*
She found her old CD of Terence’s greatest hits and ripped the songs to her hard drive’s library, and they still moved her. She felt nostalgic, reminded of stonewashed jeans and metallic lip gloss and how it felt to want a boy to notice her, and to see if making out with one was all it was cracked up to be.
She chuckled to herself. Once the initial “ick” factor of tasting someone else’s tongue in her mouth had passed, the experience lived up to her expectations. Too bad everything else was more complicated than that.
She was humming along to “Delicate” in a low enough voice not to sound off-key; not too much, at any rate. “Don’t Call Me” and “Wishing Well” really brought it back, the kind of songs that made Ororo and Anna jump out of the bleachers once the slow songs were over and gather back at their abandoned spot amidst their girlfriends, lack of a partner temporarily forgotten. Ororo’s fingers were adopting the rhythm of the music again, and she went with it, glad to do something as mindless as keying if only to enjoy her disc a little longer before her conference.
“Ooh,” she murmured, “there it is. Aw, yeah, baby.” Terence, picking up where Smokey and Michael left off, taking his medicine for being a dog.
She just had to sing.
Badly.
Uninhibited.
*
Logan was glad the break room was stocked with coffee cup sleeves for a change, cuppa joe comfortably gripped in one hand and manila folder of hard copies in the other.
He headed back toward his office, and was surprised to see two men putting up yellow tape across a nearby doorway.
“What’s goin’ on?”
“We need to do some work in this office. Pretty soon we’re redoing the copy room beside it to take out the back wall and make it bigger.”
“Must be nice. At least someone’ll get some more space.”
“Yup.” He let them go on about their business and headed back to his desk.
He no sooner opened up his inbox than-
ZZZT. ZZZT. ZZ-ZT. BANG! BANG! ZZT!
“Fuckin’-ay,” he muttered. His train of thought was shattered.
ZZZZT. BZZZ-ZT! BANG BANG BANG!
“Hell, no,” he grumbled as he headed back out to the main corridor.
“Hey, man, how long are ya gonna be workin’ on this today?”
“All day. We leave the site at five.”
“Shit.”
“It’s gonna be a little noisy for a while. Sorry, pal.”
Fuck.
The conference was in five minutes.
He decided to stop by Scott’s office. He could bunk with him for a half hour and be far away enough from the noise, hopefully.
No go. Scott’s door was locked and his windows were dark.
“Where’s Scotty?” Logan asked Amelia, one of the girls in clerical support.
“Home sick. He felt like crap.”
“Shit.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I can’t borrow his office, can I?”
“Why?”
“Because I need a break from that racket.”
“Why don’t you see if anyone else is on the conference on this side?”
“Most of the management team’s off-site.”
“Tory isn’t,” Amelia reminded him.
The idea left a sour taste in his mouth.
“Knock on her door!” Amelia suggested cheerfully.
“Yeah. I’ll go do that,” he muttered.
Logan trudged to her office door and tapped lightly on the glass. She had her blinds pulled but her lights were on.
…what was that sound?
Wait…was she singing?
He contemplated knocking again, then decided against it.
It was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
She’d paused in her typing, or so he guessed, and was…using her stapler as a microphone. Ingenious. A grin was slowly spreading its way across Logan’s lips. Her back was slightly to him and she was hitting the bridge of the song.
It was the best part. Clearly, she thought so, too, because she was currently murdering it.
This is rich. Aw, man. Logan wished he had a Web cam, or that he could grab a few guys from the mail room to share in the spectacle.
“Life without lo-ooove-WHOO! is oohhhh, so lonelyyyyy…I don’t think, I don’t think I’m gonna make it, BUT- all my love, all my love, yeah, belongs to you only! Come on and take it, girrrrrl, c’mon and take it! Be-“
It had just been getting good. She was up from her seat, working up to a little dance that was comical, yet also sexy, her moves making her blazer cling to her more snugly.
She was belting it out, eyes squinched shut in the manner of James Brown. Logan was in pain from trying not to laugh.
Then it was over. She opened her eyes. She saw him.
Her voice cut off on a little squeak, just before the high note. Logan didn’t know whether to be grateful or disappointed. She dropped her stapler in surprise, fumbling to catch it, but it slipped through her fingers.
“Damn it!” she hissed. She yanked her earbuds out and flung them back onto her desk. “Oh! YOU!”
Logan was howling, leaning back against the doorframe, arm wrapped across his middle as he tried to hold it in. It was hopeless.
“Bastard,” she muttered miserably. Her pout almost made him take pity on her.
Not likely…
“Ahahahaha…whooooooo…” He tried to master himself, but it was difficult. “Man…”
“Shut. Up.”
“Sorry, sorry…”
“No you’re not. It’s called knocking.”
“Don’t think…*snerk*…ya could hear me over yer little solo there, darlin’.”
