I saw Bruce Chamberson smile for the second time since I’d met him when I pulled the banana split out of the freezer. Thankfully, it’d only been in there about twenty minutes, and the bananas were still the perfect temperature. It was a monster of a split. There were two bananas on either side of three mounds of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla ice cream. The entire beast was covered generously in whipped cream, chocolate syrup over the chocolate ice cream, strawberry syrup over the strawberry ice cream, and a caramel drizzle over the vanilla.

“You’ve been talking to William, haven't you,” said Bruce.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

Bruce gave me a look that could’ve had a nun stripping out of her robe in an instant. It was pure sex. Pure fire. “The last time William talked someone into getting me a banana split, he told me he had said it’d get them in my pants. Does this mean you’re hoping to get into my pants?”

“That would be crazy,” I said quickly. “I’d never fit.”

He burst out laughing. He had a good laugh. It was an honest laugh. Infectious, even. I smiled along, watching him to wait for his next move. Whatever was happening, the ball was in his court. I may have dragged us to the court to begin with, but I knew it was up to him from here, and I was glad for it. I still wasn’t sure where I really wanted this all to go. The only thing I knew was there was no use fighting my attraction to him. Who knew if a relationship would ever work between us, but it was like Candace said. I was a big girl. I didn’t have to like him to sleep with him.

But it would’ve been easier if I knew I didn’t like him. The problem was that I wasn’t so sure anymore. I found myself thinking of him all the time. I craved those glimpses of happiness he’d sometimes let slip. I liked being the cause of that, feeling like I had some kind of special effect on him.

He didn’t waste any time digging into the desert, but he did make sure I got a spoon as well and could share. It felt intimate, sharing the desert with him, especially when he kept making the most adorable and somehow sexy noises of enjoyment. It was like he couldn’t help himself.

“You have any family?” he asked. The question came out of nowhere, but when I realized we’d just been stuffing our faces for close to five minutes, I guessed he might have started wondering about me. All he knew was what he saw. Bruce knew next to nothing about my home life, my past, or my family. It was a little flattering that he was curious.

“Yep,” I said, licking the back of my spoon clean and sighing. I set it down, because I didn’t want to feel bloated and gross in front of Bruce, no matter how much I wanted to keep eating. “My mom and dad live outside the city. They’re teachers. My older brother lives with them.”

Bruce gave the nod I was used to seeing when I revealed that little tidbit about my brother. It was a kind of mixture between sympathy and curiosity.

“He never really found his direction in life,” I explained. “He spends all his energy on get rich quick schemes. He’s tried the multi-level marketing stuff. Once he was running a kind of scam where he’d list items for sale that he found on big store’s websites at a markup. Like if they were selling mittens for two dollars, he’d list a bunch of them on eBay for four, and then once someone placed the order, he’d go drive up, buy the stuff, package it, and sell it for a profit. I’m pretty sure it was illegal, but his account got shut down for some other stupid thing he did, anyway.”

“I’ve known the type,” said Bruce. “My parents are a little bit like that. They think William and I are their personal, bottomless ATM machines. Forget the fact that they did just about everything in their power to stop us from getting where we are in the first place. Now that we’re here, it’s thanks to them, of course.”

“That can’t be easy. I’ve thought about it before,” I said. “How it’d be hard to make it big at something. Pretty soon, you’d realize almost everyone you knew was just after their own piece of what you had.”

He laughed, but it was a sad sound, and the way his eyes went distant told me I’d struck a chord. “Is that what happened?” I asked. “With the girl, I mean. The one your brother mentioned.”

Bruce seemed to think about my question for a long time. I wasn’t sure if he was deciding whether to answer or trying to find the right way. “It’s not really something I want to think about right now,” he said finally.

I nodded quickly, and in my hurry to apologize for asking such a nosy question, my hand catapulted his spoon out of the dessert dish, spraying both of us with bits of ice cream and syrup from the base of the bowl. I looked down at his lap in horror at the three large spots of ice cream, one of each flavor, quickly seeping into his expensive pants.

I half-reached to wipe it away before I realized I’d be the one doing the groping if I did.

