Free Beautiful Stranger by Christina Lauren Page A

it had run its course. Luckily for us, I don’t think we’ll ever stop feeling what we felt those first few times. Even so, I didn’t trust him. I didn’t really even like him. Above all of it, he was my boss . I mean, hello, inappropriate.” She laughed, and following her gaze over to her desk, I saw that the first and only thing she’d unpacked so far was a picture of the two of them at the house in France where he’d proposed to her. “But I think if I’d just given myself permission to enjoy it a little bit, it might not have consumed me so much.”
    I was starting to know exactly what she meant about being consumed. And I knew, too, that I was consciously fighting it with Max, with the idea of Max. But my reasons were different. It wasn’t a boss-employee thing, or any other kind of power struggle. It was the simple fact that I didn’t want to be anyone else’s but my own for a while. And although this thing with Max was insane and completely different from anything I’d ever felt before— I was different—I liked it. A lot.
    “I do like him,” I admitted carefully. “But I don’t think he’s boyfriend material. In fact, I know he’s not. And I am most definitely not girlfriend material right now.”
    “Okay, so maybe you just get together every now and then as fuck buddies.”
    I laughed, pressing my face into my hands. “Seriously. Whose life is this?”
    She looked at me like she wanted to pat my head. “Sara, it’s yours .”

    George was reading a newspaper in my office with his feet up on my desk when I returned.
    “Working yourself to the bone?” I teased, sitting on the corner of my desk.
    “On my lunch break. And you had a package arrive, darling.”
    “You found it in the mailroom?”
    He shook his head and lifted the parcel off his lap, waving it at me. “Hand delivered. By a very cute bike messenger, I might add. I had to sign for it and promise not to open it.”
    I snatched it from him and jerked my chin to the door, wordlessly telling George to scram.
    “You’re not even going to tell me what it is?”
    “I don’t have X-ray vision, and you are not going to be here when I open it. Get out.”
    With a noise of protest, he kicked his feet off my desk and left, closing my door on his way out.
    I stared at the package for several minutes, feeling the rectangular shape of it beneath the padded envelope. A frame? My heart jumped in my chest.
    Tucked inside were a wrapped parcel and a note that read,
    Petal,
    Open this with discretion. It is my favourite.
    Your stranger.
    I swallowed, feeling a little as if I were on the verge of unleashing something I would no longer be able to contain. Looking up to ensure that my door was firmly shut, I unwrapped it, my hands shaking when I realized that it was indeed a frame. Made of deep, simply cut wood, it held a single photo: a picture of my stomach, and the curve of my waist. The black table beneath me was visible. Max’s fingertips were also visible at the bottom, as if he was pinning me to the surface at my hips. A faint beam of light spread across my skin, a reminder of the door opening nearby, of the person wandering around the room just beyond the screen.
    He must have taken that picture just as he’d buried himself in me.
    I closed my eyes, remembering how it had felt when I came. I was like a bare wire, plugged into the wall and with the charge that would illuminate that dark ballroom running through me instead. He’d bared my clit with his fingers, stroked me just like that. I’dwanted to close my legs against the intensity of it, but he’d growled, held me open with his pounding hips.
    I shoved the frame back in the mailing envelope and hid the entire thing in my purse. Heat spread like a clawing vine across my skin and I couldn’t even turn up the air, couldn’t open a window this high in the building.
    How did he know?
    I felt the weight of it pressing down on me, how much I’d wanted it to be a photo of us, how much