Chapter Eight
Harris
What the hell am I doing? That was the thought that bounced around the inside of my brain while I looked over the woman across from me—an employee young enough to be my daughter. But... she wasn’t my daughter, and thank God for that. For all I cared, she might as well have been a creature from another planet. Mystical and magnificent. I wanted her. God help me, I wanted her a lot.
“Why do you have to be like that?” I asked, overcome with my desire for her.
“Like what?” She cocked her head to the side, letting the loose strands of her blonde hair travel over the most glorious shoulder I’d ever seen. She had the grace of a dancer even when sitting still.
“So damned sexy.” There. I’d said it. The words were out, and now they hung between us, widening the gap between her and me the same way that our twenty some years of age difference did. The first time I’d discovered what it felt like to be inside of a woman, she wasn’t even born yet. In fact, I was already out of college by the time she took her first breath. When I was thirty, she was barely more than a toddler.
I was a monster, a dirty, inappropriate old man with a hunger to take advantage of an employee, an underling. The power I had over her life was too large to ever make courting her okay. But, she didn’t seem to see any of those truths. Instead, she was smiling at me and looking at me like she wanted to wrap herself around me and eat me whole.
I stood. “Addilyn, go home.”
“No.” Addilyn uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again with the other leg on top, slowly, alluringly. ‘
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“Just no... I’m not going to go home when what I want is right here.” Her gaze was unwavering on me, challenging, making my blood heat to a boil.
“I’m your boss, Addilyn, and I’ve crossed a line.”
“You haven’t crossed the line yet, but I’m hoping you will.”
“Addilyn, get out of my office.” I closed my eyes and took a calming breath, willing myself to stay strong, but the only thing I managed to do was breathe in the barely perceptible sweet musky scent of her perfume. When I opened my eyes again, it was to find her standing right in front of me. In her heels, she was almost as tall, and it took only the stretch of her neck for her to caress my lips with hers.
I couldn’t stop my hands. They moved on their own, finding her waist to hold her as I took over to deepen the kiss. Then, like pulling a thorn that had lodged in my heart, I jerked away. “Addilyn, go home,” I said, pleading as much as I was demanding, but as it turned out, she had demands of her own.
She kissed me again, and then said, “Go lock the door.”
It was my turn to say, “No.”
“I’m not a little girl,” she said as her eyes narrowed with seeming disapproval of my refusal to give in.
I swallowed... hard. “You are all woman. I get that, but that’s why you’ve got to go.”
The palm of her hand traveled up my front until it reached my ear. There, she squeezed and pulled my earlobe the way a mother might do an errant child. Stretching up to me again but halting with her sweet lips close enough to mine that I could feel her heat, she ordered again, “Go lock the door.”
I’m only a man. I’m not a God, and this time when she bid me to lock the door, I did as I was told, knowing that what was to follow would mean sacrificing a piece of myself that I had managed to keep intact for as long as I had been in a position of authority. I had never taken advantage of a subordinate. I had never been romantically involved with anyone who was depended on my largess and good will, but that was about to change and I knew it. I couldn’t feel good about it, but if she wanted me, I was not a man strong enough to tell her no. Not any longer. Not when she looked at me with those jewel-like blue eyes of hers.
I crossed the floor to my office door, tempted it to open it and keep on going instead of locking it, but when my hand fell upon the handle, my fingers did the work of turning the knob that sealed us both inside and kept the rest of the world out. And maybe that was all I needed. If the secret was ours and ours alone, if I never behaved wrongly toward her, maybe it was okay. Maybe what I was doing wasn’t wrong.
I shook my head, recognizing a self-deception when I heard it. I turned around, my hand still on the door knob, prepared to open it and once and for all demand that she leave, but the sight that greeted me when I turned back to her was her in her burgundy high heel pumps, a lacy bra and panties, and nothing else.
My hand slipped free of the door handle, and I no longer gave a damn about propriety, largess, or anything approaching an ethical argument of any kind. I covered the distance between us with long, sure strides until I had my hands on her hips and her body pulled hard against me.
“This is what you want?” I asked, my voice barely recognizable to my own ears. She nodded her head in answer. “Say it. Tell me,” I demanded.
“This is what I want... You’re who I want,” she whispered, husky and breathy with lips that pouted, ready to be kissed.
It was all I needed. The mantel of my argument of right or wrong fell away from me, and I surrendered to my baser needs to have the most amazing woman I’d ever met cry out my name when I filled her senses to overflowing with me.