Page 23 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“It’s my archive.”

“I’m working. Some of us take the audit seriously.”

“You shouldn’t be down here alone at this hour.”

“Then you shouldn’t have given me a deadline.”

“I didn’t. You did.”

She steps down off the stool, which brings her closer, not farther, and her chin comes up, and she’s burning with it, hours of dust and my son’s signatures. “You want to know what I found? Because it’s ugly, and I’m only halfway in, and I’ve been down here alone with it for three hours getting angrier.”

“Tell me tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? You came all the way down here at midnight to tell me to brief you tomorrow, that’s, why are you even—“ and she stops, because I’ve stepped inside. My trousers have tightened.

There’s no distance left to argue across, and her voice drops out of the whisper. Her breaths come harder as she eyes me. “We have a pact.”

“We do.”

“It never happened.”

“And nothing is happening now.”

Neither of us moves for one second. Then both of us move at once.

She grabs my lapels and I lift her up, and her back meets the steel shelving hard enough to rattle a decade of receipts. Her legs lock around my waist. My mouth finds her silken throat, the pulse going hard under my tongue. She makes a sound that’s half curse, half my name, and drags my hair back in both fists to get my face up to hers.

The kiss is nothing like the hotel. The hotel was patient. This is teeth and two weeks of conference tables and being good and polite.

“Two weeks,” I tell her against her mouth. “Two weeks of watching you pass me folders.”

“You looked down my blouse.”

“I did.” I’ve a hand up her skirt already, shoving it to her hips, and she’s bare-legged and warm and my fingers find the edge of her underwear. “I’d do it again. I’d do it in front of the board.”

“Max—”

I hook the fabric aside and push two fingers into her, and she’s wet, soaked. Her head goes back against a box of 2019 invoices with a thud, and she bites her own wrist to keep quiet and fails. I work her fast, thumb on her clit, her hips rolling into my hand. I watch her face come apart in the fluorescent light, flushed, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, a sight worth every second I spent pretending not to look.

“I can’t,” she pants, “I can’t be quiet, you have to⁠—“

“Then don’t.” I kiss her to swallow it anyway, and she comes on my hand with a broken sound into my mouth, shaking, her thighs clamping around my wrist.

I don’t let her finish shuddering. I get my belt open and my zipper down one-handed with her still pinned to the shelf, and she’s fumbling at me too, shoving my trousers off my hips, wrapping her hand around me and dragging a groan out of me I didn’t authorize. I pull her underwear fully aside and line up and push into her in one long shove, and she’s so tight from coming that it takes a yelping second. Then she opens and takes all of me, and both of us stop breathing.

“God,” she says. “God, Max.”

“Hold on to the shelf.”

She grabs the steel upright above her head with both hands and I take her hips, and I fuck her, no finesse, no patience. I’m out of patience. A box of files goes over somewhere behind us and neither of us cares, every thrust rattling the steel.

She’s loud now, gasping my name and yes and harder, her heels digging into the back of my thighs. I find the birthmark on the nape of her neck with my teeth, mine, still mine, and she clenches around me so hard I almost lose it.

“Not yet,” I grit out, more to myself than her, and I get a hand between us again and find her clit to rub hard circles in time with my hips. Her whole body goes rigid against the steel. All of it.

“Again. Give it to me again.”

She does. She comes with a cry she muffles in my shoulder, and the pulse of her around me takes the last of my control.