BoardResolution (8 page)

It was a moment before he found his voice, and he managed to make it gentle, since she was blinking at him with the startled look of a deer, not anything like the Savannah he knew.

“Don’t you attend the corporate safety seminars you torture your employees with?”

He saw the snap as the spell was broken. She even took a defensive step back, looked around herself, and that familiar disdain and faint irritation took over her features.

“We fulfill all OSHA requirements, Kensington.”

“Oh, yeah.
That was definitely an OSHA-approved maneuver.” He flicked a hand out, caught a loose lock of her hair,
enjoyed
her look of shocked anger at the casual familiarity.

“I know you think you have to live up to your Savannah
Cyborg
image, but you don’t have to be and do everything yourself, you know.”

He actually saw a split second of hurt at the nickname that was used too often for her not to have overheard it countless times before. It made him angry with his clumsiness. And with her, for being so worthy of the name, but only in how she closed herself off to any advances of affection or friendship.

“You delegate administrative tasks to your assistants. Why can’t you let other people help you with things?” He let his concern for her show, hoping to amend that inadvertent barb. “Damn it, if you’d fallen, there’d have been no one to see you fall.”

“That’s the plan,” she said dryly. “Better to bust your backside when no one’s looking.” Some of the spunk was returning, but in the shift of her eyes, he saw she knew something significant had happened. He wondered if she understood what she had revealed, if she even knew it about herself.

The thought brought out a fierce possessiveness in him, a desire to crush anyone who’d taken advantage of such a sweet gift. He enjoyed the many faces and forms of sex, and having an excess of alpha in his personality, he’d often let the natural Dominant in him take over with his casual lovers who liked BDSM. The idea of exercising it in a less casual mode with the woman who’d become his obsession was so intoxicating he had a hard time keeping his cock settled in his trousers. Fortunately, she chose that moment to distract him.

“Fine.”
She tossed her head, presented him with a bulb from her desktop. “You want to do maintenance, here’s your chance. And don’t worry. I’ll stand right here and catch you if you fall.”

Typical Savannah.
In the time he’d had two
thoughts,
she’d marshaled her defenses and reorganized her strategy. He thought if Napoleon had had her, the world would have undone the Tower of Babel and everyone would speak French now. The Russian winter couldn’t have defeated
nerve that cool
. But he’d seen the heat just for a moment in her eyes, in that soft expulsion of
breath
as he set her down. He’d also felt the warmth of her skin beneath her clothes. Maybe she would have melted the ice in Russia, if she couldn’t match it.

He grinned at her, fast and reckless, enjoying her, and her look of startled surprise at his reaction. He became less amused and more absorbed as her gaze lingered on his mouth, changing the look in her eyes. Testing, he took the bulb from her fingers and had to grasp it quickly to keep from losing it as she did her best to let go before he touched her fingers.

“Careful, don’t drop it,” she admonished, a snap to her voice.

He gave her an even look, toed off his shoes and slid onto the desk. His height helped him reach the bulb with a few inches to spare, and he unscrewed it and put in the new one, blinking as it came to life in his eyes.

“Jesus, Savannah, you could have turned off the light first.” He took the panel from her and replaced it.

“Then how would I know the bulb worked while I was up there?”

He looked down and found her staring at his feet.

“What?”

“You…” Her lips pressed together, and then he saw a corner curl up in a tiny, shy, totally out-of-character smile. “You have a hole in your sock.”

He sat back down on the desk, brought one leg to the floor and put his ankle on his knee, blinking around the flash image still popping within the spectrum of where he focused his vision. There was in fact a small hole worn just over his big toe. Not big enough to push through, or notice when he got dressed this morning.

“So I do.” He looked up at her, at the unusual expression on her face. “What is it?”

“I just never think of you as someone with holes in his socks.”

