Chapter One
I would have been out of the bathroom twenty minutes ago if it weren’t for Alex Miller.
But the question of why he had flown to New York and invited me to dinner had left me pondering, and there was no place better for pondering than the shower.
Dinner with Alex wasn’t exactly newsworthy. We’d known each other since we were kids, and whenever work brought him to New York we’d usually grab dinner. Sometimes his brothers came. Sometimes it was just the two of us. We’d catch up for a couple of hours, laugh a little, argue about something pointless, and then I’d take a cab home wondering why seeing him always left me annoyed yet wanting more. And also aroused. Stubbornly, obnoxiously aroused.
So dinner wasn’t the weird part. The weird part had been the phone call.
Alex communicated more or less exclusively by text. He only called when something had gone spectacularly wrong or he wanted to make sure I felt particularly bad if I ignored him.
But he’d called this time, and he’d said he wanted to talk about a “business proposition”.
Plus he’d sounded serious, and Alex was rarely serious.
Wiping a streak across the mirror, I looked at myself for a long moment.
I had a law degree from Columbia. I’d argued in front of federal judges and held my own against attorneys twice my age without ever once feeling the flutter in my chest I currently did just because a man had called instead of texted.
Taking a breath, I reached for my clothes. I could handle dinner. Probably.
I padded into the bedroom, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood, and pulled up the news article I’d bookmarked on my phone. The headline was three weeks old now.
Hargrove Mathis Partners Indicted in Federal Bribery Probe
Buried in paragraph nine was the mention of Miller Technologies as a former client of Hargrove Mathis. Everything was couched in careful language that stopped short of making any specific allegation while still managing to vaguely cast aspersion.
I’d texted all three brothers the day it dropped. Derrick had responded with a measured We’re handling it. Landon sent a longer message about their legal options that read like he’d drafted it on a whiteboard first. Alex wrote back lol we’re fine, stop worrying mom followed twelve minutes later by okay yeah it kinda sucks but we’ll figure it out, we always do.
Tossing my phone onto the bed, I started toweling off my hair. Right on cue, the memory came back, uninvited, fully formed, and incredibly fucking irritating.
It was my senior year. Alex was a junior, and unlike most guys his age, he had the nerve to ask out a senior. He caught me in the hallway outside the science wing with that cocky little half-smile that should’ve made me roll my eyes. Instead, I said yes for who knew what reason.
That was bullshit. I knew exactly why I’d said yes.
I’d said yes because Alex Miller was hot as fuck.
There. The twelve-step-program could begin.
His brothers had “secret” crushes on me back then too. Teenage boys aren’t subtle, and the Miller brothers were no exception. But Alex was the only one who crossed the hallway and asked.
The date itself was fine. Good, in fact. Surprisingly, annoyingly good.
He took me to Rosario’s, the Italian place on Colfax where the booths had those red vinyl seats that stuck to your thighs in summer. He held the door. He asked me questions about myself and actually listened to the answers. During the movie he put his arm around me in this slow, smooth way. Like he’d thought about it beforehand and decided to commit rather than doing the fake-yawn bullshit. And the kiss afterward, in his car in the parking lot… that kiss had no business being as good as it was. Sixteen-year-old boys were supposed to kiss like they were trying to eat your face. Alex kissed me like he knew exactly what he was doing and enjoyed proving it. Soft at first, then his hand came up to cup the side of my neck, thumb brushing my pulse point, and when he finally pulled back there was this look in his eyes, half surprised and half hungry, that made my stomach flip.
Then he’d driven us to Baskin-Robbins because I mentioned I wanted ice cream, and for about fifteen minutes the entire evening felt like something out of a movie where the girl falls for the charming underclassman against her better judgment.
And then he had to go and act like… a teenage boy.
We had just gotten back to the car, that warm, buzzy post-kiss feeling still fluttering through my chest, when Alex spotted Tyler Briggs crossing the lot with my friend Megan. Tyler and Megan had been on maybe their second date. Megan was holding a sundae cup and laughing at something Tyler said, looking happier than I’d seen her in weeks.
Alex’s hand shot to the steering column, apparently before his brain knew what it was up to, and the next thing I heard was an obnoxiously long blast of the horn.
