinctively lower.
And then I stopped.
Or, more precisely, he stopped me, his fingers gripped tight around my wrist. His grip was brutal. Definite. Tight and strong and hard and everything that would set my fantasies into overdrive if I wasn’t so thoroughly mortified.
“Shit!” I squeaked, sounding like a total fucking imbecile. My eyes met his and his were angry enough to burn me alive. The apologies came tumbling over and over. “I’m sorry, Mr Hart. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. Shit, I’m so sorry.”
I saw my colleagues gathering open-mouthed at the doorway, and I flinched when he let go of my wrist as though he was going to fire me on the spot.
But he didn’t.
He didn’t speak. Not even a word.
The moment was hot, and heavy, and long. Way too long. His stare was bruising against mine, his mouth open just a little as he took in a hiss of breath.
His gaze travelled down slowly, from my eyes to my own open mouth and my heaving chest underneath. I followed his glare and found my blouse soaked worse than he was. The fabric was stuck tight to my skin, and you could see the red polka dots on my bra as plain as day.
So. Fucking. Humiliating.
“You should get cleaned up,” he said finally.
I managed a nod. One stupid nod before he brushed on past me.
And then I raced like an idiot to the bathroom.
Chapter 2
Jackson
My paperwork was ruined. Totally and utterly unsalvageable.
I dabbed myself down with a fistful of paper towels in the kitchen, cursing that sweet little slip of a girl for her clumsiness.
Mine too.
I hated the holidays. The frantic wrapping up of business to account for the slack days between Christmas Day and New Year was nothing but a ball ache. Everyone was vacant and preoccupied with their looming time off, forgetting conveniently that business continued on regardless. Orders to ship out, and schedules to maintain. Fuck the downtime, and fuck the stupid Christmas jingles and Santa hats and ridiculous office decor.
My shirt was smeared to shit, but that was the least of my worries.
More of a concern was the raging hard on in my fucking pants. So close. She’d been so close to brushing my crotch with those dainty little fingers, and I’d felt it, even though I’d managed to cut her off at the pass.
I shouldn’t be hard. The girl was fresh out of university and a lifetime too young.
Even if her pretty blue eyes were wide and filled with the kind of sweet innocence that made my balls tighten. Even if she had a perfect swell of tits under that tight little blouse, and her ass shimmied like temptation itself as she paced back and forth to the photocopier every fucking day.
She was out of bounds. Totally and utterly. Both morally and professionally.
Plus, she was ditsy. I didn’t tolerate ditsy in my organisation easily, even if it did look good on her.
I ditched the paper towels in the bin and ditched my paperwork along with them. My watch informed me I was late for my own meeting, and I despise lateness, especially when it’s my own.
I could feel the tick of frustration in my temple as I grabbed my laptop from my office and made my way into the main meeting room.
Jenny Morris was already in there, seated at my right in the position usually occupied by her immediate boss. The logistics manager was on extended leave, and I only hoped my sweet little coffee spiller was up to providing me with the answers I’d need for the holiday period. It was a tough ask, and I knew it. The fact that she was barely into the job, and it was her first serious position, didn’t matter at all. My demands are high and I expect them fulfilled.
I took my seat at the head of the table, scanning the faces to make sure everyone had their eye on the ball. It was almost a full house of attentiveness.
Almost.
The girl from stock management, Kristina, was wearing reindeer antlers. I considered calling her out on the unprofessionalism of wearing them to a company meeting, but managed to bite my tongue and rein in the bah humbug for one afternoon.
Aside from Kristina and her stupid novelty headwear, there was only one person who irked me on the readiness front.
Jenny wasn’t even looking at me. She was far too frantic in her quest to get with the plot.
She had her laptop in with her, indicating that her paperwork had fared no better than mine in the body slam. I stared at her fingers working the keys, taking an audible breath until she looked up from the screen and finally met my eyes.
And then I began.
I started with the accounts team, demanding the current list of outstanding payers and those on the no supply list. I grilled Kristina on the current levels of filter sheets in our Birmingham warehouse, and dug deep into delivery schedules for the coming weeks.
Jenny’s fingers were still tapping away at the keyboard when I turned my attention to the client delivery schedules for the coming week.
Her cheeks were still flushed from our clash in the corridor, and her blouse was still clinging to her cleavage here and there. Red dots and lace. The outline of bra straps. Peeks into intimacy that most certainly shouldn’t be available to my hungry eyes.
It infuriated me to realise that my dick was still throbbing under the table, and infuriated me further to realise she didn’t have the client summary to hand.
I repeated my request for the rundown, and still she kept clicking away behind the screen.
“I’m sorry, Mr Hart,” she said. “Just a second, please.”
I gave her a second but her fingers kept on tapping.
I gave her to the count of three and the pale blonde of her eyebrows darkened as they pitted.
