Scandalous novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wrong Night
The night before her first day as a spy in her father's enemy's office, Jillian sleeps with a nameless stranger in a hotel suite; at nine the next morning he walks into the boardroom as the CEO. Hook: 'Ms. Lowe. Sit. You work for me.'
The night before my father made me start spying on the man he said ruined our family, I went to a hotel bar and ordered one whiskey.
I had a fake name, a fake resume, and a pen with a recorder hidden inside it.
None of it was my idea.
Nolan Covington had written the resume, and my father had stood over me while I signed it.
I didn't have a plan for my hands, which would not stop shaking.
"Rough week?" said the man on the next stool.
He didn't look at me when he said it.
He looked at the glass in front of him, then at the bartender, then finally at me.
He was maybe forty, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a pale scar through one eyebrow.
I was twenty-four, and he had a good fifteen years on me.
His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his forearms were the kind that make a woman forget what she was about to say.
"Rough decade," I said.
"I'll drink to that."
He touched his glass to mine without smiling.
"I'm about to do something I'm not proud of," I told him.
I had no idea why I said it.
Maybe because he wouldn't repeat it.
"Is it illegal?"
"Probably."
"Is it going to hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it?"
I thought of the man my father was sending me to rob of his secrets.
I thought of my mother crying at our kitchen table.
"No," I said.
"Then it can wait until tomorrow." He finally smiled, a small crooked thing. "Tonight you're just a woman at a bar."
"And you?"
"I'm a man who doesn't want to talk about his day."
"Do you have a name?"
"Not tonight."
"Good," I said. "I don't either."
He held out the key card for the suite upstairs, and I took it.
He kissed me in the elevator, with one hand flat against the small of my back and the other fisted in my hair.
He tasted like smoke and whiskey, and I made a sound against his mouth that embarrassed me.
"Come upstairs," he said against my lips.
"Then stop talking."
Inside the suite he turned me against the door and pushed my dress up to my hips.
His hands were rough and slow.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him.
His hazel eyes were dark, and his breath was uneven, and I wanted him so badly it frightened me.
He dropped to his knees and dragged my panties down my legs.
I grabbed his hair when his mouth found my clit, and my head hit the door with a thud.
He licked me in long, patient strokes, then sucked until my knees started to give.
"Please," I said. "Please, I need you inside me."
"Not yet."
He slid two fingers into my pussy and curled them, and I came apart with a cry I couldn't swallow.
He stood and wiped his mouth with his thumb.
Then he lifted me against the door, and I wrapped my legs around his waist.
I tore at his belt until his cock was in my hand, thick and hot and heavy.
"Tell me you want it," he said.
"I want it. Fuck me."
He pushed into me in one deep stroke, and we both groaned.
For a second neither of us moved.
Then he drew back and drove in again, and the door shook behind me.
He fucked me hard and without hurry, his mouth at my ear, telling me exactly how I felt around him.
Wet.
Tight.
Mine, for tonight.
I clawed his shoulders through his shirt and bit his neck to keep from screaming.
He carried me to the bed without leaving my body.
He laid me down, pinned my wrists above my head with one hand, and rolled his hips until I was shaking.
"Come for me again," he said.
I came with his name stuck in my throat, because I didn't have his name.
He followed a moment later, with his forehead pressed to mine and my legs locked around him.
He took me a second time before dawn, slower, with me riding him in the gray light and his hands on my hips, guiding.
When I woke, the sun was in the window and he was asleep on his stomach.
I dressed in the dark, found my shoes, and left the key card on the nightstand.
I didn't write a note.
I took the elevator down and told myself it was only one night, the only one that would be mine.
At nine o'clock I stood in a glass tower on the thirty-first floor, in a gray dress and my mother's maiden name.
HARTWELL GROUP, said the wall behind the receptionist.
The conference room smelled like coffee and new carpet.
Six executives sat along a long table, and one chair at the head was empty.
"He's late," the man beside me muttered. "He's never late."
My phone buzzed with a text from Nolan Covington.
Remember who you're doing this for.
I put it face down.
The only photo of him I had ever seen was ten years old, and it showed the back of his head.
The door opened.
The man who walked in wore a charcoal suit, with his sleeves buttoned this time, and a pale scar through his left eyebrow.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
He saw me, and for half a second nothing moved on his face at all.
Then he sat down at the head of the table, folded his hands, and looked straight at me.
"Ms. Lowe," said Burke Hartwell. "Sit. You work for me."
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