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  I winced at the friction — he hadn’t taken any time to prepare me, and I hadn’t come in here all lubed up and ready for action — but my body quickly adapted, slicking the way as he thrust upward, widening to accommodate his girth.

  I tried to get him to look at me, to make eye contact with me, to reveal what he was feeling and why he was feeling it, but he had his face buried between my breasts, sucking the fragile skin on either of them until it bruised.

  Then, he was suddenly and brutally done, holding me still as he strained against me, filling me and leaving me empty at the same time, shoving me up and off of him even as his own essence ran down the inside of my thighs.

  “Get dressed,” he muttered at me without so much as looking at me. “Take better pride in your appearance.”

  It was all I could do to pull on my dress and zip it up without bursting into tears. I fled to the washroom, locking the door behind me, and stared blindly into my reflection as I cleaned Peter’s stickiness from my legs.

  Something was really, really wrong. If this was a game, I didn’t want to play it anymore. Work was feeling more like a battle zone than anything. I’d shown up these past two days not knowing who the bad guy was. If I’d done something wrong, I wished Peter could’ve let me know like a normal human being instead of humiliating me sexually. This was a power struggle. I could recognize that even if I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it. I’d somehow done something to make him feel like he’d lost a kind of control. But he obviously wasn’t interested in talking about it like a regular person.

  What could I have done to make him react like this? What had happened?

  I didn’t have to peer into his office once I left the washroom to discern whether he’d left for the day. I knew he was gone. There was no way he could’ve been in the same building as me after what he’d done, finding his own pleasure in me without consideration for how I felt. Where was the tender man who’d washed my feet after I’d marched across block after city block, frightened and angry that he was using me for sex?

  That same man really was using me for sex, now. My fears had been true after all. I was just a hole in which he could relieve whatever bad feelings had built up. A receptacle. Something he could discard emotionally after sating himself physically.

  The next morning, I didn’t even want to come in to work. Perhaps that was how I should’ve known the honeymoon was over. Peter had gotten tired of me and was possibly trying to push me away. Perhaps I should just go without a fight, slinking away with my tail between my legs, eager for anonymity and oblivion. It wouldn’t be so bad to go back and live with my mother, would it? She had Frank to distract her, now, and she’d told me that the most important thing was my happiness. I wasn’t anywhere near happy right now. I was sad, afraid, confused, and more than a little bit perturbed that I hadn’t yet been able to decipher the source of Peter’s issues with me. If I had done something to upset him, it was so slight that I couldn’t divine what it could’ve possibly been. Surely nothing that would’ve rocked his world so thoroughly.

  I pulled on a plain business suit, one with sleek trousers, and did my makeup modestly, my hair pulled back from my face and secured at the nape of my neck. I looked very professional, but in a moment, my face crumpled. The boundary had been crossed, the one we’d been so careful to define and avoid. I was genuinely worried about my physical appearance and how it related to my work performance. Peter had promised me this wouldn’t happen, but here I was, sweating bullets in front of my reflection, wondering what fault he was going to find with me today. He was the one who’d crossed the line.

  I arrived at work exactly on time and was set to march into his office and tell him exactly which hell he could go to when I was roughly pulled into the washroom. It was so sudden I couldn’t even make a noise of surprise, not even when I realized it was Peter who’d yanked me in here.

  He looked at me like he was a man dying of thirst, drinking in the sight of me, and he pushed me over the countertop, slipped my trousers down over my hips, and entered me from behind. It was smoother than yesterday’s frantic coupling, and my body adjusted more quickly, but it was still impersonal. There was a barrier down between us that I didn’t understand, and it made me angry. I scowled at his reflection in the mirror I faced, and he glared right back, thrusting into me almost hatefully.

  It would’ve been so easy to end it all right then and there, to tell Peter to go to hell, to walk out of the job and quit, to pack up what little I wanted to take from the penthouse and leave New York City forever.

  Except I loved the way his cock felt inside of me. I loved the slow build of pleasure, the way that I felt good no matter how angry I was at him, the way that even this was hot, both of us mad at each other and only one of us knowing why.

  I gasped a helpless orgasm and fumbled for something to hang on to, activating several sinks at once as I flailed around. I was only dimly aware of Peter pulling out of me and coolly watching me come apart, shaking against the cold metal of the sinks.

  Before I was fully recovered, he was zipping his still-hard erection back into his pants and walking away.

  It was no worse, I figured, as I pulled my trousers back up over my legs and fastened them with trembling fingers, that he hadn’t finished after not finishing me off for two days. But it was a different kind of worse, another kind of power play. Yesterday and the day before, he’d taken his pleasure in me thoughtlessly. Today, he’d deliberately made me come with no intention of coming himself, making me fear that he thought so little of me that he’d rather not feel that final pleasure.

  It was the very definition of a mind fuck. I had no idea what he was thinking, what he was playing at. I could only tuck a few strands of hair back into their pins and limp off to sit back down at my desk, my knees weak.