Kill.
She looked thoroughly put out. She got straight to the point. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Whoo…erm. Yeah. I, uh, needed a place ta dial into the conference.”
“Not here?” she argued.
“Why not here? Ya’ve got enough room.”
“Oh, that’s not a good idea.”
“Am I gonna be in yer way?” He cocked his brow in that way that she found so annoying. Ororo gave him a rusty sigh.
“You love getting in my way. Don’t you have some clients to finesse somewhere?”
“Look,” he said, “I need a quiet place ta dial in. My office is in the middle of that mess they’re makin’ by the old copy room. Cut me a break, Tory.”
There it was. That name again.
Her pet name.
His tone was straightforward. He wasn’t there to play any games. For the moment.
“Do you promise to behave yourself?”
“C’mon, what is this, third grade?”
“Hey, it’s my office. My rules,” she insisted.
“Geez. Fine. Yer rules.”
“You can sit over there,” she said, pointing to the small guest table she had across the room.
“We can both sit over there,” Logan argued. “It’s gonna sound weird with both of us talkin’ on different phones in the same room.”
“So?”
“Just use one phone. You won’t hafta use the headset, too, just put it on speaker.”
His logic was sensible enough, but Ororo was still embarrassed and wanting to commit homicide by stapler.
Speaking of which, she realized, it was still on the floor. She bent down to retrieve it.
Logan silently drooled at the way her tapered skirt hitched up, despite that she bent her legs and stooped down gracefully. She caught his glance and scowled.
“What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure,” she said, doubtful.
“It’s probably a good thing that yer so good with numbers.”
“Jerk,” she muttered.
“Don’t quit yer day job.”
They set up the call and dialed in once Ororo brought up her email.
“Donald here.”
“And Selene. Tory?”
“Up and at ‘em,” Ororo offered. Logan saluted the phone with his coffee cup.
“Jim here.”
The perfunctory greetings were brief, since everyone was busy, and they all seemed to be typing a mile a minute from their desks.
Ororo was in fact tired of staring at her screen. Annoyance with Logan was tightening and enhancing the pain in her temples as they sat, and her patience was paper-thin.
“…so we have the rates ready for the X-Effect mid-year renewal?” Selene inquired.
“I left them on the shared drive.”
“That’s why I love her,” Selene bragged.
“Any time,” Ororo said.
“Any time,” Logan mimicked in a falsetto by her elbow.
“Ssshh!” Ororo’s eyes were blue chips. Logan made a face at her, and then made talking motions with his fingers, making it look like a hand puppet.
“I left them on the shared drive. I’m Ororo. I’m a good little underwriter. I have email older than the Ark,” Logan teased under his breath, straight-faced. His own deadpan was even worse than the mimicking.
“Asshole,” she mouthed.
The conference continued on at a steady pace.
“Jim? What’s the status on that seven-one new account?”
“It looks good. They bought flex and life.”
“Of course they did,” Selene griped on her end.
“Whatever Lola wants…Lola gets…” Selene hummed playfully. Ororo wondered if Donald was in her office.
“Ew,” she murmured, hitting the mute button.
“Oh, so yer brave now, with it on mute, huh?”
“I wouldn’t have to if someone wasn’t being distracting and noisy and inappropriate.”
“Least they couldn’t hear ya a little while ago.”
“You wouldn’t have if you’d knocked.”
“I did knock.”
“You. You tapped.” Rats. She got him, there.
“Same thing, darlin’.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Ya liked it when I called ya that before.”
“I had a lot of tequila. My judgment was impaired.”
“Bullshit.” Logan shook his head. “What you call impaired judgment, I call a helluva good time, sweet cheeks.”
“It was such a mistake. I should have known better.”
It irritated him, perhaps even bruised Logan’s ego to have been a lapse in Ororo’s fabled good judgment. But what was fair, was fair, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Logan done the walk of shame back to coach class? He was just thankful that he had his clothes on right-side-out.
“Why do ya always hafta know better? Why can’t ya loosen up?”
“Are you calling me uptight? It sounds like you’re calling me uptight!”
“No. I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
“An uptight person would be concerned about that.”
Once again, she longed to bludgeon him with her stapler.
“I am who I am,” she told him. “Sorry if that rains on your parade. I don’t have patience for anything messy like one-night stands or trying to even explain myself, or my personal affairs, with someone who doesn’t like dealing with me much so far.”
He scowled. “Ya haven’t explained any of yer personal affairs. Far as I can tell, this is it. This is as ‘personal’ as it gets.” He was back to making air quotes.
“Stop doing that. It’s annoying.”
“Now I’ve annoyed Miss Perfect.”
“It’s Tory, damn it!”
“Is it?”
The teleconference was just background noise as the volume rose in Ororo’s office between them.
