Nadine grabs my arm as I pour over all the accounts.

“Celia is on her way. Can you do the orientation at ten-thirty?”

“Yeah, sure. You really think it was a good call to postpone just for her? Won’t that give her…?”

I realize suddenly what Nadine is doing.

I make a hissing sound. “Damn, Nadine, you’re cold.”

“I don’t have time to discipline her, Hunt,” she says. “Let the other interns do that. If she can’t handle that, then she’s not cut out for this.”

“And if she can handle it?” I ask.

“Then I can hire her without worrying that it’s favoritism.”

“So no special treatment?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “None at all. If anything, go harder on her.”

“She knows that you are marrying me, righ—”

“Shit,” Nadine says. “I was going to tell her just before I told the office staff, but she was late…”

I laugh. “So you want me to just drop that on her? Hey, I’m your stepdad, by the way.”

Nadine shakes her head. “I’m sure she’s found out by now. I don’t really care, it’s her fault for being late.”

“You’re a terrible mother,” I say, laughing.

Nadine locks eyes with me. Her face is coldly neutral, but I can tell I hurt her.

“Hey,” I say, “Sorry, I—”

“You were joking,” she says. “It’s fine. Let’s get through these accounts.”

I nod, but make a mental note not to joke about her parenting skills again. It’s an understandably sore spot for her.

The time flies by. It feels good to be working again, and I realize I’m going to be working some long fucking nights. I’ll have to really work in overdrive to carve out some time for Elise. To fuck her brains out again, with my hands on that tiny little waist, her full lips parted and—

“Hunt?” Nadine says. “You hear me?”

I look up. “Yeah, the orientation.”

“You sure about this idea?”

“I’m sure,” I say. “You ever make fresh ricotta cheese?”

“God, no,” she says. “Why would I do that?”

I shrug. “Once I save your ass, you should really take some time off work to enjoy the finer things, Nadine. When you make ricotta, you pour some vinegar into the milk as you heat it—”

“Spare me the metaphor, Hunt. Just do it.”

I start to walk off, but I stop in the doorway. “Oh, Nadine?”

“Yes?”

“If Celia doesn’t keep up, are you sure you want me to—”

“No special treatment for her,” Nadine says, her voice icy and sharp.

I don’t comment this time.  

I walk out of Nadine’s corner suite and into the main bustle of the office. Everyone stops what they are doing to look up at me.

I glare at them, and without even saying a word, they all get back to work. A silent wolf is scarier than a barking dog.

I shove the doors to the conference room open and walk straight to the front of the room—to the head of the table. There are a dozen interns seated at the table and more tucked away in chairs near the door where I entered. I don’t look at any of them yet, I simply stand at the head of the table and look down at the conference table.

“Why are you here?” I ask without looking up.

I’m met only with silence.

“Anyone?”

“To learn?” a male intern’s voice asks.

I look up to lock eyes with him, but something else catches my eye. Elise.

She’s seated in one of the chairs in the back. Her face is ghostly white, and her wide blue eyes are locked onto me. Her mouth is hanging open.

I can suddenly feel every milliliter of blood pumping through my veins—icy cold—and I can hear it rush from my heart up through my ears where it starts thumping loudly. I summon every last ounce of discipline in me to not show my surprise, and I tear my eyes away from Elise to look at the intern who spoke.

Even as I pull my eyes off her, she’s burned into my brain. A white button-up shirt and a black skirt. I couldn’t see her legs, but I imagine the stockings hugging the soft and supple skin of her thighs. I imagine myself pulling the stockings off her, peeling them away to get to the warmth at her center.

But fuck, she’s an intern here. Nadine told me not to give her daughter any special treatment, but she didn’t say anything about the other interns, and there’s no way I can go hard on Elise. Well, I’ll go hard on her in bed, just not in the office.

“To learn…” I say, stalling for time.

I step closer toward him. He’s at the back of the table, and getting closer to him brings me closer to Elise. She’ll be the next person I target. I want to see her squirm. I realize I’m going to see her every day now. She’ll interfere with my work, but fuck, I always liked a challenge.

