The Naughty Corner (20 page)

He’d never had sex in his office. He’d always wanted to, but no woman had been right for it. Lola was perfect. She made reality better than fantasy.

“I screamed,” she said softly.

His face was buried in the crook of her shoulder, the fruity scent of her hair tantalizing. His cock throbbed. Leaning over her, the position was awkward, but Gray didn’t care about that either. He realized it wasn’t that he
couldn’t
move, but that he didn’t want to.

He also didn’t care about the executive staff meeting he was ten minutes late for or the phone calls he had to make, or about his customers, his suppliers, his employees. There was just Lola and this moment.

“Mindy might have heard,” he said, referring to his secretary. Though Lola’s cry hadn’t been as loud as a scream, there was still the possibility they’d been overheard, and the idea made him pulse anew. A proclamation. His stamp of ownership.

“I didn’t mean to,” Lola said. He felt her voice against him and inside him.

“You couldn’t help yourself.” God, yes, that was good. That’s how he wanted her, totally lost to everything but him. Just as he was lost to everything but her.

“Are you going to get fired?”

He laughed. There was a rule against sex on the premises. He’d violated it. But Mindy wasn’t likely to tell. Of course, if he made a habit of it . . . but he wouldn’t. Some things should be done only once or they lost their impact. He couldn’t duplicate what they’d just created.

There would be other moments, potent yet different.

After allowing himself several more indescribable seconds, he finally pulled away from her, straightened. She lay deliciously debauched on the table, hair in disarray, nipples peaked against the white blouse, skirt around her hips, pussy wet with her climax, his cock still in her. He burned the sight to the inside of his eyelids.

“Do you know how good you look?” He heard the awe in his voice and didn’t care about that either.

“No.”

“Da Vinci. Botticelli.” Magnificent.

He held his hands out, and when she grabbed on to him, he hauled her up until they were chest to chest. Then he tangled his fingers in her hair and licked the seam of her lips. She opened. He caressed her tongue with the tip of his. The kiss was so damn sweet, his heart turned over. He didn’t kiss her enough. He was always so busy with her body.

Pulling away, she licked her lips as if she needed one last taste of him. “I like you inside me.”

He loved it. He didn’t want to leave her. Still cupping her head, he said, “I like the feel of you around me.”

“You planned this, didn’t you? You had a condom.”

He grinned. “Hell, yes, I planned it. I lay awake long into the night thinking about it.” He rubbed her nose with his. “But it was even better than I imagined.”

“Good.”

Then he had no excuse to stay inside her. “Don’t move,” he ordered.

His body ached, having to leave her, to lose her. He disposed of the condom and the package—what would his janitors think when they emptied his trash?—then returned to her. She still wore the delicate thong. He smoothed it back in place. Lola shivered.

He put his hands to the hem of her skirt. “Lift.” And he pulled it down, straightening it over her thighs. “Do you have a comb?”

“I left it in my car.”

He used his fingers to untangle the silky locks, holding hanks of it close to her scalp so it wouldn’t pull.

“There,” he whispered when he was done. “Good as new.” Hands at her waist, he hoisted her up and onto her feet.

She stood a long moment just looking at him, her gaze roaming his face. “That wasn’t punishment.”

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t believe it was.”

They were beyond punishment. They’d moved into something else entirely.

* * *

LOLA WAS SLEEPWALKING. SUDDENLY SHE WAS AT HER CAR
without truly knowing how she got there. Okay, okay, she remembered sliding her feet into her sandals, Gray unlocking the office door, opening it, ushering her out. She remembered the studious bent of his secretary’s head as she pointedly ignored them, obviously having heard something more than Lola taking dictation. She remembered those things, but they were all dreamlike.

Retrieving the car key from her pocket, she chirped the alarm. The locks popped up.

She’d never had sex like that. No man had ever made her cry out when she knew she absolutely could not, should not. She was hooked, obsessed, crazy, totally in over her head.

And she was almost sure he was, too.

