CHAPTER 8
Vaughn
I was still in my office, though I should have left an hour before if I wanted to miss the traffic getting back to Falls Church. Now I might as well just stay in my D.C. apartment for the night and head home for the weekend in the morning.
Natalie called a cheery goodbye and wished me a happy weekend. I wondered what I would have been like at her age if I hadn’t been Amory Vaughn. Would I have left work on Friday afternoon with nothing more pressing than what bar to go to, or who to go home with on my mind? I shook my head. I was being a grouch, not to mention showing my age.
My parents had died not long before I was Natalie’s age, so I’d been learning the ins and outs of the Vaughn Foundation, with the eyes of every board member on me, waiting for me to prove that it would be a mistake to leave the family holdings in my hands. I’d been learning how to live alone in the home I’d grown up in, every sound and movement seeming to echo in the emptiness they’d left behind. I hadn’t been out at bars. I hadn’t been out at all. Only Valerie had ever come to see me. Valerie and an endless parade of lawyers, investors, development officers, and financial planners.
With a sigh, I turned back to the Excel spreadsheet that had my eyes crossing, grumbling as I increased the magnification to two hundred percent, cells and numerals swimming on my computer screen. I’d spend one more hour attempting to make sense of this data and then I’d order sushi and sake to be delivered to my apartment so it’d be there by the time I arrived. I would eat, take a bath, and watch the DVRed episodes of Antiques Roadshow that I would deny enjoying to my dying breath. I held the pleasant evening up like a carrot for finishing the spreadsheet.
I’d just sunk back into it when my intercom buzzed.
“There’s a Mr. Fo—er, Agent Fox to see you, sir,” Margery said, and I smiled, imagining Will correcting her about his title. I added “stickler for protocol” to the ever-expanding list of things I was learning about Agent William Fox.
“Send him on up, Margery, thank you.”
This was progressing just as I had hoped. Calling cards, after all, could go both ways. It was a lesson that young James Novack, for one, hadn’t needed to be taught. The night of the art show opening, after I’d left William beset by Loel and waiting for a forensics team, my phone had chimed with a text from an unknown number. It had said Nice one. –Beltracchi.
How did you get this number? I’d replied, wondering if I should add pocket-picking, hacking, or wheedling to Novack’s growing résumé.
He’d responded with a winky face, and I’d found myself smiling in return. Ah, the next generation. I’d saved the number in my contacts, just in case.
I shook out my suit coat from where it hung inside my office door, and slid it back on, smoothing my white shirt more snugly into my trousers, and checking that my vest was buttoned properly. I checked the mirror. The fresco suit and vest were just a hair paler than navy, with a light blue stripe that looked silvery-gray, just like my hair. My crisp white shirt still looked fresh, even at five thirty on a Friday afternoon and I made a mental note to ask Darnell, my personal assistant, what brand of starch the dry cleaner had used, and to instruct them never to use anything else. The leather of my brown wing-tip oxfords and belt was buttery warm, the perfect complement to the blue suit. I nodded at myself in the mirror just as I heard the elevator ding.
The knock at my door was over-loud, aggressive.
“Come in,” I called, walking back behind my desk rather than opening the door. Let him come to me.
The first thing that came through the door wasn’t William though. It was a framed, stretched canvas. Rain on the Mountainside, the painting William had admired and I’d had delivered to his home. Will followed, looking distinctly rougher for a Friday afternoon than I did. I imagined he’d come straight from work and tried to reconstruct his journey, assuming he got off at five.
“William,” I said, gesturing him inside. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
He had been clutching the painting angrily, and now put it down, leaning it against the wall carefully, as if it were a baby he was dispensing with before getting in a fistfight. There was still the desk between us, and I came out from around it, drawn to the violence in him. The passion.
He stabbed an angry finger in the space between our chests. “You can’t manipulate me, so stop trying!”
“How is it you think I’ve manipulated you?”
He shot me an exasperated look, then gestured between me and Rain on the Mountainside.
“The painting? That was a gift. I didn’t steal it, I assure you. I bought it.”
“Well, I don’t want it.”
“No?”
“I—no.”
Liar. And not a very good one. Little practice, or little inclination? “That’s too bad. Hmm, I wonder if the student artist who painted it will take it back,” I mused, finger to my lips, watching him. He flinched.
“Damn you,” he bit off, and I smiled. I liked watching William Fox off-kilter. I liked that very much.
“Well, I’ll pay you for it, then.” He rooted around in his bag, exasperated, finally coming up with a checkbook. He glared at me but took a step closer so he could bend over the desk to write the check. He was wearing a gray suit today, identical to the black one I’d seen him in before, and the notion of William trying on a suit, deciding that it looked good on him, and then buying it in two different colors filled me with an unexpected tenderness. Followed by a powerful urge to take him shopping with me and show him what would actually look good on him. Black and gray were all wrong for him. Too stark, too cold. With his rich brown hair, amber eyes, and honeyed skin, he should be wearing browns and blues, rusts and hunter greens.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my fingers itched to get this steel gray suit off him for reasons beyond the purely aesthetic too. Bent over my desk, the curve of his ass was on display and the powerful muscles of his thighs bunched in the cheap fabric. I wanted to strip away everything that was in the way of seeing how he was put together—his strong spine and muscular shoulders, the curve of his neck and the cut of his hips.
