Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 79328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
She came apart just like that, shuddering and gasping, her release coating my fingers. I groaned, my self-control snapping.
I shoved her panties down her hips and she kicked them aside eagerly, planting her feet wider apart, wanting this as badly as I did. Good, I thought, as I tore open my jeans and freed my aching cock.
She leaned over the counter, arching her back and presenting that gorgeous ass to me—flushed and beautiful and mine—and I notched myself at her entrance from behind. My hands gripped her hips. One hard thrust, and I was buried to the hilt.
We both groaned at the sensation.
I didn’t go slow this time. I took her hard, driving into her with a raw, primal need that bordered on desperate. She met me thrust for thrust, grinding back against me, her moans growing louder with every snap of my hips.
My hand slid around to find her clit again, and she cried out—oversensitive, overwhelmed—her inner walls clamping down around me as she detonated for the second time.
Her reaction ripped my own release from me. I buried myself deep and came with a groan that felt like it was torn from somewhere in my chest.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. I stayed inside her as she lay pressed against the counter, both of us catching our breath. I didn’t want to leave her body. Didn’t want to break this connection, even temporarily.
I was in so fucking deep. Over my head. Drowning in feelings I didn’t know how to name, for a woman I’d never expected to want this much.
But there was no stopping it now. No going back to who I was before her.
I understood her concerns. They were all valid, and I would do everything in my power to address them. But I also knew, with a certainty that surprised me, that I wasn’t giving her up. Not as my assistant. Not as… whatever she was becoming to me.
I needed to figure out how to make this work. All of it. The job, the relationship, the complicated tangle of professional and personal. Because walking away wasn’t an option.
For a man who had been content being alone, who had built his entire life around independence and self-reliance, the realization should have been terrifying.
Instead, it felt like the beginning of something worth fighting for.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Raina
The past week had been a revelation. As Simon pulled into the sprawling parking lot of Neptune’s Kingdom, I found myself reflecting on everything that had shifted between us since that night at my apartment. Five days. That’s all it had taken to upend every assumption I’d made about who Simon Powers was—and who we could be together.
We hadn’t slept together again since last weekend. Not because the desire wasn’t there—God, it was definitely there—but because Simon seemed determined to prove a point. During the workdays, there was a new ease between us, a current of flirtation running beneath our professional interactions. Lingering looks across his desk. His hand brushing mine when I handed him his coffee. The way his voice dropped half an octave whenever he said my name.
But he’d kept things deliberately restrained.
Instead of tumbling back into bed, he’d taken me to dinner. Twice. Real dates at restaurants with candlelight and wine lists, where we’d talked for hours about everything and nothing. I’d learned that he collected rare first-edition books but had never told anyone because he thought it seemed pretentious. That he hated cilantro with an irrational passion. That he’d wanted to be an architect as a kid before his father steered him toward business. That he ran five miles every morning, rain or shine, because it was the only time his mind went truly quiet.
And I’d shared things too. Stories about my childhood, my dreams of finishing my degree someday, my complicated feelings about my father’s death and how it had shaped me. Simon had listened to all of it with an intensity that made me feel seen in a way I hadn’t experienced in years.
At the end of each date, he’d walked me to my door and just kissed me, nothing more. Soft and thorough and maddeningly restrained, before pulling back with a smile and saying goodnight.
It had driven me absolutely crazy.
But it had also made something clear: this wasn’t just about sex for him. He was courting me. Actually courting me, like something out of another era, and the realization had cracked open something in my chest that I’d been trying desperately to keep protected.
I was falling for him. Hard. Probably faster than was wise.
The cautious part of me—the part that remembered my heartbreak after Eli and Mr. Hull’s cruelty—kept whispering warnings. Be careful. Don’t give too much. Protect yourself. But Simon was chipping away at those walls with every thoughtful gesture, every moment of unexpected vulnerability, every kiss that promised more without demanding it.