Chapter 16 When Want Doesn’t Wait
Orion’s POV
The phone is still warm in my hand when I step out of the suite and into the hallway. I can still taste her on my tongue. I can still feel the way her thighs shook around my face when she lost control.
I can still hear that broken, beautiful sound she made when she finally came. I have to force my legs to move down the long, carpeted hallway toward the elevators. The call was from Marcus.
He is my lead engineer on the high-level encryption project back home.
“Emergency patch failure, Orion,” he had said.
“We’re bleeding users by the second. The board is already circling like sharks.”
His voice had that specific sharp edge that means things are actually hitting the fan. It was the kind of tone that tells me my company is on fire. I couldn’t ignore it.
I couldn’t stay, not even with Cora naked and trembling against the shower tile. I could still see her in my mind, begging me with her eyes not to stop what I was doing. I take the private elevator down to the resort's conference level.
My cock is still half-hard behind my zipper. It is aching with a heavy pulse that I can't seem to quiet down. Every step I take makes the fabric of my pants rub against me the wrong way.
I try to adjust myself once. I try a second time when the elevator doors open. It doesn’t help at all.
I am walking into a boardroom full of high-level executives while I have a goddamn hard-on. All because of the woman I just left shaking in my shower. The heavy double doors slide open.
Marcus is already there, pacing a hole into the expensive rug. Three other executives are clustered around the massive digital screen on the wall. There is Lena from the legal department.
There is Raj, who handles product management. And there is Chen, our CTO, who looks like he hasn't slept in forty-eight hours. The room smells like stale coffee and high-level stress.
“Orion,” Marcus says.
A look of pure relief flashes across his tired face.
“Thank Christ you're here.”
I nod my head once. I drop into the heavy leather chair at the head of the table.
“Talk to me,” I say.
They launch into the technical details immediately. Marcus pulls up the security dashboard first.
“The exploit chain started at 03:47 server-side,” he explains.
“It’s a zero-day in the key-exchange handshake. We’ve patched the client side already.”
He taps a key, and red lines start appearing on the graph.
“But the backend is still leaking session tokens faster than we can rotate them.”
“How fast?” I ask.
“The rate is at twelve thousand compromised logins per minute and climbing.”
Raj jumps in before I can process the number.
“We isolated the vulnerable endpoints, but the fallback cipher suite is still exposed.”
He looks at me with concern.
“If we force-quit TLS 1.2 support entirely to stop it, we lose fifteen percent of our users.”
“Specifically the legacy Android users,” he adds.
“Our churn projections are already spiking through the roof.”
Lena leans forward, her face tight.
“The liability is the bigger issue here, Orion. We have the GDPR notifications queued up.”
She shakes her head.
“But if this hits the press before we contain it, we’re looking at class-action territory.”
“The California AG’s office loves a good data breach headline,” she warns.
Chen is scrolling through the raw logs on his tablet.
“I’ve got three signatures that match known APT groups,” he says.
“It could be a nation-state, or it could be ransomware-as-a-service.”
He looks up at me.
“Either way, these people are patient. They waited six weeks after they got initial access.”
I listen to everything they say. I nod my head at the right moments to show I'm following. I ask the questions they expect a CEO to ask:
“What is the containment timeline?”
“How many of our high-value accounts are exposed?”
“Have we alerted the certificate authorities yet?”
My mouth moves and the words come out. The answers they give me register in my brain. But the rest of my mind is somewhere else entirely.
I keep seeing the image of Cora’s head thrown back against the tile. I see the water streaming down her breasts and her nipples tight from my mouth. I remember the way her fingers twisted in my hair.
She held onto me like she was afraid I would disappear if she let go. I can still taste her—sweet, salty, and completely addictive. I shift my weight in the leather chair.
My dick twitches again. I cross one leg over the other and I hope to god that no one notices. Marcus is still talking about the technical side.
“…re-issuing the certs now, but the OCSP stapling is failing on forty percent of the nodes.”
He looks at me for a decision.
“We need to decide if we roll back to the previous firmware or push the emergency hotfix.”
“Pushing the hotfix means we have to eat the downtime,” he adds.
I force my focus back to the room.
“Hotfix,” I say firmly.
“Downtime is a better option than another data leak. It’s cleaner.”
“Schedule it for the low-traffic window—0400 to 0600 UTC,” I direct them.
“Notify the enterprise clients right now. Give them the steps for mitigation.”
They all nod their heads. A wave of relief ripples through the room. The decision has been made.
They start breaking off into smaller groups to handle their tasks. Raj starts working on customer communications. Lena starts looking into the legal hold requirements.
Chen begins coordinating with the red team for security. I let them talk over each other for another ten minutes. I contribute just enough to the conversation to keep the gears moving.
But every time there is a lull in the talking, my mind slides right back to her. I think of the little gasp she made when I first licked her. I think of the way her hips rolled because she couldn't help herself.
