She’d mentioned in the elevator that her best friend, Julia, provided a majority of the wardrobe I loved/hated. This morning’s selection of a fitted pencil skirt and deep blue blouse was now also on my list. I tried a couple of times to convince Chloe that we needed to go back to the room to get something, but she’d only raised an eyebrow and asked, “Get something? Or get some?”

I’d ignored her, but now I wished I’d admitted I needed one more round before conferencing. I wondered if she’d have gone for it.

“Would you have gone back to the room?” I asked into her ear as she carefully read an undergraduate poster on a rebranding idea for some small cellular company. Graphs were taped to the poster board, for crying out loud.

“Shhh.”

“Chloe, you’re not going to learn anything from this poster. Let’s go get a cup of coffee and maybe a blow job in the bathroom.”

“Your father told me it was impossible to predict where I’d get my best ideas, and to read everything I could find. Besides, these are my student colleagues.”

I waited, toying with a cuff link, but she apparently wasn’t going to address the latter part of what I’d said. “My dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

She laughed, appropriately. Dad had been on every top-twenty-five list of CEOs practically since before I was born.

“It doesn’t have to be a blow job. I could f**k you against a wall,” I whispered, clearing my throat and looking around to be sure no one was near enough to hear. “Or I could lay you down on the floor, spread you wide, and make you come against my tongue.”

She shivered, smiled at the student near the next poster, and walked closer to read it. The man held his hand out to me. “Excuse me, but are you Bennett Ryan?”

I nodded, distracted as I shook his hand, watching Chloe move farther away.

The aisle we were in was practically deserted but for the students standing near the posters. Even they had begun to wander off to more interesting areas of the room, where larger companies—conference sponsors, mostly—had put together shiny, trademark-filled posters in the interest of getting the inaugural student-led session off the ground successfully. Chloe bent and wrote something on her notepad: Rebranding for Jenkins Financial?

I stared at her hand and then up at her face, fixed in a thoughtful expression. The Jenkins Financial account wasn’t one of hers. It wasn’t even one I handled. It was a small account, occasionally half-ass managed by one of the junior executives. Did she actually know how much it was struggling with the dinosaur marketing campaign we had?

Before I could ask, she turned and moved on to the next poster, and I was mesmerized with Chloe at work. I’d never let myself watch her so openly—the surreptitious stalking I had done only told me she was brilliant and driven, but I never realized the breadth of her company knowledge before.

I wanted to compliment her somehow, but the words got tangled in my head, and a strange defensiveness surged in my chest, as if to praise her work would somehow break strategy. “Your penmanship has improved.”

She smiled up at me, clicking the end of her pen. “Fuck off.”

My dick twitched in my pants. “You’re wasting my time here.”

“Then why don’t you go glad-hand some executives over in the reception hall? They have breakfast there. Those little chocolate muffins you pretend not to like?”

“Because it’s not what I feel like eating.”

A small grin pulled at her lips. She watched my face as another student introduced herself to me.

“I’ve followed your career ever since I can remember,” the woman said, breathless. “I heard you speak here last year.”

I smiled, shook her hand as briefly as I could without appearing rude. “Thanks for saying hello.”

We moved to the end of the aisle and I wrapped my hand around Chloe’s elbow. “I have one more hour until I have a meeting. Do you have any idea what you do to me?”

Finally, she looked up. Her pupils were so large her eyes turned nearly black, and she licked her lips into a wet, decadent pout. “I suppose I need you to take me upstairs so you can show me.”

Chloe was still looking for a new pair of panties when I was already five minutes late to my one o’clock. It was with Ed Gugliotti, a marketing executive for a smaller Minneapolis firm. We used Ed’s firm to subcontract smaller jobs, and had a more significant project we were thinking of passing off to him to see how they handled it. As I zipped my pants, I reminded myself that Ed was himself pathologically late.