Page 81 of Boardroom Mask

I’m not actually calmer. I still want to take that laptop I just destroyed and beat him over the head with it. But I can’t, because what he just said makes a horrible, twisted kind of sense.

“That doesn’t make it okay,” I say.

He shrugs. “We’re long past ‘okay,’ Ms. Pierce.” Then one corner of his lip quirks up in the beginnings of a grin. “Besides,” he says, “I don’t think you hate it as much as you claim to. The red underwear suits you, by the way.”

I feel heat crawl up my neck before I can stop it. “You watched me get dressed?”

“I watched you do a lot of things.” He hasn’t moved from the edge of the desk. His arms are still folded. He looks completely at ease, which makes me want to throw something else at him. “You take your time in the mornings, you know that? Most people just grab whatever’s closest and throw it on. Not you. You stand in front of your closet and think about it. You hold things up. You put them back. You change your mind. And then—” He pauses. “And then you drop the towel.”

“Stop.”

“You dropped it and you stood there for a second. Naked. Just looking at yourself in that little mirror you’ve got on the back of the closet door. And then you reached for the red ones.”

My mouth is dry. I swallow, but it doesn’t help.

“I watched you pull them on,” he continues. His eyes haven’t left mine. “And then I locked my office door and jerked off at my desk to the sight of it. Came so hard I couldn’t see straight for a little while there.”

“You aredisgusting.”

“Maybe.” He grins. “But here’s what I think, Jillian: I think if you’d known I was watching—if I’d told you beforehand, if you’d known that on the other end of that little blinking red light was a man who couldn’t tear his eyes away from you—you wouldn’t have closed the vent. You would’ve slowed down. Taken even longer. Let me see even more.”

“That’s not true.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then why is your pulse going crazy right now?” He nods toward my throat. “I can see it from here.”

I clap my hand over the side of my neck, which is the most obvious tell I could possibly give him.

“I think,” he muses, “that youlikedbeing watched. I think you liked it before you even knew it was happening. And I think the part of you that’s screaming at me right now is the same part that chose red lace on a quiet morning when nobody was supposed to see.”

“You’re wrong,” I tell him.

He just smiles. “Oh, no, I don’t think I am.”

He’s off the desk before I can blink, closing the distance I fought so hard to put between us. My back hits the wall again, but his hands don’t cage me this time. Instead, one lands on my hip, fingers digging in through the denim, and the other presses flat against my stomach, right above my belt.

“I think you’d be soaking wet and dying to touch yourself if you knew,” he whispers, low and close. “You like being on display, don’t you?” His thumb drags a slow line across my hip bone. “You like feeling my eyes on you. Showing off for me.”

“I wasn’t showing off for anyone. I was gettingdressed.”

His hand on my stomach pushes down half an inch. Not enough to be anything, but just enough to be everything. “Who were you wearing those red panties for, Jillian? For me?”

“Myself.”

His brow curves upward. “Liar.”

“I wear whatever I want. It has nothing to do with you.”

“No?” he says again. “Well, then I guess it was just my luck. That didn’t stop me from getting off, of course. I saw your ass in red and it was like all the blood in my body rushed straight to my cock. You’ve felt it—you know how hard it gets for you, little fox.” His thumb dips just inside the waist of my jeans and strokes the frilly edge of today’s black thong. “I was pumping and moaning your name. Right in this office, actually. I came for you, and I think, deep down, you knew it. You felt it, right… about…here.”

Onhere,his hand shoves down inside my underwear just far enough to graze my clit and confirm that, like he suspected, I am in fact insanely wet. I feel my cheeks go nuclear and I shove him back.

Or at least, that’s what I intend to do. But the message gets its wires crossed somewhere on the way down, so instead of wrapping around his wrist and yanking his hand out of my pants, I wrap my fingers around his strong, muscular forearm, and just… stay there. Not pulling him away or telling him no.The opposite, in fact—I’m keeping him from going anywhere else at all.

It’s almost like Idowant this.