I grabbed my mug with both hands and gulped the water down, desperately trying to lower the heat my body was giving off.
“Just stopped to talk to Callie and this new man of hers,” said Bill. “But you’re right, I’m off—”
And then another contractor walked in through the front door: Cam, one of the younger guys and the one who always did the worst when it came to treating me like a human and not a piece of meat to ogle.
“Hi, Callie,” he said, looking me up and down with what seemed to be extra interest. Maybe what Lucas was doing to me was making me just light up to men. Here they all were, buzzing around me—I’d heard that was a real phenomenon, I was sure. “Sorry, sweetheart, but here I am with a whole load more work for you to do.”
“She’s busy today, you hear that Lucas?” said Dane with a wink in my direction. “So try not to distract her too much.”
I dared to roll my eyes at him, but I was biting my lip to avoid letting any moaning or panting out, so I didn’t really have many options.
Cam tossed a stack of dog-eared papers in front of me, and the three men clustered together a short distance from my desk to gossip some more. I don’t know who thought women were worse at that. I almost wanted to throw myself in front of them and beg them to leave, except of course I couldn’t do that because I was impaled on Lucas’s hand, still sliding and rubbing against me.
“That’s enough, don’t you think?” I said to him quietly, now nobody was paying us any attention. My lips were quivering. I felt tears coming into my eyes.
“I’ll know when it’s enough,” said Lucas, shifting like he was leaning back in his seat, but somehow moving into a position where he had an angle to push his fingers even deeper in me.
It didn’t take much thinking to know what that meant: he was going to get me off, right here in public. And there seemed to be only one thing I could do about it: I would have to fake it so he’d stop before it was too late.
But then I felt a familiar tingling sensation spreading through my arms and legs. It was already too late.
I shared a small house with my parents, so I was used to keeping myself quiet when I was getting myself off. But it was a lot harder when someone else was controlling the pace of things. I pushed myself backwards in my chair as my body closed hard around Lucas, using the squeak and scrape of it to cover for my breathing.
Lucas’s fingers slid out of me. The other men turned around to look at us, but he was sitting with his elbows on the desk by that time, clearly disentangled from me. I had a feeling all three of those men could tell from my face something of what was going on, though there was no way they would guess the extent of it.
“Like I told you, Lucas, don’t distract her,” Dane said, grinning. “Or I’ll have to evict you from my offices.”
“I promise,” Lucas said, leaning back even further. “I’m feeling pretty happy to sit back and watch from now on.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Dane said, “or she’ll have more di
stractions than she can contend with.”
I wanted to make some retort about not being that distractable, but I didn’t trust myself to speak at that moment… and it seemed a bit hypocritical.
Once we were alone again, Lucas put his two fingers in his mouth and made a big show of sucking them clean. The marbles in my head I’d sort of managed to roll into a coherent pile completely scattered. I was pretty sure there was at least a double meaning going on there, probably a triple meaning depending on how you looked at it.
I needed the next ninety minutes to go quickly… but even then, I realised now I was far from safe.
Chapter Eleven
Lucas took my car key from me once I was finished at work, and I was so wrecked from that unwanted orgasm plus the effort of doing so much acting normal after it, I didn’t put up much of a fight.
“You’ll still get your chance to drive once you drop me off,” he said. “Let me do something nice for you.”
We were still inside the building at that point, with Dane right there saying goodbye to me, so if I didn’t want to drag my boss into my personal business, I had no choice but to keep quiet. Not that I was exactly feeling combative at that point.
It was immediately clear to me as Lucas pulled the car out that he was not going to drive straight to his house, and I didn’t even really have it in me to care. There were other questions on my mind, and if I wasn’t owed some answers now, I didn’t think I’d ever get them.
“Lucas,” I spoke up, my head flopping back against my headrest. I didn’t fight it. Maybe he would be more willing to be open with me if I made myself as non-threatening as possible. “That girl whose grave you took me to the other day. Jillian Montgomery?”
“What about her?” said Lucas, with absolutely nothing in his voice I could interpret. He executed the neatest and least terrifying turn onto a main road I’d ever experienced from him, which made me think there was a lot more going on beneath the surface.
“Who was she? Were you two dating, before she…?”
Lucas snorted. “Dating Jill? Fuck, no.” Again with the careless words and unexpectedly competent driving. “Jill was someone my sister knew,” he said. “From when she was sick.”
A memory flashed back to me: someone at our school, asking about Lucy Starling in this really serious tone of voice. And maybe I’d heard something once, a long time ago, that hadn’t been made a big deal of because we were kids and not expected to be able to take adult things. Finally, I got it. “Cancer, right?”