CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rule No. 5: Never touch me. When you reach out to me on purpose, it makes me want to fall to my knees and thank you for showing me the effect I have on you, even if you’ll never openly admit it.
There are many moments in life where we have to decide whether to do what’s wrong or what’s right. It’s unfortunate that the distinction between good decisions and bad aren’t always clearly defined, the consequences and results not always clear, the lasting impact hidden while you attempt to navigate those moments while hoping for the best.
I was living one of those very moments with Donovan Stone. Seated on the edge of his desk, my legs wrapped around his hips, the skirt of my dress puddled around my waist as his palms slowly explored up the backs of my thighs. I had to make a decision about how far I would be willing to go with a man I knew very little about.
Yes, I’d worked with him for over a month now and had played and flirted, teased and joked around, but none of our encounters had left me with an understanding of the man who could drive me to the point of insanity with a well placed compliment, or a single look that somehow conveyed every desire inside him to get to know all of me as much as I wanted to know him.
I was too swept away to think clearly, too full of sinful need and unquenchable thirst to push him away as his body pressed closer to mine. His hand reached the apex of my thighs, his finger tracing the edge of my panties requesting permission to continue his exploration of my most private parts. Rolling my hips in response, I granted him full access, begged him to make me feel all the sensations I’d missed in life by being locked away in a box where no person could touch me.
It didn’t matter that Donovan was silent, because what he lacked in voice, he made up for with body language. He didn’t need to tell me what he was thinking or feeling, the strength of his hands screamed it loud and clear. But rather than yanking my panties aside and entering me with those long, elegant fingers, he teased me instead, his body becoming tenser as the rate of my breath increased, as the silent breath of his was a warm pulse against my skin. I’d never heard Donovan before, but I heard him now, and it was the most sensual sound I’d ever experienced – the simplicity of air rushing against my ear.
If it had just been the beat of his breath, I may have survived the heat of this moment, I may have endured the incapacitating fury of the hormones pumping into my bloodstream in such a flood that my head spun and my body trembled beneath his touch, but it wasn’t just the sound of his breathing I heard in that moment.
Donovan Stone – the man who hadn’t made a sound since the day I first met him – growled out his frustration, the deep vibration of it undoing me, forcing my legs farther apart and liquid heat to soak my panties beneath Donovan’s teasing touch.
Falling back, I lay against the surface of his desk, watching how his chest beat with labored breath, catching sight of a set of blue eyes that were set ablaze by the permission I was granting him now. I’d surrendered to the intensity of my desire, had thrown every last bit of caution to the torrential winds, not caring if I ever regained the ability to care again. There was nothing more that I wanted than to be taken completely, to have this man exert his control over the world I’d carefully constructed for myself, to rip away the veil I’d used to hide for most of my life and shred it beneath his capable hands.
Maybe my mistake had been giving him the freedom to look beyond me, because when I thought Donovan would finally give in to the emotions exploding between us as we forgot about the rules that had been set in place, his eyes left mine for only a brief second, that beautiful gaze of his locking on the single photo on his wall, the pain he’d carried for far too long returning with such a vengeance that he flinched in response to it.
In one second, we were on the verge of taking two tortured souls and combining them to learn to move forward, and in the next, Donovan backed away from me, anger filtering into his expression before he turned his back on me to scrub his palms over his face. Sitting up, I pushed my skirt down to cover my thighs, hopped from his desk and reached to touch his shoulder. But he didn’t turn to me in response to that touch.
He simply walked away.
Without bothering to close the door behind him, Donovan left me standing alone in the center of his office, my expression sullen, my body still recovering from the sensations he’d forced through me by the warmth of his touch. Dejected, I stood motionless, my mind racing as I tried to understand what had happened. I came to the conclusion that, perhaps, common sense should have won after all.
Donovan walking away should have been punishment enough, but when I took the first step to follow him into the main room, I was stopped in place by Jackson’s appearance, his broad shoulders filling the frame of Donovan’s door, his face pulled tight with anger at what he knew had happened.
It didn’t take more than a passing glance to see that my hair was a mess and my eyes were welling with unshed tears. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out the reason for Donovan’s anger and regret when he exited his office. It didn’t take Jackson saying a word for me to know that I’d just made a fatal mistake by breaking every rule that Donovan had set in place to prevent what had just happened.
Slamming the door behind him, Jackson stalked toward me, his brown hair a stylish mess around his face, his amber eyes glowing with hatred. My first reaction was to shrink down, to cross my arms over myself and back away much like I’d done when my father had looked at me with the same vehemence Jackson had now. But I wasn’t that woman anymore. I wouldn’t allow myself to be intimidated or scared, not when I’d tasted what it meant to be powerful and unafraid.