  It would’ve been so much easier if the sex weren’t so good. That was all I could think about, staring sightlessly at my computer screen, wondering how I’d found myself in this mess.

  I didn’t even hear my phone vibrate during the first call. That’s how troubled I was after Peter’s escalating versions of trysts over the past couple of days. It wasn’t that I wasn’t having a good time. Office hookups and his dominant behavior were still incredibly sexy for me. But his tone in them had…changed. Perhaps it would’ve been nearly imperceptible if I hadn’t known him well. But unless I was completely mistaken, our little role playing sessions had taking on a mean-spirited tilt. Peter was being a jerk. I just didn’t know why.

  My phone vibrated again, rattling across my desk and coming to rest against a cup of pens, magnifying the racket it was making. It was my mother, but I was in no mood to talk to her. I was afraid she would ask about how Peter and I were, and I didn’t think I could make a lie about what I really felt was going on float for her. I didn’t even know what I would lie about. I couldn’t be certain that things were on the rocks between us, and I certainly couldn’t tell her I suspected something was amiss because he’d spanked me harder than I thought he should have.

  What had happened to me? Had I completely lost my ability to lie? It hadn’t ever been something I prided myself on before, but it had seen me through some dark times. No matter how many times I’d stepped in dog poop in my day job or been disparaged by customers during my night job, I was always able to feign a happy voice for my mother and spin tales of success at some imaginary office. Now that my happy reality at that office was beginning to wane, I didn’t have the heart to be false about it. Something was really wrong with Peter, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

  It didn’t strike me that my mother might be having an emergency until the fourth consecutive call, a few coworkers glancing over at my endlessly vibrating phone. I grabbed the device and took it into the conference room, which still had maps of the hotels in the France acquisition. Had anyone even used this space since Peter had eaten me out in here after I signed the contract he'd given me without reading it? Maybe he’d lied to me — maybe the contr
act really was serious and binding and not a joke, like he’d said. Was that the reason he was being surly?

  “What’s going on?” I asked quietly, answering the call. “I’m sorry it took me a while to answer, but we’re having a pretty busy day here.”

  The other end of the line was quiet.

  “Are you there?” I blocked my other ear with my hand, afraid my mother and I had a bad connection on the call. “Hello?”

  A quiet noise grew and grew until I realized my mother had called me, weeping.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked, my panic growing. “Are you all right? Tell me what’s happening.”

  Our roles had been reversed, which was more than a little disquieting. I was the comforter, and she was the one in need of comforting.

  “It’s Frank,” she finally managed to sob out.

  “What’s wrong with Frank?” My eyes shot up to the closed office door, Peter just on the other side of it. Had something happened to his father? Was that why he was acting so strangely? No — he’d been off for days. If something serious had happened to Frank, I was sure my mother would’ve called me as soon as it had occurred.

  “The — the wedding.” But she was crying too hard for me to understand her, her words becoming nonsensical syllables punctuating her tears.

  “Mom, I can’t understand you,” I said, my heart breaking for her. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the windows in the conference room, trying to fight the rising tide of panic in my chest. What had gone wrong? Why was she so upset? “You have to try and calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Frank,” she said again, hiccupping for air. “He says… He says the wedding’s off.”

  Out of everything that could’ve happened, this was the last thing I would’ve thought to imagine. “What do you mean, the wedding’s off? What did he say?” My rising panic was swiftly replaced with anger. It was Frank who’d reduced my mother to this state. He was going to hear from me about this.

  “He said… He said that we couldn’t get married anymore.” This elucidation brought on a fresh bout of crying, and I had to will myself to be patient.

  “Did he say why, or did he just cut you out of his life just like that?” I asked slowly. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “There was an investigation,” she said tearfully. “Something about his money that he didn’t like me doing. He thought I was trying to wrong him with it, but that wasn’t what I was doing, Gemma. Why would I choose money over someone I loved? I wasn’t trying to do anything.”

  “How was there an investigation?” I asked, confused. “Were there police?”

  “God, no. There was a private investigator who reported things to Peter.” I blinked swiftly, a dull roar in my ears. Peter was in on this? “About an account. And Frank said Peter told him he couldn’t trust me anymore. That we shouldn’t get married because I only cared about the money, and not him.” This released another torrent of tears, which was a blessing in disguise.

  I didn’t know what to think, let alone say. How could I comfort my mother if I didn’t even understand what was going on? She was inconsolable, and I felt as if I only had half the picture of what was going on. How could Frank possibly think that my mother only loved him for his money? The idea was ludicrous. I’d seen the way she looked at him, seen the way loving him had transformed her completely. She had been so happy. It wasn’t fair for her happiness to be ripped away like this, so suddenly and strangely. My mother wasn’t the kind of person who would do this, and Frank didn’t seem like he would’ve initiated this without some kernel of prompting from someone.

  That left Peter, and that point confused me most of all. Why would Peter insert himself into the wedding preparations? What reason did he have to ruin the relationship that our parents shared together?