Tyler spun around, spotted Alex through the windshield, and burst out laughing. The honking game was their thing. The boys at our school had turned ambush-honking each other into a sport with unwritten rules that no girl had ever been consulted about. It was all very terrible.
Megan’s sundae hit the pavement. She stood there staring down at the mess, then up at our car, and the look on her face could have stripped paint.
I turned to Alex. He was still laughing, waving at Tyler through the glass.
“Are you serious right now?”
He glanced at me and registered my expression. His grin faltered but didn’t disappear, which was somehow worse than if he’d kept laughing. “What? It’s just the honking thing, it’s not a big deal.”
“Megan just dropped her ice cream.”
“I mean, Tyler will buy her another one.”
I stared at him for what felt like a full minute, watching the grin finally die on his face and be replaced by a semi-serious look that was definitely only there to humor me.
“You’re a fucking asshole, Alex.”
I got out of the car, trashed my ice cream cone, walked over to Megan, and the two of us called her mom for a ride home.
I dropped the towel on the bathroom floor and walked into my closet, the air cool enough on my bare skin to make me actually focus on the task at hand. Pick an outfit, go to dinner. Listen to whatever Alex was about to pitch. Behave like a grown woman with a law degree and a retirement plan.
The restaurant he’d chosen was one of those places in Midtown where the lighting made everyone look like a Renaissance painting and the menu didn’t list prices, which meant this wasn’t a catch-up-over-tacos situation. This was Alex in business mode. And business mode, for a guy whose company was hemorrhaging investors thanks to their former law firm’s implosion, almost certainly meant one thing. He wanted to talk about building an in-house legal team.
To be specific, he wanted to talk about me building them an in-house legal team.
I slid hangers back and forth, considering and rejecting. Too corporate, too casual. Too much like I was trying to impress him. Too much like I wasn’t.
My hand paused on a navy silk blouse I’d bought in Milan on a work trip last spring. I paired it with fitted black trousers and a pair of heels that were professional but tall enough to give me some height. I always felt a little more in control when I was taller.
I held the combination up against myself and caught my reflection in the full-length mirror at the back of the closet.
What if this isn’t about business at all?
The thought arrived suddenly. What if Alex Miller had flown to New York, booked a table at a restaurant where the sommelier probably had a Ph.D., and texted me about a “proposal” because the proposal was… actually a proposal? Or at least some grand, sweeping romantic gesture that would force me to either reject him in public or admit that I’d been thinking about him in ways that went well beyond friendly ever since—
No.
I hung the outfit on the hook by the mirror and pressed my palms flat against the closet island, steadying myself against an idea that was as ridiculous as it was sudden.
Alex wouldn’t do that. Not anymore. That was the thing about the last ten years. The kid who honked the horn without thinking about consequences had grown into a man who co-ran a billion-dollar tech start-up.
He wouldn’t ambush me with something romantic. He was too mature for that now.
I stood there for a moment staring at a row of blouses I was no longer seeing.
Alex is immature. Alex isn’t serious. That had been the wall. For ten years, every time my body reacted to one of his texts, every time his smooth-criminal voice on the phone left my panties drenched, every time I saw a recent photo of him and noticed the way his shoulders had filled out or the sharpness in his jaw, my brain had pointed to that wall and said, Remember the horn. He’s not serious. Put him back in the friend zone where he belongs.
But now that wall was gone. And my nipples weren’t just hard from the cool air.
Fuck this.
I reached for my underwear drawer feeling reckless in a way I hadn’t felt since law school, when I used to take the LSAT practice exams drunk just to prove I could still score in the 99th percentile. If Alex Miller were standing in this closet right now, and I asked him to pick out my underwear for tonight, which pair would he choose?
I pulled out my first option. Classic black lace, elegant, expected. Alex would look at these and appreciate them, sure, but they wouldn’t make him forget what he was saying mid-sentence.
I stepped into them, turned in the mirror, and pulled them off again.
Next I pulled out a deep burgundy pair, Brazilian cut, with a little satin bow at the front that I’d always thought was cute. But Alex wouldn’t pick cute. Not the version of Alex who’d kissed me in that parking lot with the expertise of a man twice his age.
Off they came.
