Jessie Slaymaker's Non-Existent Love Life (The Jessie Slaymaker Series) (21 page)

Jessie felt like she was nearly dying from the need to be touched down there. She could feel her nipples were hard and they ached to be sucked and caressed. She could feel a certain part of her anatomy starting to moisten as her body automatically responded to the anticipation of something more about to happen. Jessie had done her best, with her words at the harbourside earlier, to appear apathetic and disinterested in this man, but her body was well and truly betraying her now.

Jessie was on the edge, holding on for dear life as she willed Jack’s fingers to get closer to where she really wanted them to go. Each circling stroke of her inner thighs seemed to tease her a little more as she neared the point of no return.

And then he just stopped.

‘You know, we could have been epic,’ he whispered huskily into her ear, making her tingle from head to toe.

Jessie lay there, practically panting. Soaking wet. Horny beyond belief. She lifted her head groggily to see Jack’s back as he headed for the exit.

‘Bastard,’ she called out pathetically as she lay there, her body unwilling to respond to her brain’s demands to restore some decency to her appearance, lest anyone see her practically butt-naked state.

Chapter 54

Upon reflection, perhaps checking into the same hotel as Charlie and Jessie hadn’t been Jack’s wisest move that day. But he’d been tired after the flight and he’d regarded this hotel as being as good as any in which to take a nap while he figured out what it was he was going to do.

When he’d gotten back to the hotel after Jessie had walked away from him again, he’d felt unsettled and didn’t want to be in his room. He’d arranged to meet Sonia for dinner that night, but that wasn’t for some hours yet. He decided some exercise might be a good way to work out some of his frustration at the complete fail of a day he’d had. The quality hotel Charlie had picked didn’t have a gym, but it did have a pool. That would have to do. The concierge had assured him that the place was usually deserted and Jack felt confident that there would be no familiar faces there on a Saturday afternoon. His brother was no doubt out schmoozing with someone and he imagined Jessie to be holed up in her room.

The concierge had been right and wrong. The pool
was
deserted—aside from one person: Jessie. Jack didn’t know why he’d done it. His original plan had been to tempt her and ultimately hurt her when he walked away, but now he felt like with his massage act he’d only served to torture himself.

Lying there in the late afternoon sun, she’d looked amazing. She’d seemed to be asleep, with her head slightly resting to one side, and he’d stood watching her for several minutes. Jack had found that he couldn’t take his eyes off of her beautiful body, which looked golden in the sun’s hazy glow. He also hadn’t failed to notice that she was barely wearing her swimsuit, and it had been impossible for him not to focus on her full, heavy tits, which were overflowing from her bikini top for his private viewing.

That’s when he’d formulated his rather crappy plan. He’d turn her on and tease her. He’d wanted to make her beg to have him inside her and then he’d just up and leave, making sure she knew how amazing it could have been between them. His plan had been working fine until he’d gotten a little too involved in the massage. He’d found that massaging her toned back and shoulders had been a real turn on, not to mention the ample side boobs he could see pressing against the sun lounger, which he was literally dying to touch.

To stop himself from groping her he’d forced himself to move onto her legs, but that hadn’t helped much either. Jessie had beautiful legs and a cute bum, which he’d also found a real turn-on. When Jack had started working on her thighs, it didn’t take him long to notice that a small patch of moisture had formed in the gusset of her bikini bottoms. When he’d seen that, all he’d wanted to do was whip her bottoms off and lick her up. His original plan had been to make her beg, but he’d had to pry himself away from her and leave before he could make her do that simply because if he’d stayed a second longer it would have been him doing the begging.

So much for his swim. That woman was affecting his life and plans at every turn. Jack returned to his room, where he took a long cold shower and tried—unsuccessfully—to not think about the woman upstairs in the minuscule white bathing suit.

Chapter 55

It was Monday morning and Jessie had had a fitful night’s sleep of poor-quality rest. Thanks to Mr Davenport’s exploits from the previous afternoon by the pool, she was one het up and sexually frustrated lady. For lack of anything else to do, she’d gotten up early and beat the rush into the office in order to add some finishing touches to her report. Her plan was to get the documents submitted and then do some more sightseeing around the city for the rest of her stay. That was provided her boss would still let her do that, of course. He could, she realised, make her work until it was time to go home.

