Page 4 of Filthy Promises

Which, apparently, has not been properly closed.

Meaning that, when I make contact…

It swings open.

2

ROWAN

Vincent Akopov, the man who has starred in my most private fantasies for five years, is looming tall over his desk.

His dark hair falls in perfect disarray across his forehead, those distinctive silver streaks catching the overhead glare like lightning trapped in midnight. His jaw—that impossible sculpture of angles and shadows—clenches beneath the trimmed precision of his beard. The sleeves of his charcoal button-down are rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms mapped with veins that branch under his skin.

His presence devours the room. Consumes the oxygen. Consumesmyoxygen.

It’s the reason—well, one of many—that Vincent is always the one I go to in my lonely, late night imaginings. Ol’ Reliable to get me to the metaphorical mountain peak.

The man doesn’t occupy space—he owns it, warps it, makes you forget there was ever anything else here before him.

But thereissomething before him.

Somethingbent overbefore him, rather.

To be specific, that something is a woman.

The woman, whom I presume can only be the missing Vanessa, has her cheek plastered to the desk surface, so she doesn’t see me. That’s probably for the best, because I’m slightly preoccupied by the fact that her skirt is hiked up around her waist, her panties twisted around her ankles, and more tortured moans keep sputtering past her lips as Vincent thrusts into her from behind.

I make a sound somewhere between a gasp and a squeak.

The woman, lost in her pleasure, doesn’t notice.

But Vincent does.

He turns his head, his movement unhurried, lazy, uncaring. The muscles of his back bunch and flex under the thin silk of his dress shirt.

And our eyes meet.

Time grinds to a complete and total halt.

His eyes are bluer than I remembered. Like glacier ice. Like the Caribbean waters in those vacation brochures I always collect but never act on, because vacations are for people who have fun, people who have sex, people who aren’t drowning under the unbearable weight of crushing medical debt and loneliness.

In other words, not for me.

I wait for shock. Or, if not that, for embarrassment. At the very least, I’m bracing for him to bellow at me to get out becausehe’s trying to fuck, goddammit.

I get none of that.

Instead, his lips—wet and glistening with things I don’t dare think about—curve into a predatory smile.

Then he winks at me.

“Oh” is the only thing I say, the only thing Icansay, like all the other words in the English language have burned up in smoke.

The papers go tumbling from my suddenly numb fingers and scatter across the floor like oversized confetti. In my haste, I trip and bump the door a second time.

It rocks all the way open, rebounds off the wall, and then, with some insane comedic timing from a universe that apparently thinks this whole thing is funny in the extreme, it swings back and closes in my face.

Click.

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