Illicit Affairs

by Dixon

  Nate pondered the meaning behind this, wondering if Ava was that rose—chosen for her looks and body but never anything more than that. Had anyone ever touched more than this woman’s body? However, then his mind drifted to their predicament. No matter how beautiful this moment felt, it would never have the chance to blossom for there was no place for Ava in his life. That slot was already taken.

  “I think you should go now.” Nate’s voice was suddenly distant, colder than he had intended as he sat up and coaxed Ava to get off him.

  “Yeah, can’t be having any more sleepovers here; I doubt my neck could handle another night on this sofa.” Ava chuckled, disregarding his melancholic tone as she stood up and stretched her long body upwards.

  “No, we cannot,” Nate uttered in agreement, his brow creasing over almost as though he had been wounded as he watched her perfect flesh stretch over muscle and bone. He wanted to grab her and pull her down to him just once more but resisted the urge.

  The pair began getting dressed again, Nate helping pull the zip up on her dress as Ava played with the messy curls over her shoulder.

  “I take it you’re staying at the Beaufort Hotel?” Ava asked, her voice holding a slight insinuation that made Nate’s eyebrows jump as did the zipper up on the nape of her neck.

  “Yes,” he stated with a dry tone, stepping back and shoving the red tie, which was stained with Ava’s sultry aroma, into his suit jacket.

  “Oh, it’s just around the corner from me. You know I was think—”

  “Ava, this won’t happen again,” Nate ruled, his words like a needle scratching across a record. He would give anything for her to fall asleep in his arms tonight but knew it was out of the question. He could have winced at the pained expression on her beautiful face when she snapped around to look at him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think you heard me; this cannot happen again. I don’t have time for this arrangement, and quite frankly, you’re a distraction that I don’t need,” Nate attested, standing up straight before turning his back to her, unable to bear another second of the hurt on her face that she was masking well. He needed control over this situation.

  “A distraction?” Ava squawked, her heart beating faster yet again this evening as she stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at the back of Nate’s head. “I wasn’t looking for roses and romance, Brooks.”

  “Good. Then you’ll have no issue accepting that this was a one-time event.”

  “Event?” Ava’s tone grew ice-cold and bitter. “Look, mate”—she bit the word in her thick accent—“I wasn’t looking for anything out of this either, but you don’t have to treat me like used goods.”

  “I meant no disrespect,” Nate tossed, idly packing his briefcase without making eye contact. “I am just being clear on my standing and re-establishing a rapport between us. We already discussed the dangers of this type of engagement, Ms. Archer.”

  “Oh, I see,” Ava scoffed, stood there with a scowl as she crossed her arms. “Fuck me like it’s part of my role and responsibilities, like it’s what you’re paying me to do.”

  “Hardly.” Nate finally peered up at her, his eyes narrowing slightly in annoyance before he stood and walked past her.

  “You’re not going to tidy the mess?” She pointed to the scattered and crumpled documents over the floor and his desk. “Wouldn’t want anybody finding out your dirty little secret, Mr. Brooks.”

  “I’ll sort it in the morning.” Nate sighed a tired sound, waiting idly by the door with a key in his hand. “Ms. Archer, I’d like to go now, please.”

  “Ms. Archer,” Ava repeated, the use of his formal title for her causing a sting of offence deep in her belly as her teeth ground together.

  He wants to act formal when his dick just informally fucked me?!

  With arms crossed she breezed out of his office and gathered her belongings before marching to the elevator. The doors pinged open and Ava stepped inside but frowned when Nate remained grounded in place.

  He doesn’t want to be seen with me—got it, grreaaat!

  Her finger punched the button on the wall, but Nate’s suitcase stopped the doors from closing, giving her a pathetic fleeting feeling of hope.

  “Ava,” he said beseechingly, his eyes warming for a brief second and making her head tilt up expectantly. “Please…don’t tell Sam.”

  Ava favoured the one-night stand but never once had she felt like the person being tossed aside. Not until Nate. It sucked having that shift in power; it made her feel reduced to nothing more than a used cigarette. He had lit her up, burned her hot, took her high, and then tossed her aside like ash.