He looked down at my hand, watching as I pulled it back awkwardly and blushed like an idiot.

With no apparent hurry, he swiped up a bead of the melting chocolate ice cream on his index finger, inspected it, and then extended his finger toward my mouth. “Are you going to clean up your mess, intern?” His voice was a deep, sexy rasp, and there was no mistaking the way his eyelids looked almost heavy beneath those thick eyelashes.

Did he want me to… Oh, God. I felt immediately and totally sexually inadequate. I wanted this. I knew I did. It wasn’t awkward college-level sexual tension. This was real. The big leagues, and I had never been aware of how woefully unprepared I was for this.

“Uh,” I stammered, reaching for a napkin.

“No,” he said firmly. “Not with the napkin.”

I swallowed hard and lifted my fingertips to his wrist, where I pulled him closer to my mouth, inch by nervous inch. I brought the tip of his finger into my mouth, letting my lips wrap around it. All my uncertainty and nerves were blasted away when I saw the look on his face. He was rapt with pleasure, absolutely over the edge with need and desire.

It felt like I could bring him to his knees with the slightest movement of my tongue, and I thought I could get drunk on power like that.

I pulled away from his finger, my hand still on his wrist, and when our eyes met it sent a jolt of pure fire lancing through me. “I don’t… This isn’t the kind of thing I do,” I said.

“So you just make messes and don’t clean them up?” he asked.

I looked down at his finger, smirking a little. “I don’t typically use my mouth, especially when the mess is on someone else’s crotch.”

“Typically? So you do at times, just not always?”

“Believe it or not, this is a first.”

“Good,” he said. “I like the idea of having you to myself.”

His words sent a warm tingle across my skin, like they were a spell that bound me to him in some way. I wasn’t sure how he intended them. I knew our bodies were both probably moving on auto-pilot at this point, drawing us closer and closer to the inevitable, but I didn’t know what happened after that. If I believed Candace, I wasn’t supposed to care. It was just supposed to be sex. Just fun.

That wasn’t enough for me, though.

“Is this a good idea?” I asked.

He was standing now. His body was so close to mine I could feel the heat radiating off of him. I wondered if I’d feel the hardness of his arousal if he moved another inch closer.

Bruce brought his fingers to my cheek, letting them drift from my jaw to my chin as he traced a path and followed it intently with his eyes, almost like he expected to find something there. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe you’re just after my money, and maybe I’m just looking for a taste of you before I’ll toss you aside. But we could talk about it for days and we still wouldn’t know unless we tried.”

I leaned forward, letting my forehead touch his chest as my thoughts raced. “How do I know you’re not after my money?” I asked after a while.

His chuckle rumbled through his chest. “I guess you’re going to have to ask yourself a very important question. Do you feel lucky, intern? Huh, do ya?”

I looked up at him with a half-smile. “Right now? Yes. For once, I do.”

He kissed me then, and it was more than I thought it could’ve been. The world closed in around us. The distant sound of cars rumbling across the street and wind against the windows and the air conditioner all blurred until they were nothing. It was like every sensory nerve in my body except my lips and hands shut off to focus as much as possible on the places where he and I met.

His lips were so unbelievably warm and soft, with just enough wet to keep from feeling dry but not so much to seem sloppy. I could taste the faint sweet tang of our desert on his lips and tongue. He kissed me like he'd been waiting since the first moment he saw me. He advanced on me, holding me by the shoulders to keep from knocking me over as he backed me up to the break room door and pinned me there.

I felt his hand thump against the door beside my head. His other hand threaded through my hair until he had a grip of my hair and he could tilt my face up more to meet his. The solid warmth of his body was flush against mine, and I could feel the distinct pressure of his arousal digging into my stomach.

“My brother was right,” he breathed between kisses. “But not exactly.”

“About what?” I asked. My hands were moving on their own, shamelessly exploring every bulge, curve, and crease of his sculpted body that I could feel through his dress shirt. I ached to strip it off him, but I was in uncharted waters. I wanted to let him take the lead. I wanted to trust him to guide me through this.

“About the pencil skirts and the secretary look. But it’s not a fetish. I just couldn’t stop thinking about hiking those skirts up and spreading you out, making you moan my name until your voice was hoarse.”