“Yes, sir,” the man says. I look at his nametag.

“What else, Hugo? We’re expending all these resources on all of you just out of the goodness of our hearts? Just so you can learn? What are you going to offer us?”

I’m tempted to look up at Elise now, but the image of her is still fresh and too tempting in my mind. I’ll let her stew a bit longer.

“Well,” Hugo says, “we’ll do whatever you want us to.”

“So trained monkeys?” I ask.

“It’s an unpaid internship, man,” another guy’s voice breaks out from the back. “Free labor for you.”

I look up at him, and Elise is now in the corner of my vision. It takes every last ounce of my willpower to not look at her now. But not yet.

“So you think you’re going to just get coffee?” I ask. “Make copies? Do bullshit grunt labor in exchange for a pat on the back and a good letter of recommendation? You know why I’m here, don’t you? Sencorp is failing. The ship is sinking. How many of you just want to get off right before it goes under, and how many of you want to help me save it?”

Silence.

Now.

I look right at Elise, and I lock eyes with her.

She’s fucking shivering, trembling. Why is she this shaken? I don’t care why, I grin and move closer to her. I have to pretend to read her nametag before I call her by name.

I lean closer in. I start to move my lips to form her name, but then I see her actual tag.

Celia Haze.

Celia. Nadine’s daughter. My fucking stepdaughter.

I freeze mid-stride.

Elise’s voice from last night rings through my mind—clear as a bell—”Everyone calls me Elise. Except my mom.”

Holy shit. I couldn’t have asked her what her Mom called her before I buried my cock inside her? Before I took her virginity?

I realize I’m just standing there, my mouth hanging wide open. I force myself to regain my composure.

I can’t deal with her right now. I have to get through this. I look at the nametag of the girl sitting right next to Elise, and pretend I was moving toward her.

“Haley,” I say. “Are you going to try to save this ship from sinking?”

Haley looks up at me and licks her lips. “Yes, sir. I’ll be right by your side, ready to do whatever you tell me.”

She flashes me a look. A look I know all too well. I ignore her completely.

I was going to drag this out a lot longer, but I’m too shaken. I fucked my virgin stepdaughter. Well, technically she wasn’t my stepdaughter yet. I realize I have to let her go. I have to pretend it never happened. I have to tear her memory out of my brain. Excise it. But I’m close enough to smell her now, and forgetting her taste is going to be a tall order.

“I’ll cut right to it,” I say. “I want all of you to give me an idea. You have an hour.”

“An idea for what?” someone at the table asks.

“To save the company,” I say.

“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Hugo asks.

“Yes,” I say. “But I don’t do this on my own. I manage the resources available to me to reach that goal. You are all my resources. And unpaid or not, you eat up company time. If the idea you bring me isn’t good, I’m letting you go.”

“You’re going to fire us from an unpaid job?” someone asks.

“Yes,” I say. “So give me your best ideas if you don’t want to get shit-canned.”

I walk right out of the conference room door, forcing myself not to look back at Elise. At Celia.

I’m still reeling when Nadine takes hold of my arm.

“How’d it go?”

I steady my breathing before looking at her. I can’t let her see that I’m shaken.

“Good,” I say. “They know the stakes.”

“Did you introduce yourself to Celia?”

I inhale deeply through my nose, then say in a calm voice, “I will after work. Like you said, no special treatment.”

I gave the interns full access to everything. It’s totally against protocol, but the company is going to fail anyway, and I need people who can quickly process large amounts of data to come up with solid solutions.

I pour over everything again myself, mostly to get my mind off of Elise. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do, all I know is that I can’t fuck her again.

I can’t…right?

I always told myself I liked a challenge, but this is a bit more than I bargained for.

I rub my eyes and bury myself into analyzing the information on my screen.

China is the most obvious problem I can see. Given a full hour, I’d expect at least some of the interns to recognize that.

I bite my lip and make a decision. If Elise can’t identify that, I’ll cut her. Fire her. It would make at least part of this situation easier.

