“Maybe you can serve a purpose for me,” I say. “Some inter-office stress relief.” I bite the back of her neck while I lift her hips and slam into her. She rides me as I palm her breasts, mark her neck with my teeth, and scrape my nails down her back until I come, hot and wet and messy, with her smeared all over me and chasing her second climax.
“Christ,” I mutter, kissing the red bite marks along her neck. “I’ll never get anything done with you here.”
“You were the one who made me come over here. I was sitting like the good little girl you wanted me to be over there.”
I pinch her thigh and groan into her neck in response.
“I could help you with your proposition to Amaranov,” she says. “It seems there’s a missing piece to those transactions.”
I still. That quickly, she looked at my computer screen that I didn’t even bother to hide. I lift her, bring her to the bathroom, and clean us up before I bring us back to the desk. Thinking.
“Now tell me. What is that missing piece?” I slide her back onto my lap and situate her there. I don’t care that she sees what we’re doing. There’s no hiding why I met with Amaranov, and the encrypted message here is nothing she won’t hear when I’m talking to one of my men.
“Filip is handling these transactions?” she says, staring at the screen and biting down on her nail. I give her a sharp swat to the thigh and she immediately pulls her hand from her mouth.
“Yes.”
“There are three steps to effective money laundering,” she says. “Placement, layering, integration. Right?”
I nod. I don’t handle the finer details, but I understand that basic gist. “Correct. And Amaranov needs our help.”
“Well of course he does,” she says, frowning at the screen. “What kind of a dumbass launders money in America or the U.K.? Especially a prominent politician. Is he trying to start another world war?”
She’s cute when she gets fired up like this. “Amaranov is stubborn and arrogant,” I tell her. “When he sets his mind to something, it’s hard to sway him.” I tense beneath her, remembering how he looked at her the night before. How he wanted her for himself.
“Well, is his goal to pad his pockets?”
“No doubt.”
“Then consider a country that’s easier to target. The Bahamas. Israel. Hell, keep it domestic. If he targets a less challenging location, the layering step becomes easier. He may get away with placement, but it’s the layering that’s most difficult with countries that have major federal funding to prevent exactly this.”
I’m both impressed and annoyed at her clear admission that she’s skilled in this area. “I see. And after he’s placed his money and we’ve effectively layered it, Filip can handle the integration.”
“Yes,” she says, mulling over the numbers. She hits a few strokes on my keyboard, and I watch as she expertly maneuvers funds. “There,” she says with a flourish. “See? It’s that easy.”
I hold her to my chest and whisper in her ear. “You’re very good at that, malyshka.”
I want to know who she has at home. In my mind, she’s got a man, and I want her to eradicate the thought. “Did your boyfriend teach you?”
She shakes her head. “I have no boyfriend,” she says. “My father taught me the basics and the rest I learned on my own.” But she’s pulling away from me and doesn’t look at me. She’s hiding something, and I mean to find out what that is.
“I’ll have you and Filip discuss this,” I tell her. I let my words drop like hail, heavy and cold, so it shouldn’t surprise me when she flinches. “I’ll allow you to discuss it with him in my presence. You could be useful while you’re here.”
“Works for me,” she says nonchalantly.
“Here,” I say, handing her my phone. “You may entertain yourself on my phone while I get some work done. Download a game or a book or something.” I want to test her. I want to see how far she goes.
Tentatively, she takes it from my hand and nods. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll need your password to access the app store, though.”
I swipe it in, allowing her to see it and she gives me a curious look. Within a few minutes, though, she’s curled up on the chair, swiping at the screen with her lips caught between her teeth, smashing some sort of fruit. She’s good at it, with quick reflexes and a sharp eye, and I’m soon more interested in watching her play on my phone than my work, my anger forgotten.
There’s a stark simplicity about her that I like. She isn’t honest. She hides things from me. But somehow, in our short time together, as I’ve stripped away her layers, I’ve revealed some of the real Calina. Intelligent and cunning. Responsive and eager. And so damn beautiful something inside me aches.