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The thought process was simple: with Ava staying the night again, I’d inevitably wake up at my usual time, and if she wanted me to stay in bed with her, I could at least get started on damage control from the canceled event while she slept. But that meant I needed files and my spare hard drive from my office on the forty-fourth floor.
Get in, get out, take her home, and bury the last of my stresses by being with her, touching her. Andrew and Michael had long since taken their work home with them, and with no one left in there, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows to waltz through the office blocks and the private wing with David Riley’s daughter.
And it didn’t.
We made it all the way to my private office before she’d tempted me enough that I broke.
Half-dressed and with bare breasts pressed against the floor-to-ceiling window, she shuddered and sputtered a moan as I sank fully inside of her from behind, her knees resting on a single filing cabinet I’d kicked the contents off of. With one hand between her thighs and the other around the front of her throat, I pulled her upper body back toward me.
Heavy-lidded eyes looked up at me upside down, her mouth parted. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Just like a fucking painting.
Half of me wanted to get into Shibari just so I could tie her up beautifully and hang her in a goddamn museum. But the other half, the half that had control and thought mostly logically, wanted to keep her entirely for myself.
I lost my mind with her,inher, and she took all of it, warped it, made it her own. The way she grinned up at me as if she were the devil herself with my hand gripping the sides of her throat, the way she gasped my name as I harshly squeezed her nipples between my fingers, the way her body responded to absolutefilth that I couldn’t keep myself from saying —all of it was too much, too tempting, too grounding, too perfect, wrapped up nice and neat in a pretty little package that fit me so well in so many ways.
“You’ve ruined me for anyone else,” I rasped, my teeth playing with the soft flesh of her earlobe. Pleasure knotted in my gut as she tightened around me, her little, raspy moan the only reply.
I’d known what I was doing when I had told her that I wanted this. I’d known what I’d been admitting to—that I saw a pathway to falling harder than I’d wanted to with anyone, that I’d end up somewhere I’d told her over and over I couldn’t handle. The words weren’t all there to explain how I felt but I showed her in the ways I could muster at this point, in the ways I touched her.
And for now, that would have to do.
Chapter 25
Ava
“Ava. Please. Think about this for two seconds.”
I set down the steaming cup of peppermint tea in front of Emily as she lounged on my cracked, vintage leather couch. She was fully dressed for the office despite me deciding we would work from my apartment today, and although she looked absolutely incredible in a full, dark pink pantsuit, it clashed with my pajamas and made it feel a bit like I was being talked down to by a therapist.
“He’s twenty years older than you.”
“I’m well aware of that,” I said, trying to keep the snark in my voice to a minimum as I sunk into the matching chair opposite her. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Just because it doesn’t bother you doesn’t mean it won’t bother other people,” she explained. Her braid fell over her shoulder as she leaned forward, wrapping her fingers around the hot mug. “Others will question it.Constantly.”
“Like you’re doing now?” I snapped, and her mouth shut. “It’s no one else’s business. It doesn’t matter if they have a problem with it.”
“I get that. I do. And please understand that I’m talking to you about this as your friend, as yourconfidant, and I don’t wantto upset you. I’m genuinely thrilled for you, but I’m worried, too. You guys have such different lives and I don’t want that to come between you, but you should be aware that there are risks here for that kind of thing.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for one, he was a fully grown adult when 9/11 happened and you were still in diapers,” she deadpanned. “He has a different perspective on the world. Hell, he probably has a different perspective on thiscity. One that probably clashes with yours, at least a little.”
“I can handle clashes in perspective. I’m not five years old on the playground fighting over toys any more.” The longer I stared at the swirling steam of my cup of black filter coffee, the more her words sunk in. She wasn’twrong, necessarily. There was an inherent oddity in the idea that he was a legal adult before I was even born.
“I know.”
I sighed and lifted my cup to my lips, wincing as the contents burned my tongue.Fucking ouch.“Look,” I said. “If Adrian was anyone else, if he was the same person he is now, but in the body of a man my age, it wouldn’t change anything. I’d still want him. I’d still be drawn to him. And maybe that’s naive of me to assume that, because he probably wasn’t as well-rounded twenty years ago as he is now, but I honestly don’t think it would change a thing. He would still be him. And he’s who I want.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line.
“I can’t change the fact that he’s the person I stumbled into blindly. I can’t change my stupid, incessant teenage crush that I had on him, and I can’t change how that’s playing into things now. But in all honesty, if I had a time machine and could pluck anyone out of a crowd to do all of this again with and feel the same way about, I wouldn’t. I’d choose him. Over and over again.”
Her shoulders sagged as she leaned back, resting her cup of tea on her knee. “I love that. Genuinely. It makes me insanely happy, even though I don’t look it,” she said, huffing out a weak chuckle. “But you know I have to ask about the other part of this.”
I averted my gaze. “Lucas?”
