As the elevator doors slid shut with a bone-jarring thunk, sealing Max and I into the small, enclosed space, I found myself abruptly pinned beneath the full weight of his piercing emerald regard.

That familiar dark heat flickered through those turbulent green depths as his intense stare raked over me in an unhurried sweep from crown to toe. There was no mistaking the undisguised spark of primal masculine appreciation smoldering in his hooded gaze this time, despite the incongruously laughable state of my current dishevelment.

"You know," Max began in a silken rumble, not bothering to hit the lobby button as the elevator remained stubbornly immobile. He took one prowling step inward, forcing me to instinctively retreat until the padded railing bit into the back of my thighs. "Despite your...spirited enthusiasm for all things bureaucratic, I must admit I'm finding it difficult to envision you embracing any tangled webs of red tape with quite the same...unbridled appetite."

His tongue caressed the last two words with silky relish, the rough timbre vibrating against my oversensitized skin like a physical caress. I swallowed hard, every nerve suddenly hyper-aware of the scant foot of space separating our bodies as Max's intoxicating cedar and smoke cologne threatened to overwhelm me utterly.

"Then again," he continued, taking another infinitesimal step through the brackish silence. The broad wall of his chest loomed scant inches away now, near enough for me to feel the searing heat emanating from his powerful frame in lush waves. "Perhaps I'm simply underestimating the...scope of your rapacious appetite for mindless busywork, Miss Bennett."

The last silken endearment gusted warmly against my cheek and I bit back a full-body shiver, fighting to maintain my composure beneath his heated stare. But Max seemed to require no response, his piercing gaze slowly dropping to my parted lips with a look of dark longing.

For an endless suspended moment, the heavy tension throbbed between us in a living thing, coiling tighter and tighter until it threatened to implode. I felt delirious with it, every gasping inhale filling my senses with the overwhelming taste and scent of Max's pure, masculine potency.

Then, before I could open my mouth to utter a single husky syllable, Max struck with the devastating precision and swiftness of an apex predator.

Powerful fingers tangled into the dripping silk of my hair, wrenching me forward with a harsh upward tug that sent bolts of electrified heat ricocheting straight to my core. His mouth slanted over mine in a searing brand of possession - molten, demanding, rapacious in its ferocity.

I moaned shamelessly into the brutal onslaught, every last vestige of self-restraint reduced to cinders beneath the onslaught of Max's unleashed passion. His free hand scorched a merciless path along the curve of my hip, clenching with punishing force in a silent demand for submission that had me arching shamelessly against him in mindless capitulation.

Our kiss quickly devolved into a primal clash of tangling tongues and nipping teeth as if we each strove to consume the other whole. Max's powerful frame pressed me back without mercy until I was flush against the railing, dizzy and undone from the sheer intensity detonating between our fused bodies.

"Max," I finally gasped in a broken plea, reluctantly tearing my mouth away in a desperate bid for oxygen. My chest heaved with each ragged inhale, the incessant throbbing between my thighs near unbearable now. "Max, please..."

His swollen lips brushed mine once more in a tantalizing graze, tender and infuriatingly controlled in juxtaposition to the savagery that had so thoroughly unmade me just moments before. I could taste the hot puff of his ragged exhalation, feel the powerful flex of unyielding muscle caging me in on all sides as Max fought to regain his ironclad restraint.

"Soon, Charlotte," he husked in a voice gone lethally husky with banked restraint. His words seemed to vibrate against the sensitized hollow of my throat as he dipped his head to trail a scorching path of velvet caresses along the thudding pulse point. "Dear Christ, you've no idea the exquisite punishments I've envisioned inflicting for this endless game of provocation you insist on playing..."

A tremor of pure liquid heat lanced through me at the dark promise blazing in that graveled rasp. An unbidden whimper stuttered from my parted lips as I fought the primitive urge to brazenly wrap my legs around his narrow hips, drawing him into the slick, aching juncture between my thighs in blatant invitation.

But before I could give in to that base impulse, Max abruptly stepped back on a harsh indrawn breath, effectively severing our heated full-body contact.

"But not here," he grated in a tone etched with vibrant restraint. He raked a shaky hand through the tousled ebony wings of his hair, jaw clenched into harsh brackets of primal control. "Not in this metal box, not in a tacky conference room. You deserve so much more than that, Charlotte."

My knees threatened to buckle beneath me in sheer incredulity. This staggeringly virile, devastatingly powerful embodiment of pure masculinity was...pulling back from taking the ultimate rapture he so clearly craved in deference to giving me a more worthy experience?

I blinked up at him in stunned disbelief, every fiber of my being still humming in the aftermath of that searing, unrestrained onslaught of possession. "Max, I...I don't understand," I finally rasped, not even trying to disguise the naked longing still scorching through me.

Slowly, as if emerging from a trance, his turbulent emerald gaze refocused on my face - and something in his expression seemed to shudder and fracture ever so infinitesimally. One broad palm rose to tenderly cup the curve of my jaw, his thumb rasping lightly against the swollen fullness of my lower lip in a barely perceptible caress.

