34. The Copy Room

34

The Copy Room

KINGSTON MOORE

Kingston was walking down the utilitarian hallway on the second floor of the Sidewinder building in late June, when Southern California became incrementally warmer than its standard daily high of seventy-five degrees and the locals thought the sky was raining fire, when he saw the Nicole Lamb disappear into the copy room.

He hadn’t seen her during his three previous trips to Sidewinder Golf after he’d emailed her and she’d rejected his entreaty.

The fault might have been his because he hadn’t gone up to the third floor to try to see her in her lab or office, but she might also have been avoiding him.

Probably both.

The front lobby was carpeted with deep, plush carpeting and furnished to impress investors and buyers, and the lab was equipped for engineering marvels.

The second floor, however, was where legal and accounting languished unloved and walked on a floor of industrial tile. Fluorescent bulbs flickered unflattering blue light from the dropped ceiling, turning lawyers and CPAs ghastly as they haunted the corridors.

Nicole was a ghost slipping through the door to where the copiers were corralled, her white skirt fluttering inside just as the door closed.

His legs sped to a half-run. His hand reached, desperately grabbed and caught the door.

Kingston hurried inside, dodging into the over-warm room after her. “Nicole!”

She whipped around, spinning in the small space not taken up by the beast of a copier, shelves stacked with office supplies, and one geriatric fax machine, even though the copier and most of the printers in the building could also fax. “Oh.”

His soul writhed in his body, spewing stupid confusion. “I know you’re mad at me?—”

“Then why are you following me?” she demanded, hands on her shapely hips.

In a white sundress.

His little engineer was a feminine flower, and Kingston thought his heart would explode.

“Just the last few steps,” he said. “I didn’t even know you were on the second floor. There’s a sales meeting in late September to start pre-planning for the show at the Javits Center in NYC. It’s going to be a huge show.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just making a few copies.”

She turned back to the copy machine, a behemoth that came up to her shoulders, dropping a sheaf of papers in the feeder.

“I just wanted to explain?—”

Her words were clipped when she spoke, “I’m not interested in your reframing of what you said.”

“There are things I can’t tell you.”

“Then you shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t want them to have to lay people off from Sidewinder. I want to help the company.”

She spun back to face him. “You never should’ve asked me to give you my designs. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I will not be a part of it.”

Kingston lolled his head to the side in frustration, his brain so busy coming up with retorts that he did not see his hand reach forward. “Nicole, that’s not what I meant.”

His fingers grabbed hers.

Their hands were joined, linking them together, a bridge and a bond.

Nicole didn’t pull away.

Her fingers tightened around his.

Passion is anger and passion is sex, and the energy can channel either way.

Kingston dragged her toward him.

When she slammed into his chest, he wrapped his other arm around her, caging her.

Nicole grabbed the collar of his shirt to rise up to her toes, closed her eyes, and her head tilted back.

His mouth crashed down on her, kissing her and sucking her breath into his mouth until his head spun. He let go of her hand and reached out to steady himself on the copier, but she stumbled with him, ending up with her back pressed against the mammoth machine while it pounded out pages with rhythmic clanks and howls.

She was kissing him back, her arms around his neck, her breath quick in his ear as he ran his mouth over her neck to her shoulder.

Her curves under his hands were a cherished memory, tinged with regret.

Longing made him desperate.

She bit his neck, a spark of pain that jumped his nerves, and her hands insinuated between their bodies to find his belt.

“I don’t have a condom,” he growled. Cried? Growled.

“I’m on the Pill,” she said, her voice cracking.

“You weren’t.”

“In case you came back,” she said, her whimper sad and needy at the same time.

In case Kingston came back.

He all but attacked her, his body shoving hers against the hot copy machine, and she yanked at his suit belt until it was undone. He flipped her skirt over his hand and grabbed that luscious, teardrop ass of hers.

His palm filled with rough lace and tender flesh.

The need to see those panties—white? Her skin tone?—was a dart in his mind, but his body’s roar to take her swamped his thoughts.

He moved his hand around her thigh and slipped past the leg band, slipping his thumb into her slippery folds and rubbing through the sexy parts of her until she was hanging on his shoulder and gasping.

Then he shoved her panties to the floor, and she shook them off her pretty ballerina shoes.

Kingston was standing back, giving her room while she fumbled with his belt until it jangled loose under his suit coat, and he took his hand off of her sweet little bottom to jerk his shirttails out of the way and undo his pants’ hook and fly. “You’re sure?”

