Screw common sense.

Honestly, I should push Ben off and scream at him to go away. I’d draw the attention of all the people—reporters, co-workers, and opposing side alike—all around the corner, just waiting for the next juicy sound bite.

But I want to bite Ben. I want him, here and now, when my anger and oppression can be unleashed and I can forget about what I know, what I have to do. I don’t have to think about the past and how Ben broke my heart, or the resulting betrayal. I’m a woman. Ben wants me now. I want sex. Hot, scorching, soul-crushing sex, and I can just be for once.

I hate him. I despise him because I loved him. And I’ll always want him.

I pull away from his delicious, earthy taste for mere seconds to say, “Follow me.”

Ben’s eyes, a miraculous blue-green, are fogged and unfocused. “Huh?”

“I know where to go.”

“Here? Now?”

I throw a look over my shoulder as I’m walking, as if to say, You’re hesitating now?

Ben answers by placing a hand on my middle back and propelling us forward.

We take the back stairwell, and he crushes me against the wall a few times, kissing, sucking, nipping, and it takes strength to push away and continue our ascent.

So many attorneys take secret smoke breaks in these stairwells, or use them as short-cuts when they’re late for a hearing or trial. Too risky.

When we reach the floor I want, I tell him to halt and be quiet, poke my head through, and see we’re alone.

Still, to be sure, I keep our steps quiet over the carpeting, past the empty paralegal’s desk, and sneak into a side room.

Ben takes in the large, wooden, desk, the open closet of black robes, the amount of books and the single couch and says, “Is this what I think it is?”

“Judge Morcrest’s chambers.” I lay my lips on his, and he groans into my mouth.

“This is…you could lose your job for this,” he says.

“He’s on vacation. Nobody’s coming in or out of here for another week. And…” I peel away to flick the lock. “There’s that.”

“I’ve never fucked in a chamber before.”

I smile. Wickedly. “Neither have I.”

“What’s gotten into you? I thought we were in a fight.” Ben seems to second-guess his question, because he shuts out any response with a kiss and pulls my blazer off my shoulders, locking my arms behind my back.

“You decided to substitute our argument for sex,” I say against his lips. I can’t move, with my arms at my sides, but he takes advantage by biting my jaw line, kissing my neck, and taking my earlobe into his mouth.

“Or add to it.” His voice and breath against my skin sends shivers to all the right places.

“Prove it,” I say, my eyes cast to the ceiling. “I want you to fuck me. Hard.”

Ben lifts from my neck, presumably to study my answer, but I don’t want him to.

“Are you—”

“I’m sure, Ben. I’m fucking sure. Now take off your pants already.”

Before—when it had meant something—he’d been gentle. Sweet. I don’t want to remember that. I want Ben hard and ready and disaffected.

This isn’t love.

It’s forgetting with pleasure.

Ben lets go of me long enough to pull off his shorts—no boxers—and toss them somewhere to the right. I’m too busy drinking him in to notice if it draped over a lamp or a first edition George Orwell.

He’s as lengthy and gorgeous as I remember. And unfortunately, I can’t use my hands to explore him.

I make the mistake of meeting Ben’s eyes, which contain too much emotion for me to want to decipher.

He says, “Astor…”

“No more words, Ben. No strings, no consequences. Okay?”

Ben hesitates, like he’s unsure whether we should make the same mistake again. But he’s not dealing with a naive, clueless, twenty-year-old anymore.

I tip my chin up in challenge. “You have me restrained. What are you going to do now?”

Like liquid fire, his eyes go molten.

Ben closes the gap and goes straight for my skirt, unzipping it roughly as I continue to stare him down. It pools at my feet, my heels spearing it as I regain balance. Ben looks down, sees the black lace of my underwear, and smiles.

One by one, he undoes the buttons on my shirt, exposing a matching, scalloped lace bra. He peels the lace back, but leaves the underwire where it is, so my breasts are exposed and pert, nipples instantly hard as they hit the cool air.

