She looked like a goddess at my feet. Big eyes, chestnut hair and gorgeous, big brown eyes. But my eyes couldn’t leave her lips. Those full, perfect lips that were so made for mischief.

She leaned her head forward, and to my surprise, she pinned my zipper to her front teeth with her tongue in a seductive little pose and tried to pull it down. In classic Natasha fashion, it slipped out of her mouth. Her cheeks flushed red, which only made me even more turned on.

It was borderline insane, but I wasn’t just crazy about the good parts of her—the way she had a good head on her shoulders and could surprise even seasoned businessmen with insightful thoughts or genius ideas, or the way she was kind and cared about everybody else before herself, or even the way she made me forget I was bitter and had spent most of my life building up walls to keep everyone out. Natasha had stumbled, tripped, and crashed her way through all my defenses in a perfectly choreographed merger of clumsiness and fate.

No, it wasn’t just the good that drew me to her. I even loved the way she was a walking disaster. It was refreshing and endearing. The way she always seemed so adorably embarrassed afterwards was also a massive turn on, and right now, I thought I might just explode if she didn’t hurry up and find a way to get my zipper down.

She clamped it between her teeth this time, leaving the tongue out of the picture, and managed to pull it down, even though her determination not to let the zipper go made it look more like she was grimacing than putting on a sexy show.

“You may have to use your hands for the button, unless you’re exceptionally talented.”

She arched an eyebrow up at me, and for a second, I thought she was actually going to try to undo the button of my pants with her mouth. Instead, she threw aside all the slow act and practically ripped my pants and boxers down. It was fucking hot, and if I hadn’t already been fully erect since the first kiss, I thought I would’ve made it in record time to see how badly she seemed to want to do this.

She gripped the base of my cock with her hand, and even the simple touch made my body tense up. She looked up at me, letting those lips of hers curve into the mischievous smile I’d seen so many times as she stared down the length of my cock.

“Is this a bad time to say I’ve never done this before?”

“As long as you don’t treat it like a banana and try to take a bite? No. It’s not a bad time at all.”

“You’ll tell me if I’m doing it wrong?” she asked.

The sudden vulnerability was indescribably sexy. I shook my head. “Natasha. If your mouth is on my cock, there is no wrong way for you to do it. Trust me.”

“I feel like you’re underestimating my ability to screw this up.”

“Just suck my cock,” I said, grinning and pushing her head down until her lips were against me.

She was either lying about having never given a blowjob before, or she was a natural. I guess the third possibility is that I’d been teasing myself with the idea of fucking her for so long now that I probably could’ve gotten off to watching her reading a book.

I took a handful of her hair while she bobbed up and down on me. I didn’t force her head down or thrust myself deeper into her. It was her first time, and I wanted her to be in control. At first, she focused entirely on taking me in her mouth. I could feel the tight ring her lips made as she moved her head up and down on me and the warm slickness of her tongue blanketing the base of my cock. Her hands were on my thighs, gripping tightly. I loved watching the way her forehead creased and wrinkled as she sucked me off, like she was enjoying this as much as I was and simultaneously surprised by that fact.

She pulled one hand from my thigh to circle my cock just below her lips and started jerking me off while she sucked. The added friction made me throw my head back and clench my teeth. Fuck, she felt good, and I knew I would only last a little while longer if she kept this up.

I tormented myself more by craning my neck to look at her curves as she knelt and her skirt strained against her hips and ass. I could see a hint of her cleavage shaking freely with every pump of her fist on my cock, and then I had to squeeze my eyes shut to force myself not to fill her mouth with cum.

“Okay, okay,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to cum yet because I wanted to fuck her. It felt like I’d been waiting to get inside her from the moment I met her. I wanted to cum inside her, even if it was inside a condom, I needed it so badly it hurt. “You have to stop or I’m going to cum,” I said again, a little more frantically this time.

She wasn’t slowing down. If anything, it was like I was encouraging her.

“Natasha—fuck,” I groaned. She was swirling her tongue around my cock now and using both hands on me. One was jerking me off and the other was massaging my balls. She was moving so fast now that I could hear the wet, messy sound of the blowjob, and it was possibly the sexiest sound I could’ve possibly imagined at that moment. It was raw and it was dirty. Thinking of prim little Natasha making those noises on my cock was the last straw.

My whole body tensed. My chest tightened and my eyes slammed shut. “I’m cumming,” I gritted out. It was a final warning to let her avoid a mouthful of my cum but if anything, she pressed her lips tighter around me, like she was worried about losing even a drop.

My cock twitched again and again with each release of my orgasm, and to my surprise, she stayed right where she was.