All of the voices in the back of her head, all of the pieces that composed the whole were moving faster and heating up like stimulated molecules, ricocheting off each other and causing friction within her. It was heady, and the angry rush of words felt too good tumbling out of her mouth to stop.
So help her, she liked arguing with him.
“We’re back to square one. We work together. That’s it.”
“It was just a misunderstanding in communication,” Logan scoffed.
“Yours,” she huffed.
“Mine, my ass.”
Ororo’s reading glasses were lying on the table. Logan noticed she wore a minimum of makeup and again decided she didn’t even really need it, but she was still heaping insult on top of injury with that hair. It was killing him, seeing her look so damned frigid every day. If anything, it had gotten worse since she moved to his branch. She wore her clothing like armor equipped with a platinum chastity belt.
“Maybe you should take your ass out of my office.”
“That make ya feel big, kickin’ me out?”
“No.” Yes.
“Go ahead, then. Take it off mute.”
“Maybe I don’t feel like it yet.”
“Yer a brat.”
“Sticks and stones.”
For some reason, he knew that wasn’t true.
But he’d rattled her. Her posture was elegant but stiff as she rose from the table. She marched to the door and flung it open.
“You had to step away. It’s an easy excuse. It’s believable. Don’t let this hit you on the ass on your way out.” Her expression was proud and unrelenting.
“I don’t trust ya enough ta turn my back on ya while yer holdin’ on to it like that.”
“You don’t trust me,” she scoffed.
“Give me reason to.”
“Oh, get real. Find your own,” she snapped. “I don’t have to spoonfeed you any reasons to like me.”
Yet despite himself, he was beginning to like her. Bit by bit.
“I don’t need ya ta spoonfeed me.”
“That’s right. You have opposable thumbs.”
His nostrils flared.
His senses betrayed him. He didn’t even realize he’d gotten up from the table until he was standing by the door, since it looked as though she really was about to kick him out. But he heard the shift in her breathing and caught a whiff of her scent, her light perfume, or maybe her shampoo tantalized him. It was too temptingly feminine and too subtle, demanding to be explored more thoroughly, through closer contact.
Her lips parted. The tip of her tongue almost imperceptibly darted out to lick the plump lower one, not enough to desecrate her perfect mauve lipstick.
No. That was Logan’s job.
His eyes dilated. Before she could form any further words of reprisal, she felt his hands close around her upper arms.
“Don’t-!”
“Damn it,” he grated out before he pulled her against him, closing the too-narrow gap between them.
Why did a man who made her so mad have to taste so good? Her voice was a strange, breathy little sigh that she didn’t recognize as he kissed her without mercy. His lips were firm and the way he used them took away her ability to think straight.
Her hands didn’t obey her commands to stop clinging to him, which certainly didn’t help matters any. We must touch. We must explore. We must caress, they chanted back to her.
Damned hands…
But he just felt so right, radiating heat and smelling so virile. She nuzzled his throat, needing to get closer to his scent.
“Mmmmf…” There it was again, that sound he loved to hear her make. Was that her tongue, lapping wickedly at his earlobe and making him erect as a tent pole?
He wasn’t going anywhere. Clearly. The door was kicked shut once again, and this time Ororo reluctantly let go of him with one hand to punch the button lock in on the knob.
“Please, darlin’,” he whispered roughly. His blunt fingernails scored her through her clothes, and the sensations that caused gave her goosebumps.
Her blazer had to go. That was first and foremost on his mind. She didn’t fight it, even shrugged her arms out of the sleeves when he jerked open the buttons.
Her blouse was a simple white satin with cropped sleeves and just a few buttons, no real barrier between Logan and paradise. He felt hot and itchy and worked up, and it only made sense as she wrangled him out of his jacket, too. He was relieved to be free of the warm wool, needing her touch so badly as her palms smoothed over his hard slopes of muscle through his crisp dress shirt.
“Ya make me crazy,” he groaned.
“Don’t blame that on me,” she accused, then whimpered as he bit her pulse. She shuddered with need as his large hands found her breasts, scorching them through the thin, slippery fabric. The bodice fell open and his fingertips stroked the satin of her skin instead, mapping out her curves. Her breast betrayed her, craving his touch and yielding easily to the weight of his hand as he cradled it in his grip.
His tie was a nuisance. He could always retie it, if need be, but Ororo was sick of it. It had to go, plain and simple, and she worked her fingers under the stiff Windsor knot, yanking it loose and flinging the offending accessory away. Her fingers clutched greedy handfuls of his shirt, pulling it from the waist of his slacks inches at a time until she found hot, smooth flesh. She savored the feel of him and he jerked in surprise when she discovered his sensitive nipple.
Blouse and dress shirt were both gaping open shamelessly, one more ineffective barrier between them stripped away. His hands were back in her hair, tugging it loose and fanning it out, clutching it, running his fingers through its lush mass and thickness as their kisses grew dizzying, even ravenous.
