quickly towards the movement I make, then away again, as if he’s training himself not to look.
I don’t do it straight away. I wait until one of the associates is droning on about hybrid schemes and then make a bit of a show of shifting in my chair. Then I sigh gently, so the others won’t be alerted to what I’m doing but Benedict will, and raise my foot, propping the heel of my shoe on the front bar of my chair so my knee is in the air, which forces my legs to open a little, parting my skirt.
In my peripheral vision I see Benedict’s head turn and hear his sharp intake of breath as he clearly spots my ‘accidental’ indiscretion. I’m full-on flashing him now, and as I turn my head to look at him our gazes finally lock and I see exactly what I’ve been waiting for since that moment when he couldn’t tear his eyes away from me in the bathroom.
Desire.
Hot, fierce need.
But before I can even smile he looks away again and asks his colleague a question, as if nothing has happened.
As if I don’t exist.
He’s ignoring me again.
A wave of burning frustration floods through me and I drop my foot from the chair and cross my legs again, determinedly keeping a blank expression on my face in case he looks at me again. No way will I ever show Benedict Chivers how much he’s hurting me with his disregard.
The meeting seems to go on for another couple of hours—though according to my watch, when I check it at the end, it’s only eighteen minutes. Eighteen pain-filled, life-sucking minutes.
The others get up from their chairs on Benedict’s say-so, and I gather my pad and pen together and make to stand up, smoothing my skirt down over my legs.
‘Maya, come with me. I want to see you in my office. Right now.’
The vehemence in Benedict’s last two words leaves me in no doubt that I’m in for it. It just remains to be seen exactly what he has in mind by way of punishment.
The thought of that breaks through my aggravation and wet heat floods between my thighs as I follow him to his office on trembling legs, hearing him call to his other PAs that he’s not to be disturbed.
I shut the door behind me with a shaky hand and turn to face him, my breath coming quickly but my head held high.
I am not going to let this guy get the better of me.
Benedict
MAYA DARLINGTON-HUME IS bad news. Everybody knows that.
Like everyone, I’ve seen the gossip articles showing her falling out of nightclubs on the arm of the latest It Boy and giving the finger to the camera, both of them clearly drunk or high, as well as those grainy long-lensed shots of her slouching around Primrose Hill in the late afternoon, wearing dark glasses and with a takeaway coffee clutched in her hand, after a reportedly wild party at her place the night before.
The whole thing churns my stomach. Not because women shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy themselves, but because I’ve had a lot of experience with spoilt, bored, rich girls throughout my life, so I know one when I see one.
In my teens I worked as a maintenance guy at Tinderly, the most famous and moneyed of all the private girls’ schools in the country. It was only a few miles away from where I grew up, in a rundown post-war prefab house on a rough estate on the edge of Oxford, but those girls’ lives were a million miles away from my own tough upbringing.
I worked at that school throughout my late teens, saving every penny I could so I’d finally be able escape the life I’d been desperate to leave behind since I was old enough to realise that I had a waste of space, sociopathic drunk for a father and that I needed to earn enough money to rescue and rehouse my mother so we’d never have to see that piece of shit again.
That’s how I was able to stick it out at Tinderly—carefully navigating my way through a dangerous minefield of adolescent girls’ boredom and lust. I swear to God, I never met a single pupil there I believed would go on to make any meaningful contribution to society. It was clear they’d all end up living off either their parents’ vast fortunes or their self-satisfied aristocratic future spouses’.
From my inferior position of servitude I experienced it all from those girls: abuse from the privileged, the occasional veiled but thankfully not acted upon threats to have me fired when I wouldn’t give in to their sexual demands—as if I was just some plaything put there for their entertainment—and their cruelty and scorn when I refused to engage with them on any kind of level.
That school was a terrifying microcosm of a pampered, obtuse and corrupt society that I’ve tried hard to avoid during my working life.
Unfortunately, in order to maintain my software company’s position as market leader, I now find myself having to associate with exactly those sorts of people. Including, it seems, Maya Darlington-Hume, who personifies everything I’ve come to hate about rich people: the petulant, entitled behaviour, the narcissism and, most of all, the goddamn self-indulgence.
She might be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, with a charisma that makes it virtually impossible to keep my eyes from being drawn to her, but I’m no fool. As hard as it is to ignore her after that intensely erotic moment we shared in her father’s bathroom the other week, I know I have to.
The trouble is I’ve not been able to stop thinking about her ever since I unashamedly watched her beautiful body writhing in the water as she brought herself to orgasm.
Fuck.
I’ve thought about it a thousand times since then, even though I’ve told myself not to.
The expression in her eyes as she came in front of me, seeming to see inside my mind and know that I couldn’t bring myself to look away, has haunted me ever since.
I’ve spent more time in the gym since she’s been working here than I normally would in a whole month, battling to drain the energy out of my sexual urges, trying not to picture what it would be like to have her lying writhing and needy beneath me as I thrust into her, teasing that beautiful, spirited face into the same expression of ecstasy I saw that day.
And now here she is in the flesh, looking at me with those defiant, perceptive eyes, waiting to see how I’m going to punish her for deliberately flashing me.
It’s as if she senses it in me—the urge to dominate her and to take pleasure in it that I’ve fought against since she first started working here.
But I can’t let myself do it. I can’t get involved with her.
I need to keep her father sweet if I’m going to use his influence to get what I want: his agreement to sit on my executive board and exert his not insubstantial influence over the money men, so that the business I’ve strived so hard to build from scratch has a real chance of survival in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
We’re getting our biggest product—a piece of Customer Relations Management software, or CRM as it’s more commonly known, which organises and logs client contacts—into a lot of key British companies, but there’s