  The following days twisted at her stomach and messed with her head as Nate blanked her like her existence was a fleeting thing. He avoided her and only contacted her when he required something at work. It made her feel cold, the warmth never managing to reach her bones, but in some twisted sense, it was whenever she looked up to see Nate that a flicker of heat licked at her skin only to be replaced by the arctic breeze of his shoulder.

  To make matters worse, Nate was spending a lot of time with Charlotte Forbes. Sometimes the blinds would be shut but it was worse when they were open and Ava saw that snobby-mouthed woman laughing away, her eyes eating Nate up and making Ava snarl at the idea of all the flirtatious things she was saying to him. Why would Charlotte even be smiling when her stepson took his own life and the Murder Investigation Team was breathing down her neck? Oh, that’s right…because with the second trustee out of the way she was the main executor to all her late husband’s accounts. Life for her was peachy. For Ava, not so much.

  “Hello, earth to Tinkerbell?” Sam waved her hand in front of Ava’s face, making her slowly drag her dazed expression off the water drops trickling down the cafe window.

  “Hi,” Ava said after a moment, her lips feeling heavy as she pushed them up into a smile.

  “Alright, what is going on with you this week?” Sam glared, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, aye right, don’t act the goat. What’s happened?”

  Looking up into her friend’s ivy and amber orbs, Ava hated the fact that as much as she wanted to offload to her friend she couldn’t. It wasn’t as much trying to be faithful to Nate as it was fear of her friend’s judgement. Would Sam be disgusted in her for sleeping with their boss?

  “I hate men,” Ava affirmed with a sigh and leaned forward to cup the warm tea on the table.

  “What the fuck has he done?” Sam gasped, sitting upright in her chair, her rings tapping on the table as she grasped it. “I’ll skin that ginger bellend if he’s hurt you!”

  For a fleeting moment, Ava dropped her jaw, about to ask how Sam knew about her and Nate, before quickly realising that her friend presumed it was Peter that she was referring to.

  “We had sex, amazing sex, the best sex I’ve ever had really,” Ava mumbled as though finally confessing this fact to herself, “and now, in the office, he’s acting as though I don’t exist.”

  “What a bloody bellend!” Sam cursed and Ava saw that fire burning in the amber in her gaze. “He was the one wanting to stay back for breakfast! Does he not want anything more now?”

  “He called it off! The sex, he said it wouldn’t happen again and now I just can’t help but feel used,” Ava fumed, her nostrils flaring as she shook her head. “And it doesn’t help that he’s now getting awfully cosy with that bloody Forbes woman.”

  “That wee arsehole! That explains why he came out of that meeting room all flustered with that Forbes woman that looks like she could crack a nut with a Kegel!” Sam growled, getting herself more worked up over Ava’s situation than Ava herself. “You know, I reserve this word for the absolute crème de la crème but that man is a complete…” She hesitated for a second looking at Ava before blurting it out in the middle of the cafe, “A complete cunt.”

  “Samantha!” Ava flinched, the sharp word making
her cover her ears.

  “I know, I know, but he is! That is proper cuntish behaviour!” Sam attested before sending apologetic eyes to an older woman who tutted and shook her head at Sam before returning to her jammy scone. “If I were you, I’d get even.”

  “Get even? And how do I do that exactly?”

  “Get the fancy knickers out, the short skirts, and make that cu—” Sam coughed on the naughty word before saying, “man realise just what he is missing out on.”

  Twenty-Two

  Although Samantha didn’t realise at the time that she was actually referring to Nate and not Peter, Ava followed her advice and began dressing a lot more provocatively to work.

  At first, she went easy on Nate, starting off with just some low-cut blouses and a couple of short skirts, but as the days went on with no attention received from her boss, her workwear got a lot more risqué to the point that Ava started to receive attention from some of the other gents in the office. It wasn’t that she was invisible to Nate, she had noticed his jaw flex, the way he’d ball his hands under his desk, and could only imagine what she stirred in his pants. However, after a day or two of enticing him to utter more than two words to her, she began to get creative.