I stood there with both rejected pairs on the closet island and reached toward the back of the drawer, where the underwear I bought while drunk-browsing Temu lived.
My fingers found sheer black mesh. Almost nothing to the fabric, cut high on the hips, a single tiny clasp at one side that could be undone with a flick.
I stepped into them and turned sideways in the mirror. The mesh left approximately zero to the imagination. If I bent over, whoever was behind me would be able to see everything through the fabric, and the front wasn’t much better.
My reflection stared back at me, flushed from the chest up, wearing panties that had no business being anywhere near a professional dinner.
These. He’d pick these.
That was decided then.
[divider]
The restaurant was exactly as pretentious as I’d predicted, but Alex had managed to get a corner table that felt almost private, separated from the main dining room by a low partition of frosted glass and trailing ivy. He stood when I walked in. Navy sport coat, open collar, a watch on his wrist that cost more than my first car but that he wore like he’d forgotten it was there.
“Sinclair.” His grin was warm and easy, and he kissed my cheek as he pulled out my chair. “You look incredible.”
“You look like you own a tech company.”
“That’s either a compliment or you’re saying I look like a nerd. Either way, thank you.”
“Your brothers are nerds. You’re the one who figured out how to make nerds look cool.”
He laughed, settling across from me. The candlelight did something very striking to the angles of his face, catching the edge of his cheekbone and turning his brown eyes amber. We ordered drinks and burned through ten minutes of small talk. His flight had been turbulent. My apartment had a mouse problem that my landlord was pretending didn’t exist. Derrick had apparently taken up competitive Jiu-Jitsu, which I filed away to give him shit about later.
Then the drinks arrived, and Alex’s posture changed. Not in a way most people would have noticed, but I’d known this man since he was a kid and I could see the shift. His shoulders squared and his jaw set, the grin still present but tempered now by something underneath it.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“You know why I asked you to dinner.”
“I have a theory. But I’ll let you go first, since you’re the one who flew across the country.”
He leaned forward, forearms on the table, turning his glass once between his hands. “We need someone in-house, as you can probably guess. What you probably don’t know is that it’s worse than the news is making it look. We’ve got three investor groups in various stages of due diligence who won’t sign until we can prove our legal house is spotless. Not just clean. Spotless. We need someone who can walk into a room full of people who’ve been reading about the Hargrove Mathis shit for weeks and make them forget they ever heard the name.”
“And you think that’s me.”
“I don’t think it. I know it. I’ve watched you work, Lace. Not just the big stuff, the way you handle people. The way you read a room. Landon’s the smartest guy I know when it comes to numbers, and Derrick’s the smartest guy I know when it comes to risk, but you’re the smartest person I know, period.”
“What does the offer look like?”
He hesitated, and I saw something flicker across his face.
“I can’t officially offer you anything yet. I haven’t told Derrick and Landon I reached out to you.”
I set my glass down. “You flew to New York to recruit me for a position your co-founders don’t know about?”
“When you phrase it like that, it sounds bad.”
“It is bad, Alex.”
“It’s going to be fine. I’ll get them on board.”
Ten years ago, that sentence would have made me roll my eyes hard enough to see my own brain. I’ll get them on board was what Alex said about everything. He’d get Derrick to buy beer for the party. He’d get Landon to lend him the car for the weekend. The success rate on those promises hovered around, say, fifteen percent, and the failures were always spectacular.
But sitting across from him now, seeing the steadiness in his eyes and the certainty in the way he held himself, I believed him. He’d navigated his company through a crisis that would have sunk most startups, and he’d built a marketing division from nothing that had made Miller Technologies a name people recognized. He knew his brothers. He could get them to agree to this.
The kid who honked the horn would have said I’ll figure it out and meant I’ll wing it and hope for the best. The man across the table meant I have a plan and that plan will work.
Margaret Whitmore’s face floated through my mind. The woman who’d pulled me out of the associate pool, put me on her own cases, introduced me to clients whose net worth required scientific notation. She had invested in me. She believed in me. If I left Whitmore & Kessler now, before making partner, it would feel like—
No, actually, Margaret would understand. She’d built her own firm from nothing at thirty-two. She’d left a prestigious partnership to do it. If anyone understood the pull of something new, something that was yours to shape rather than someone else’s legacy to maintain, it would be her. She’d probably pour me a scotch from the bottle she kept in her bottom drawer, tell me I was making the right call, and ask me to refer any conflicts of interest her way.
