His lips pressed against that sensitive spot behind her ear that made her gasp softly as he said again, “Stay with me.”
She wanted to. She shouldn’t. The fact that she wanted to was dangerous. Vihaan had managed to make her do things she’d never done before.
Like sleep with the same man more than once. Like behave foolishly and jeopardise her career.
Instead of complaining to HR about his flirty messages, she’d participated in every repartee. At first, she could fool herself intothinking that she was staying silent so as to not create strife at work. Eventually, she couldn’t hide the giddiness she felt at his replies to her waspish comments. She caught herself eagerly waiting for when next he’d say something silly or inappropriate and make her giggle in private.
Being fuck-buddies with her ex-boyfriend-turned-boss was a massive risk which had trickled into idiocy. She’d let him fuck her in his office in the middle of the workday. She’d begged him for it.
The four walls of his cabin had kept their actions hidden. For now.
She was constantly flirting with being discovered. She’d lose every bit of the respect she’d earned at Ethos if any of her colleagues caught them, because they’d assume that she’d slept her way to her current position and was doing it again for more progress.
With the SSI launch on the horizon, one misstep would destroy everything she’d worked for. How would she face Nanu then? What would she say? That it happened because she was addicted to the orgasms Vihaan doled out like candy?
Or. . . was it because her resolve to remain unaffected by him was weakening? She’d begun to wonder if the reason she’d never fallen in love with anyone else was because she’d never fallen out of love with Vihaan. It had been so easy to maintain an emotional distance from all men, but she’d struggled to do that with Vihaan. Every interaction between them had been driven by her feelings without any care for logic. The persistent and unbearable anger she’d held towards him had somehow transformed over the months into something eerily reminiscent of what they’d shared at seventeen.
Something in her had shifted, edging towards closure. With old complaints no longer at the forefront of her mind, Vera was running out of excuses to pretend all she wanted from him was a good dicking down.
“Sleep overtonight, Vera.”
She twisted around, stepping away from him before she lost all reason. It was hard to think with Vihaan’s hands and lips on her. “I don’t have a change of clothes.”
“You don’t need clothes to sleep in my bed.”
At the look she slanted at him, Vihaan relented. “Fine, you can have one of my t-shirts. It’ll probably look better on you than it does on me anyway.”
This. It was when he said things like this, like they were a couple and it was natural for her to wear his clothes, that Vera felt unsettled.
When he said things like this and did things that led to Rahul sending her an apology and Vihaan turning up at work looking like he’d been in a bar fight. It didn’t take a genius to deduce how exactly Vihaan had followed through on his promise totake care of everything.
With two fingers tracing the edge of his jaw, she gently tipped his face to the side, her eyes inspecting the slowly fading bruises on his cheek. Her stomach rolled in worry even now at the thought of him getting attacked by his beefy cousin.
She was torn between berating him for fighting her battles and thanking him for defending her. For nearly fifteen years, she’d had only herself to rely on. The idea of Vihaan strolling into her life and effortlessly assuming the role of a protector was petrifying. And maybe, a little bit exciting.
Could she really let him in again? Rely on him once more? Because nothing about this felt casual anymore. She’d been burned by him in the past but recent events had softened her to the idea of . . . them.
Maybe he’d changed from the boy he used to be into a man she could trust again. The time for that discussion, however, wasn’t now. “The big broadcast interview to kick off the SSI series is on Monday. I should go home and prepare for it. You should as well.”
“It’s only Friday night. We can prep together over the weekend. Hell, we can grab your stuff from your apartment, and you can stay with me till we go to work.”
“I don’t do sleepovers,” she replied, her voice holding none of the decisiveness she’d have hoped for.
“You also said you wouldn’t sleep with me again. Yet, here we are, losing count of how many times you’ve broken that rule.”
Unable to hold his gaze when he looked at her like he could still picture her flushed face and pleasured cries when he drove himself into her, she spun toward the mirror, pretending to fix her hair to hide the slight tremble in her hand. “What’s your point?”
“My point, Princess,” he murmured, meeting her gaze in their reflection, “is that things change. You’ve broken one rule. Break another.”
Vihaan
Vihaan waited, impatience striking him when Vera bit down on her lower lip, clearly still thinking about his offer. Whatever her reason for insisting on maintaining this distance, he was done pretending. Arjun and Rian’s advice kept swirling in his mind in the days since his altercation with Rahul, and it had all boiled down to a single thing.
A second chance.
For years, he’d remained trapped, burning in the flames of her betrayal. For ages, he’d been tormented by imaginary scenarios. What would have happened to them if they’d run the natural course of their relationship? Maybe they wouldn’t even be together. Maybe.
But Vihaan knew he’d been lying to himself.