Page 18 of Devilish Bully (Steamy Latte Reads Collection #3)

THE ACCOUNTANT

KENDALL

The next several days dissolve into contracts, kisses, and the sharp edge of deadlines—somewhere between the work and the sex, we’ve carved out a rhythm that makes no sense to me but feels dangerously natural.

We bury ourselves in reports until my eyes ache from staring at numbers, and then, in the space between signatures or in the middle of a phone call he puts on mute, his hands and his mouth are on me.

Sometimes he devours me against his desk, sometimes in that ridiculous side lounge with the glass walls, sometimes in the elevator before the doors even shut.

And I let him. Every time. Because no matter how many times I tell myself I should push back, I don’t want to.

It shocks me how easy the rest of it has become too. I used to think we were opposites, that his arrogance and my exhaustion couldn’t exist in the same orbit. But the longer I work beside him, the more I notice how much we have in common.

We both live for deadlines, we both despise inefficiency, and we both know what it feels like to be under immense pressure to succeed.

He doesn’t say it, of course. Lucian Pearson doesn’t confess things like that. But I see it in the way his jaw tightens when the board questions him, and I feel it when his hand lingers against mine long after the pretense of helping me with a file is gone.

It’s terrifying, realizing I might understand him.

And it’s worse knowing I might even like him.

But his end goal of the IPO is coming, faster every day, and with it comes the reminder that this…

whatever this is… has an expiration date.

Once the stock goes public, everything changes.

His focus will shift, his priorities will rearrange, and I’ll be left outside the glow of it all, another employee he barely remembers.

So I tell myself not to get used to it—the late nights, the shared smirks over ridiculous emails, the way he actually listens when I call out a mistake.

I tell myself not to get used to the pleasure of his kisses, the intensity, the way he makes me forget who I am for hours at a time.

Because “long-term” is just a word, and it doesn’t last here. Not at Pearson Tech. Not with him.

And I’d be an idiot to believe it ever could with me.