I picked up my glass. The wine was expensive and very, very good, and Alex was watching me with an expression that was ninety percent business and ten percent something he probably thought he was hiding.
The mesh panties shifted against my obnoxiously slick lips as I recrossed my legs.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
Denver would mean going home. I’d loved my childhood there.
Memories filled my mind as I took my time answering. Colfax Avenue in summer with the windows down. The smell of pine coming off the foothills after a rainstorm, and the way the sun hit the Flatirons at six in the morning when you were driving west on I-70 and the whole Front Range opened up in front of you like a painting you’d forgotten you loved.
New York had never given me that. My apartment was nice. I could walk to work. My dry cleaner knew my name. But it wasn’t home.
I’d told myself that here, working under Margaret was where I was supposed to be. Her clients were powerful people doing powerful things, and the legal work required to protect them was genuinely fascinating, the kind of intellectual puzzle that made me forget to eat lunch and stay at my desk until the cleaning crew started vacuuming around my feet. But it was Margaret’s puzzle. Her firm, her clients, her legacy.
Whitmore & Kessler was the dream I was supposed to want. But it wasn’t my dream.
I took a sip of wine and looked across the table at Alex.
“Fuck it. When do I start?”
[divider]Chapter Two
Derrick
Alex was doing the thing with his hands.
I’d noticed it the second he walked into the conference room. He had his phone out, flipping it end over end between his fingers like a card trick, which was the exact same shit he used to do with a pencil before asking us to buy him a six-pack of Coors when he was underage.
He’d also brought coffee. Three cups from the place on Sixteenth Street that charged nine dollars, arranged in a neat row on the conference table like offerings to the elder gods. Subtle.
I looked at Landon. Landon looked at me. We’d been having unspoken conversations since birth, and this one went something like:
What did he do?
No idea, but look at the coffee.
I see the coffee.
He brought the good coffee.
This is going to be some serious bullshit.
Alex dropped into his chair at the head of the table, which was another tell. That was my chair. He knew it was my chair because I’d sat in it for every meeting we’d held since we moved into this building, and the only time anyone else sat there was when they were about to try something and wanted the psychological advantage of being at the head.
I took the chair to his left. Landon took the one to his right. If Alex noticed that we’d flanked him like opposing counsel at a deposition, he didn’t let it show.
“So,” he started, and the phone kept spinning.
“So…” I repeated.
Landon said nothing. He picked up his coffee, sniffed it, took a sip, and set it down.
“I want to talk about the legal situation,” Alex said.
“We know what the legal situation is,” I said. “We’ve been living in the legal situation. We had dinner with the legal situation last Tuesday when Renner Capital pulled out of the Series C.”
“Right, exactly, that’s what I want to talk about.” The phone stopped spinning. He set it on the table screen-down, which meant he’d rehearsed this, because unrehearsed Alex never put his phone down. “We’ve been trying to find a firm to work with us for, what, two months now? Every firm with the credentials to impress our investors is either conflicted out because of Hargrove Mathis or too spooked to touch us. And the firms that aren’t spooked are the ones that should scare us, because there’s a reason they’re desperate enough to take on a client in our current situation.”
“Yes. Everything sucks. And…?”
Landon’s voice was flat. He’d arrived at the same assessment weeks ago and had laid it out for us in a presentation with charts showing the declining probability of securing Series C funding for every additional week without competent legal representation. The presentation had not been enjoyable. Landon’s presentations were never fun, but they were always right, which was worse.
“And the in-house option keeps coming back around as the best play. We bring someone on full-time, someone with serious credentials, make them part of the executive team, let the investors vet them directly. No intermediary, no firm with its own baggage. Just our person, our team, our story.”
“We’ve discussed this,” I said. “The problem isn’t the strategy. It’s finding someone willing to take the job who won’t make us look like we scraped them off LinkedIn. We need someone who walks in with their own credibility. Someone investors have heard of, or at least someone from a top law firm.”
