Page 19 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“Come in.” His voice is rough and tired.
I push the door open. Ethan is sitting at his desk, staring at the drawn blinds, and holding a tumbler of amber liquid.
He looks exhausted. His tie is gone, his top button undone, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thick forearms corded with muscle.
“Ms. Hartley,” he says without turning around. “You’re still here.”
“I finished the analysis,” I say, stepping into the room. I clutch my tablet to my chest. “I wanted to go over the findings before I left.”
“It’s after six,” he says. “Go home.”
“But you’re still here.”
“I live here,” he mutters. He spins his chair around slowly to face me. His gray eyes are heavy-lidded. He takes a sip of his drink. Whiskey. I can smell it from here. “What did you find?”
I walk forward, placing the tablet on his black marble desk. I can hear my own heartbeat. The room feels too small, too dark, too intimate.
“It’s the onboarding,” I say, keeping my voice steady. “I ran the numbers. We lose forty percent of users when we ask for the ‘Deep Dive’ vulnerability questions. It’s too much, too soon. It scares them off.”
Ethan looks at the tablet, scrolling through the graphs I built. He nods slowly. “We need that data to make the matching algorithm work. If they don’t answer the deep questions, the matches are superficial. Like Tinder.”
“I know,” I say. “But you’re asking for their darkest secrets before you’ve even bought them a drink. You have to earn the trust first, Ethan. You have to court them.”
Ethan looks up. His gaze locks onto mine.
“Court them,” he repeats, letting the words linger on his tongue like the aftertaste of the whiskey. “It’s a valid strategy. But it requires patience.”
“Yes,” I say, my throat going dry. “You can’t just demand intimacy. You have to build it. Slowly.”
He stands up.
He comes around the desk like he has already decided the outcome. I hold my ground, though every instinct in my body is telling me to run. Or step closer.
He stops a foot away from me. He towers over me, blocking out the ambient light from the monitors.
“Is that where I failed?” he asks quietly. “Did I demand too much?”
He’s not talking about the app anymore.
“I…” I falter. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Friday night,” he says. The words hang in the air. “I told you it was trouble. I told you not to wear it.”
“And I wore it anyway,” I whisper.
“You did.” He steps closer. I can feel the heat radiating off him. “You defied me. You walked into my world, wearing that dress, knowing exactly what it would do to us.”
“I didn’t know who you were,” I say, my voice shaking. “I knew you were Harper’s brothers—who I didn’t intentionally send those photos to, by the way—but I didn’t know you were my new bosses.”
“And if you had?” He leans down, his face inches from mine. “You think that makes it safe? You thought you were just teasing Harper’s boring older brothers?”
“I don’t think I’m safe right now,” I admit, my voice trembling.
“You’re not,” Ethan growls. “You are in my office, Tessa. Everyone is gone. And I am tired of pretending that I haven’t spent the entire day thinking about how you looked in that red silk.”
My stomach drops. “Ethan, we can’t. I work for you.”
“I know.” He clenches his jaw, his grip on the marble so intense I expect the stone to crack under the pressure, the muscles in his forearms rigid and taut. He’s physically restraining himself. “That is the only reason you are still standing there. If you weren’t my employee… if you weren’t Harper’s friend…”