I think of how wet she was. I think of how ready she was to take all of me. I could’ve fucked her right there against the shower wall.
I wanted to do it so badly. I still want to do it. My hand flexes on the armrest of my chair.
If I close my eyes, I can almost feel her body around me.
“Orion?”
Marcus is looking at me again. I blink my eyes and focus.
“Yeah.”
“Are you good with the communications timeline? We’re drafting the disclosure now.”
I scan the slide he is sharing on the big screen. It looks fine.
“Approve it,” I say.
“Send it out the moment the hotfix goes live.”
He nods. They keep going for a while longer. I check the time on my watch.
It has been forty-seven minutes since I walked out of that bathroom. It feels like it has been years. Finally, Marcus closes his laptop with a click.
“That’s everything we can do for now. I’ll ping you when the patch deploys.”
“Good,” I say.
“Keep me in the loop on everything.”
They file out of the room one by one. I stay seated until I hear the heavy door click shut. The room becomes very quiet.
There is only the low hum of the air conditioning. I exhale hard through my nose. My cock is fully hard again.
It is actually painful now. I have been sitting here pretending to care about cipher suites. Meanwhile, my body is screaming for the woman upstairs.
I stand up. I try to adjust myself, but it barely helps the pressure. I head for the private suite that is attached to this conference level.
It has its own bathroom. It has a shower. It has a door that locks from the inside.
I don’t even bother to turn on the lights. I lock the door behind me and strip as fast as I can. My shirt, my pants, my boxers, everything hits the floor in a heap.
The shower water is ice cold when I turn it on. I don’t care about the temperature. I step under the freezing spray and brace one hand on the cold tile.
My other hand wraps around my cock. I am so hard that it hurts. I let out a low groan in my throat at the very first stroke.
I close my eyes tight. There she is in my head. I see Cora on her knees in front of me.
No, wait. I see myself on my knees for her. I see her leg draped over my shoulder.
I see her pussy, pink and slick under the light of my tongue. I remember the way she tasted when she came. It was sharp and sweet and it flooded my mouth.
I start to stroke faster. I picture her right now, in my bed upstairs. I imagine her robe is open.
I imagine her legs are spread wide. I imagine she is waiting for me to come back. I imagine sliding into her very slowly.
I see her nails digging into the skin of my back. I hear her breath hitching every time I bottom out inside her.
“Fuck,” I mutter to the empty shower.
I see her riding me. I see her hips rolling in that way she does. I see her breasts bouncing.
I see her head thrown back just like it was in the shower. She is saying my name like it is a plea. I twist my hand at the head of my dick.
My thumb swipes over the slit. Pre-cum slicks the way for my hand. My balls tighten up.
I think about her mouth. I think about those soft lips wrapped around me. I think about her tongue teasing the underside.
I see her looking up at me with those big eyes while she takes me deep. My rhythm stutters for a second. I picture flipping her onto her stomach.
I see her ass up in the air. I am gripping her hips. I am fucking her hard enough that the headboard bangs against the wall.
I hear her muffled moans into the pillow.
“Orion—”
I can actually hear her voice in my head. It is the exact broken way she said it when she came on my tongue. That is it.
I come hard. I am groaning through my clenched teeth. Ropes of cum hit the wet tile and wash away under the spray.
My knees almost buckle under me. I lean my forehead against the cool wall. My breathing is ragged and uneven.
It is not enough. This took the edge off, but it is nowhere near enough to satisfy me. I still want her.
I still need her. I rinse off quickly under the water. I dry off.
I dress in the spare clothes I keep in the locker here. A pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. My body feels a little bit looser now.
But my mind is still wired and tight. I head back to the elevator. I go back up to the suite.
The hallway is dark and quiet now. I open the door as slowly as I can. She is in the bed.
She is curled on her side. The robe has slipped off of one of her shoulders. The moonlight cuts across her collarbone.
I stand there for a second, just watching her breathe in and out. Then I cross the room quietly. I kick off my shoes.
I slide under the covers behind her. I don’t touched her yet. I just press my chest against her back.
I bury my face in her hair. She smells like my shampoo and something sweeter. She smells like herself.
She stirs a little bit. She murmurs something sleepy that I can't understand.
“Shh,” I whisper into her ear.
“Go back to sleep, Cora.”
She lets out a sigh. She relaxes her body against mine. Her ass nestles right against my groin.
I am already starting to get hard again. I don’t even care. I wrap one arm around her waist.
I pull her closer to me. My hand rests low on her stomach. She is warm.
She is soft. She is real. I close my eyes.
the meeting is completely forgotten. The exploit chain, the numbers, the legal issues, it all fades away. There is only her.
I press a kiss to the back of her neck. It is soft and barely there. She makes a small, happy sound in her sleep.
She sounds content. I let out a slow, long breath. Tomorrow we will talk.
Tomorrow we will figure out what this is. Tomorrow I will bury myself inside her until neither of us can think. For now, I just hold her and finally, I fall asleep.