He thrust the check at me, brows drawn together. “Don’t do it again.”
I purposefully pressed my fingers into his as I took the check, and I didn’t let him release it. “Do what, William? Buy you student artwork that you admired?”
“Don’t-don’t-don’t…” He shook his head in frustration, his irritation clear. I could work with irritation. One strong emotion would do just as well as another. “Don’t act like we’re close. Like you know me. Like you know what things I like and who I am. Because you don’t.”
“But I’d like to. I’d like to know who you are inside and out. I wanted to see you again.”
I’d banked on the same spark that had flared to life in my study after Val’s wedding reigniting, if I could just get William close to me again.
I let go of the check then and it fluttered to the floor at our feet. Will glared at me, eyes wide, cheeks flushing. He stooped and snatched the check up, slapping it down on the desk and whirling back around to face me.
“You think that you can do anything, get away with anything, because you’re rich and privileged and handsome,” he spat out, though his lip twitched at “handsome,” suggesting he hadn’t meant to include it in his list of offenses. “But it doesn’t work that way. Eventually, things catch up with you. Eventually, you make a mistake and give the game away. Eventually, you get caught. And I’m going to be there when you do.”
He’d closed the distance between us and I could smell him: inexpensive aftershave and soap, and a hint of stale, after-work sweat clinging to his clothes. It was the smell I imagined was associated with the first kiss after a lover walked in the door. The kiss that said, I’m so happy to be done with work and home, here, with you. The kiss that said, I’ll go change and then we can start our evening together. The kisses I’d thought about enough that they felt real, but never actually had.
“You’re here now,” I murmured, mostly to myself. I’d lost the thread of the conversation a bit, distracted by thinking about William coming home to…me. I wasn’t sure where the thought had come from. I wasn’t the coming-home-to type, or so I’d been told by enough lovers I assumed they must be onto something.
But William’s eyes were narrowed and his color was high and his breath was audible. Either he was about to hit me, or—
The kiss hit me like a fist, and I had to grab him around the shoulders to keep from pitching backward under the onslaught. I allowed myself the briefest moment of victory that my plan had worked, and then I sank into the kiss. His mouth had the slightly sharp bite of coffee, but that gave way almost immediately to the warm caramel taste that was Will’s alone. It was sugar and heat and richly turning leaves and I opened my mouth, desperate for more of it.
Will grabbed me and slid his hand up my back beneath my suit coat, trying to pull my shirt out of my pants without breaking the kiss and failing.
“God, of course you’re wearing a fucking vest,” he muttered, and his magnificent mouth was nearly a pout.
“Shall I take it off, William?”
He rolled his eyes and nodded impatiently. I took off my coat and unbuttoned my vest, keeping my eyes on his the whole time. Those wonderful amber eyes that were by turns suspicious and warm. Right now they were lit with the twin fires of arousal and anger, and I decided on the spot that an angry and turned-on William Fox was a great William Fox.
I shrugged out of my vest and he went for my shirt, pulling it up and over my head without unbuttoning it, swearing when the sleeves got caught at my wrists. I hadn’t expected this. The way wanting something made him careless, indelicate.
Finally he pulled my shirt off and I made a mental note that I’d need at least two buttons sewn back on it later. Then Will came at me again and we were stripping each other thoughtlessly, wordlessly, our clothes mixing together on the floor of my office as Will shoved a pre-lubed condom into my hand and turned away from me, bracing himself on the edge of my desk and—Jesus—offering himself to me. Tilting his gorgeously muscled ass up to me, the gesture as aggressive an order of Fuck me as the words would have been.
I took a moment to sear the sight before me into my mind forever. William Fox, muscular arms rigid before him, shoulder blades spreading like wings, legs just wide enough apart for me to see the delicious darkness between them.
I must have waited a beat too long because Will looked over his shoulder at me. Glared, really. And for just a moment I saw the uncertainty in his eyes. Naked fear that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t want him.
Which was absolutely unacceptable.
I groaned as I closed the distance between us in one step, and ran a hand up his spine to his neck and into his thick hair, damp at the nape. I pressed one kiss there, where hair gave way to hot skin, another to the center of his spine, a third and a fourth to the dimples on either side of the cleft of his ass, lightly furred with soft, dark hair.
“You’re exquisite, William. A work of art.”
That, perhaps, was a slight miscalculation. While his eyes had softened at “exquisite,” at “art,” he snorted and dragged me forward to him, the message of speed clear.