They knew they should stop. They just didn’t know how.
The front clasp of her bra gave way easily beneath his finger and thumb, and she cried out with need as he dipped down and suckled her, hardly believing that was really the feel of his mouth, hot, sultry, damp, pulling on her. She felt oversensitized and far too needy with each lap of his tongue, and he was making that groan of satisfaction that she, too, tasted too good, felt too good, too right pushing her way into his mouth.
Scorching kisses rained over her face, closed lids, parted lips, and she returned them with just as much passion and need. Her own hunger frightened her, but her heart was pounding as she kneaded and groped him.
He was burning up beneath her touch. He craved it. She was soft and yielding, such a contradiction to Ororo Munroe, the Underwriter from Hell. She didn’t make any bones about letting her hands slide down his back, now bare once she dragged his shirt down his arms. She palmed his firm ass and squeezed, memorizing and appreciating its shape. He “mmphed” in surprise but ground himself against her, pressing himself against the divide of her thighs. Her boldness thrilled him, because it was unexpected.
He pulled back, and a low whine of complaint escaped her, but his arm was still curled around her waist, and he raised a shaking hand to flick away a few strands of her hair that were stuck to her lips. Their breathing was ragged, and his eyes were dark with need, yet full of confusion.
She nibbled the edge of his thumb, and he groaned at how erotic it looked, then nearly lost it when she sucked the end of the digit into her mouth, closing her eyes at how good he tasted.
“I shouldn’t want this,” he rasped.
“You don’t?” For a second, she sounded like an unsure little girl, almost crushed, but he shook his head.
“I do. Damn it,” he recanted, torn between common sense and total, thrilling ruin.
“Logan?”
“What?”
“Don’t think.” She leaned down and captured his lips, draining him of his resistance.
He’d been planning to pry himself loose. The best laid plans were a fucking wet blanket, as far as he was concerned, when the temptation between her thighs was a mere skirt hem away. No, nonononooooooo… He wasn’t going anywhere. Hell, no. He bunched her skirt in his hand, sliding it up over her rump. She felt like satin, her skin was cool and soft beneath the whispering slickness of her pantyhose, and he loved running his palm over it, skimming the contour of her thigh as she wrapped her ankle around his calf.
They stumbled back against the wall. He was so close, fingers working beneath the waistband of the detested No Nonsense taupe sandal toe control tops, and her moans were getting to him as she kissed him.
He was thrown off balance, and they slid and stumbled again into the small conference table.
Ororo’s backside collided with the phone, knocking the handset to the floor with a loud thunk.
“Oh! What was that? You okay out there?”
Ororo and Logan froze. Her intake of breath was sharp they stared into each other’s eyes, momentarily aghast.
“Shit,” Logan mouthed.
“Fuck!” Ororo hissed.
“You guys have been quiet, Tory. Any thoughts? Questions?”
“Questions?” she said blankly.
“Just-just gimme a second. Questions? Uh, no real questions, for the moment,” Logan stammered as they disentangled themselves and began to search for their clothing.
“Why do you sound so far away?” Donald inquired. “Got up to stretch your legs?”
Oh, if only he knew.
Ororo felt the draft of her still rucked-up skirt as she tried to smooth it down over her thighs while trying to yank her bra closed at the same time. It was hard to try to snap the tiny clasp shut and think of something believable to say.
“Um…Selene, any takeaways? Action items?”
“The rate revision for seven-one, Tory,” she said, slightly impatient.
“Right. Right. No problem.”
“Thanks for taking the time to call in,” Donald said pleasantly.
“Any time.” That came from Logan as he fought to rebutton his shirt, now hopelessly wrinkled.
He was frustrated and his itch was unscratched. His sense of blue balls was contagious, if the desperate look on Ororo’s face was any indication. He turned away from her and plowed his fingers through his hair, already disheveled from Ororo doing exactly the same thing.
They resumed the meeting for another few minutes, as Ororo and Logan sat calmly by the phone, a safe distance apart. Ororo offered her feedback while making some sense of her hair. Logan watched her despondently as she bit by bit returned to the no frills, take no prisoners woman who frustrated him every day.
So he hardened himself. He slipped his mask back on and clipped his notes back into his folder, leaning in toward the phone as he spoke.
“I’ll send a memo out to the client. We’ll wait for their approval and signoff.”
“We’re already going to print. Just ask Contracts,” Ororo argued.
“Tell them to stop the print job until we get the signoff. Otherwise it’s wasted postage, paper and time,” he snapped.
Her blue eyes narrowed dangerously. “Fine.”
One word heralded the death knell of the spark lingering between them. It flickered and died as they logged off the call. Logan left her office without another word. She didn’t even look up as he closed the door behind him.
They were back to business as usual.
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