Chapter3
Ethan slipped out of his bed as carefully as possible, not wanting to wake Brianna up. The night had gone exactly the way he’d hoped it would, and in the morning she would find out that he wasn’t just someone else in the company she worked for; in the morning there would be a very important, but hopefully very short, meeting.
He padded into the living room and opened up his laptop, pulling up the documentation he wanted. He’d had it ready—not filled out, but prepared—for a few days, a back-of-the-mind sort of idea. He hadn’t known when he would need to bring it into use, but he had wanted to be ready just in case he found the right candidate for what he had in mind. He had built up an empire with the foresight to always be prepared for serendipity, and now—he was fairly certain—he would have another victory to add to his tally on that score, though it would be a deeply personal victory.
Ethan filled out the few spots in the paperwork that he had left empty for the time when he found the right woman, and sent the command to his printer to print them out. It shouldn’t take too much discussion to convince Brianna, and really—he thought—he was going to be offering her generous terms.
He’d been keeping an eye out for the past week as he’d come and gone from the office, looking for the right person for his needs, and when he’d met Brianna earlier in the evening, he’d been intrigued by her immediately—and that intrigue was only deepened by the events of the evening.
Ethan sat back on the couch, closing his eyes and remembering what it had been like to kiss her, how it had felt to be inside of her. She was hot—there was no question about that—and she was the best lay he’d had in months, if not years. He had no intention of letting talent like that go to waste if he didn’t have to.
Ethan stood when he heard the printer finish up the job he’d sent to it, and closed his laptop. He gathered up the paperwork and slid it into a manila folder, and took out a fine-point Sharpie to write Brianna’s name on the tab. He set it aside on a table between the kitchen and the living room, and took his phone off of the charging cable. Everything would—with any luck—be set up just right by the time Brianna woke in the morning.
Ethan opened up the UberEats app and scrolled through the different restaurants in the area willing to deliver to him; most of them were still open, even as late as it was. But he chose one that would be opening in a few hours, and pre-ordered a fairly generous breakfast for himself and Brianna: eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, a few odds and ends to go with those items. Coffee he would make himself.
It would, Ethan thought, make his proposition go down better. He sent a delayed-time message to his “fixer,” someone he’d hired about a year before out of whimsy, but who’d proven himself time and again to be useful and hardworking. Jon: get some flowers for my table, the Times, and a woman’s size 8 dress.
Jon would know that Ethan expected the items to be delivered no later than six-thirty; and Ethan knew that Jon would have a way to get his hands on a dress in Brianna’s size—he’d checked her tags between the rounds of sex—regardless of the fact that none of the shops opened before maybe nine at the earliest. Jon knew people.
He set it to go to his fixer at five-thirty to give the man an hour to make everything happen, and mentally went over his plan. It was a mixture of a long-term scheme and spur-of-the-moment inspiration. He hadn’t even known anything about Brianna—not even that she existed—until that night. But he’d been looking for someone exactly like her.
Ethan smirked slightly to himself, remembering the way she’d demanded an audition from him in order to decide whether or not she would stay the night. He’d known he wanted to take her home from the moment he’d proposed dinner to her—but that had been his audition for what he intended to propose to her in the morning. By the time she’d been in his living room, he’d already known that Brianna would suit his purposes perfectly; and then of course when he’d gotten her into his bed, it had been even more conclusive.
Ethan checked the time. It was nearly four in the morning, and he’d let himself drift off to sleep with Brianna at around midnight. He should get back to bed, and put the silent alarm on his wrist, make sure it was set to go off at six. That would give him time to get showered, get ready, and gather up the things that Jon would deliver to his doorstep by the time Brianna would be getting up at seven.
Of course, she’s going to be pleasantly surprised at the fact that she’ll have plenty of time to sleep in, in reality, Ethan thought with wry amusement. He would feed her breakfast, make the proposition, and then he had his own business to attend to the next day.
Ethan combed his fingers through his hair and set up his alarm, wrapping the band around his wrist. It would wake him up without waking Brianna—and he wanted time before she woke up to finish his preparations. He set the alarm on his phone and plugged it back in.
Ethan shut off the lights in the living room and went back into the bedroom where Brianna lay curled up under the blankets on his bed. He smiled to himself. With any luck, he would be seeing quite a bit more of her from then on out—and maybe he’d even be able to see her in his bed, if they could come to an understanding beyond his proposal to her.
Talent like Brianna’s was wasted on being single. Ethan carefully climbed back into bed, between the sheets, and shut off the lights in the bedroom from the console on his bedside table. Brianna shifted and murmured softly in her sleep, but didn’t wake, and Ethan settled in to get two more hours of sleep, thinking of just how he would put Brianna’s abilities and talents to good use.
As Ethan began to relax more and more thoroughly, drifting off, he spared a small moment to acknowledge the fact that Brianna would probably not be all that thrilled—at first—with what he had in mind. It was not, strictly speaking, all that ethical. It wouldn’t be without benefits to her, but Ethan was sure that wouldn’t occur to her right away. Ethan shifted under the blankets and let his mind drift, away from the subject of his proposal to Brianna and onto the memory of what their night together had been like.
He began to fall asleep, thinking of the tight, wet heat of her body wrapping around him, the sound of her moans, and the way she’d moved like a coiled spring against and underneath him. There would be quite a lot to explore, and through Ethan’s mind flashed ideas of just what he wanted to explore next, even as his thoughts slowed down more and more, spacing themselves out between periods of blank non-thinking. Between one thought and the next, he was fast asleep.