Entry-Level Mistress - By Sabrina Darby Page 0,19

me toward him. I went willingly, loved the feel of him sliding over me. A crinkle of wrapping and his hand between us for just a moment before I wrapped my legs around him again. I sucked in my breath at the still new feel of stretching around him, of his naked body so intimately against mine.

Only this time, he moved slowly, infinitely slowly, and held himself up, our gazes still locked. I didn’t know what the hell we were doing but the sensations within me were rising faster than his hips rocked against me. I grabbed him close, mouth to his neck, and urged him on faster.

He was skin, flesh, male and hot. It was strange and frightening and wonderful all at once. When I came, I cried out his name as if I had known it forever.

Chapter 6

It was late when I asked him to drive me home. I overrode his protests and attempts to seduce me back into bed with a stern reminder that I had work in the morning. Work for him. Then I blushed and looked away, trying to pretend we hadn’t had that strange conversation on Friday about a different kind of work.

He had put back on his shirt, left it half-unbuttoned. He wore leather flip-flops down to the garage, but drove barefoot. With my dress slipped back over a body that didn’t really want to be confined, that wanted to revel in the lushness of the night, the drive across town felt illicit. The sky looked darker, the roads more silent and deserted. When we pulled up before my apartment building, I wanted to climb on top of him one more time, right there in his car, on the street. As if he’d read my thoughts, he reached out, caressed my thigh. But that was it, just that brief touch. As he walked me to the building, I wanted more. Finally, at the door, he kissed me.

The apartment was quiet when I stepped inside; Leanna’s door stood closed. I moved about the space as if it were a strange place, as if I’d made a new home in the world of his bed in the fourth floor of that walkup. I did everything by rote, washed my face, brushed my teeth, changed into nightclothes. But under the covers of the bed, my body felt different. I smelled of him.

In the darkness I glanced about the room. I could make out the shape of the last sculpture I had created before I graduated, the head of Medusa. I’d been playing with a mythology theme, trying to find a way to make it new and fresh. In the dark, the snakes looked too smooth, the skin as well, and my skin, the pads of my fingers, so sensitized after the evening, understood exactly what was missing.

Several hours later, I walked into the third-floor office and, grainy-eyed, headed straight for the coffee maker. I set the pot to brewing and then settled down in my cubicle. I didn’t look at James when he walked by, or meet anybody’s eyes, except for Lance when he stopped at my desk with a CD of images and a list of detailed directions. The creative surge of three a.m. dimmed under the bright, fluorescent light of morning. I had absolutely no idea what was going on between Daniel and me. The sex had been good. No. The sex had been great. But maybe all he had wanted was to get Mark Anderson’s daughter in bed.

Was there anything wrong with that? If that were his entire motivation, could I blame him? The thought both amused and disgusted me.

I silently sat through the morning department meeting, staring at the color-photocopied handout. Lance talked about a shared vision of the future of Hartmann Enterprises and a bunch of other managerial motivational stuff that made me tighten my grasp on my coffee cup. Then he shifted into creative stuff, relaying Hartmann’s plans, his desire to move the company in a more global direction, to think about portraying the business that way as opposed to purely American. I’d never thought about company branding as being culturally derived, but it was so obvious I felt stupid for having not. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t admired art, particularly pop art, from around the world.

Jillian, Greg and Steve were the main creative designers and the sketches in the handout were all variants on ideas they had come up with for a new logo, the logo being the