Chapter 1

Lexical’s downtown offices. Wall to wall cubicles, horizontal filing cabinets, and private offices and conference rooms as far as the eye could see. All done up in a depressing palette of gray. More fit for an accountancy than a high growth tech startup. Perhaps because the previous tenant had been Grimaldi Harden and Associates, LLP. An accountancy.

No open pods or communal spaces to share ideas. No bean bag chairs for software developers to rest in during marathon coding sessions. No foosball tables or gaming consoles to help clear the mind and get the blood flowing. And definitely no beer fridge because the new owners were A-type teetotaler assholes.

We used to be called Sensus back when I ran the company. Before I took that first big round of investment from Butler Financial. Things had been a lot more fun back then. Butler Financial’s two general partners, brothers Sean and Patrick, took a two-thirds stake in my company and installed themselves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer respectively.

They kept me on as Chief Technology Officer, since it was the company’s tech that gave us our competitive advantage. That, and the Butlers knew the engineers would revolt if they tried to bring in someone else. Our codebase was the secret sauce. Our eleven herbs and spices. They seemed content to leave me with my fiefdom, as long as I paid tribute and my team continued to deliver.

They changed the name of the company I founded seven years ago to Lexical and moved our offices from the hip, grungy, converted Victorian I’d found near the warehouse district to this soulless, glittering high rise in the CBD. The previous tenant, the accountancy, had wanted out of their lease. They agreed to sublet most of the twelfth floor to us at a bargain rate, furnishings included. Those skinflint bastards jumped at the offer, and now, here we were.

I opened the door to conference room 3B to find the Butlers already seated inside, waiting for me.

“You’re late,” Sean said. His brother, Patrick, leaned back in his chair with his legs crossed and tapped his pen on the edge of the conference table.

I checked my watch, then the clock on the wall. I was four minutes late to my own goddamned meeting. Fuck them.

“Previous meeting ran over,” I lied. Why did I even feel the need to explain? I took a seat across from them and launched right into the purpose for the meeting. “Braintrust Capital. Ever hear of them?”

Sean and Patrick exchanged a glance. “Of course,” Sean said. “Private equity. What about them?”

“They want to make an offer to buy us.”

Patrick leaned forward and palmed his face. Sean patted his brother’s forearm and exhaled an exasperated sigh.

“We’ve been over this, Ryan,” he said in that dumb Irish brogue I hated so fucking much. “We’re not selling the fecking company. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”

“Stop wasting our time with this shite!” Patrick said, his tone far more irritated than his brother’s. “My brother and I handle this company’s finances. Not you!”

“It’s a two hundred million dollar offer!” I shouted, my own anger rising. “No stock. All cash. You two can walk out of here with fifty million right now. That’s a twenty-x return on your investment. Why are we even discussing this?” You greedy Irish fucks.

Sean stood up to button his blazer and his brother rose to join him. The meeting was over.

“We’re taking this company public, Ryan,” Sean said. “On our own schedule. You don’t agree? There’s the door. We’ll be sad to see you go. Otherwise, I suggest you stay in your lane and leave these decisions to me and my brother.”

When the door shut behind them, I rested my head in my hands, then slammed my palms on the table.

“Fuck!”

I stalked across the office to the Research and Development area. My kingdom. The place where my department staff did all of the actual hard work that added value to the company. Most of my code monkeys and data scientists sat heads down in their cubes, ensconced behind triple banks of monitors, cranking out the industry’s most advanced sentiment analysis engine. I glided into the corner of the bullpen occupied by the User Experience and Design team and peaked into Serena’s cube. She sat hunched over her keyboard, working on a webpage layout. It sucked.

“Serena,” I said, getting her attention.

She looked up from her work and smiled. “Morning, boss,” she said in an Irish lilt that irritated me almost as much as her father’s did.

“My office,” I said before turning away.

I’d negotiated one of the two corner offices. Sean occupied the other. Patrick said he preferred an interior office without windows for some stupid reason. His loss. Serena appeared at my door with her laptop tucked under her arm.