Ben goes to his knees. I close my eyes and tip my head back in anticipation, and when I feel his tongue around my hip-bone, I moan in acquiescence.

The tearing sound, the sudden yank and jerk, have my eyes popping open.

“Ben—“

He stands, my flimsy underwear in his teeth. I open my mouth to communicate my approval, but he doesn’t give me time. He flips me around and bends me over the arm of the couch.

“You want a quick fuck?” he asks behind me. I hear the sounds of crumpling and unwrapping, and spend a few wasteful seconds wondering when he scrounged around for a condom before answering.

“Yes.”

“You want it rough?”

I don’t hesitate. “Yes.”

His next statement is in the form of a thrust. I cry out before he reaches around and presses my underwear to my mouth to muffle anything else.

I’m bent over the arm of the couch, my face is mashed against the velvet cushion as he pounds, my arms are still encased in my blazer’s restraints.

I’ve never, in my life, been so turned on.

I feel every inch of him against the walls I’ve erected, both mentally and physically. My mouth pools with saliva as I forget to swallow around the lace, but my vocal cords do all the heavy lifting.

Words are pointless, useless, so I moan and wriggle and try to take him deeper. Ben’s hands cup my hips and squeeze, the sounds of our skin smacking like our own musical accompaniment to a sexual percussion.

“Astor…fuck…I’m gonna…”

Guess I’m not the only insanely horny one in this moment.

I can’t speak. Instead I close my eyes in bliss and arch my back, letting him know I’m getting there, too.

Faster, harder, he plunges, and I feel him all the way to my heart. But—forget that—focus on the pleasure.

Focus on his dick.

Inside me. Wet from me. About to spill—

Ben groans at the same time I reach my cliff’s edge.

We fall together, he and I, and when I’m catching my breath, when he’s pulling out of me, I wonder how it’s possible to feel so connected to a man who touched me with nothing but his cock during sex.

There was no stroking, no sighing, nothing to indicate anything other than a calculated, baseless fuck. He wasn’t on top of me, I wasn’t on top of him. We didn’t watch each other as we came.

So why, then, does this feel like so much more?

I spit out my panties and straighten, noticing my nipples feel a little raw from scraping over couch fabric over and over again. My own fucked up version of a hickey, I suppose.

“You get what you want out of that?” Ben helps pull my blazer all the way off, and I resist the urge to turn and fall into his hold, to catch my breath on his chest, feel his heartbeat in my ear.

“And then some,” I say over my shoulder as I bend down for my skirt.

He backs away without a word, and slips on his shorts as I’m pulling on my shirt. His cheeks are flushed like he just ran a few yards, and when he catches me looking, I’m thinking he’s up for another round.

“I can’t,” I say before my vagina betrays me.

Ben scrapes a hand through his hair. “Okay.”

I follow up with an even better line. “I have to go.”

“I may have to come with you,” he says, and at my questioning look, he adds, “I don’t know how the hell to get out of here.”

“I can show you a private exit,” I say. “You ready?”

“Sure.”

If he’s dubious over this after-sex talk, he’s not showing it, a habit from his slutty days that I appreciate.

When we’re taking the stairs, there’s a few moments where I swear I feel his hand hovering near my back, but he never makes contact.

“I’m still worried about you,” Ben says. “Chavez was making a point, coming to you instead of anyone else.”

“He won’t hurt me,” I reply with confidence. “Since I finally have what he wants.”

“And what’s that?”

We round for another flight of stairs down, but Ben’s attention won’t divert away from me.

“You don’t want to know,” I say.

“I’m here, aren’t I? Clearly, I do.”

“You made it clear last night, and this morning”—don’t think about his mouth don’t think about his mouth—“that you want to be as far away from this case as possible.”

“I said I want you to be—”

“I can find Ryan, okay?”

Ben comes to a sudden halt, and I have to backtrack up a few steps to meet him.