  There were many ways to seduce a man in an office environment, for example: licking envelopes provocatively, bending over to fill the printer to expose your lingerie, sucking the spoon clean that you used to stir his coffee, but Ava’s favourite had to be the filing in Nate’s office. It was at the top of a tall set of shelves, so Ava had to stretch up so high that her short skirt rode up and exposed the fact she wasn’t wearing any panties.

  That was the day Nate ruined his shirt and burnt his cock with hot coffee.

  And yet still he refused to acknowledge her, and nothing seemed to work. She’d put typos in her emails, left her desk messier than normal, and she even came into work late! Mr. Brooks was adamant that she didn’t exist in his eyes other than as the good little assistant she was. He was avoiding her to the point of exile, and it drove Ava towards breaking point.

  “The following images will be used as evidence in court, but also to spook you and shake your defence, Mrs. Forbes.” Peter was leading the briefing and exhibiting things on the large screen at the front of the room while Ava, Charlotte, and Nate sat around a large conference table. “I must warn you now, they are of a highly explicit nature regarding Oliver’s death.”

  “Very well, Peter. Go ahead, I’m ready.” Charlotte sniffled behind a handkerchief, dressed in the most extravagant black dress that Ava had ever seen. She looked like she was attending a gala and not her attorney’s office.

  As Peter brought up the images on the PowerPoint presentation, Ava’s gut lurched, and a churning mixture of stomach acid and her lunch filled her throat. She covered her mouth, catching Nate’s concerned gaze. His brows creased together as if asking her if she was okay, and she nodded as she gulped down the bile and reluctantly looked at the screen.

  Oliver Forbes’s flimsy neck hung from the gym apparatus inside his art-deco-themed apartment. Even without blood flow, his skin was still slightly tanned, however, his face was a ghostly pale shade and his lips were stained a ghastly blue. He wore white silken pyjamas, flawless if not for the sunset-coral smear down his shoulder, a colour that wasn’t quite the shade of blood and seemed out of place. His feet dangled like the rest of him, toes pointed towards the floor and only inches away from saving his life.

  “As you know, Freya has been detained for being the main suspect in this case since there is hard proof of her being at the crime scene and having a motive for wanting her brother dead—to absorb his share of the inheritance,” Peter explained as he continued on through the PowerPoint, bringing up images of evidence bags containing strands of Freya’s hair upon the gym apparatus and Oliver’s skin cells under her fingernails. “Her alibi is paper-thin, stating that although she was sleeping over at Oliver’s apartment that night, she believes she was drugged during the auction event, having no recollection of the evening. While we wait on forensics to come back, the spotlight is then naturally turned to yourself, Charlotte.” He held up a file and began flicking through it to produce a piece of paper that he slid in front of Mrs. Forbes. “During the night of your stepson’s death, you claim to have been at a night spa in Wembley, a twenty-minute drive from Oliver’s apartment…”

  “I was there; I have booking receipts to prove it!”

  “Yes, you clocked in at eight-thirty in the evening and we have CCTV footage showing you leave just before nine-thirty. However, Oliver died fifty minutes later…” Peter stated.

  “Why do I feel like I am on trial right now?” Charlotte scowled at her lawyer.

  “Mrs. Forbes, what Peter is trying to explain is that we have a void of time to fill with no hard proof to back up your alibi. Do you have any witnesses that can vouch for you?” Nate explained, the sound of his deep voice sending chills down Ava’s arms. It was the first time in days that she had heard him say more than a few words, even if those words weren’t directed at her.

  “I’m sure the caterers would be able to confirm my whereabouts.” Charlotte’s demeanour softened as she glanced at Nate.

  “Perfect, can you arrange a meeting?”

  “Certainly, I’ll do it the second I am home, Nate.”

  Nate? She was calling him Nate?! Ava fumed to herself.