“God, yes,” she groaned, bracing her elbows on the copy machine.

He hooked his hands under her armpits and lifted her right off the floor.

“Oh!”

Carrying her lightness over to the wall was easy, and she wrapped her legs around his waist when she got the idea.

He wrapped his hand around the back of her skull and slammed her against the sheetrock. His little engineer’s brainy brain had to be protected, but the rest of her was his for the ravaging.

Her body sank over his, taking him in with a slick press upward, and he ground into her and crushed her between his oversized body and the wall, surging into her in time with the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the copy machine.

She was tightening inside, holding onto his neck and keening near his ear, her breath higher with each whimper.

His own release was impending, his body on fire from her touch, her softness magnetic.

Nicole seized in his arms, her body rigid as he ground into her, and he was experienced enough to know to keep doing exactly that.

Her breath was caught in her throat, not breathing, and then she gasped and clutched his neck, her body throbbing inside.

The mind-consuming urgency to have her grabbed him, and Kingston thrust up into her as his soul expanded into the bliss and nothingness, and then his balls pumped into her with each throb of relief.

Dear God, he hoped she really was on the Pill, but he couldn’t have stopped unless she’d told him to.

After he’d held her, told her what a good girl she was, with soft skin and a pretty ass he liked to squeeze, she got worried about how long they’d been in the copy room and bent to retrieve her pink lace panties from the floor.

Pink.

“Leave them,” he told her.

“What?”

He kept his voice low. “Leave them there.”

“But I have to?—”

“You should leave the copy room first so people won’t see us coming out together. Go.”

Nicole peeked out of the cracked-open door. “Okay. The coast is clear. Give me five minutes.”

She swished out the door, her fluttery white skirt escaping as the door closed.

Kingston picked up her panties, such a delicate scrap of pink lace, and folded them precisely before stuffing them into the breast pocket of his suit as a pocket square.

The Javits Center meeting would start in just a few minutes.

When he went to leave, the doorknob wouldn’t turn in his hand.

Odd.

He jiggled it.

Nothing.

He rattled it longer and pounded on the door. “Hey!”

Finally, Gia Terranova, his erstwhile manager who watched him too closely and asked pointed questions about his employment history that had nearly tripped him up on more than one occasion, shoved the door open from the other side. “What are you doing in the copy room?”

Ben, the young sales associate who had narrowly survived the first wave of layoffs, not that he knew that, stood behind her to better observe Kingston’s plight.

He swiped some of the copies off the tray. “Getting the handouts.”

“The handouts are already in the conference room,” Gia said. “What have you got there?”

He looked down at the paper in his hand.

Not copies of handouts, but spreadsheets that someone had remotely printed.

Tables and tables of numbers.

Dammit.

“Why must one badge oneself out of the copier room?” Kingston demanded.

“When Hammerhead installed the internal security badge network, they put the lock on the wrong side of the door because that’s what Joe wrote down.”

‘That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Gia said, holding her hand at her shoulder like a waiter with a serving tray.

Ben fished around in his wallet and slapped a twenty into her hand.

“You were wagering on it?” he asked them.

Ben cocked his head at Gia. “We paid off HR to not give you a badge because you were ‘non-local,’ to bet on how long it would take for you to get stuck somewhere.”

“And my getting stuck in the building after hours wasn’t the endpoint of the bet?” he asked them, just to cause trouble.

Ben’s sharp glance at his manager told Kingston everything. “Hey! Yeah, it should have been!”

Gia’s face scrunched like she’d stubbed her pinkie toe.

Kingston strolled back to the sales meeting, enjoying the thought of Nicole somewhere in the building, maybe in her office, sitting in her office chair, flustered because she wasn’t wearing panties.

Absolutely titillating.

Back at the pre-planning meeting for the NYC golf show at the Javits Center, Kingston sat at the back of the table.

Nicole walked into the conference room with her white skirt fluttering around her bare bottom.

The moment she saw her pink lace panties in his breast pocket like some depraved sociopath’s trophy, her eyes grew on her face, and a blush bloomed over her throat and cheeks.

Kingston kept a demure smile on his face while Nicole blushed furiously during her presentation.

Meghan, Morgan, Ben, and Gia didn’t notice a thing, probably.

With a languid move, Kingston crossed his legs. He did not allow his face to show that he was suffering from a raging, unremitting hard-on that threatened to give him blue balls at the thought of bending her over that table, her bare ass in the air and pussy naked to him, and taking her right there in that damn conference room.

His throbbing blood pressure almost gave him a migraine.