That was dangerous. It was no longer punishment. They didn’t need excuses. All he had to do was call her up and order her to come to him. She’d drop everything and go. It didn’t matter what kind of work she had to do. It didn’t matter what prior plans she’d made.

Was this sexual addiction? Or addiction to Gray?

Lola started the engine. The dash clock flashed the time at her. She’d lost an hour. A whole hour. How could he have made her come for an entire hour? Yet that’s how it seemed, her body simply riding from peak to peak. He was some sort of magician. Or a hypnotist. Or just all male. She couldn’t afford this kind of addiction. Addiction was need, and need led to heartbreak.

She’d been on her way somewhere when he called. Oh yeah, she had to go to the plant. She needed to see Robinson. Then she had to find George.

Lola rested her forehead on the steering wheel. God. George. She so did not want to tackle the issue now. She wanted to savor that amazing hour with Gray. She couldn’t lose it yet. There hadn’t been any messages since that phone call on Friday. Maybe he was over it. Maybe she didn’t need to say anything at all. Or maybe it was the twins and George had nothing to do with it.

She heard the voice of reason in her head saying that a problem only got bigger when you ignored it.

But when she got to the freeway, her car turned in the opposite direction, back home. She didn’t have to see Robinson. She could call. In fact, she could do it now.

He answered on her second ring. “Hello, Paul Robinson here.”

She liked his formality and knowing immediately that she was talking to the right person. “It’s Lola, Paul. Did you get the files?” At this point, she had the document in separate files. She would collate them later when she was ready to do the table of contents.

“Yeah. But we’ve got problems.”

“What?” Dammit, she should have called him from home so she could take notes. She tapped the brake as she closed in on a slow car in front of her. Changing freeway lanes now would distract her from whatever Paul said.

“They’re corrupted. The software wouldn’t even recognize them.”

Corrupted? How the hell did her files get corrupted? It wasn’t possible. “Did you try opening them with FrameMaker?” Which was the program in which she’d created them.

“Of course I did, Lola.” Even over the Bluetooth, his sarcasm rang through.

“Okay, well, I’ll have to check them. Sorry about this.”

“Fine. But we’re getting down to the wire.”

“I’ll call you when I’ve got the problem resolved.”

“Make it snappy.”

She tapped the button, but she was sure he’d already disconnected. Dammit. She wanted to pound her head against the steering wheel. Instead, she turned on her blinker, gunned the engine, and zipped around the slowpoke in her way.

It was gone, all that delicious bliss, even the phantom scent of Gray in her head. You just couldn’t hold on to good things. She knew that; it was why she didn’t like relationships. They never lasted.

* * *

UNLOCKING THE FRONT DOOR AND STEPPING INSIDE, LOLA COULD
hear them. Their laughter didn’t emanate from their room, which was first on her right, or the living room off to the left. It originated down the hall, and the only rooms down there were her bedroom and her office.

Lola began to seethe.

She was stealthy, tiptoeing so her sandals didn’t slap on the front entry tile. Like a secret agent, she crept along the wall before her office door, then stuck her head around the jamb.

Harry was seated at the computer,
her
computer. William was on his knees, elbows on the desktop, watching as Harry typed.

They hadn’t heard her unlock the front door. She whirled into the doorway, stood with her legs planted firmly apart, hands jammed on her hips. “What. Are you. Doing?” she snapped, three separate sentences booming across her office.

Harry jumped and hit William in the nose with his elbow, who in turn squealed and fell back on his butt.

“Aunt Lola.” Harry stared, his eyes as wide as fried eggs.

“This is my office.” She stabbed her chest. “And that is my computer.” She jabbed a finger toward her desk. “Why are you using it without my permission?”

“I—I—” Harry didn’t usually stammer.

“Step away from the keyboard. Now.” She wasn’t about to let them erase any evidence of what they’d been doing.

Harry stood, the chair flying out behind him and rolling into the wall. William scuttled away on his hands and knees, then slowly rose to his feet. They both held their hands in the air as if she were a cop with a gun on them.

She had a password for initial start-up but didn’t employ a screen saver password. Obviously she should have shut everything down when she left this morning. And obviously she needed to deploy her office door lock as well.