“Shut the door,” I told her from behind my desk. “Lock it.”

Patrick Butler’s daughter, Serena, had been foisted on me through nepotism. She’d moved from Galway with her family while still in high school, and had studied marketing here in the States, then decided after college that she wanted to try her hand at user experience design, because a marketing degree totally qualified you to do that. I’d had no choice but to find her a position on my team.

Before Serena, I’d held a romanticized notion of the bonny Irish lass in my imagination. Red haired, ruddy cheeked, emerald eyed. Big-busted beauties herding sheep on some verdant rolling hillside on the heath. Or maybe milking cows or something. Serena had dispelled that mythical vision. Dark haired, brown eyed and whip thin, with crooked teeth and an annoying, braying laugh, she kind of repulsed me.

But Serena’s true talent, it turned out, was sucking cock. She couldn’t design for shit, but she could suck a dick like no one’s business. If sucking dick were an Olympic sport, Serena would be its Michael Phelps. I’d promoted her to associate UX designer in charge of our partner portal. We had no partner portal. Not yet anyway. Maybe one day. Serena reported directly to me. A sixty-five thousand dollar a year private cocksucker.

“Lift it,” I said.

Serena set her laptop down and lifted the front of her skirt. No panties and a shaved pussy between her wide thigh gap. Marvelous. She hated that I called them panties. Knickers, she’d said the first time I asked her to take them off. Whatever, I said. I’d prefer it if you didn’t wear anything. We never spoke of it again. She frequently chose not to wear panties after that. Knickers. Whatever.

Shortly after hiring Serena, I took the entire R&D department out for a night of fun and team building over dinner and drinks. Toward the end of the night, I found myself alone with her. I’ll admit I’d had far too much to drink that night. As had she. We ended up in the back seat of my Mercedes where she blew my mind with the best blowjob I’d ever received.

The next day at work, she acted as if nothing had happened and I was fine to leave it at that. Then I got into an argument with her father about my department’s budget, and scheduled a one on one with his daughter in my office immediately afterwards. Now I had a thirty minute, daily recurring meeting with her on my calendar. Every day before lunch, Serena came to my office to suck my cock. If I had a long conference call or a Zoom meeting, I’d sometimes call her in to my office to join me.

Before Serena, I’d never fooled around with an employee. Bad business. And if she’d been anyone else on my team, I would never have offered her that ride home. But she was Patrick Butler’s daughter. My nemesis. So of course I helped myself.

I’m not sure what compelled her to go along with it. Maybe she thrilled at the idea of going behind her dad’s back. Maybe she had a thing for older guys. Whatever the reason, these clandestine trysts seemed to drive her mad with desire and fueled her lust, making each encounter better than the last.

I pushed away from the desk and spread my legs. Serena dropped her skirt and came forward to kneel in front of me. She unbuckled my belt and undid the fly. When she pulled out my cock, she sighed dreamily.

“Beautiful,” she said, then took me into her mouth.

I don’t know what it is about a woman with your cock in her mouth, but it instantly elevates her appearance and desirability. Watching Serena’s thin lips roll over the head of my cock, and hearing her low, throaty groans, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to fuck her. For the past couple months, it had been her giving me head. Occasionally, I fingered her, but not often. She never seemed to mind, though. She loved sucking my cock and never asked for more than that.

I thought about Patrick’s outburst in the conference room earlier and my mood darkened. I hated that penny pinching prick, and the feeling was mutual. We’d clashed from day one. Before the Butlers, the company had been my cash machine. I’d taken out money whenever I’d needed it. I’d leased my cars through the company. I’d maintained a company apartment in the city as a crash pad to take women. I’d expensed everything I possibly could. All of that, on top of my fat salary. Patrick had shut it all down the minute he’d stepped in as the company’s financial controller.

Watching his daughter suck my cock alleviated some of the sting from his little dressing down of me at the meeting, but I wasn’t sure it would be enough this time. I put my hands on her head and pushed her back.