“I don’t…” she began. “I don’t, um… my laptop is…”
I didn’t hold back the groan. “Your laptop is what exactly, Jenny?”
She shrugged, then spun the laptop to face me, her bottom lip pinched in her teeth like a naughty schoolgirl.
And my fucking dick kept on throbbing like a piece of needy shit.
The application windows on her screen were flashing with a life of their own, unresponsive to commands as I slammed my thumb down on the mouse pad.
“It was working fine at my desk,” she continued. “It was totally fine…”
“It’s not fine now.”
The whole table fidgeted as I tried to bring her machine to order, but the sonofabitch blue screened on me before I could even pull up the task manager.
“I’m sorry,” she said again and I managed a nod.
I buzzed through to Richard in the IT team and told him to come and collect the sack of crap machine, and then I shunted my own laptop across the table at her.
“It’s on the network,” I told her. “Pull up your documents from the group directory.”
She nodded a thanks, taking a sharp little breath as her shaky fingers clicked through to the work she needed.
And I watched her. I watched her so intently I’m sure it burned, and in those moments I took her in.
All of her.
Every tiny detail.
Her blonde hair was pulled up in a loose bun, one stray strand curling down onto her shoulder.
Her cheeks were still pink and highlighted the smattering of freckles over her nose, and her mouth was closed tight as she battled with the hardware.
She was beautiful.
Beautiful in an understated way… at contrast with the more preened girls in the office.
Kristina had red lipstick and eyelashes so long they were blatantly false. Dawn from accounts was touting yet a new shade of red hair dye, and Sally from the stock team always looked as though she was ready for a night out, not a long day in the office.
But Jenny was… different.
Finally, she stopped with the tapping.
She risked a smile and cleared her throat, and when her words finally came they were ordered and confident. She competently ran through the delivery schedule and addressed my concerns from the last meeting about emergency couriers over the holiday season. She told me the updated deadlines for Christmas cut off as per her conversations with the depot that morning.
She was good.
Poised and professional and fully worthy of the thanks I gave her when she’d done with my questions.
Her smile in response to my gratitude was anything but poised, and it hit me with a pang of something I couldn’t quite identify. Something… warm. Gooey and tender and quite fucking ridiculous.
She was still beaming as she slid my laptop back across to me. She couldn’t hold back the grin as I moved the discussion along to the loyalty sales I was planning on running in the new year.
I felt it all the way through my presentation. Burning. Tickling.
I tried to envisage her mother all those years ago, sitting at the desk opposite mine in my History class. I hadn’t seen the woman in years, but on meeting Jenny I’d seen little family resemblance, even through a hazy memory.
Her mother had been a lively one, I remembered that much. She’d hooked up with my friend, Evan, and they’d been a thing right the way through senior year.
I’d only heard about her pregnancy at seventeen on the grapevine. They’d long split up by then. She’d had a few splits after him so the rumours said, but I’d never given much of a mind for gossip.
I’d like to have claimed that Jenny’s arrival in my company was a longshot coincidence and little more, but I’d have been lying.
Carolyn Morris, Jenny’s mother, had added me on social media just over twelve months previous, along with several other of our classmates. I’d accepted without a second thought, barely scanning her profile until she’d posted a picture of her daughter a few weeks later.
It was a proud picture of Jenny at Bodmin university, about to enter her final exams… and I’d paused.
Stared.
And then I’d clicked for more.
Three knocks on the meeting room door and Richard from IT stepped inside.
Jenny’s eyes opened wide as saucers as I handed him her laptop straight from the table.
“Sort this out,” I grunted. “Take the documents and email history from it before you do anything risky. Don’t lose anything.”
He raised an eyebrow like I was stating the fucking obvious and took it away without another word. IT guys get my hackles up with their tech guru swagger, but with him I let it slide.
Jenny’s eyes were still wide when I wrapped the meeting up. Her smile was all but gone as I informed everyone they were free to go. The flush of her cheeks faded to pale as everyone filtered out for lunch.
Nervous.
She was nervous.
Too nervous to ignore. It was just a tickle of a thought, barely a suspicion on the edge of my consciousness, but it was enough. More than enough.
I buzzed back down to Richard in the IT room as soon as the door closed behind the last of them.
“Bring her machine up to me before you hand it back,” I said.
Chapter 3
Jenny
I retreated from the meeting room with my happy smile dead and buried. The day was going from bad to worse, and from worse to full blown disaster.
I could barely even grab a breath as I headed back to my desk, my lungs crushed to shit by the weight of impending doom.
I jumped a clear mile as Kristina landed a healthy slap on my back, shunting me over the threshold into our admin room.
“Great job in there,” she congratulated. “IT issues aside, you were impressive. Seriously impressive. You even got a thanks. Mr Hart barely gives thanks, it’s usually more of a grunt.”