  “Gemma? Are you there?” My mother’s voice was so tenuous. She was so unsure of herself, and it broke me. I shored myself up and made my decision.

  “Mom, I’m going to call you right back,” I said. “You stay near the phone, okay? I’m going to get this figured out for you.”

  “Okay.” She sounded so lost, but I knew exactly where I was going, exactly where I had to go to get this all straightened out — or at least to extract the truth.

  I marched out of the conference room and straight toward Peter’s office.

  Chapter 12

  “Explain something for me,” I said, none too politely, as I interrupted a conversation Peter was having in his office with another man, one I’d only seen in passing during my time working here.

  Peter frowned apologetically at his colleague and looked at me, his brows drawn together. “Will you give me a moment to finish this up?”

  “You need to address this immediately,” I informed him. “As in, right now.”

  “I’m aware of what immediately means, thank you, Gemma,” Peter said tightly. “Would you excuse me?”

  The man laughed and murmured something I was too angry to hear, and swept by me and out of the office. I didn’t even wait for the door to close to launch into him.

  “The wedding’s off,” I all but shouted.

  “What wedding?” Peter asked, but I rolled my eyes at him. He was so transparent.

  “You know exactly which wedding I’m talking about. The one where my mother’s marrying your father.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” he asked me, scrunching up his face. “This is rather a busy day for me.”

  “Not too busy for us to have a little office hanky-panky earlier,” I reminded him, raising my eyebrow.

  Peter was quiet for a long time. “What do you want me to say, Gemma?”

  “I would like you to explain just where you get off meddling in my mother’s happiness,” I said, the force of my anger tinging my words in steel. I’d been puzzled and up in arms after ending the call with my mother, but now I realized just how enraged I was.

  “What did she tell you?” It made me even angrier to see how calm Peter was.

  “She called me, crying, mind you, to tell me that Frank told her it was off. Something about private investigators. Something about him being convinced that she was only marrying him for the money.”

  My rage gradually built as I watched him consider this calmly.

  “Is she not?” he asked finally, and I exploded.

  “Of course she’s not, you asshole!” I yelled. “For some reason, she fell in love with Frank. He was all she talked about for months and months. You saw how happy she was with him at dinner — even when they very nearly caught us ‘working’ right here on top of your desk.”

  Peter smirked at the memory, but it didn’t help how angry I still was at him.

  “I would love for you to tell me just why you think this is so fucking funny.” I glared at him, and he leveled a look right back at me, apparently not impressed by my attempts to show him just how upset I was with curse words. I’d grown up around them when they were flung around dispassionately, heard the cooks and bartenders use them while I was a cocktail waitress, but it was always my experience that their weight was felt more completely when used sparingly.

  “I don’t think it’s funny at all, actually,” Peter informed me. I usually loved his accent, but right now, I felt like it was one of our many differences, a sign that we were from two very different worlds and would never bridge that gap. It made him sound cold and distant, when it was usually so warm and inviting.

  “Well, at least you understand that this isn’t a joke,” I said, my anger not slackening in the least. “Would you care to explain just what you were thinking? Just what in the hell put the idea in your head that my mother would be using your father for money?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “You did.”

  I actually laughed at him. That’s how ludicrous that idea was. “And just what makes you think that?”

  “The other day,” he said easily. “When we were so rudely interrupted in this very office by our parents. You mentioned t
hat your mother was in it for the money. That she was a gold digger. Do I misremember?”

  My mouth had fallen open. “Peter, that was a joke.”

  “I thought so, too, at first,” he admitted. “But it bothered me and bothered me. My father…is not a handsome man. He’s been burned in love before for this very reason. Women half his age throwing themselves at him once they catch wind of just how much he’s worth, how much his estate is worth, how much this business is worth.”

  “My mother isn’t half his age,” I spat. “And she didn’t throw herself at him. They met. At a dinner party. The attraction was mutual.”

  “Then there was the text message from you,” Peter continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “Showing your mother in that ridiculous gown. Bragging that she’d asked for the most expensive dress in the entire store.”

  I could not have been in more shock if I’d lost every drop in my body. How could a misunderstanding go so badly?

  “That was also a joke,” I said slowly, as if over-pronouncing the words would help him understand where he’d gone wrong. “I made two jokes — perhaps in poor taste — and you have absolutely blown this entire thing out of proportion. You need to call your father immediately and set the record straight. My mother is beside herself.”

  “The driver commented that the two of you were giddy about money.” Peter gave me his back and went to look out the window as if he were pulling his arguments out of the air just outside. “That you were giggling at the prospect of spending and spending for the wedding.”

  “Because it’s a rush,” I said. “Because it is a lot of money. Because when I was a child, never in our wildest dreams would my mother and I have considered that one day we’d be chauffeured around New York City while planning her dream wedding to a man she loved so much. Because your father told her that money was no object and it made her uncomfortable. It frightened her, so we were trying to laugh it off. Because it is frightening to love someone who cares so little about something we once had so little of.”