If the last month had taught me anything, it was that I was a woman with hopes and dreams, longings and expectations. If I refused to face life with the same bravery and resilience as every successful person I’d known, then I was doomed to always stay caged within my lonely prison, doomed to die without knowing what it felt like to chase my dreams without fear of the bullies who wanted nothing more than to see me fail.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Jackson’s voice was edged with rage, his hands balled into fists at his sides as he slowly stalked my direction. Refusing to bow down to his anger, I uncrossed my arms from my chest, straightened my shoulders and tilted my chin with as much determined ferocity as I could manage. And although Jackson towered over me, much like the other bully in my life, I refused to feel afraid beneath the weight of his stare, refused to grow quiet in response to the strength of his voice.
I wouldn’t become the woman my father’s wrath had made me. I would become my own woman once and for all.
“That’s none of your business.”
He grinned, the expression menacing and tight. “If it involves Donovan, it is my business. Why the fuck did he just leave, Mia? What happened that pissed him off? What did you do to him?”
Anger boiled inside me, the force of it coloring my cheeks and tightening every muscle in my body. Raising my voice to match the volume in Jackson’s, I met his eyes and answered, “I didn’t do anything to him that he didn’t want done. What is your problem, Jackson? Why do you feel like it’s your earthly duty to cock block every potential chance Donovan has for being happy? You’re not his babysitter and you sure as hell aren’t mine.”
His voice roared over his next words, a sound that would have shattered me less than a month ago, but only served to piss me off now. “Do you have any idea what that man has been through? Do you have any clue who he was before he shut himself away from the world and damn near lost everything? Who do you think you are, Mia? Because you sure as hell aren’t doing him any favors by forcing yourself on him and risking the small amount of progress he’s made since –“
Jackson’s voice cut off, his jaw ticking with anger as he paced the floor in front of me. Both of our faces were red with anger, both of our bodies locked in rage. Where I was trying to help Donovan overcome his past, Jackson was doing everything he could to tiptoe around the fact that Donovan’s current state of life wasn’t healthy. Breathing out, I forced myself to speak evenly, to think about how we could fix this mess without one of us losing our job in the process.
“Since his fiancé died, you mean?”
Jackson’s head snapped up, his eyes pinning me in place. “He told you?”
“No, he didn’t tell me. That man might as well be Fort Knox for the thickness of the walls he has built around him. He has more secrets than the damn CIA, and those secrets are destroying him, Jackson. Don’t you see that?” Sighing loudly, I sat down in the chair where I’d watched Donovan’s presentation earlier, my eyes practically begging Jackson to understand that, although he was trying to help his lifelong friend, all he was doing was helping Donovan strengthen the walls he built around himself on the day his fiancé died.
“Rachel told me,” I finally admitted. “And after she mentioned what happened, I looked up the old news reports. But from what I read, none of it makes sense as to why Donovan refuses to speak. Was he so traumatized by watching her die that he lost the ability to communicate? There’s no physical reason for his silence, so why would a man like him make such an extreme choice?”
“Because he blames himself for her death. That’s why,” Jackson roared again, fury written into the lines of his face and the tight set of his shoulders. “The news didn’t tell the entire story, and instead of digging into someone’s past and making up your own conclusions, maybe you should mind your damn business and come to work to do the job you were asked to do and then leave without threatening to destroy the company.”
Frustration was a vibration beneath my skin. “How am I threatening to destroy anything? It’s not like I held Donovan down and forced him to kiss me!”
Rolling back on his heels, Jackson smirked, his expression that of a cat that had just cornered a mouse. “So, that’s what happened. You decided to be a whore and spread your legs for –“
The sound of my palm against his cheek ricocheted through the small office, the moments between sitting in the chair and standing in front of him lost to me. I didn’t recall standing from my seat, didn’t recall taking those few steps to close the distance between us, but I certainly felt the sting of that slap on the palm of my hand, saw the red mark blooming across his skin where I’d struck him.
I’d never hit another person before, but I’d also never been called a whore either. Even my father hadn’t dared to demean me in such a way. Perhaps a month ago, I would have run off and licked my wounds to be called such a foul name, but not anymore. And definitely not with this son of a bitch.
“Never, and I mean NEVER, call me a whore again.”
Rubbing his hand over his skin, Jackson narrowed his eyes on me, his smirk stretching back in place as he towered over me. Lowering his voice so much that it was a menacing growl, he answered, “You deserve what’s coming to you, Mia. Don’t forget that. There are things about Donovan you don’t know, but I’ll step back and let you figure them out for yourself. I’m sure once you realize how stupid you’ve been by not listening to me, you’ll be begging me to forgive you for this.”