"Don't you, though?" He murmured, that deep rasp of his slithering through me with velvet coaxing. "Haven't you always understood, deep down, that this..." His gaze dropped meaningfully to the scant few inches still separating our bodies, where the searing waves of heat and unslaked hunger practically shimmered like a living force. "...this explosive connection between us could never be just another impulsive dalliance? Not for me, at least."

Something near my battered heart seemed to splinter at the naked vulnerability threaded beneath the heated promise of his words. This was no casual workplace flirtation or steaminess of the moment for Max - this was an all-consuming reckoning, one I suspected he'd been waging and denying for longer than either of us cared to admit.

Slowly, hardly daring to breathe for fear of shattering the suspended spell, I reached up to trace the sharp edge of his jaw with trembling fingertips. Max went utterly still beneath my attentions, his eyes flaring with banked embers as he held my gaze in silence.

"Then show me," I finally whispered, surprising even myself with the sudden fierceness of conviction blazing through me. I wanted - no, needed - to understand the scorching tangled truth of this connection shackling us together in irreversible ways. "Not here, not now...but soon, Max. Show me the inferno I've unknowingly been stoking this whole time between us."

His pupils flared into molten pools of undisguised yearning, but Max simply inclined his head in silent acquiescence to my demand. No taunting ripostes or velvet double entendres, no more fanning of the flames until he was ready to fully unmake me in the cleansing furnace of our combined raptures.

The air itself seemed to shiver around us with that unspoken vow searing the atmosphere. Then, coming back to himself with visible effort, Max dragged his fingertips along my jaw one final searing caress before taking a measured step backwards and breaking my tetering trance.

"Very well, Miss Bennett," he said evenly, though that same banked burn still flickered with naked promise in his stare. Turning to finally punch the button for the lobby, he gestured towards the mirrored walls with an eloquent twist of one wrist. "It appears what's left of your professional dignity could use attending before any further...indulgences are provided."

The waggish double entendre slipped from his lips with barely a flicker of that predatory intent now fully leashed once more. Feeling oddly bereft despite the undeniable wisdom of heeding the cooling pause, I could only nod in silent acknowledgment as I struggled to regain my own equilibrium.

Max's mouth curved in the barest ghost of a smile as he watched me try to smooth down my wrinkled skirt and makeup-smeared decolletage to some reasonable approximation of decorum. The tip of his tongue traced the contour of his lower lip in an unconscious mimic of my trembling fingertips, searing a fresh lick of liquid heat low in my belly.

Damn him, the man could wield mere eye contact and body language like an erotic symphony with the same devastating mastery as his unleashed passion a scant few minutes ago. The combined effect left me feeling deliciously off-kilter and unmade in a thousand shivery ways.

The jarring chime of the elevator reaching the ground floor blessedly broke the suspended tension before I could descend too deeply into those enticing psychic depths again. Clearing my throat with as much dignity as I could muster, I brushed past Max and exited into the marbled lobby without a backwards glance.

I refused to give him the satisfaction of witnessing my legs wobbling with aftershocks of lingering arousal - though the husky resonance of his dark chuckle trailed after me like a silken caress all the way to the powder room. Clearly, he didn't need any further visual confirmation of the overwhelming effect he'd had on me in that elevator.

Slipping inside the mercifully deserted lounge, I instantly gravitated to the long granite counter before the ornate brass mirrors. Bracing my palms on the cool stone, I leaned heavily into the support as the first frissons of residual shudders wracked through me in the solitude.

Christ Almighty, I hadn't even been fully intimate with Max - not in the way every last smoldering instinct was presently clamoring for, at least - and already I felt as though I'd weathered a cataclysmic storm of epic proportions. Tremors still rippled through me in the wake of whatever seismic shifts had just transpired in the past few incendiary minutes.

Had I really thought I could neatly fit Max back into a cordoned-off little box labeled Boss? Glancing up to confront the devastatingly ravaged vision of myself in the mirror, I snorted in self-disgust. What a callow, naive notion that had been. Max wasn't simply an authority figure or a casual dalliance to waltz in and out of when convenient...

No, the raw ferocity of that possessive, unleashed passion could only be the blazing harbinger of something far more primal and elemental shackling us together than any polite social convention could contain for long. The real question gnawing at me through the lingering aftershocks was whether I'd finally found the one missing talisman to obliterate those last fortifications of control the supreme Master Max Pemberton kept battened down so ruthlessly...

And if so, what armageddon-level cataclysms might be loosed upon the world once his legendary restraint finally shattered under the weight of our combined hungers?

BONUS CONTENT

Max's - Mini POV

"Don't you, though?" I murmured, unable to hide the yearning rasp in my voice as I stared down at this bewitching woman. Hadn't she sensed the profound shift between us? That this rapacious hunger binding us together had long ago transcended mere physical temptation into something far more eternal and sacred?

My gaze dropped meaningfully to the scant inches separating our straining bodies, that searing negative space practically shimmering with the ferocious undercurrents of our unslaked desires.

"Haven't you always understood, deep down, that this...explosive connection between us could never be just another impulsive dalliance? Not for me, at least." I rasped, willing Charlotte to lay her last defenses bare so our connection could blaze into its full intensity. "Never again, just for me."

☆*: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

What a ride! Do you guys have any interesting elevator stories to share? Let me know all about it!

Until next time,

DQ 🤩👍