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Delaney’s eyes go wide. The supervisor goes gray and loses every drop of color he had left.
“You are dismissed,” I tell the man.
He lurches a step toward me, and one look from me roots him where he stands. “Sir, please, I can change. Give me one more chance.”
“I’m not the one you owe an apology.”
I loosen my hold on Delaney and bring her gently forward. The man turns to her, and even now, even here, he cannot help himself.
“I’m sorry,” he says to her, and then, in the same breath, “Now tell him. Tell him I’m a good manager.”
He still doesn’t understand a thing he did wrong. Delaney lifts her chin and says nothing whatsoever, and I have never wanted to keep a stubborn creature more than I do right now.
He reaches for her wrist a second time.
Sparing one of his arms was, it turns out, too generous of me. I drive my heel hard into his chest and send him sliding into a bar stool three feet back. The whole floor stops breathing at once.
“Take him out,” I tell Yuri.
Yuri hauls him up by the collar like a sack of wet trash.
“Please, one more chance, I’m begging you.”
Yuri claps a hand over his mouth and walks him off, and then he is simply gone.
Even the sharp-eyed young woman has gone still at her station. The whole floor is rattled down to its bones.
I turn to Delaney and drop my voice until it is only for her. “You are a great deal of trouble, solnyshko, you know that. This is twice now I have caught you off a floor.”
Color floods up her neck and into her ears. The same flush she wore under me last night. I tuck a loose strand of hair behind one of them, and my fingertip grazes the soft lobe on the way. Her breath catches, and I’m glad of the sound. She remembers my cock and my mouth as clearly as I do.
“You are finished working for the day,” I say.
“I can keep working,” she says quietly. “I’m fine, really.”
“I have no doubt that you can.” I let a beat pass between us. “That is not my point.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asks, wary now.
“Come and work for me instead. As my assistant. This place was never the right shape for a woman like you, and I want you where I can see you.”
She notices it then, the ring of burning stares closing around us, coworkers pretending to look busy.
“After that scene, you are the only thing this room will look at,” I go on, leaning in slow until her lower back meets the edge of the bar and she has nowhere left to retreat. “They will pick over who you go home to long before they ever let it go. Let me take you somewhere they cannot reach.”
She bites her lip, thrown by how plainly I have laid it out. “And what if I say no?” she asks, lifting her chin at me. Her defiance interests me far more than it should.
“Then try saying it,” I answer, and let my gaze fall to her mouth. My thumb drags across her lower lip the way it did last night before I filled her mouth, and I feel the exact moment she remembers it too. Her pupils go dark and wide.
Let the whole floor watch. She believes I’m offering her a job. What I’m building is smaller and far more complete than any job. I want her inside my office, under my eye and under my hands, every hour of every day. I want the line between working for me and belonging to me, body and all, to blur so slowly that she cannot find it, until at last she stops looking for it at all.
7
DELANEY
The refusal is right there on my tongue, and the damn thing will not come loose.
I stare up at him and try to decide whether he is insane or simply still half-asleep. A handful of hours ago I peeled myself off his cock and out of his arms while he breathed slow and even, certain I would never stand this close to him again. Now he has announced to an entire floor of my coworkers that I’m his new assistant.