Then when the last threads of my climax were fading to a dull, pleasant buzz, I realized she didn’t know what to do. She was frozen on my cock, mouth probably full of my cum, and he eyes looked wide and slightly worried.

I barked a laugh. “This is where you either swallow or—”

She gulped, and raised her eyes to meet mine as she sat up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What was the second option?” she asked.

“Spit,” I said. “But swallowing is a hell of a lot hotter.”

She bit the corner of her lip. “So, how did I do?”

“Here’s a universal tip. If a guy comes, you did perfect.”

She grinned.

I reached to unbutton her blouse, because I may have already came, but I wasn’t about to give up my chance to fuck her over a temporarily quenched sex drive.

She gripped my wrists and lowered her eyebrows. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Taking off your clothes…”

“Why?” she asked, and then I saw the familiar hint of mischief twinkling in her eyes.

“Because I want to see every last inch of that perfect body when I spread you out and fuck you.”

“What if I want to keep you waiting for a week like you kept me waiting?” she asked.

“Then I’d call it cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Hm,” she said, tapping her chin. She looked so sexy and fuckable at that moment, it was unfair. Her lips were still wet from sucking me off, and one of the buttons of her blouse was undone, letting me see the hint of her black bra. Her skirt was hiked up almost to her panties, too, as she sat on her knees, still right where she had been when she blew me. I’d never been tortured, but knowing she was about to tell me I couldn’t fuck her had to be worse than anything a torturer could’ve dreamed up. “Call it cruel and unusual then,” she said.

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when she stood up, fixed her blouse, and took a step back toward the door.

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“I owed you a return of the favor from last week. Now we’re even. Your move.” She twinkled her fingers in a flirtatious wave before closing the door and leaving me speechless. I heard a loud thump and the raised voice of my secretary outside.

I quickly buttoned myself back up and opened the door to check on her. From the looks of it, she was getting back up after falling.

“Seriously?” I asked, but I beat my secretary to helping her up.

Natasha was blushing, but she waved me off once she was standing and tried to straighten herself up. “My leg was just a little bit asleep,” she said quietly. “I was trying to stall before my dramatic exit but I knew that was my moment so I took it.”

“You’re unbelievable,” I said.

I had almost forgotten Natasha’s brother was still crashing at my place when I got home. If it helped Natasha, I was fine letting him stay as long as he needed, but I honestly hadn’t expected it to last more than a couple days.

Braeden was lounging on my couch in his boxers when I got home. I made a mental note to call the housekeepers later and tell them to pay special attention to that spot. He nodded to me.

“What’s up, Bruce Wayne.”

I frowned at him. “Is that the guy from Batman?”

“Is that the guy from Batman?” he asked incredulously. “What are you, thirty-years-old going on seventy? Yes, the guy from Batman.”

I gestured to the fact that he was half naked on my couch. “That must make you thirty-years-old going on twelve?”

“Ha, ha,” said Braeden. He popped what looked like a cheese puff in his mouth.

A fucking cheese puff? On my couch?

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Grocery store,” he said, like I was an idiot.

“I have plenty of food here. Why are you wasting what little money you have on cheese puffs?”

“You call what you have here food? Maybe you can subsist on vegetables and chicken, but veggies give me gas and chicken grosses me out. I mean, have you ever seen that shit before it’s cooked? Looks like they cut it straight out of an alien’s ballsack.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’re familiar with alien ballsacks, then?”

He tilted his head at me. “How do I know you’re not the one with the weird fetish? Billionaire. Neat freak. Seemingly perfect? You’re like a walking example of the prototype for a serial killer or a guy with a secret BDSM sex dungeon.”

“Feel free to scour the place for clues while you continue being aggressively unemployed, if that’s what you think.”

“Aggressively unemployed my ass,” muttered Braeden, who stood and faced me with all of his six feet of lanky, pasty self.

I looked down on him, literally and figuratively. “You realize most people would be kissing my ass for giving them a place to crash, right?”

“Yeah, well, most people wouldn’t be dumb enough to wind up needing help from an asshole like you in the first place. So let’s get that out of the way. You’re not dealing with most people right now.”

“Clearly,” I said.

For a second, he looked like he was actually about to swing at me. Then he relaxed slightly and squinted his eyes at me. “What do you want with my sister, anyway? We can cut the shit before you try to make up some bullshit about this not being about her. This is all about her. You wouldn’t be putting up with my obnoxious ass if you didn’t want something from her.”

“She works for me,” I said simply. “A happy employee is a good employee. And with baggage like you? I think getting you out of her hair is a definite turn towards happy.”