I gulped, forgetting to kiss him back for a few seconds as the dirty sting of his words worked its magic on me, from my tingling fingertips to the way warmth was exploding in my lower belly. And then, with the suddenness of a cold hand gripping my ankle from the darkness, reality broke through the moment. I needed to admit the truth to him. I couldn’t do this while still planning to write my story. He had to know.

“Bruce, there’s something—”

“If this is the part where you admit you’re a Russian spy sent to kill me,” he said, cutting me off. “Save it. I don’t care. Not right now.”

I tried to will myself to say it anyway. I really tried, but every time he kissed me or felt hungrily at me with those big hands of his, I was torn back into his dream world, the strange place where it didn’t seem to matter that I had bills to pay and the only way they were getting paid was if I could betray Bruce. All that mattered here was what felt good and what was natural. And God, I’d never understood the meaning of natural until his hands were on me and my mouth was against his. There was nothing more natural in the world than taking more, craving more.

He picked me up, still stealing kisses even as he hauled me with my legs wrapped around his waist to the table overlooking the indoor gardens in the courtyard below. My skirt was bunched up around my waist and, to my horror, I realized I was wearing what had to be the least sexy pair of panties I owned. They were a kind of unflattering grass green with pulled threads in the fabric. Worst of all, they were a little big on me and had the definite granny panty factor going for them.

To my relief, Bruce, Mr. Control and Mr. Calm, decided to go full barbarian. Without taking his lips from mine, he reached down, took the waistband of my panties in his fist, and pulled. They didn’t snap off, they ripped off.

I gasped into his mouth and gripped the back of his neck, digging my fingernails into his skin.

“Hope you didn’t like those,” he grunted, and I thought I almost sensed surprise in his voice, like he wasn’t expecting to feel so out of control. It comforted me a little to think I wasn’t the only one who felt pulled along by some invisible but overpowering current.

“They were my favorites,” I lied. “I’m going to sue you now.”

“I understand now,” he said, gently forcing me to lay my back down on the table with my legs spread around him. “You were after my money this whole time. This was all an elaborate setup to get me to tear off your panties and land me in court.”

I licked my lips, too turned on to fully dive into the act of teasing him. “That’s right,” I said breathily. “Putting your banana in my mouth was just the first step in a long, complicated dance you didn’t know you were part of. I’m actually a mastermind, not a clutz.”

He chuckled, but the arousal in his system wiped the amusement from his face in an instant, as if he could only momentarily distract himself from what was in front of him. From me. “You almost had me going until you tried to claim you weren’t a clutz.”

“Damn,” I said. “My cover is blown, I guess.”

He stole the breath straight out of my lungs when he reached for his tie and stripped it free in one smooth motion. His eyes never left mine, and God did they hold all the dirty promises eyes could possibly hold. He knew his slow, unhurried pace was torture for me as I laid there helplessly exposed before him, but he showed no mercy.

He undid each button with deliberate movements that seemed to take forever.

One button. The top of his tanned chest and a hint of his clavicle.

Two buttons. A deep crease running between his pecs and a hint of the raised muscle of his chest.

Three buttons. The distinct line where his pecs end and the first pair of perfectly defined abs.

He never made it to four, because I lost my patience. I sat myself up, grabbed both sides of his shirt, and spread it wide. I didn’t care if I popped buttons in the process. He had destroyed my panties, after all. Forget the fact that his shirt probably cost a hundred dollars and my panties were a bargain bin steal—that wasn’t the point.

He made a sound somewhere between a growl and a grunt as the shirt tore free and I got a front-row seat to the kind of body you normally only saw on big screens or in fashion magazines. "Well, there goes your legal grounds, intern," he said.

“Fuck the money. I just want you.”

I didn’t have to wonder if my words had any effect on him, because he stripped out of his pants and tore off the rest of my clothes in what felt like milliseconds. In an instant, we were both completely bare. I might’ve felt self-conscious, but the way his eyes were drinking me in left no room for doubt. He liked what he saw.