“Well, you can’t steal me,” he said roughly. “And you can’t buy me. So you better hope I’m not a work of art, or I doubt you’d know what to do with me.”
I cursed myself for my clumsy speech, but smirked at Will. “I know exactly what I’m going to do with you,” I said, pleased that my voice sounded as confident as ever.
“Oh yeah?” Will ground out, getting back into the spirit of things when I rubbed two fingers against his glorious hole.
“Oh yes.” I kept rubbing him and bent to lick his ear. “I’m going to fuck you on my desk. And then I’m going to think about how you screamed for me every single time I sit at it.”
I was so hard it hurt and I ground my erection against Will’s naked ass to punctuate the sentiment. He groaned shakily as I pressed into him.
“On Monday morning,” I said into his ear as I reached around and took him in hand. He cried out, knuckles white where he grabbed the desk. “I’m going to sit there and imagine you just like this. Legs spread, open and begging for me.” I licked a stripe up the side of his throat.
“I’m not…begging…” Will gasped, and I smiled against his damp skin.
“No,” I conceded. “No. Not yet.”
I replaced my fingers with my cock, then and took his hips in my hands. I loved this moment. The moment just before penetration, when everything was still swirling arousal, yet to coalesce into the muscular pleasure of thrust and stroke, clench and slide. The moment when I was not yet as close as I knew I was about to be.
Only for once, I did feel that close. I held William’s lean hips in my hands, and smelled his skin, and saw the scattered freckles on his shoulder blades, and I felt a rush of connection, as if I’d seen him this way before, though it was impossible. I dropped my head down, forehead against his spine, limned with sweat. Then I slid my hands down to cup his ass, giving him a squeeze for good measure, and spreading him wide for me. This time I paused to feel the tension running through William’s frame, the gentle tremors of anticipation.
“Please,” he whispered, every muscle tensed. “Come on.”
“I told you you’d beg me,” I growled, and I bit his earlobe—just a nip. Just a reminder of who was in charge. He groaned and I slid inside him in one powerful thrust that left me lightheaded and pulled a tremulous whine from Will.
I fucked him and he fucked back into me, his earlier anger and irritation channeled into pleasure-seeking. It was aggressive and messy and inelegant and so very much more than I had ever imagined it might be.
And I had imagined it.
When Will began to slide up the desk with the power of my thrusts, I wrapped my left arm around his chest, holding him up so I could continue pounding into him, and grabbed his heavy erection with my right hand, stroking it, then rolling his balls, which made him cry out and throw his head back in pleasure. He would’ve broken my nose if I’d been one second slower in reacting, but once his head was on my shoulder, I kissed his exposed throat just once, and then let slip the dogs of war.
I slammed into him and he shook around me, crying out my name in a voice that was nothing like what I’d heard from him but would live in my mind whenever he spoke, a relic stored away like something precious, even if I was the only one who knew it was there.
“Are you gonna come for me, William?” I asked, voice gone rough and low.
“Gonna…come,” he gasped, and I could see just enough of his face to see his eyes were squeezed shut tight. “But not…for you,” he added.
Stubborn, William. I would have laughed, had every molecule of my being not been in pursuit of my orgasm, hovering just on the other side of a few final thrusts.
I grunted, grabbed his dick, and jerked him, driving into him so hard he slammed into the desk. I felt him start to come, muscles gone tight, insides quivering on the edge, mouth opened in a silent scream. I reached down and pressed a finger to the tip of his dick, then gave him one final stroke, and his come spattered the side of my desk and ran down my fist as I unloaded inside him, pleasure shooting white-hot through me.
When I came to a few moments later, limbs still shaky, I had my cheek pressed to Will’s sweaty back, my hand still curled protectively around his dick. I dropped a light kiss on his shoulder as he pulled away to stand.
He dressed in silence, seeming almost shy in the way he wouldn’t quite meet my gaze. I pulled my underwear and shirt back on, but left the rest. I had spare clothes in the closet.
William lingered at the door. I’d thought if I could just get him near me—or under me—that things could progress from there. But rather than wishing to take him out to a restaurant or a show, I found myself wishing he would come back to my apartment with me, order sushi—or whatever he wanted—and do this all again. In the time it took me to have the thought, though, Will had slid his shoes back on and grabbed the painting from its still-safe spot on the floor.
“I guess I’ll…” He gestured to the door.
“Hey.” I stepped close so that our chests were touching. Finally, he made eye contact. His amber eyes weren’t hostile like they had been when he first showed up, but that wariness was back in place. “Hey,” I repeated, “William. Have dinner with me.”
He shook his head and looked down.
“All right. If not tonight, then when are you free?”
“I’m not going on a date with you.”
It was measured, considered, final. “Why not?”
“Because.” This time when he met my eyes they were cold with judgment. “You’re a liar.” And he pulled the door firmly shut behind him.