“Yeah.” Alex leaned back and crossed his arms, and there it was. That grin. Like he was unwrapping a present he’d already peeked at under mom and dad’s dresser. “I think I solved it.”
“What do you mean by ‘solved it’?” I asked.
“I found someone. Someone perfect. Better than perfect. Someone who could walk into a room full of skeptical investors and have them eating out of her hand before the appetizers arrive.”
He was talking about her.
I felt it in my chest before my brain fully processed it, this sinking certainty, because there was only one woman on earth that Alex would describe that way while doing the pencil trick with his phone and buying us nine-dollar bribe coffee.
“I had dinner with Lacey in New York last week.” And there it was.
Nobody spoke for three seconds that felt like thirty, then Landon sighed.
“I flew out, took her to dinner, and pitched her on the in-house counsel position,” Alex continued, ignoring Landon.
“Without discussing it with us first?” Landon demanded.
“I wanted to make sure she was interested before I brought it to you guys.”
“Without discussing it with us first,” I repeated, because the repetition felt important.
“She said yes, by the way.”
“Let me make sure I’m hearing this right,” I said. “We just survived a scandal that was not of our making, which cost us four months of momentum and two anchor investors and probably a year off all of our lives from the stress. And now you, without consulting either of us, flew across the country to recruit the woman you dated in high school—”
“It was just one date. And it was ten years ago.”
“It was just one date because you fucked it up so egregiously,” Landon put in helpfully.
“—for a newly created role within the company that exists specifically to prove to the investment community that we’re serious professionals and not some fly-by-night operation.”
“She graduated top of her class at Columbia Law.”
Landon finally spoke, and his voice had that controlled, measured quality he got when he was genuinely pissed. “You’re just begging for a scandal when you finally stop pining for her and try to get in her pants. There is no way you’re going to be able to keep this fully professional.”
Alex’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “So your position is that we should reject the most qualified candidate we could possibly find because I kissed her once in high school?”
“My position is that if this company goes bust because our CMO was thinking with his cock instead of his brain, you’re not sleeping on our fucking couch again.” I crossed my arms. “You’re going to be sleeping in a fucking van down by the fucking river this time.”
“I’m not thinking with my—”
“You flew to New York,” Landon interrupted, “made a dinner reservation, and pitched a job offer to a woman you’ve been flirting with at every opportunity for a decade—”
Alex opened his mouth, closed it, and pressed both palms flat on the table. For a moment he looked like a boxer gathering himself for the final round.
“She’s at Whitmore and Kessler,” he said quietly. “She’s Margaret Whitmore’s protégé. She’s been on billion-dollar deals since she was twenty-five. The investors we need would kill to have someone from that firm in our corner, and she’s not just from the firm, she’s been hand-picked by a founding partner. You want credibility? That is credibility. That’s the kind of credibility you can’t buy.”
Fuck him, but he was right.
“You still went behind our backs.” That had sounded a little pouty. Goddammit.
“You would have said no. Besides,” he paused like he was about to mic drop, “you two are just pissed because I’m the only one who ever got a date with her.”
The mic had been dropped.
We both glared at him.
“Unless either of you can deny that with a straight face, just flip me the bird and walk out and I’ll interpret that as you saying, ‘Go ahead and hire her, but we reserve the right to be pouty little bitches about it for a while until it’s time to pretend it was our idea when it works out great.’”
Landon reached his decision fairly quickly. He raised his right hand, extended his middle finger, and walked out without a word.
I held out a bit longer. Alex met my eyes and I could see it all in his face. The certainty, the calculation, the cocky awareness that he’d played this perfectly, and underneath all of that, buried so deep you’d have to be his brother to find it, the knowledge that Lacey Sinclair was going to be in our building every day and who knows maybe we’d all get a shot with her at some point…
I flipped him off and walked out the door too.
[divider]
I could hear Landon in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator, probably stress-eating the leftover Chinese food he’d labeled Landon’s: DO NOT EAT. Alex had disappeared into his room the moment we came upstairs, probably to call Lacey to confirm we’d folded as easily as he’d no doubt promised her we would.
Shutting my bedroom door, I stood there in the dark a moment, trying to decide if I should still be pissed at Alex and concluding that should played no role here and he could kiss my ass.
