Alien Romance: Arcturus Mates Complete Series (Book 1 - 9): Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Invasion Romance, Alien Romance) (11 page)

Chapter 4

Lunch made one thing very clear.

Vincent Grimoire, genius inventor, pioneer of space exploration, and CEO of Orbital Prime, had no idea how people worked. He generally expected ‘jump’ to be followed by ‘how high?’

Obedience was met with satisfaction, fearful disobedience was met with disdain, and defiance was met with perplexed admiration.

“Maybe if you didn’t look terrifying?” Genevieve suggested between bites of her pasta.

He stared at her in sort of puppy-ish incomprehension.

“Have you seen yourself when you’re annoyed?” she wondered, her brows rising.

“You either look like you think everyone but you is an idiot, or like you’re getting ready to go for the jugular.”

He cleared his throat. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Dinner that evening was leftovers from lunch as Genevieve sifted through all of the messages that had poured in while she was gone.

She called back the ones that left all of the proper contact information, left notes about the ones who at least left a name and some inkling of what they were calling about, and discarded the ones that offered nothing to work with.

The office door slid open, and Genevieve glanced up, the phone cradled between her cheek and her shoulder and her fork raised halfway to her mouth as she listened to a man stutter out his name and phone number.

“You know,” Vincent began conversationally, leaning in the doorway, the tablet from earlier held in one hand. He held the tablet up.

“This is good work. Maybe I should use you as a note-taker more often.”

Her brows rose. “With all due respect, Mr. Grimoire, I’m bringing the phone with me next time.”

He snorted and waved a hand at her to continue with what she was doing and stepped back into his office.

Chapter 5

Working for Vincent was a bit like sitting in a frying pan and then jumping into an ice bath.

Some days, he would pop into the waiting room purely to chat with her. Some days, he would lean out of the office just say, “Morning, Genesis,” before slipping back into his office, and she gave up correcting him on her name after the fourth time. 

Some days he simply would not shut off, like some sort of talkative perpetual motion device. Other days, he grunted at her a few times and didn’t say a word. Other days, she only saw him as he came and went.

To say he ran hot and cold did not do him justice. He ran scalding and frigid, a shock to the system like jumping from the tropics into the tundra.

His temper was not much different. Some days, his patience stretched for miles, and on other days it snapped with a single wrong word. It was always brief, though.

His anger never lasted more than a day, and it always seemed to simply evaporate, as if he had suddenly just decided ‘well that’s a silly thing to be angry about, so I won’t.’

With each day, Genevieve got better at navigating the minefield that was her boss, and she thought that maybe he was evening out as time passed. Perhaps she was growing on him.

Three weeks in, as Genevieve sat at her desk eating lunch and rescheduling a meeting with the representative of BioMetrics after a lab accident left most of the workers under quarantine, Vincent stepped into the waiting room. He paced the room quietly until Genevieve hung up the phone, and then he cleared his throat.

“Cathy worked here for about three and a half years,” he said, completely out of left field.

Startled by the random topic, Genevieve was silent at first.

She gathered her wits quickly, though. “Quite a track record,” she acknowledged.”

“Yeah. Heh.” He dragged a hand through his hair.

“See, I’m a bit of a perfectionist…”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Genevieve drawled wryly.

Vincent flipped her off off-handedly and plowed onwards.

“I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I went through PAs like toilet paper before she showed up. I would have a new one pretty much every week. The longest lasted a month, and I think I might have replaced one of them after only three days. And then Cathy came along and managed to exceed all of my expectations.”

“She was your friend,” Genevieve guessed.

Vincent sighed. “Yeah. A sister, really.”

They lapsed into silence, until Genevieve asked for the second time, “Why did she leave?”

“I told her a secret,” Vincent admitted with a shrug.

“A big one. I’d never told anyone else before. But I figured, she already knew everything else about me, so if anyone deserved to know, it was her.” He scuffed one shoe against the corner of the desk.