Jessie hadn’t thought much about Charlie since the last time she’d seen him. Her mind had been preoccupied with the other Davenport man in her life. Plus, every time she thought of Charlie now, she pictured him naked in her bed. That whole experience was not something she remembered with fondness, let alone something that she wanted to repeat this side of hell freezing over.

As Jessie finished her fifth and hopefully final edit of her report she felt butterflies suddenly wake up in the pit of her stomach. She’d been so focused on the task at hand that morning that she’d completely been able to bypass the inevitable awkwardness that she was bound to feel as soon as Charlie came into the office. For once, Jessie felt completely unsure as to how Charlie was going to react. As she forced herself to look back on the previous day, it dawned on her that it was more than a safe bet that Charlie would not be a happy camper. She had more or less told him to get lost in front of his brother. Knowing Charlie as she did, worst-case scenario was that he could very well have felt significantly slighted, bordering on humiliated. Best-case scenario was that he’d forgotten all about their hookup and had moved on to someone new. That was possible. Jessie hoped. Or maybe Sonia had had a change of heart and decided that Charlie wasn’t such a bad catch after all.

Jessie’s desk phone rang, providing her with a welcome distraction from second-guessing what Charlie’s reaction would be that morning.

‘Hello, Jessie speaking,’ she answered clearly.

‘Hi Jessie. Charlie here. Please come to the large meeting room as soon as you can,’ Charlie said, sounding official.

‘Okay, I’ll just print out the final version of the shadow banking report.’

‘Don’t bother. Just bring yourself,’ he said curtly and hung up.

Great. So Charlie hadn’t taken yesterday’s events too well. He obviously wanted to talk things through with her and express to her his disappointment in her poor treatment of him. Jessie crossed her fingers, hoping it wouldn’t be so bad, and also that Jack wouldn’t be there. This was her workplace and she really didn’t want to pollute the relative stability of her work environment with the sordid state of her personal affairs.

Jessie knocked and entered the meeting room fully expecting to see Charlie running his hand through his hair, probably standing at the window. She was shocked to see the room full of serious-faced suits. She recognised a few of the senior bigwigs who she’d been introduced to briefly when she’d first arrived. And Charlie was there. Of course. They were all looking stone-faced and unfriendly. Jessie propelled herself forward, feeling like she had been summoned before the headmaster and his cronies. Not that she’d ever been summoned before the headmaster in her life, but she guessed that this was what it felt like.

‘Take a seat, Jessie,’ Charlie said formally, gesturing to a seat across from where the half-dozen sharks were sitting.

‘What’s going on?’ Jessie asked, making a concerted effort to look at each of the sharks in the eye. She gave Charlie an extra long look, trying to see if his poker face would give anything away. Nope. Nada. Charlie must be a good poker player, she concluded to herself.

‘We have a few questions to ask you,’ Charlie replied—with the barest hint of a smirk, Jessie noted. Charlie was clearly loving his newfound position of authority as chairman of the sharks.

‘Okay,’ Jessie replied, unable to hide the puzzlement from her face.

‘It has come to our attention that some information of a delicate nature has mysteriously vanished into thin air,’ began Dennis Chan, who, if Jessie remembered correctly, was the Director of Human Resources.

‘Okay,’ Jessie repeated, still looking lost.

‘We believe this information disappeared at the weekend, sometime on Saturday. I can also tell you that the information was taken from a locked filing cabinet in my office. Is there anything you would like to tell us?’ Mr Chan asked, giving Jessie a tight smile.

‘Umm, not that I’m aware of,’ Jessie started. And then the penny dropped. She’d been in the office on Saturday working. Jesus, did they think she’d been stealing company information? ‘Well, I was in the office on Saturday,’ Jessie added. Dammit, she thought to herself. Why couldn’t she have just behaved like a normal person for once in her life and not have gone to work on a Saturday? This is what she got for being conscientious. Now she had no alibi
and
she’d admitted to the sharks that she was at the scene of the crime around about the time the crime had been committed. Good one, Jessie.

‘What were you doing in the office on a Saturday?’ Mr Chan asked, his tight smile gone. Now Jessie felt his eyes boring into her. ‘The bank operates a five-day working week,’ he added for clarification.