“Come here.” Before she could evade him, he caught her hand, tugged her over. As he did, he put both feet on the floor so she was eased between his thighs. He took his fingers and carefully raised the hem of her skirt on the right side a few inches, so she could see what he had seen when she stood on her desk.
A pencil-thin run in her stocking, starting just above the knee.

“And I don’t think of you as someone with a run in your stocking.”

She looked up at him, but the rest of her body didn’t move. She was suddenly as still as a wild animal again, and he was even more aware of the feel of skin and silky nylon beneath the pads of his fingers.

His hand shifted, slipped up several more inches and encountered a lace top, the short skirt hem forming a folded crescent around his wrist. Her scent filled his senses.

She jerked back as though he’d slapped her when his fingers touched bare skin. Moved back so quickly she bent her heel and would have stumbled if he hadn’t straightened just as fast and caught her by the waist, a touch she threw off as soon as she regained her balance.

“The office isn’t a dating pool, Matthew. Go get yourself a one-night stand from a club like a regular guy.”

He seized her by the elbow and whipped her around so fast that the shock was still in her face when he put her up against the wall and his body against hers.
His fully aroused body.
She felt perfect, her little pussy rubbing against him as she squirmed. It fulfilled his intention to let her know how she affected him, though it was more direct than he’d planned. Nevertheless, he pressed his cock harder against the juncture of her thighs.

“If you’re going to flirt,” he snapped. “Expect to get a response.”

“I wasn’t flirting.” She shoved at him. Panic flickered across her face as she realized what he already knew, that she was ineffective against his strength. Though she tried to mask it, he felt her shiver down through her legs and arms. “Let go of me.”

It registered like another fist in the gut.
The trembling of her body, the emotion in her face, the wonder and desire followed by the panic and confusion.
It was the shock of the truth, more than her
demand, that
had him easing his touch, gentling it.

For he
was
a very sexually experienced man.
Enough to recognize a woman with none.

She’d never known a man, never handled his lust or accepted it into her body. Savannah Tennyson, the cold-blooded CEO of Tennyson Industries, was a virgin at the age of thirty-five.

* * * * *

“I can see from the way you’re holding your mouth, the tense line of that classic jaw, that you remember that night as vividly as I do. I knew a couple things after that.” Matt’s fingers sent tingling jolts of pleasure down her neck as he drew short lines on the soft skin just beneath the straps holding her head up. “That you craved a man’s Mastery, and you were untouched. And to a man like me, already in love with you, there was no way I was going to settle for less than total possession. Then came Lucas’s summation of the situation, and we know the best way to take a fortress is to trick our way in, or use a battering ram. The only way to keep it is to win over the inhabitant, make her admit she can’t do without you. So here we are.”

…already in love with you…

He said it with such simple assurance, with no guile in his voice… What did she know about love? There had never been any such ship on her radar. She had no idea what it looked like, felt like. Her feelings for Matt were sexual, a strong sexual obsession.
Professional admiration warring with animosity, most of the time.
And he was using his knowledge of that to take advantage of her, to make her another conquest.

She couldn’t explain why the simple telling of a story about a light bulb had made her body, so recently roused to climax, aroused again, the dampness between her legs heating with new moisture. Her nipples were so taut their light contact with the table was almost painful. But that was a physical reaction, not an emotional one. Wasn’t it?

“You want me to believe that Matt Kensington would let himself fall prey to a weak illusion like love?” She scoffed, though she didn’t like the harsh sound of her voice. “The idea of love is only used as a weapon.”

“We’ll see,” he said after a long moment. There was a forced lightness to his voice. “Jon is going to give you pleasure next.”

His hands lingered on her face, and she felt his reluctance to leave her side. It infuriated her. The whole situation, his ridiculous, patronizing assumptions, his gall in saying…
God, why did he say that?
Already in a tailspin, now she was diving out of control, all her thought processes lost, and all she could fall back on was frightened fury.

He returned to his chair, but from the creak of its frame, she suspected he’d turned away, was looking out over the panoramic view of the city. She’d gotten so familiar with his habits
that,
even blinded, she knew what he was doing.