“Astor,” he says, in that low, snarling tone of his, “I thought I told you not to do that.”

“Yes, because I always submit to what you say.” I peel my lips back at my own realization. “What just happened up there not withstanding.”

But Ben doesn’t follow up with a predicted snipe. He’s too busy trying to read my expression, drinking in any wayward clues.

“Nah,” he says at last. “You don’t know where to find him.”

“Uh, what gives you that impression?”

“I just know.”

With infuriating ease, he brushes by me. “Where’d you say that exit was?”

“That’s it?” I say to his retreating back, my voice echoing in the stairwell. “You find me, fuck me, and now that you’ve got whatever answer you wanted, you’re gone?”

Ben spins around on the bottom step. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Find, finger, fuck, forget. In that order.”

I catch my breath at the unexpected, jarring hurt in the pit of my stomach—the one spot I can’t harden. “It’s how we both feel, Ben. Why complicate it?”

“You always think you know everything.” Ben takes a few steps closer to where I’m standing. “How I feel, how you need to feel, what the Delaneys went through, what could happen to Ryan if you put him up on display for everyone to see.” When Ben’s one step below me, he stops, so we’re eye-to-eye. “You may know a lot, Astor, but you need to learn to fucking care.”

The last time he was this close, I was sucking his tongue out of his face. Now, all I can fathom is punching it down his throat. “Don’t you dare presume to understand what’s in my head.”

“That’s the sad part,” he says, without even a blink. “I’m well aware of all the poison in your brain.”

I suck in a breath—

“Your mom’s death,” he cuts in. “Breaking up with Mike. Me. Experiencing sudden love for Lily in a way that fucking terrifies you, because you’ve never loved something like that before. Not since your mom. Watching Locke fall in love and becoming happy. Not even your brother got that much love from you—”

I rear back to slap him but he catches my wrist.

“The truth hurts,” he says without breaking our stare. I’m furious that my vision’s gone hot and blurry. “It’s meant to. Reality’s no fucking cakewalk.”

I can barely talk through the blind emotion. “You can’t possibly understand…”

“I understand a lot more than you think,” Ben says quietly. “But I see you, Astor. I see you. And you can build all the castle walls around yourself as high as you need. You can have me fuck you from behind all you want. I’m still going to know the heart that’s inside. And this—exposing someone who’s already escaped from Hell—that’s not you.”

I swallow, covering the earthquake going on inside. “Get out of my way.”

Ben stands firm.

I say, “You’ve said your piece. Now let me continue on with my day.”

“Don’t do this, Astor.”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t—”

“No, fuck you,” I spit out. “You don’t get to stand here and count all the ways I’m an asshole and come out clean. You screw around all over town and don’t care how many hearts you break. You certainly didn’t give a shit about mine. You’re covered in burns and you won’t say why. You won’t talk about your real parents, you won’t confide in anybody, ever, about anything you’re feeling. You’re a big, bad football player, right? You don’t need a soul. You don’t give a shit about anything but pigskin and team colors.” I lean in close to say, “And yeah, I like being fucked from behind, because it’s a whole lot better than fucking a stranger face-to-face.”

When I pass him, I make sure not to touch any part of him.

“If this conversation has taught me anything,” I say as a parting shot, “It’s to talk to Ryan myself and give him a chance to see what he wants to do. Before I go to my boss, before I loop in anyone else. Not that you wanted to ask me about that part. You just assumed I’d erect a flag outside my office with his goddamned home address in capital letters.”

“Astor, wait.”

I don’t bother with a response. Instead, I slam my heels harder into the concrete steps as I leave. I hope I burst his fucking eardrums. I’m trying my damndest not to use my stiletto as a murder weapon.

“It’s me.”

I freeze, my hand clenching on the railing. I want to, I try to, but I can’t turn around.

“It’s me, Astor,” Ben repeats, and it’s with the most hollow tone that he adds, “I’m Ryan Delaney.”