Page 47 of Boardroom Mask

He pushes the chair back and stands up. He’s so tall that the overhead light catches the top of his head and throws his masked face into partial shadow.

He walks toward me. It’s a horror movie monster pace—one step after another, unhurried, closing the distance between us.

“Don’t,” I warn. My back touches the counter. “I just told you?—”

He stops right in front of me. His cinnamon and sandalwood heat tempts me and I find myself inhaling deeply before I realize it and stop.

The Masked Man’s hand comes up. He hooks one finger under my chin and tilts my face toward his.

“I told you to leave,” I whisper. “Didn’t I? Didn’t…?”

He pulls the mask up above his mouth. I see his jaw for the first time. It’s sharp, clean-shaven, with a faint scar near the corner of his lip. I don’t get to catalog anything else because then he kisses me.

I don’t meet him halfway.

I meet himallthe way.

My hands find the front of his jacket and I pull him into me and kiss him back. He lifts me onto the counter. I wrap my legs around his waist and urge him closer. The mask is bunched up above his mouth but still covering his nose and eyes, and when I feel the fabric brush against my cheek, reality punches through.

I pull back. “Wait.”

He freezes. His chest is heaving against mine. “What?”

“The mask,” I breathe. “Pull it back down.”

He looks at me. Or I think he does—I can’t actually see his eyes with the fabric pushed up like that. I can only see his mouth, and I need to stop seeing it, because a mouth is too personal. A mouth hasexpressions. A mouth can smile and frown and belong to a real human being who has a name and a history and thoughts and feelings.

I can’t fuck a person. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“Pull it back down,” I repeat. “Please.”

The Masked Man doesn’t argue. He reaches up and tugs the fabric into place, and his jaw and lips and that tiny scar all disappear behind black fabric. He’s no one again.

The relief is instant and enormous. My whole body unclenches.

“Better?” he asks.

“Much.”

He pulls my hips to the edge of the counter and steps between my thighs. His hands go to the buttons of my blouse and he works them open, one by one. When it’s open, his palms skim up my stomach and over the lace of my bra. He unclasps it from the front and pushes both layers off my shoulders.

“Arms up,” he says, and I raise them, and he pulls my undershirt over my head and drops it on the floor.

When that’s done, he drags my trousers and underwear down together. I lift my hips to help until those items are also discarded without a second thought.

Then his hands go to his own waist. His belt clinks. His zipper rasps. He frees himself and he’s hard, and huge, and then he’s in me, and I’m gasping and clinging. The stretch is less shocking tonight. My body remembers him from before and opens easily, pulling him deeper, and the fullness is so intense that my eyes roll shut.

He’s nobody. He’snobody. He has no face and no name and no story. He’s just warmth and pressure and the smell of cinnamon and the sound of our breathing tangled together in the too-bright kitchen. That’s all he is. That’s all I need him to be.

His hips snap forward and I cry out and tighten around him. He groans through the mask. One hand braces on the cabinetbehind me. The other grips my hip, pulling me onto him with every thrust.

I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face against his collar and breathe him in. Cinnamon. Sandalwood.

Nobody.

Safe.

As long as he’s nobody, it’s safe.