It was something he did when he was contemplating something that disturbed him, and the fact that mattered to her made her even angrier.

“If you’re ballsy enough to do this to me,” she grated. “You should be ballsy enough to watch your men grope me.”

The frozen stillness that settled over the room told her the arrow had hit its mark. There was the sound of the chair again as he turned, and she imagined him laying his hands on the table. One palm flat, fingers straight, the other laid casually upon it, like a lion lying at the edge of a meadow, watching a deer with every appearance of casual regard, all the while mulling whether he was hungry enough.

She’d seen the pose, knew it elicited tremendous discomfort in his prey. She wasn’t sure she could be even more disturbed than she was at this moment, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’d unsettled her further, not after his declaration and his peeved withdrawal when she hadn’t fallen fawning at his feet in gratitude.

“Jon. Proceed.”

Chapter Three

“Can I have the lighting aimed at the center of the table, please?” Jon spoke, revealing that he was behind her.
Directly behind her.

If Matt was known as the fearsome Lord Kensington, Jon’s nickname was Kensington’s Archangel. Savannah remembered the first time she’d heard him speak and she, like everyone else, had done a mental double take. Words came from his mouth in such fluid, resolute tones that it was nearly impossible to imagine arguing with him over anything, even if he calmly indicated the sky had orange polka dots and grass sprang out of the ground purple. With the inexorable strength of water, he could break down financials into their most elemental pieces as quickly as he could an engine’s components, revealing every flaw, and not use any visuals to get complicated points across. In the most turbulent conditions, Jon could bring absolute silence and attentiveness to a room the moment he began to speak.

But it was not just his voice that gave him that power. It was his expressions, his body language. He always brought to mind the words of Han
Suyin
: “There is nothing stronger than gentleness”. It was an honor just to agree with Jon, because he seemed to take so much joy in a person’s accord.

The others teased him, because his passion was reading enlightenment texts. Not the new age and self-help works with their generalizations and crunchy granola messages carried over from the sixties.
The ancient works of Eastern gurus or Greek philosophers.
He would bring up excerpts during their meetings, amusing them all, but the observations were never trite. Savannah had noted that often those quotes served a purpose. With them, Jon gently reminded all of them that their negotiations to win more stock shares or acquire companies could never be treated as a Monopoly game. That jobs, livelihoods and local economies were involved. He provided perspective and, according to him, helped them all keep their karma slate clean. No one disputed it.

There was a different kind of beauty to him. Slender, not tall, with luminous blue eyes and a black mane of silk that fell like feathers over his forehead and past his shoulders.
Pale, for his interests kept him in offices and laboratories most of the time.
Holding a dual Master’s in accounting and mechanical engineering, he could slip from one topic to another as smoothly as he now began to touch her with the cool firmness of his hands. Down the crease between her buttocks and lower, where she was still wet and dripping from her climax, something she’d chosen to ignore until he reminded her of it. The embarrassed flush on her cheeks was something she could not stop or hide, particularly when Jon’s request was met and the spotlight warmed her skin.

Typically it was used to highlight marker boards set up on easels on the table. Now it highlighted every bit of data concerning her.

She heard his footfalls as he came around the table, the roll of the chair a moment before she felt the touch of his hands on her face. He removed the mask’s blinder section so she could see. She blinked a moment, despite the dim light of the conference room.

“Savannah, I’m so glad we decided to do this.” In his magical way, he almost made her feel like she’d had a hand in planning the evening. “I’d like to do something to give you pleasure, something I’ve invented. You’ll be the first woman I’ve tested it on, and I’d like your permission.” His long, clever fingers stroked her forearm, making her shiver.

She was wrong. She
had
fantasized about these five men, in one way or another, for months. Matt had always been central, but they’d been steamy appetizers. They’d been her sex life, all in the realm of her mind.