“Yeah, no shit. Why do you think I was hiding out in the park instead of bothering her?”

“Have you considered just getting a job?” I asked. “Stupid question, I know.”

“You’re right, it is. Me and the traditional kind of job just don’t mesh. I’m a big idea guy.” He tapped the side of his head. “I just need to keep at it until my luck improves, and I’ll be good. Don’t you worry about that.”

“I wasn’t going to worry. What about this. You take a job in my promotional department. Toss around some of those big ideas with the professionals. See if you’re hot shit like you think you are.”

“Fuck your charity,” he said. Braeden shook his head and crossed his arms over his pudgy belly like I’d just asked him to shine my shoes with his personal toothbrush.

“Fine, I was—”

“Out of curiosity,” he said quickly. “What would your charity job pay, exactly?”

“Nothing until you proved you were worth a damn. Get one of your big ideas pushed through into circulation with our promotional team, and then we can talk salary.”

He chewed his nail. “Damn it. Fine. I’ll do it, but you’re still an asshole. I’m only doing this because maybe I could finally help Natasha pay the bills her shitty job can’t.”

I felt a pang of guilt at that. I wasn’t paying her, after all. At first, I’d thought it was one of the reasons she’d have to quit. Then, when I got to know her better, I was afraid offering to pay her would actually make her quit. For a woman who needed money as badly as she did, she had a stubborn, prideful streak that I was sure wouldn’t be receptive to charity. Still, I remembered all too well how her landlord had been trying to harass her about rent, and now her brother was mentioning her tight funds. I shouldn’t have been surprised. New York was expensive, and I never quite understood how any but the top brass at companies managed to afford to live here.

A thought occurred to me for the first time. I left Braeden to taint my couch more while I opened up the laptop in my home office. I dug around in the company files until I found employee records. It didn’t take me long to find Natasha. I wanted to know what job she’d worked before coming to intern at Galleon, if any. Had I actually interviewed her, I would’ve already known.

She had a waitressing job listed and a job in her campus bookstore, but that was it. I frowned. Based on the number of years she said she waitressed, that was supposedly how she had been paying her rent up until now. Something didn’t sit well with that, so on a whim, I called up the restaurant she had listed and asked to speak to a manager. It took them a little digging, but they confirmed for me she had only worked there for two years, not the four she listed.

That left a two-year employment gap. A gap she was trying to cover up.

So what was her real job? And what kind of job would be so shitty that you’d try to cover it on your resume with a waitressing gig?

I spent some time trying to Google her name, but kept getting page after page of unrelated articles from some business magazine. I decided to stalk her social media next, not even sure what I was looking for, but overcome with curiosity nonetheless.

I found a post among her sparse Facebook activity mentioning how excited she was about a new job. The date was roughly two years ago. Heart pounding, I scrolled through the comments. Then I saw it.

Martha Flores: Still can’t believe my little girl is going to be a reporter! So proud!

A reporter?

I thought back to the articles I saw when I first searched her name and went back to click through the links. I realized they were articles written by Natasha Flores. My intern.

I sat back in my chair, head spinning and stomach dropping. She was a reporter. For a business magazine. And she hid that fact from her resume when she put in her application to be an intern for me.

It felt like Valerie all over again, except worse. Worse because I already cared more about Natasha than I think I ever cared about Valerie. Worse because I’d broken my number one rule. I’d made the same mistake twice.

“Yo,” called Braeden through the door to my office. He punctuated his word with a heavy bang of his fist. “You have any toothpaste I can borrow?”

“Fuck off,” I growled. I expected him to argue, but I must’ve sounded more pissed than I realized, because there was a slight pause with no sound and then I heard his footsteps retreating from the door.

I knew I should ask Natasha what was going on. It would’ve been the fair thing to do, but I also knew the threat of betrayal already stung so badly I wasn’t thinking straight.

I texted Natasha and let her know I was going to be out of town tomorrow, so she could take the day off. Then I spent the rest of the night lying awake in bed, staring straight at the ceiling while the same icy rage I’d felt two years ago took me over. It was easier to remember now how I’d shut myself off from people. Natasha had started making me forget. I’d even started to think I had overreacted, that I should’ve just gotten over what happened with Valerie and moved on.

Now I remembered.

There was still a chance I was wrong. I knew that. But it was a small comfort. I’d always been a believer in following the simplest path to a conclusion. If all the evidence seems to point one way, that is the right way, more often than not. I even thought back on the times she’d seemed like she was trying to tell me something. Yes, maybe I’d been the one to cut her off, but she had more than enough opportunities to get the truth out.

I knew she had betrayed me. I knew it deep in my chest. All that was left now was to confirm it.