We’d lived together since the company’s early days, when sharing a place was a necessity. Then when Miller Technologies had taken off and we’d moved into one of those swanky condo/office combos where work-life balance is achieved by doing both in the same hipster-approved building we’d grabbed the penthouse on a whim and then gotten used to our commute being an elevator.
And now Lacey Sinclair was going to work in that very same building.
She was going to sit in a chair forty feet from my office door and do brilliant things with her brilliant brain, and I was going to have to watch it happen five days a week while pretending that the only thing I felt about the arrangement was professional enthusiasm.
Pulling off my shirt, I tossed it toward the hamper. I missed but left it on the floor because I was thirty years old and this was my room and the shirt could stay there until it decomposed for all I cared.
She was going to be here. Every day.
And Alex had the nerve to accuse me and Landon of being bitter about the date. As if one dinner and a kiss in a parking lot was the sum total of what I’d felt for this woman across a decade of phone calls and visits and late-night text exchanges where she’d ask my opinion about some case she was working on and I’d stay up until two in the morning reading about contract law so I could give her an answer that wasn’t completely useless.
I lay back on the bed. The sheets were cool against my shoulders and the room was dark except for the glow of the city leaking through the curtains. Denver at night was nothing like New York at night, and I wondered if Lacey would miss the feeling that the city never slept.
Denver definitely slept.
She’ll be bored in a week.
Except Lacey didn’t get bored. She got restless. Even back in high school she’d get this look, this slightly dangerous glint when she’d burned through every task in front of her and was looking for the next obstacle or challenge that was going to bite the dust.
I thought about that glint. The way it would look across a conference table.
The way it would look if she were on her knees.
My cock was already hard. It had been since about thirty seconds after I’d gotten into bed, if I was being honest, and I might as well be honest since the only audience was the ceiling fan.
I slid my hand beneath my boxers and gripped myself, and the image arrived fully formed, vivid, obscene, exactly the way it always did when I stopped fighting it.
Lacey. Kneeling on the hardwood floor of this very room. Naked except for a collar around her throat, black leather, snug enough that she’d feel it every time she swallowed. A leash hanging from the ring at the front, the leather trailing down between her bare breasts and pooling on the floor between her spread knees. Her hair loose around her shoulders so I could easily grip it in my fist when she needed to be reminded of who was holding the other end of the leash.
And the tail. Fox fur, auburn to match her hair, attached to a plug seated deep in her tight little ass. It would brush against the backs of her thighs when she shifted her weight, and she’d blush every time she felt its presence because the tail would remind her of who put it there. She was looking up at me, her eyes filled with their usual fire. The leash and collar hadn’t tamed her.
I stroked myself slowly, drawing it out.
“Good little pet,” Lacey’s lips twitched and I noticed the faintest catch in her breathing. That crimson flush climbed her chest to her throat, her nipples stiffening into hard peaks.
I wrapped the leash around my fist once, twice, pulling her closer.
“Open.”
Her mouth opened. Those lips, the ones I’d been staring at since high school, parted for me. I didn’t rush it. I fed her my cock inch by inch, watching her jaw stretch to accommodate me, watching her eyes water but never break contact. She gagged slightly when I hit the back of her throat and I held her there, one hand holding the leash and the other entangled in her hair, feeling the vibration of her muffled moans travel down my shaft.
“Take it, little pet. Take all of it.”
Her throat worked around me, swallowing reflexively, and I felt every contraction like a fist milking my cock from the inside. Her hands came up to grip my thighs, nails digging in, not to push me away but to anchor herself. The tail swayed behind her, the soft brush of fur against her skin a constant reminder that she belonged to me.
I pulled back enough to let her breathe, and she gasped, looking up at me with defiance and surrender mingled together in her gaze.
My hand moved faster, and I came harder than I had in months with the image of her on her knees, collared and tailed and magnificently unbroken, seared deliciously into my mind.
I lay there afterward, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned its lazy circles above me. The sweat cooled on my skin as reality reassembled itself piece by piece.
Lacey Sinclair was going to work for us. I was going to sit across a conference table from her and discuss quarterly projections and legal strategy while trying to keep from imagining her with a collar around her throat and a tail peeking out from between her bright red bottom cheeks.
Fuck.
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