Page 29 of To Curse A Knight

His mouth puckered like he’d just sucked a pint full of salt. “You can call me ‘sir’.”

Oh boy.

“Yes, sir.” I repeated, rolling my internal eyes a thousand times. Just what I needed;anothernarcissist calling the shots.

Marco excused me from the farce of the meeting, and Gertie wasn’t at her desk when I left his office. I made a beeline for the front entrance, needing to think through this recent development in peace.

I was getting closer to my goal—months of slow movement into his system had allowed me to penetrate his firewalls and create the necessary backdoors to get out. It was painstaking work, but the only way to get by undetected. The next three weeks weren’t mine anymore, so I’d have to come up with another way to continue my progress… and figure out how to shake my new beefy bodyguard.

Asmuch as I liked him around to fuck, I worked alone. And speaking of alone, my arsehole escort wasn’t waiting for me when I walked out into the parking lot.

Calling an Uber, I vowed to get the Barbarian back as soon as I found the time. Maybe with a little torture session of my own.

“Aaron Rodriguez, billionaire business mogul and recent partner of Lane Enterprises, is missing and presumed dead after evidence of a gruesome car crash off the gorge of Cascade Falls was discovered late yesterday afternoon. Sources say the gray Mercedes registered in his name was last seen leaving the parking lot of his central office in Carlisle, and no one can attest to his whereabouts since. The investigation is ongoing, but foul play is not suspected at this time.”

I scrolled through the online news story the minute it landed on my phone. I sat in his very office chair, having spent the day overseeing a myriad of business decisions on his behalf. The last time I’d been in here, I’d pinned him to the floor and rode him until my body couldn’t possibly come anymore. Today, I was keeping up the façade life was continuing on without the man who’d changed everything.

The news he was missing had leaked the previous afternoon, so I was heavily immersed in damage control. Now that the ‘presumed dead’ status was circulating in the media, I’d have to manage the shit storm for the next several weeks to keep operations running and suspicions diverted.

As a saving grace, everything was reported as we’d expected, but it didn’t stop the shiver that swept up my spine at an image of Aaron’s lifeless body at the bottom of the gorge, as if it had actually happened.

Especially now I’d finally admitted how much the man meant to me.

I hadn’t uttered those three fateful words to anyone romantically in a long,longtime. I’d expected them to taste rancid when he dragged them from my throat post-orgasm. Instead, they’d tasted like a pure sugar hit; overindulgent, potent, and all-consuming, for the brief period it took to dissolve on my tongue.

The ambrosial flavor still coated my mouth, a delicious memory I couldn’t wait to treat myself to again.

I loved Aaron Rodriguez. The admission made my tainted heart flutter at the possibility of something real, but the flutters instantly sunk to the earth when I admitted another truth:

My love for him wasn’t enough.

I’d always known it. Perhaps that was why I’d always kept him at arm’s length—somewhere I could always grab hold of him when I needed his touch, but push him away when the touch became too real.

His declaration hadn’t come as a surprise. From the first time we’d fucked in the limousine more than ten years ago, I’d held his heart in a vise, and squeezed it whenever the mood suited me. Now that I’d finally given him what he wanted, I was going to have to take it away—or wrap it in a series of caveats that might make him want to take everything back.

The thought sliced viciously through my chest, the stabbing pain saying all the words I wasn’t willing to.

I didn’t want to lose him, but I couldn’t keep him if I could only have him.

I was a wishy-washy bitch at best; a cruel heartbreaker at worst.

The stress of it all: this monumental realization, the race to get to Alvarez, my unwanted roommate, and the serious lack of sleep from my nightmares, had wormed its way under my skin. My veins crawled with the insatiable need tohurtsomething. We were sitting on the precipice of losing control, and I did not lose control.

People died when I lost control.

Scanning to the bottom of the article, I closed my browser and let those depressing thoughts slide from my mind before getting back to my very busy day. I was the Queen of Compartmentalization, and our list of ends to tie up was currently infinite.

Drawing in a deep breath to bury the anxious ball in my chest, I blew it all out in a forceful rush, then turned my attention to the task in front of me: running Aaron’s company.

Thankfully, it was close to Christmas, and the company would shut down for a week to allow employees to enjoy their holidays. I just had to hold down the fort for a few days before the break, enough time to come up with a better game plan than impromptu office visits.

Our legal operations were very similar, so it wasn’t hard to fill his shoes from that perspective. Aaron had more fans than he’d realized, because the tone in the building was considerably reserved and downright distraught.

Gabby was distraught, anyway. The poor woman had sobbed continuously at her desk, but she refused to go home when I offered her the rest of the day off with pay.

“He would want me here,” she’d sniffed. Her watery eyes and puffy face pulled at my heartstrings. “He’d want me here, making sure you were taken care of.”

Her attempt at a smile brought on another fit of crying; I gently patted her shoulder and carefully tiptoed back to the office.

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