Marching away from me, he’d barely passed through the open door before spinning on his heel to glare at me and say, “I suggest you clean up that mess on the floor near your desk. And when you’re done with that, I suggest you take off the rest of the day because you won’t want to be here when I find Donovan and drag him back into the office. You’ll be lucky if you even have a job by the time I’m done talking to him.”
Jackson walked through the door, his heavy steps thudding through the office as he slammed the door on his way out of the back room and slammed the main door on his way out the office entirely. For the first time since I’d started my job with Stone Industries, I was alone in the office.
Trembling where I stood, I let the tears slip from my eyes. Sad tears. Angry tears. Frustrated tears. They all spilled together in hot drops down my cheeks, all the misery that was held inside them left as wet trails down my skin until they slipped from my jawline to drop into a pathetic puddle at my feet. For once it wasn’t the threat of losing my job that scared me. Trevor had already offered me a position in his company should things go south here. I didn’t like the idea, especially after he asked me out this morning, but it was still a viable option regardless. Slapping away the tears still dripping down my face, I rolled my shoulders back as I took a deep breath. I wouldn’t let the argument with Jackson ruin me, but it was more than likely that whatever Jackson had to say to Donovan would be the final nail in the coffin of that budding romance.
It was just like my life that I would finally open myself up to a man, only to discover he was even more complicated than me.
But, I wasn’t fired yet, and as such, I had a job to do. Walking out of Donovan’s office, I closed the door behind me out of habit. My eyes scanned the mess of papers still littering the floor, and after blowing out a breath filled with what remained of the volatile emotions swirling inside me, I knelt down to scrape those papers into a pile and carry them to my desk.
Setting them down, I went about sorting the papers. It was a tedious job, no more exciting than doing your taxes or sitting in the waiting room of the local driver’s license office. But it filled the time. An hour passed as I grouped the invoices into one pile, the contracts into another, the schematics into a third pile, and the correspondence into another. Having been at this job for over a month now, I was rummaging through contracts and records dating back two years. None of it held my interest, so I didn’t bother reading about the myriad of computer programs, hardware installs and website developments Donovan’s firm had accomplished since the satellite office first opened its doors. These records couldn’t have been for the entire firm. There weren’t enough to be the only work performed by a multi-national company.
Once the piles were broken down into type, I went to work grouping them by client names. Flipping through the invoices and billing, I’d made a dent into this newest stack of records when a name caught my eye. It wasn’t a client name, wasn’t a project name or a proposal that failed to sell. It was the name of a website, one that had been a thorn in my side and a shadow hovering over my days for the past month.
Dropping a handful of papers to flutter over the surface of my desk, I gripped that one piece of paper in my hands and almost screamed to realize just how well I’d been played by Donovan Stone.
Two words that should have had no meaning stared back at me with the same pompous smirk I’d come to associate with my silent boss.
Dark Realities.
The paper itself was a list of players in the sexual fantasies game offered by the site. Predators and Prey, and the amounts paid to them based on the size of the audience they’d gathered. It was all meaningless to me as I stared. I blinked my eyes thinking I must be going insane, only to open them again and discover that I wasn’t.
Dark Realities.
The website that had disappeared the day after I signed up for a game I never wanted to play.
Dark Realities.
The mistake I made because I was desperate to keep running from a past that wanted me to be a failure.
Dark Realities.
The game that gave a man the opportunity to know everything there was to know about me when I had absolutely no knowledge about him.
I didn’t have to guess which man was behind the site. It was the same man who watched me while silently prodding me to be a stronger woman. The same man who could cut me to the bone without speaking a word, and who had been running me through a maze of illusions and deceit since the first day he ever met me.
The paper crinkled in my clenched hands, my eyes scanning over the remaining piles as I wondered what else could be found regarding the site in what was left of the careless record keeping.
Had Donovan known I would eventually find this? Was he watching through his cameras at this very moment enjoying the shock on my face now that I’d discovered his little secret?
My fingers flew through the papers almost as quickly as my anger boiled up inside me. Thumbing through the stacks in a frantic search to find more, I hissed when the edge of one page sliced across my skin. The stinging cut didn’t bother me half as much as the knife stuck in my back, the blade twisting and turning until it was embedded deep enough to shred my heart.
Not finding any other records discussing Dark Realities in that stack, I tore through the others on my desk. After that, I tore through what was left of the disorganized stacks on the shelf, finding nothing that would point me to who within Stone Industries ran the site. Running back to my desk, I picked up that one lonely sheet of paper again and noticed the dates of the payment made to the players. None of the payments were over a year old, which meant this page shouldn’t have been grouped with records that were twice its age.