The hour passes by quickly, and when I step back over to the big tables where the interns and their laptops are all situated, I see Elise buried in her screen, typing furiously. She looks up at me as I approach, and smiles at me seductively. The white-faced shock and horror has disappeared, and she’s eyeing me up and down like she wants my cock in her. It makes me want to throw her onto the table and bury myself into her from behind, to—

I look away. I have to stop thinking like that. There’s no way I can have her again, not now that I know.

“I’m going to call you into the conference room one by one,” I say. “You each will have two minutes to pitch your idea to me. I recommend you get straight to the point. I’m not your fucking philosophy professor. I see straight through bullshit. Who’s first?”

“Me,” Elise says, shutting her laptop and standing up. “I’m ready, sir.”

My throat goes dry. Me and Elise alone in a room for two minutes. The things I could do to her in just two minutes. Could I make her cum in that time? I bet I could.

No. She needs to pitch her idea to me. Or she’s gone.

I wave her into the conference room. Her hips sway as she walks, and she stares me down as she approaches me. I hold the door for her, and when she steps past me, I smell her hair, and every moment of last night flashes through me in a rush. It’s like heroin going straight into my fucking system, and I squeeze the door handle until my veins bulge. Her scent lingers as she passes, and I shut the door behind me.

“Hunter,” she says.

“Mr. Thorn,” I say, my back pressed against the door.

Elise leans back onto the conference table. She sticks her chest out and presses her hands back onto the table. Her whole body leans back, as if she’s ready to submit to me.

“What if you fucked me here,” she says, “on this table—”

“I’m your stepfather now,” I say, my voice tense. “We can’t do that. Ever again.”

“I figured it out,” she says. “There’s no way you actually have feelings for Mom. I already have a father, Mr. Thorn, so there’s no reason you have to be anything more to me than what we were last night.”

She licks her lips and undoes the top button of her blouse.

I’m tempted to reach out to her. To take her up on her offer to fuck her raw on the conference table. She is wearing black stockings—I could just tear a hole in them to save time.

“You don’t mean it,” she says. “You know we have to do it again, Mr. Thorn.”

I look up at the clock. “You have one minute left, Elise. If your idea is bad, I’ll fire you.”

“You’d fire me?” she asks, undoing another button.

“I will,” I say. “I hope you didn’t waste your hour trying to figure out why your mother married me.”

“That only took me about five minutes,” Elise says. “I made good use of the rest of my time.”

“Your idea,” I say. “Give it to me.”

“Oh,” she says, flashing me an evil grin. “I’ll give it to you alright—”

“Forty-five seconds.”

“It looks like several upper-level managers, and even some of the board,” Elise says, “have kickback deals with Chinese manufacturers. As far as I can tell, the factory owners in Shenzhen use part of the money to bribe our people, then they pocket another fat chunk, and finally they use the remaining ten to twenty percent to ship us shoddy, substandard garbage. We’ve had one factory ship us steel beams with welding so bad that we had to redo the order three times—”

“Enough,” I say. “What is your solution?”

She’s good. Really good. She dug deeper than I expected any of the interns to. She not only identified China as the problem, but the assholes within Sentech who are profiting while the company goes under.

“Sack the offenders within Sentech,” Elise says.

“And where do we get our steel beams from?”

“Estonia.”

I laugh. It’s the exact solution I came up with. And it took me much longer than an hour.

“What?”

“Good girl,” I say. “Very good.”

She starts to undo another button, but I look at the clock.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Time is up, you have to get out. You can’t let anyone think I’m giving you special treatment.”

She grins wide. “Not in the office, at least, right Mr. Thorn?”

“Out,” I say. “Now.”

The moment her last button is fastened, I grab her arm and pull her off the table.

Her scent overwhelms me, and she falls into me, pressing her full breasts against me. Her hair grazes my forearm.

I push her away.

“Don’t be so mean, Mr. Thorn,” she says, pouting.

“Out,” I say, though I can barely breathe after touching her. “You’re safe. Send in the next intern. And get me a list of people you’d sack.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

I open the door, and when she steps out, the tension in the room lingers. It’s so thick it’s almost vibrating.

Fucking hell. There’s no way I can keep my hands off her.