Page 40 of Boardroom Mask

“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. I’m here.”

He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my pajama bottoms and pulls them down over my hips. The underwear goes with them. The cold air makes me flinch, but his hand is already onmy knee, pressing it back down and open. He pulls off the other glove. Both bare hands now. They grip the insides of my thighs and push them apart.

“Jesus Christ,” he says under his breath, looking down at me. “Do you have any idea what you look like right now? Do you have any clue how fucking radiant you are?”

He drags me closer by the hips until my thighs bracket his waist. He’s still fully dressed—jacket, jeans, boots, mask. I’m naked from the waist down, wearing a faded flannel shirt and nothing else under it. It’s better this way. He’s the one covered up. I’m the one exposed.

He’s the one in control.

I don’t have to choose anything.

His thumb paints a slow line from my knee down the inside of my thigh. I jolt when he reaches the crease where my thigh meets my hip. He pauses there, circling, circling, not touching where I need him to.

“Ask me,” he says.

“No.”

With a shrug, he moves his thumbaway, back up my thigh, featherlight, barely there. A retreat. A taking-away.

“That’s not how this works, little fox.” His voice is a hushed reprimand, almost gentle, which is worse than if he were growling. “You don’t get to lie on my floor with your legs open and pretend you don’t want this. That door closed the second you got on your knees.”

“Fuck you.”

His hand leaves my skin entirely. The cold rushes in where his warmth was and I gasp at the loss, which is humiliating, which is, I expect, the point. He sits back on his heels and looks down at me—spread out, half-naked, panting—and hewaits.

“There’s that mouth again,” he says quietly. “I like your mouth. I like it a lot. But right now, it’s the only thing standing between you and what you need.” He licks his lower lip. “So I’ll ask one more time. And if you say no, I’ll pull your pajamas back up and disappear and you can spend the rest of the night on this floor by yourself, remembering what my hands felt like. Your choice.”

The silence stretches. My chest heaves. I can feel myselfthrobbingwhere he was just touching me, the absence every bit as agonizing than the contact.

“Ask me nicely, little fox.”

Locked doors flying open.

Chains breaking. Deadbolts crumbling. Knobs turning.

The Fear leaves.

The Want remains.

“P-Please…” It rips out of me before I can stop it. “Please, just?—”

Chuckling devilishly, the Masked Man gives me what he promised. Nice guy that he is, he doesn’t even make me finish my sentence. His thumb drags through my folds and presses directly against my clit and I rise up off the tile with a choked whimper. He rubs in a slow, firm circle, watching my face the whole time. I grab for something and find his forearm and hold on.

“There she is,” he murmurs. “There’s my girl.”

He keeps saying that sentence again and again.There’s my girl. There’s my girl. There’s my girl.It’s like he knows I need something to ground me, and those are the magic words.

I lock onto them as he works me with his thumb. Meanwhile, his other hand pushes the two halves of my flannel shirt apart, baring my stomach, my ribs. He doesn’t ask permission before his palm covers my breast. He squeezes, rolls, finds the nipple and pinches it between two fingers. My back bows. He does it again, harder, and I make another keening whine.

His thumb disappears and two fingers push inside me. I’m already so soaked that there’s no resistance whatsoever. It’s a smooth glide, the briefest pang as I stretch around, and then?—

“Oh my fucking God.”

I cry out and my hips buck against his hand. He curls his fingers up toward the ceiling and strokes over my G-spot. It’s like he’s pressing a secret button and my whole body, head to toe, responds by squeezing down around the quarter-inch point, all of me compacting to meet him there.

He pulls his fingers out and away, I whine, he pushes them back in, I moan. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The wet sound of it, ofme,fills the kitchen, and I’m well on my way tovery far fucking gone.

It’s building fast. So unbelievably fast. My legs are shaking and my stomach is clenching and I need—I need?—