ABBY
YOU ASKED MY mother on a date?” I demand Wednesday afternoon when Hank strolls into my room just as my last student is leaving.
I’ve been watching the seconds tick by since lunch when I started getting bombarded with one breathless, delighted account about that wonderful Hank Wagner stopping by after another.
He holds up a wagging finger, amusement glinting at me from behind his dark frames. “I asked you on a date. I asked her to be my date. Big difference.”
“Hank!”
“Abby,” he counters, walking past me to sit on the edge of my desk like he owns it. “Sweetheart, if you’re jealous, I’ve got invites to these things coming out of my ears. I’d be more than happy to bring you as my date sometime.”
“I am not jealous.” That would be absurd considering he’s only taking my mother in an effort to get closer to me. “And get off my desk.”
“So jealous,” he practically purrs. He removes himself from my desk and then has the gall to walk around it and park himself in my chair. “Not going to lie, Abby—I love seeing you all possessive of me.”
He’s trying to get a rise out of me, and, for as much as I don’t want to give him the satisfaction, it’s working.
I snatch a pen up from my desktop and start wringing it in my hands. Anything to keep from having to look too deeply into Hank’s eyes. “That’s not what this is.”
“Then what’s the big deal? I’ve always cared about your mom, and I realized I had the perfect opportunity to catch up with her.”
“Oh, it sounds like you two caught up, all right. She couldn’t stop talking about you.” For seventeen minutes straight. “How long were you even there?”
“Long enough for her to open a fresh sleeve of Oreos for me.” He leans forward, crossing his arms. “But again, Abby, what’s the big deal?”
“I don’t want her to get her hopes up about us, Hank.”
“Hmm. Couldn’t have that.”
I peer up at the shrewd look he’s giving me, and my pen flips out of my fingers and lands behind my file cabinet.
Hank raises a brow and starts to get up. But I wave him off, not wanting any of it. I’m being unreasonable and I know it, and it’s all his fault. This man has gotten to me like no man in my life and it’s frustrating the heck out of me. I’m not sleeping. I’m not focused. And now I’ve gone and lost one of my favorite pens behind my cabinet because he distracted me and I let him.
The cabinet is heavier than I expect, and I’m struggling a bit when Hank steps into the space behind me, his hands closing around my hips.
I freeze, painfully aware of his nearness. Of how my skin tingles when he’s so close.
His thumbs brush soft, maddeningly slow circles over my hipbones. Around. And. Around. Each revolution stirs the need inside me. Warm breath caresses my ear, sending chills skirting down my sensitized skin. “Here, baby, let me.”
And then he’s guiding me out of the way. Taking me to my desk and pressing me into it so for one fleeting second my thighs meet the edge. His fingers flex once, hard, and my body clenches, spilling liquid heat through my center.
“Hank.”
I’m waiting for him to pull my hips back, for the steely pressure of him against me. But instead he releases me, and when I turn around, he’s muscling my cabinet back from the wall. Saving my pen like the total hunk hero he is.
“BABE, ARE YOU okay?” Hank asks the next day, an urgency and concern in his tone that chips away at the anger I’ve been working up all week.
“Not really, Hank. I’m actually pretty steamed about—”
“Wait.” He cuts me off with a gruff laugh I feel deep in my belly. “You’re calling me for the first time in two months. Make that the first time in ten years, because you’re too mad to wait the extra eight and a half minutes for me to call you at nine… like I do every night?”
I blow out a long breath, but it doesn’t help. “Yes.”
“Okay, good to know.”
There’s the sound of papers shuffling in the background and then the soft thud of him dropping into his couch. His release of breath.
“Ready. So let me have it. Though in all honesty, Abby, I’m having some trouble figuring out what I’ve done in the last five hours since I saw you. Unless you’re miffed because I left too fast, and I did apologize, but I’d already pushed that meeting three times—”
“Enough, Hank,” I bite out. “It’s not because you left too quickly today.” He did come and go pretty fast. “It’s about what you did while you were there. What you’ve been doing more and more every time I see you.”
“Hmm.” It’s another one of Hank Wagner’s low rumbly sounds and damn it, I can feel my body reacting to it like I have no control whatsoever. “Explain.”
“You’re crossing all the lines, and you’re doing it on purpose.”
“I am.”
“Yes, you are.” My brow furrows. “Wait, are you agreeing with me?”
“It seems like a good strategy, but go ahead and lay it out for me so I can decide if maybe I shouldn’t.”
I blink at the phone, then shake my head.