“She didn’t take it well. She turned in her two weeks notice, barely spoke to me for those two weeks, and I haven’t heard from her since.”

Genevieve laid a hand over his on the desk, and he shot her a startled glance over his sunglasses.

“I’m sorry,” she offered simply.

“You deserved better than that.”

He offered her a crooked smile.

“I dunno. I guess she had her reasons.”

Genevieve had a strange and probably unhealthy fascination with Vincent’s accent. She could be perfectly content just listening to him talk, so it came as no surprise when she quickly came to enjoy her bouts as his scientific note taker.

The way he shaped words, the way they rolled off of his tongue, the way he almost seemed to be purring his sentences sometimes, like a smug cat. All of it enraptured Genevieve in a way that few things had before.

On a whim one day, she asked, “What sort of accent do you have, anyway?” Some people might have considered it rude, but those people had never met Vincent.

“Foreign,” he answered cheerfully.

He grinned in the face of Genevieve’s clearly unimpressed look and carried on working.

Genevieve glowered at him for a few seconds, but once it became clear that a real answer was not forthcoming, she huffed and resumed recording his scientific gibberish on the tablet.

Chapter
6

Orbital Prime was a very large company, with hundreds of employees. Vincent saw dozens of different people every day. So while Genevieve was aware that her birthdate was in her file, she figured it stood to reason that her boss wouldn’t actually bother to commit his personal assistant’s birthday to memory.

So it was quite a surprise to her when she sat down at her desk on August seventh and found a small box, wrapped simply in green tissue paper, sitting on the keyboard with a square of paper sitting on top of it.

The square of paper read simply ‘
For Genevieve Carter
.’

She had been working with Vincent for long enough to recognize his writing, and her first thought was a somewhat inane, ‘
So he does actually know my name
,’ and that led to a somewhat soppy smile as she finally realized that ‘Genesis’ was his attempt at a nickname.

She set the card aside and tore open the paper to reveal a jewelry box. With mounting excitement, she opened it, and she gasped quietly when she saw the contents.

A pair of rose gold earrings and a rose gold necklace. Each earring was a delicate swirl of rose gold curled around a string of miniscule amber beads, and the necklace was two rose gold chains join to the same clasp with a mesh of rose gold and amber between the chains.

Quickly, she pulled out her simple golden hoop earrings to put the new ones in, and she carefully latched the necklace around her neck. She got to her feet and almost jogged over to the office door. She knocked quickly, a staccato of six beats.

The door slid open and Vincent looked up expectantly from his desk.

“I know you’re busy so I’ll keep this short,” Genevieve started, speaking in a rush, “but thank you,
so
much.” She clasped her hands together in front of herself and very nearly bounced in place.

“I can’t even imagine how much these cost—I mean, I know money’s not really a concern for you, but still. Thank you.”

Vincent offered her a crooked but surprisingly sincere smile.

“No problem.” He shrugged one shoulder loosely. “Figure it’s the least I can do.”

Genevieve wanted to say something. She wasn’t sure what, but whatever it was, she felt like it would be important. Maybe that he mattered to her, maybe that Cathy had been crazy for leaving. Whatever it was, she felt like it would change things between them.

The phone on her desk rang before she could say anything, and with a smirk, Vincent pointed towards her desk.

“Back to your station, minion.”

Genevieve rolled her eyes and returned to her desk, answering the phone on the second ring.

“Orbital Prime,” she greeted. “You’ve reached the office of Vincent Grimoire. How may I direct your call?”

Chapter 7

Vincent and one of the development team leaders had been in the CEO’s office for ten minutes when the shouting started. Genevieve tried not to listen, but with how loud they were being, it was hard not to.

Mostly it consisted of Vincent calling the team lead incompetent and the team lead calling Vincent an overly demanding perfectionist, and it spiraled out of control from there. It lasted for almost a full half hour before the team lead stormed out of the office and into the elevator.