I knew some girls looked at porn, but I’d always felt weird about it. Consequently, I’d only seen one guy naked before, and it was safe to say, I hadn’t fully understood that the guy I had been with must’ve been on the very small side. That, or Bruce was fortunate. Very fortunate.

I expected him to try to slide himself in right away, but instead he knelt down in front of the table. I half-sat and had to fight the urge to press my legs together. It was one thing to be naked in front of him, it was another to have his face just inches from my most intimate places. He didn’t give me time to worry about it though, because when his lips met my inner thigh, all my worries melted away in a rush of white-hot pleasure.

I leaned back on my elbows, not wanting to lay completely flat because the sight of him doing his work was too hot to close my eyes or look away.

“You don’t have to…” I was barely speaking above a whisper, and I didn’t know why I was trying to talk him out of it when every cell in my body was screaming for him to keep going.

He met my eyes as he slowly ran the flat of his tongue from my inner thigh to my pussy. My mouth shot open in a silent gasp and my body tensed. I was left gasping from just a few seconds of the intimate contact, and absolutely famished for more.

“You want me to stop, then?” he asked with a cocky grin.

“Don’t you dare.”

He buried his face between my legs and went to work on me like I was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. I gripped his hair, the table, his shoulders, and whatever else I could get a hold of.

He used his lips, the tip of his tongue, the base of his tongue, and his fingers. They all worked together in a kind of choreography that felt designed to melt me from the inside out. A kind of pressure like I’d never felt before was building inside me, and it felt so strong I was almost afraid to feel the climax I knew was rapidly approaching.

I came when he slid three fingers into me and flicked my clit with his tongue, all while he looked up at me with those impossibly sexy eyes of his. It was too much. I flattened myself against the table and I couldn’t hold in the sounds any longer. Before, I’d been biting back the loudest of the moans threatening to escape from me, but now they all came free. I gasped, I writhed, and I eventually sat up to look at the man who was now upgraded from Sex Robot to Sex Magician, because there was nothing robotic about what just happened, and the way that slick tongue of his had made me instantly forget all the ways he had tried to piss me off over the past week was nothing short of magic.

My eyes wandered down his body to his erect cock, and I raised an eyebrow at him. And then the phone rang.

I expected him to ignore it, but Bruce glanced at his cell, which was sitting on the corner of the table, where he must’ve stripped it from his pocket before dropping his pants. He seemed to recognize the number on the ID and he actually snatched the phone up.

“What is it?” he asked.

I tried not to let my disappointment show. Until now, I’d felt like the only thing in the world that mattered to him. It was a good feeling. An amazing feeling. Then one simple act managed to undermine it all. I sat up and gathered my blouse, which was sitting beside me on the table, and held it in my lap, positioning my arms to cover my breasts as much as I could. He hadn’t sent me away, but I immediately felt strange and silly for being naked, even as he stood there looking like a statue carved by a Greek master sculptor, completely naked and completely erect.

There was a pause while the person on the other line spoke. Bruce’s eyes shifted to me in a way that wasn’t entirely kind. It was the kind of way I thought you’d look at someone you were worried was eavesdropping.

“I can go,” I said quickly.

Bruce hesitated. He looked at the phone again, eyebrows drawing down as he listened to whatever was being said. “Raincheck?” he asked.

My stomach felt like it dropped straight through me. I was mortified, embarrassed, and more than a little pissed off to be thrown out because of a phone call. Obviously, this didn't mean much to him, even if I had been busy trying to turn it into something significant in my own head. I didn't want him to see my disappointment. If he knew how much his dismissal stung, he'd know how much I had been willing to give up for him. At least this way I could pretend it was casual for me, too.

I got up as nonchalantly as I could and slid back into my bra, blouse, and skirt. I even snatched up the torn remains of my panties and tucked them into my purse before giving him a tight-lipped smile and leaving.

I could still feel where I was wet between my legs from his kisses and his tongue. I could feel the numb tingle in my lips where we’d kissed each other raw. But now, it all felt like just another taunt. Another teasing reminder by him that he owned me and I was nothing but a toy for him to cruelly bat around until he got bored.

I was suddenly glad I hadn’t confessed the real reason for my internship, after all. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a hit to my conscious when I found dirt on him and exposed it.