“Last Wednesday it started with the hair-touching business. You know I told you I don’t want us to date again, but you have to take that one little step over the line of platonic anyway.”
“Yes.”
Again I’m looking at the phone because… yes? Just yes?
“Thursday, you carried my bag out to my car and then ran your fingers down my spine in that super-light way that ends way too low to be called friendly contact.”
“I did.”
Again, no question, no denial.
“Saturday, you touched my lips.” My brain short-circuited so fast with that soft graze of his fingertips, I don’t even remember how he managed it.
“You have an incredible mouth and I was missing it pretty bad.”
“Then yesterday with the pen business and that… that… way you had your hands on me.” Cripes. Already I’m getting wet thinking about it.
“Pretty sure that was legit. Wait, no, I did want to bend you over your desk… a lot. So there’s a good chance I wasn’t quite as good as I should have been.”
“And this afternoon? The smudge on my neck.” My belly’s tensing tight from thinking about the way he licked his thumb and then stroked it over the pulse point, rubbing back and forth, turning my knees to jelly and my mind to mush.
“Yeah, there wasn’t any dirt.”
“Hank!” I stalk from my living room into the kitchen and then back through to my bedroom. “How would you like it if I showed up at your work and started touching you like that?”
“Okay, Abby, let’s get a couple of things straight. You’re right—I have been taking liberties at your place of employment. But I would like to state that I am always cognizant of who is or, more importantly, isn’t around. Additionally, while I might hint at the bad behavior I’m aching—and Abby, I do mean aching—to indulge in, I never actually do anything that could get you in trouble. Even though every… single… time, Abby, you’ve given me those big blue eyes begging for just a little more.”
“I have not!”
All I get back from him is laughter, knowing and sure.
When he’s caught his breath and I’m a hairsbreadth away from driving into the city so I can strangle him, he adds, “But for the record, if you showed up here at my place of business, looking for any excuse you could find to touch me”—he sighs, and I can hear the hint of a smile behind it, feel the desire—“I would be ecstatic.”
I drop onto my bed as all that anger and indignation drifts away.
“You wouldn’t care if anyone saw us?”
“I’d care. But only because you do. Which is why I’d hit the switch to black the windows in here before I had the door locked behind you.”
I’ve seen pictures of Hank’s office from nights we were talking late. Texts he’s sent when I’ve asked about the space that he’s in. It’s incredible. Modern and sleek. Expansive and luxurious. It’s everything you’d expect for a man in his position.
So I have an idea of what it would look like to have him closing us into that room.
“Is it really that private? No one can see in… at all?”
“No one can see.” There’s a beat of silence. “Do you want me to tell you what I’d do with no one watching, beautiful?”
Do I? The pulsing heat between my legs says yes, but I know this is a dangerous game. It’s just another way to cross the next line between us, only this time he’s asking me if I want to do it. I know better, but— “Yes.”
Hank groans and I can’t tell if it sounds tortured or satisfied, or maybe a little of both.
“If you came to me, Abby, I’d forget about all the lines. I’d touch you like you belonged to me, kiss you like I never had to stop. I’d want to have you on my desk, but after waiting all this time, I need to get my mouth on you. So I’d press you against the wall by my door.”
My heart is pounding, my body on fire. It’s getting harder and harder to resist him. I’m not any closer to feeling comfortable with the idea of putting my heart out there again, not when I know Hank isn’t staying in Chicago. That his life is going to continue to take him to all the places I’m afraid to go. But that doesn’t mean the betraying organ hasn’t started beating its way closer to Hank’s way of thinking.
Pounding just a little harder every time I hear his name. Pumping all that extra blood into my cheeks every time I think about the way he looks at me. Skipping a beat when I turn around and find him standing there in the doorway to my classroom, like he was this afternoon. Making me wonder and, worse yet, wish—
“You’ve made me wait so long, baby, I’d need you to feel it. I’d kiss you hard, Abby. Wrap your hair in my fist, pull your head back so you were open to me. So I could take all the things you’ve been telling me I can’t have. All the things I’ve been going insane thinking about each night, too often during the day.”
My head drops back and my fingers tremble as they brush my lips. I can practically feel that hard pressure, the possessive claim. Maybe because his fantasy isn’t so far off from my own.
“But kissing you wouldn’t be enough, not by a long shot.” He pauses. “Are you still wearing that dress you had on today?”
I swallow, fingering the soft jersey. Wondering how far to go along. Wondering if it was even possible for me to pull back. Then a breathless “Yes” escapes before I find the answer.