She pulled a face to illustrate, and in regular circumstances it would have been worth a decent laugh, but not today.
I stared dumbstruck until she registered my expression of horror. Her eyebrows jumped up in surprise, even though she kept on smiling.
“What’s up? You look like a ghost just took a crap on your grave.”
If I’d been even a minute closer to regaining my composure I’d have shrugged her off with a fake nothing, but she caught me slap bang in the middle of my despair. Plus, she was the closest thing I had to a friend in a hundred mile radius, so I guess that made her as good a confidante as any I was likely to stumble across.
I took her elbow and guided her past the gathered accounts team, herding us both into a corner by the photocopier and away from over enthusiastic ears.
“My laptop,” I blurted out. “He took my laptop, and I…”
She tipped her head to the side. “And you what?”
My haunted eyes must have spoken volumes, but she carried on grinning regardless.
“Shit,” she said. “You been checking out dirty pornos on your work machine or something? IT are going to have a field day with your browser history.”
But no.
It was worse than that.
So much worse than that.
“I have some… personal documents on there…” I confided.
It took her a moment to get my meaning. “We talking pictures? Or…” She was struggling not to laugh and I knew it. Her amusement made my belly flip all over the place.
“Documents… like… stories…” I told her, and she gave in to a giggle.
“Holy hell, Jenny,” she whispered. “Stories? Like dirty stories? Are you one of those kinky sex writers in your spare time? Maybe Mr Hart fancies himself as a filthy book hero, you never know. He could be all over that stuff, jacking one off in the server room as we speak.” Her next laugh was a whole lot louder than the first. A couple of the accounts team flicked us a glance and I prayed to God they wouldn’t come over.
I’ve always been cursed with being one of those girls who blush like a beetroot. It’s been a bane of my existence ever since I stepped into school for the first time and became a laughing stock in front of my classmates.
A stupid joke, some insult or other, a compliment that makes me feel squiggly inside — all of them lead to my face flaming up like a big red beacon for the entire universe to see.
Now was no exception. You could’ve toasted bread on my cheeks as the full depth of my potential humiliation flared in my mind.
Kristina was right about the sex stories. Much closer to the truth than she knew.
I’d been writing dirty fantasies since I first started crushing on Mr Fletcher back in high school, and once I got the bug for it I never stopped. If anything, it was a bigger deal for me now than back then. It was my outlet for the long, lonely hours out of office. My main source of entertainment once I was curled up on my lumpy couch at night.
Only now the dirty fantasies I’d been penning out of hours weren’t about Mr Fletcher at all, they were about Mr Hart himself.
Not only that, but having run my own shitty refurbished laptop into the ground over my final term at university, and having spent all my savings to get up here and into my cruddy apartment a few months ago, I hadn’t managed to get myself a replacement. Those stories were all on Mr Hart’s company property.
Oh, how the universe was laughing at me and my stupid ideas. I’d grinned like a Cheshire cat as I’d realised I’d be getting a work laptop as standard. I’d almost air-punched as I saw people ta
king them home to check into emails out of hours without anyone batting an eyelid. I thought I was in for the win, not in for getting fired when my filthy fantasies about my boss made their way around the office.
The laptop situation should have been temporary. Was going to be temporary.
I was hoping to scrape together enough over the next few months of my training wage to invest in a basic machine of my own.
Hoping, planning, would’ve, could’ve, should’ve…
None of that mattered anymore, not now my machine was being examined in the IT suite downstairs.
I hadn’t even taken the precaution of hiding my work all that well. It was in a folder within the standard documents folder, aptly named Jenny’s stuff for anyone who wanted to take a look at it. With a name like that it was screaming click me for anyone snooping around.
I’d figured nobody would have any reason to take it off me. That thing was glued to my side every minute of every day both at home and in the office. Hell, I almost went to sleep hugging the thing for safekeeping.
Kristina was still staring at me, waiting for me to fess up with more info, and I was still burning like a hot plate, struggling to bring myself to admit something, anything, even a vague half-truth, when all I wanted to do was race down to the IT room and throw myself over my poor cursed machine before it could cough up my sins.
“It’s just some stories, right?” Kristina prompted, and I managed a shrug.
“Some stories, yeah. But they’re, um… dirty.”
She leaned in a little closer. “I like a good dirty story. Ping them over to me will you when you get a chance?”
Like hell I would.
My next words were barely a whisper. “If I’m not fired and shamed all the way to Hell before the day is done.”
She laughed out loud. “Even Mr Hart isn’t going to fire you for writing some dirty fantasies. He can hardly be offended by a bit of filth. He’ll probably take a copy for later.”
“You think?” I asked, wishing she was someone from uni. Someone I could just spill the full force of my embarrassment to and hope she had some words of comfort.