Beautiful Bastard (Beautiful Bastard, #1)(20)

“I was told I must . . . strongly encourage you to attend.”

Turning back slowly, I saw he was now staring at me, and he definitely looked uncomfortable. “And why exactly should you do that?”

“Well,” he said before clearing his throat, “apparently she has someone she would like you to meet.”

This was new. I’d known the Ryans for years, and although Susan might have mentioned a name in passing, she’d never actively tried to fix me up with anyone.

“Your mother is trying to set me up?” I asked walking back toward his desk and folding my arms over my chest.

“So it seems.” Something in his face didn’t quite fit his nonchalant answer.

“Why?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

His brow furrowed in obvious annoyance. “How the hell would I know? It’s not like we sit around discussing you,” he growled. “Maybe she’s worried that with that sparkling personality of yours you’ll end up an old spinster wearing muumuus and living in a house full of cats.”

Leaning forward with my palms on his desk I glared at him. “Well, maybe she should be more worried that her son will turn into a dirty old man who spends his time hoarding panties and stalking girls in lingerie stores.”

Jumping out of his chair, he leaned toward me, his face furious. “You know, you are the most—” He was cut off as the phone rang. We stared fiercely at each other from across the desk, both of us breathing heavily. For a moment, I thought he would throw me across the desk. For another moment, I wanted him to. Still glaring at me, he reached for the phone.

“Yes,” he barked sharply into the receiver, his eyes never leaving mine. “George! Hello. Yes, I have a minute.”

He lowered himself back into his desk chair, and I lingered to see if he needed anything from me while he talked to Mr. Papadakis. He held up his index finger for me to wait before he slid it over his pen, rolling it across his desk as he listened to the call.

“You need me to stay?” I asked.

He nodded once before speaking into the phone, “I don’t think you’d need to be that specific at this stage, George.” The deep tenor of his voice vibrated down my spine. “Just a general outline is fine. We need to know the scope of this proposal before we can move into drafting.”

I shifted where I stood. He was such an egomaniac, making me stand here like I was holding a plate of grapes and fanning him while he spoke to a colleague.

He looked up at me and did a slight double take, his eyes dropping to my skirt. When he looked back up, his lips opened slightly, as if he would ask me something were he able. And then he reached forward, pen poised between his finger and thumb, and used the tip of it to lift the hem of my skirt up my thigh.

His eyes widened when he saw the garter.

“I understand,” he murmured into the phone, letting my skirt fall. “I think we can agree that’s a positive development.”

His eyes moved up my body, darkening as they traveled. My heart began to pound. When he looked at me like that, I wanted to slip onto his lap and bind him to the chair with his tie.

“No, no. Nothing so broad at this point. As I said, this is only a preliminary outline.”

I slipped around his desk and sat in the chair across from him. He raised an eyebrow, interested, and then slipped the tip of the pen between his teeth, biting down.

Heat bloomed between my legs and I reached for the hem of my skirt, sliding the fabric up my thighs, exposing my skin to the cool air in his office, and to the hungry eyes across the desk from me.

“Yes, I see,” he said, but his voice was deeper even still, hoarse now.

My fingertips trailed over the lines of the garters, along skin and to the satin of my underwear. Nothing—and no one—had ever made me feel as sexy as he did. It was as if he took all my thoughts of my job, my life, and my goals and said, “These are all well and good, but look at this other thing I’m offering you. It will be twisted and very dangerous but you’ll crave it. You’ll crave me.”

And if he’d said that out loud, he would have been right.

“Yes,” he said again. “I think that’s the ideal path forward.”

You do, do you? I smiled at him, chewing my lip, and he gave me a devilish half smile in return. The fingers of one hand traveled higher, cupping my breast and squeezing. With my other hand, I pushed the center of my panties aside and ran two fingers across my wet skin.

Mr. Ryan coughed and fumbled for his water glass. “That’s fine, George. We’ll take that over when we receive it. We can handle that timeline.”

I began moving my hand, thinking of his long fingers rolling the pen, those very hands grabbing my hips and waist and thighs when he drove into me in the lingerie store.

I moved faster, my eyes falling closed and head dropping back against the chair. I tried to be quiet, biting down on my lip when a tiny moan escaped. I imagined his hands and taut forearms, muscles tensing beneath skin as his fingers moved inside me. His legs in front of my face the night in the conference room, tight and sculpted, struggling to keep from thrusting.

Those eyes, on me, dark and pleading.

I looked up to see them exactly as I imagined, not watching my hand but seeing his hungry expression trained on my face as I fell and fell and fell. My climax was both overwhelming and unsatisfying: I wanted it to be his touch doing this to me instead of my own.