  As the meeting wrapped up, Charlotte and Peter began making their way outside as Nate stayed back typing something on his laptop. Ava saw her opportunity and leapt at it as she closed the door and watched Nate’s head pop up from behind his laptop, his thick brows slanting down into his whisky-coloured eyes.

  “Ms. Archer?”

  “I think we’re a bit past the Ms. Archer crap, Nate,” Ava sniped, her red heels prowling towards him, relishing in the way his eyebrows jumped back up in surprise. “You’ve been avoiding me for days.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Nate said flippantly, his eyes glancing back down at his laptop. “It’s impossible to avoid someone you work with.” He shrugged, maintaining his cool composure despite Ava now standing a meter away from him with her knuckles pressed down against the large table and glaring daggers at him.

  “Don’t play coy with me, sir,” she warned, prowling around the table like a scornful lioness. “You’ve been avoiding me, and I want to know why.”

  “I told you already, I’ve not been avoidi—”

  “I am not some plaything you can toss aside just because you’ve had your fill! I was never looking for anything meaningful with you but that doesn’t mean you can treat me like dirt on your shoe, Nathaniel Brooks!” Ava’s voice cut across the room, dominating the space as her boss’s face winced ever so slightly.

  “Look, Ava, I’m sorry if I made you feel like that, but this is for the best,” he sighed wearily, slumping in his chair as he dragged his hands down his face. “I don’t want to make things complicated, but I just don’t have room for you in my life… There’s a lot you don’t understand.”

  “Try explaining it to me then.”

  “Why can’t you just accept that I can’t get into this with you?” he snapped.

  “Can’t or won’t?” she hissed, stood next to him now as her arms crossed over and inadvertently pushed her breasts up in the swooping neckline of her ruby blouse.

  A moment passed where no words were uttered, Nate’s eyes lingering on her chest before he suddenly barked, “For fuck’s sake, will you please start dressing more appropriately for work!”

  “Oh, what’s wrong, Nate?” Ava feigned confusion as her fingertips ran down her cleavage. “See something you like?”

  “Oh, come on!” he whined, pressing his thumbs into his eye sockets as his head hung back in exasperation.

  However, the last thing he had expected was when Ava’s leg suddenly appeared at the side of his thigh and her tight behind landed down upon his lap as she straddled him. His mouth fell ajar as he questioned, “What the hell are you do—”
<
br />   “Nate,” she cut him off with her finger pressed to his soft, plump lips, “I’ll make this quite simple for you; if you really don’t want me…push me away…and you’ll never see me again…”

  Twenty-Three

  Why does it turn me on when she’s being such a brat?

  Nate’s moral compass was spinning out of control as he tried to move his hands and push the golden seductress off of him, but he couldn’t find the conviction behind his actions. He craved her. She was honeycomb wrapped in velvet, her lips were rosebuds in spring, her nails were thorns, her eyes were oceans and he was drowning.

  His self-control didn’t just shatter, it exploded into a frenzy of lust as his hands tangled into her hair and tugged her forward.

  Starved lips crashed upon each other as relief rushed through their bodies, greedy hands grabbing at any piece of flesh they could, two souls colliding as each breath built with subtle excitement on each exhale. Each kiss was wet and furious like a torrential downpour thrashing across the bare ground. He couldn’t get enough of the liquid sunshine she poured into his mouth.

  Ava needed this; she needed him. There was something about Nate that defined the meaning of hitting the spot. Being touched by a man had never felt so good until she had found him.

  He was spiralling into chaos. He knew it but damn if he could stop himself. Her nails grazing across his scalp had him losing his shit and made him turn primal as his hands yanked apart her blouse, not caring for the popped buttons as his mouth devoured her perfect tits. That spicy floral sweetness was concentrated upon her chest, sinfully delicious and making his teeth sink into her delicate skin and eliciting erotic gasps from her mouth.

  “Stop that,” he growled against her left mound as he felt her hands pry apart his belt buckle and reach for his zipper head. However, she continued tugging at his belt, not listening so he warned, “Ava, the door is unlocked, stop.” And yet, the defiant little minx yanked his head forward by his hair and kissed him rough and hard, stealing his breath.