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I bent forward, body shaking as I came. Inside Jules. Inside my personal fucking assistant.
Neither of us moved for a while. I was the one to finally slide out of her and reach for tissues from behind my desk. I used them to clean her up first, then got myself mostly taken care of.
“Let me guess,” Jules said. She got up, shimmying adorably as she tugged her skirt down. “This never happened?”
“Oh, it absolutely happened and it was fantastic,” I said. “But yes, we shouldn’t talk about it with anyone.”
“What about each other?” she asked. She walked closer, reaching up to fix my tie casually. She gave it a brief tug, then placed her palms on my chest, smoothing my shirt with a dangerous little grin. “Are we going back to the game where you pretend I don’t exist? Now that you got what you wanted, I mean.”
“I got a taste of what I wanted,” I said. My stomach sank even as I said the words. I knew they were true. Fucking Jules hadn’t cured me of my obsession. It had woken it up. I’d thought my cravings for her were bad before, but all I’d done was find the intensity knob and crank it up to the maximum.
“Oh?” she asked. “Are you planning to go back for seconds?”
“I was thinking about getting the recipe so I could make it at home whenever I wanted.”
Her grin widened to a smile. “I’m a little lost in the metaphor here. How does that translate to us?”
“It means I need more of you. Much more. But I need you to promise to help me keep this quiet, especially around the office.”
“Okay. And what about those deep dark secrets we promised to reveal once we were through?”
I grimaced. Having her to myself had felt so good that I’d completely forgotten. But I needed to do this now, because I could feel myself standing at a precipice with her. If I took another step, I’d be falling helplessly, just a slave to her gravity. I needed to get the truth out while I still could.
“My last name isn’t White,” I said. “It’s Terranova. My father was Marcus Terranova. He worked for Russ Coleton-”
Jules interrupted me when her expression broke into amusement, then laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that you’re going to think I’m ripping off your secret now.”
“I wasn’t finished with mine,” I said. My stomach felt like it was in my throat. It was one thing to lie about my last name but swearing to bring a company down to ruins and destroy my job and her job in the process was the real meat of my secret.
“Okay, but I didn’t give you the last name I was born with, exactly. I was using my mother’s maiden name. My real last name is Coleton.”
I stared. I had to replay what I’d just heard in my head several times before it really registered. “Coleton? Like the Coletons?”
“Yeah,” she said. “My father and I had a huge fight because I didn’t want to play the arranged marriage game. I wanted a position at the family company. Imagine that,” she said, grinning crookedly.
“Russ Coleton didn’t ask me to hire you,” I said dumbly.
“I’m aware. That’s because he has no idea I’m working for him. Just like he has no idea I’m planning to keep climbing the ladder in his dumb company all on my own. Eventually, he’ll realize I was capable of making it by myself and he was a misogynistic asshole for assuming otherwise.”
I chuckled. “Wow.” Except my stomach was turning. Fuck. I just bent Russ Coleton’s daughter over my desk and made her come for me. I should’ve got some sick satisfaction from that, but all I felt was the sick part.
I thought back to ten years ago when my team and I had done a deep dive into Russ Coleton. We’d searched for every possible thing we could find about the man, but discovered he kept his privacy guarded as well as his billions could manage. We’d known he had kids, but the only pictures available of them had been years old at the time. There were names, and I even knew he had a daughter named Juliette. But meeting “Jules Adams” had done nothing to trigger my memory of the picture I’d seen of Juliette Coleton when she was six or seven years old.
“So?” she said. “You said there was more to your secret, but you have to admit it’s pretty funny that our lies kind of canceled each other out. I mean, can I really be upset with you for lying about your last name when that’s exactly what I was doing?”
She looked so goddamn relieved. I could see the weight that had lifted from her shoulders. All I felt was heavier, practically bent over from the new burden pressing down on me. I couldn’t come clean to Russ Coleton’s own daughter about what I was planning to do. The risk was far too great. She’d have to have almost no interest in money at all to shrug and let me bring her family business down and probably shrink her inheritance in the process.