A moment later, Vincent stepped into the waiting room as well, pacing back and forth across it quickly and nearly vibrating with excess energy. His hair was ruffled, his sunglasses were gone, and his eyes were wild. Anger and adrenaline had brought color to his face, tinting his cheeks red.

He was muttering to himself, and the way anger shaped his accent, so it fit around his words in entirely new ways, was an absolute delight. All in all, he was well and truly frazzled.

It was possibly one of the hottest things Genevieve had ever seen.

Completely unrepentant, she watched him pace like a cornered animal for a short while, until an idea lodged itself in her head. It struck her so quickly that she stood up as soon as it occurred to her.

Vincent paused mid-stride to look at her.

“What?”

Well, no sense in backing down now. She had already been caught.

Genevieve switched the phone over to voice mail, stepped out from behind her desk, and walked up to him.

She leaned up, curled a hand around the back of his neck to pull him down, and kissed him.

The kiss was short and glancing at first. He hadn’t been expecting it, after all. But he adapted at an admirable pace, and the kiss very quickly turned harsh and biting, filled with pent up irritation.

His hands fell to her hips, his grip on them almost bruising, and the kiss seemed to go on for an eternity, the rest of the world slowing to a halt around them.

When at last they parted, Vincent asked breathlessly, “You’re supposed to be leaving soon, right?”

“Mmhmmm,” Genevieve hummed in confirmation.

“Oh, good.” He gave her one more, quick kiss and took her by the hand.

“Follow me.” He led her towards the glass door that led to the rest of the penthouse, and Genevieve barely remembered to grab her purse from the desk on the way past.

They made it to the bedroom quickly, and they stripped just as quickly, pulling clothing off and tossing it every which way, just to be naked as fast as possible.

They fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, tumbling this way and that, Genevieve on top, and then Vincent, and then Genevieve again.

When they finally came to a stand still, Genevieve was straddling Vincent’s hips, her knees on the mattress and her hands on his chest.

He was already hard, his cock pressing against her thigh and smearing precum against her skin with each subtle movement, and she could already feel herself dripping wet.

Vincent reached towards the bedside table and fumbled blindly in the drawer with one hand. When he pulled his hand out again, it was with a condom held between two fingers. He tore the package open with his teeth and handed it to her.

Genevieve rolled the condom down over his cock and tossed the wrapper aside. With that handled, there was no beating around the bush.

She closed one hand around his member to hold him steady, lifted herself up on her knees, and then sank down slowly on his cock.

They moaned in tandem, Vincent’s eyes slipping closed and Genevieve’s head falling back. For a moment they stayed like that, joined together and relishing the sensation.

Vincent gripped her hips once more, and his thumbs slowly stroked over the stretch marks there, tracing them, as if to commit them to memory.

And then he gave her a tug, and she lifted upwards, his hands pulling her back down and his hips lifting off of the bed to meet each downwards movement.

It was quick and dirty, each thrust a frenzy of movement. They seemed to be in perfect sync with each other the entire time, and each thrust was just the right speed, just the right angle, just the right depth. It seemed as if they had only just begun, and they were already approaching the end.

With each thrust, heat and tension coiled in Genevieve’s belly, like a wind-up toy being wound too far. With each thrust, it was wound a little tighter until inevitably, it burst apart, and she came with a moan that may as well have been a scream.

Her limbs felt like jelly and she wanted nothing more than to sprawl out on the bed like a content cat, but she held out for a few more thrusts, until Vincent tensed and arched like a bow and came with a low, drawn out groan.

For a slow moment, Genevieve stayed on top of him, looking down and thoroughly enjoying the sight of him utterly undone.

It wasn’t long before she toppled sideways onto the bed, though. She tucked herself against his side contently.

Vincent pulled the condom off, tied it off, and pitched it towards the trashcan. He wrapped one arm around her, and in moments, Genevieve was out like a light.