Her Secret Pleasure by Jordan Bell Page A

years and the sight of her calmer and him laughing made me smile. Taylor left the interview room moodier than before and after standing around watching me paint for ten minutes, she finally demanded I tell Sean to call her when I saw him and promptly left the club.
    With all the other workers gone for the night, I had plenty of time to panic over the idea that I might see him . That he might come here and I’d be standing in the same room with him again after all this time.
    I took a break to let a section dry and ate the food Davis gave me. Marcus and I exchanged a few texts during his fundraiser which he seemed positively bored with. I imagined him in his tux, twirling Angelina around the ballroom. I’d met her once and she was beautiful, like Taylor, but actually nice and we’d gotten along in the five minutes we’d chatted in Marcus’s kitchen. She worked with him, his marketing director or something along those lines. Deep down I feared they went home together after these functions, but I never asked. It wasn’t my business. Technically, I was free to go dancing with another guy too, but there weren’t a lot of marketing directors beating down my door.
     I had to stop dwelling on these things. Sean. Marcus. They were really starting to mess up my head.
    It didn’t help that I received a text message from my mother while I ate my dinner. She inspired almost as much anxiety as the prospect of seeing Sean did.
     
    Met your sister’s boyfriend’s parents tonight. Lovely people and so charming! Did you know his parents r doctors 2? Christine’s life = perfect. Like she stepped out of a romance novel.
     
    I sighed and closed my phone without answering. Christine’s life was like a romance novel, except maybe without the marauding pirates and busty heroine. I got all the cleavage in our family.
    My anxiety ridden phone call to Maris went to her voice mail and I rambled out my whole bizarre situation in agonizing detail and confessed I thought I might have a nervous breakdown before midnight.
    My toes ached when I finally climbed back up on the ladder. It was going on ten o’clock and I didn’t think I had many more hours in me. There was no way I’d be able to finish this wall in one night, but spending a second or third night here seemed impossible.
    I’d no sooner climbed back up to start painting in some shadows when I heard the kitchen’s red tufted leather doors whisper open and closed. The gasp that followed seared right through me.
    I twisted towards the sound and met Sean’s shocked ice blue eyes. They set my heart on fire, melting it down into my smoldering core. He looked older, more muscular and less lean than he had once been, but my body responded to his power over it as we’d never parted. Heat spread between my legs and up my body to my fingertips, to my lips, to the flush of blood in my cheeks. I forgot to breathe, had to force my lips to part when my lungs began to burn. I had no control over the pressure against my skin that held me still, waiting for a command that it could obey.
     
    Sean held my eyes with his, so very blue and bewitching and I stood naked, trembling before him. He raised a finger beneath my chin, tilted it upwards so I could see only those eyes and nothing else. They searched mine, hunted deep into the darkest parts of me, and when he parted his lips and whispered, “Kneel for me,” I broke into a million pieces and floated away in them.
     
    Shock, the kind that stops a person’s heart and lungs, held him frozen. I wanted him to say something because I knew I would never be able to. His hair fell a little longer than it used to, short at the nape and longer on top, messier and more casual than Zach could ever be. The navy t-shirt he wore clung to his broad chest and fell loose around his hips, un-tucked, and I very badly wanted to press my hand against it and drag its hem up the shape of his body until I touched skin.
    Despite all the wonderful memories he inspired