She advanced on them. William rubbed his nose, but it wasn’t swollen or bleeding. It wasn’t even red. Though Harry’s cheeks puffed in and out like a fish’s gills, not another word came out.

“The files I sent to my boss were corrupted. What have you done to my computer?” She had no clue how they could possibly have screwed up her files.

Finally, Harry fired a brain cell that worked his mouth. “We were just doing our online driving instruction, Aunt Lola. Your screen is so much bigger.”

Both her monitors were twenty-three inches as compared to their fifteen-inch laptop screens. And on the one they were using, she could indeed make out the driving school’s logo. But maybe they’d had time to toggle from another window.

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t ever touch my stuff unless you have my permission.” She couldn’t remember what program she’d had open on her desktop when she left. She’d never considered it an issue. But she should have. “Have you used my computer before when I’m not home?”

God, they could have been sending spam emails from her account, surfing porn sites, infecting her computer with sneaky, dirty little viruses.

“We’re sorry, Aunt Lola. We only used it today. Because it was already booted.” Harry’s gaze was an earnest, plaintive, puppy-dog brown.

But he was such a good actor. He could play Oliver Twist with that sweet, angelic face begging for another bowl of gruel, when inside beat the heart of the Artful Dodger.

“I am going to run scans and check registries and follow your history trail like bread crumbs”—of course they’d probably erased everything from previous uses—“and if I find anything . . . ” She stared them down, left the threat hanging.

“You won’t, honest, Aunt Lola. We were just running the driving program, I swear.”

She moved aside, then pointed to the door. “Go. Do not bother me for the next hour.” She glared a long moment. “Or there will be consequences.”

They scuttled out.

And she asked herself what consequences? She felt for anyone who was a parent with a child who just would not listen. What could you really do? You couldn’t beat them or starve them or lock them in a closet. So what made them behave if they simply didn’t feel like it?

“I’m never having children,” she muttered, then marched back out to the living room.

They were seated on the couch, laptops open, identical studious lines on their foreheads.

She held out both hands. “I want all cell phones, iPods, iPads, MP3s, video-game consoles.” Was there anything else? She had no idea. “You can work on your driving instructions until we leave for the lesson. Then I want the computers, too. You are in total blackout until tomorrow morning.”

When Harry opened his mouth to argue—if that’s what he intended to do—she cut him off. “And we’re having a chick flick marathon tonight on streaming.”

They grimaced, and she had the insane urge to laugh. But they handed over everything.
Almost
everything. Harry clutched his phone. “What if we have an emergency call from Mom?”

“If she can’t get hold of you, she’ll call my phone.”

He finally relinquished it, then swiped at his eye as if there might actually be a tear there. Lola wasn’t moved.

With an armload of their gadgets, she gave them one last glare and a parting shot. “And when I’m done checking my files, we’re going for a walk.”

They gaped. “Walk?”

Teenagers never seemed to walk anywhere, except if you counted cruising the mall. “Yes, a walk. You need exercise after working on your computers.”

“But we get
five hours
of exercise with Coach Barnett.” William groaned.

Lola smiled. “That’s tomorrow.”

Turning her back on them, she marched down the hall. She stored their devices in her office closet. And from now on she would lock the freaking door when she wasn’t sitting right there.

Forty-five minutes later, she’d found no ill effects on the computer. The twins had been in the online driving forum, so they hadn’t lied about that. The history showed nothing, but she deleted her history every time she logged out, so that didn’t mean anything. If they’d used her email program to send any funky emails, they’d deleted any evidence. The quick scan found no viruses, and she was running the full scan now. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with the FrameMaker files that she’d sent.

She dialed Paul Robinson and said she’d bring him a disk this afternoon after she’d dropped the boys off at the driving school.

“Look, we figured out the problem,” Paul said without an ounce of apology in his tone.

“What was wrong?”

“George loaded some new software on his computer, and it screwed things up.”

She stared at her computer screen without seeing it. “
George
messed up the files?”