Someone had intentionally hidden this page to keep me from finding it, and that same someone was most likely the man who assumed I wouldn’t last a day in his office, and therefore wouldn’t have made it to the records I was now sorting.
But where were the remaining records? Why was there only this one page?
Dragging my eyes away from that one bit of evidence, I flicked a glance at the lobby door and chewed the inside of my lip. There was no telling where Donovan had run off to or whether Jackson had found him to talk through what happened. They could have left entirely to go grab lunch and discuss whether I would still be employed this afternoon, or they could still be in the building, quietly talking in the hallway. There was no telling how much time I had to continue my search for additional records regarding a site that had become a mysterious nightmare, but I was alone inside the office, and Donovan’s office was open for exploration.
If there were additional records to be found, his office was where I would find them.
The indecision was a fetid pulse inside me, my heart beating as it counted down the passing seconds. The truth was I might lose the chance if I waited too long to dig into Donovan’s desk, because it was almost a certainty that I would be fired by the time the two men came back.
Jackson had it out for me, especially after I’d slapped him so hard it left a mark. If they came back early and found me snooping, would it really make a difference if they planned to fire me regardless?
The inside of my lip was so raw I could taste the trace of blood from the broken skin where I’d chewed. But my curiosity was too much to bear, my anger boiling even harder when I remembered all the fear and insecurity the Dark Realities game had caused.
Screw it. There was only one shot for me to find out the truth, and if it turned out that Donovan was my stalker, then I decided to play the game after all. Except this time, I refused to play by anybody’s rules but my own.
Decision made, I stood from my seat and cast one last look at the lobby door, not caring that Donovan’s cameras would record everything as I rifled through his office. Surrounded by the silence of an empty office, I quickly crossed the room to run through his door, but the sound of two male voices stopped me before I could make it past his doorway.
“Hey, Mia,” Jackson’s voice called out from the lobby as he walked in from the hallway, “you can take off for the rest of the day. Donovan won’t be returning.”
Spinning in place, I saw Jackson and Trevor coming through the door, their arms full of boxes and a scowl written over both of their faces.
My heart was practically tearing from my chest from how hard it hammered. “Where’s Donovan?” I asked, hating the breathlessness of my voice. “Doesn’t he want to talk to me?”
Setting the boxes down, Jackson shot me a look full of hatred and condemnation. “I wasn’t able to catch him before he tore out of the parking garage.”
My eyebrows pulled together. “What does that mean?”
Barking out his response, it was plain to see that Jackson was still angry. “It means I don’t know whether you still have a job or not. But if it were up to me, you’d be packing your shit and going home today.”
Glancing past Jackson, I saw Trevor set down his boxes before looking between us in confusion. “Is everything okay?” he asked.
Humorless laughter burst from Jackson’s throat. “If you call an assistant making out with her boss as okay, then sure, things are fine.”
Trevor’s expression shadowed at the comment, his eyes glancing my direction with rejection rolling behind them. The poor guy had just finished asking me out, and now he knew why he’d been brushed off so easily. I guess that meant I could no longer run to him for a job when I was fired the next morning.
“I mean it, Mia. Take off. I don’t want to look at you for the rest of the day while I worry about Donovan. If something happens to him because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself, then I’ll let all of our investors know who they can blame for the destruction of Stone Industries. Once word gets out, you might as well leave the city. Nobody will hire you after learning that you, personally, took down a thriving company.”
The bastard was being far too harsh, far too accusing for what happened between Donovan and me, but there was no use standing there arguing.
Rather than remaining in place just to listen to him threatening me, I huffed out a breath and marched to my desk to grab my purse. Thankfully, Jackson turned to say something to Trevor about whatever project they were working on, so he didn’t see me take the record I’d found on Dark Realities and slip it into my purse.
Letting myself out, I slipped past the two men on my way into the hallway, and made sure to give Jackson the finger as I passed.
“Wait up, Mia,” Trevor called out.
Casting Jackson a scathing look, Trevor followed me into the hall and said, “Don’t let Jackson’s crap bother you. He gets grumpy whenever he has a big project coming up.”
Forcing a friendly smile, I answered, “Thanks, Trevor. Have a good night.”
“You too,” he called as I descended the stairs. “Have a good night, and sleep well.”
I almost tripped over my feet at his choice in words. How many times had I been told the same thing by the man stalking me? I turned to say something in response to Trevor, but instead of asking him why he’d said those words, I shook my head and continued to walk down the stairs, my mind spinning with questions about the identity of the man running Dark Realities.