‘I was working, Mr Chan. I’ve been working on a report this past week and I thought I’d make some good progress with it in a quiet office. Charlie was here as well. Surely he can vouch for me,’ Jessie replied, flicking her eyes to Charlie, whose own eye contact had now become woefully poor.

‘Mr Davenport?’ Mr Chan queried, turning towards Charlie with a raised eyebrow. Obviously Charlie had been keeping quiet about that little golden nugget of information.

‘That’s right. I popped in for a minute to collect my phone charger and saw Jessie then. She was sat at her desk and appeared to be working’ Charlie answered Mr Chan matter-of-factly before he gave Jessie a brief look of disgust. Jessie was stunned. What the fuck was Charlie playing at? He’d been shagging her not so long ago and now he was looking at her like she was a piece of dog shit on the bottom of his shoe. Not to mention that she had
appeared to be
working. What the fuck was that about? Surely Charlie of all people knew that she was two hundred percent dedicated to her job. Or perhaps he didn’t. Wasn’t that part of the problem and one of the key reasons why she’d gone so off him in the past day?

And then another penny dropped. What with all the love-triangle issues that had ensued over the weekend, Charlie’s odd behaviour in the office had completely slipped Jessie’s mind. How stupid could she have been? That was one of the reasons Jack made his epic transcontinental journey to comfort her. The cynic in Jessie reared her objective head and now she wondered if Charlie’s late-night appearance at her hotel room was something more than just him looking for beer and sympathy. Charlie was trying to make Jessie a scapegoat for whatever it was he’d been up to this past week in Hong Kong.

‘Well thank you, Miss Slaymaker. We’ll be in touch,’ Mr Chan said, clearly dismissing her. Uh-oh, thought Jessie, that sounded final.

‘Look, I can assure you, all of you, that I had nothing to do with this… theft,’ Jessie added, trying her best to sound earnest, but she was conscious that she sounded desperate.

‘Thank you for your time,’ one of Mr Chan’s fellow sharks said, and gave Jessie a look which she interpreted as get-the-heck-out-of-here-now.

Jessie barely had the door closed behind her back before she heard raised voices coming from the sharks. She could make out Charlie’s voice as the loudest amongst them. Jessie was sure she could hear him say something like,
I didn’t think it was relevant
, but she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. As Jessie returned to her desk, she didn’t have a clue what to make of what had just happened in the boardroom. She couldn’t tell if she was their prime suspect or if they had simply wanted to check what she’d been doing, just for the record. One thing she was sure about, though, was that she felt uneasy about it all. It was the same uneasiness she’d felt on Saturday when she’d seen Charlie in the office obviously up to no good.

Jessie tried to keep her face neutral as she pondered that thought for a moment. Had Charlie really stolen something from the director’s office she’d seen him in? Was Charlie really capable of doing something like that? Jessie had seen him in the office with her own eyes, and he’d lied to her, and again to the sharks in the boardroom, about just popping in to get his phone charger. She knew he’d been in the office for some hours doing whatever it was he’d been doing. Jessie felt she had to check whether the HR Director’s office was the one she’d seen Charlie rummaging around in. Just to be sure.

Jessie casually got up from her chair, on the premise that she was going to get some coffee. Last time she’d checked, it wasn’t a crime to go and get coffee. She walked past all the worker bees, who barely blinked as she went past, so dedicated to their tasks they were. Jessie glimpsed a few Facebook pages open, being carefully scrutinised by some of the staff. They were definitely taking their Monday morning tasks seriously.

Jessie continued walking around the office, heading for the general direction of the pantry. However, she stopped when she got to the point where she’d spied Charlie in whomever’s office, and started to play with her phone. Between her and the office door in question were several desks whose occupants were all working hard—or doing an excellent job of hardly working. Jessie couldn’t really tell. She wondered how she was ever going to find out who the rightful occupant of that office was. The door was firmly closed and she’d lost her bottle to get any closer. She couldn’t very well wait where she was all day, playing with her phone and hoping that the office occupant would eventually either go in or out. Jessie’s less-than-mediocre plan had failed. She exhaled and continued on her way to collect her much-needed caffeine fix.