“If you were at my office now, I’d be gathering up that skirt, sliding my hand up the back of your thigh and smoothing it over the curve of your perfect ass. I can practically feel your panties beneath my palm, baby. Feel how easily they slide out of the way so I can get to the wet heat beneath.”
“Hank.” This is going too far. I’m starting to squirm, but he doesn’t stop.
“You used to be so shy, but you aren’t so much anymore. So when I ask you to spread your legs for me, what will you say?”
“Y-yes,” I whisper, so far out of my comfort zone I can barely see my way back, so turned on I don’t even want to.
“Spread your legs for me and pull your panties to the side.”
I know we’ve taken a turn. The game has changed and what he’s saying is not in the abstract. It’s for him, for me, right now.
My legs part and I lie back, doing as he says.
“Are you open for me?”
Barely able to find the air for the words, I answer, “I am.”
“Christ, that’s so nice. I can imagine it and it’s driving me fucking crazy.” His voice is deeper, teasing me with every word he says. “If you’d come to my office, I’d be running my fingers across your lips, testing to see how wet you are. How ready.”
Oh God. I don’t know if I can do this.
“Tell me what you feel like.”
“I can’t,” I gasp, aroused and embarrassed and overwhelmed by what this man is doing to me.
“I think you can. I think you want to.”
My fingers dip between my spread legs and my breath catches.
“Abby.” His voice sounds strangled. “I can hear your breathing. Are you touching yourself?”
“Y-yes.”
“Tell me, baby.”
“I’m… wet.” So wet I can feel it leaking out of me. “Swollen and sensitive.” All of me is aching. For him.
“Christ, that sounds so nice. I’m rock hard. All I can think about is being inside you, hearing those little noises you make as you get close.”
My fingers are sliding around the spread of my sex and I’m coated in slick arousal. “Are you touching yourself?” I think about how he would look with his big hand wrapped around that steely shaft.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yesss.”
His breath chokes out and I hear rustling in the background. “I’m sitting on the couch in my office, my fly’s down and I’ve got my cock in my fist. I’m thinking about you straddling me, that purple dress up above your hips, your panties pulled to the side and your pretty pink pussy wet and tight and waiting… right there above me.”
“Oh my God, Hank.” My inner walls clench in vain.
“Do you want me inside you, baby?”
“So much.”
“Put your finger at your opening and slide it inside. Slow. Just a little at a time.”
I do what he says, moaning at the first hint of penetration, knowing I need more.
“Now sink deep, baby, then when you slide back out, I want you to paint a little circle around your clit for me before you do it again.”
“Mmm.” It feels so good, so different from when I’ve touched myself before. So much more intense. “Tell me, Hank.”
“I’m thinking about how wet you are right now, about your finger coated in your cream. About how bad I want to suck on it.” God, I can practically feel his lips around my fingers. “Taste you wanting me.”
“I want you.” My voice is shaky, weak.
“Baby, my cock is so hot in my hand right now. I’m moving up and down… I want it tighter… Add another finger.”
On the next thrust, I push another finger inside with the first, feeling my inner walls clamping around them. “It’s tight, Hank… feels so good.”
“Jesus, baby, I can hear you whimpering. Are you close?”
“Yes. You?”
“So close.” I can hear the strain in his voice, the hitch in his breath. I imagine him pumping over his shaft and it pushes me all the closer.
“Set the phone down next to your head. And play with your nipples.”
I reach into the front of my dress and begin to tease one bunched tip and then the other. A hard spasm rips through my center. “Hank!”
“Three fingers…”
“It’s so tight.”
“As deep as you can go…”
So good. “I-I’m so close.”
“Think about me pushing inside… stretching you… filling you…”
The pressure is building and building.
“Fucking you so hard.”
“Hank!” I cry out, tumbling over the edge and crashing into wave after wave of pleasure.
“Baby, I’m about to come… Christ… Abby, I—” He cuts off with a deep groan, and I nearly come again.
Together we catch our breaths and then Hank is back. “You okay?”
The perspiration on my skin is cooling, and I’m still reveling in the aftershocks of my orgasm.
“I’m so good,” I sigh, awed that the tension I’d been accumulating this past two weeks seems to be gone. “I can’t believe we did that.”
His laugh is dangerously sexy. “I can’t believe we had to. One of these days, sweetheart, you’re going to have to admit you’ve already crossed the line. And I’m not talking about a physical one.”
But that’s the thing. I can’t admit it. I can’t let myself give in to this man. Not the way he wants.