sounds—okay.”
Helen saw through her hesitation. “You were thinking of seeing him again.”
“This morning, yeah, but I blew any chance I had of anything else.”
“What if you hadn’t blown it?”
Zoey sighed, and the exhalation said everything she needed to say.
Helen tut-tutted. “Zoey, love, you’ve heard of NRE, yeah?”
She rolled her eyes, even though her friend couldn’t see her. “I don’t live under a rock. But there’s no relationship here, so no new relationship energy present.”
“Sure, love, whatever you want to tell yourself. Just call me before you start in on the second tub of ice cream.” Zoey blew a raspberry into the phone, and Helen cackled. “Get started on that article, and I’ll hook things up with my guy here.”
When they’d hung up, Zoey pulled out her laptop. This was the good part of working from home, after all. Banging out an article on the couch in her jeans. When the words were hard to come by, she’d been known to reach for her fleecy pajama pants with the little foxes on them, but their magic was precious, and she was careful not to over use them. She twisted her hair up and out of her way, and go to work. It would take about half an hour to get the piece written and sent to the Voice , and then she could start outlining the longer piece.
Her belly fluttered just thinking that this might provide her with another excuse to see Alex. Maybe, this time, she could avoid screwing everything up.
CHAPTER
Alex had planned to spend the afternoon going through more of his father ’s files, trying to decipher the old man’s shorthand in his planner, or possibly trying yet again to break into his email. IT assured him that they could easily reset the password of any one operating on the server, but somehow, every time they tried, the system redirected them. They were working on it. They swore.
He’d been shocked to see the beautiful distraction from the previous night—Zoey—walking into his office like everything he needed to push the troubles of his father’s passing out of his mind and refocus on the tasks at hand. He’d planned on giving her the interview she needed for her ridiculous rag, and then he’d meant to screw her until she screamed, send her on her way, and get back to work.
Only there was something about her. He’d swung to the Dom side of things his entire sexual life, and he’d never had any trouble finding women who wanted to sub for him. He loved the atmosphere at Chez Vous, and the way that no one seemed any more interested in learning about his life outside of the play space than he had there. But there had always been something so very compliant about the women he met there. Zoey had a fire in her eyes that said he was going to have to convince her to kneel, each and every time. That it would never be a given. It was a delicious sensation. He wanted to feel it again.
It had been ages since someone took his cock in his mouth of their own volition, and the way she’d listened to him, just teasing at him, not trying to deep throat him—it had set him on edge more than he’d anticipated. The sensation of slipping inside of her, the fantasy fulfillment of taking her on the desk at work, the way she’d shuddered when he was fully sheathed in her, it had left him gasping, barely able to control his reaction at all.
There was no small part of him that was irritated with how quickly he’d come, that was convinced that she’d gotten dressed again because she was disappointed in him. He’d tried to tell her that he had every intention of kneeling down before her and licking her until she had to bite her wrist to choke back the scream, but he hadn’t been able to get the words out. And then she’d started asking prying questions about the old man, and he’d lost his shit, in part because of his irritation at her shutting down, but more because he was frustrated with