Men in this building might stop leering at her should they believe the CEO had a firm grip on her.
“You don’t care?” Ling didn’t either.
“We’re already a rumor. What difference will it make.” Tian shrugged, slid on his suit jacket, and turned, gesturing towards the bathroom door at the far corner of his office to check his appearance. Ling followed, knowing she should take one last check, too, and casually strolled with a satisfied sway behind him. She untucked his suit jacket, which was slightly hooked into his belt at his hip, and smoothed it proudly over his back. Feeling out his broad back and firm muscles. A sense of happiness warmed her inside that she got to touch this man in this intimate way whenever she felt fit.
“It won’t. I just wanted to know how I am supposed to handle it. They can say whatever they want about me. At least this time, it will be true.” Ling tossed her hair over her shoulder and slid past him to walk into the brightly lit bathroom before him. Straight to the sink and the mirror, she frowned at what looked back at her.
She couldn’t deny she had just been panting and sweating for the last two hours, exerting all her energy. She was flushed, blushed, and wild-looking. Her makeup from her cheeks down was nonexistent, and she had slight panda eyes going on. She had zero makeup to fix the issue as she always left it in her desk and came to work bagless.
Tian walked past her, opened a small unit over the toilet to retrieve some wipes, and handed them to her. Wordlessly in sync and seemingly both good at reading one another without asking. They were generic hygienic wipes for the face and other bodily parts, standard in all OTS bathrooms. Ling hauled one out to adjust her eyes and shrugged off the rest of her face. She could fix it when she returned to her own space, but it would surely add some fire to gossip.
Tian stood behind her, tall enough to see his full face over her shoulder, and fixed his hair. The neat and well-styled normal of it was gone and instead was a nail-raked, tugged, and ruffled look his lady had given him while in the throes of whining his name. He wasn’t phased and managed to lean in, turn on the faucet, and use a little water on his fingers to re-enact his gel. Smoothing it back into CEO perfection.
Because of proximity and Ling leaning in to get a good look at her face, she ended up pressing her butt into his groin and elicited a little naughty smirk as she caught him flicking a glance down at the contact with a pause. Hands were held mid-air at his hair, eyes down, and there was a slight furrow between his brows that her nudge had not gone unnoticed.
“What’s the matter? Suddenly shy? Or thinking about round three?” She smiled sassily, wiggled her butt to groin rub him deliberately, and grinned wider as his face fell to a slight agony fuelled full-on frown. Tian caught her hips and stilled her body before pushing a little distance back between them.
Her smile broke across her face, and she winked at herself in the mirror before adjusting her bust and straightening up. Pleased that she had pulled a retaliation from him.
“Mr Wang, that was so ungentlemanly of you.” She jested, finally walking out, satisfied she couldn’t fix much more.
“What? Don’t just come to a stop like that, you moron.” She fussed and fluffed her hair up again.
“Charming.” Ling snorted, not really insulted, knowing that she had work to do, too. Being AWOL for two hours was not ideal. She probably had a mountain of files on her desk, and a million missed calls and emails. She assumed he had fielded off way more than she did and was a little smug about distracting him. “What’s the big announcement I am to watch for?” She added in afterthought.
“Never claimed to be that either, and you’ll see.” Tian turned, moved back to his desk, whipped out his cell, head back to business and his to-do list, and completely recovered from what they had been doing all morning. His stamina was hard to deplete.
Although seemingly normal, Ling was still exhausted, her legs shaky like she had run a marathon and a little breathy. Her body was still tingling all over, and she moved demurely to the door before turning to him with one hand on the knob, poised to unlock it and leave.
“Someone’s keen.” She winked, blew him a kiss, and then turned to unlatch the door and waltzed out in confidence despite her lack of makeup, bust out, chin high, and a dazzling smile at the glaring receptionist as she bypassed her on the way back to her department.
“You have no idea.” He murmured to himself.
Tian sat on his desk’s edge and sank into his posture. Shaking his head, cradled his cell and yet couldn’t stop the smile that encompassed his face when he thought about tomorrow night.
Kai was perched on Tian’s desk, leaning over and looking at the paperwork sprawled there in an attempt to distract himself from waiting for Meilei to give him some reaction to his statement. It had been twenty minutes of silence, and he didn’t want to text her asking if she had seen it and make himself look like a sad idiot. He was impulsively checking his cell and caught Tian giving him the side eye.
He had no room to judge over any man’s responses to a woman he cared for. Given this morning, he bailed for two hours, going incognito while banging his love interest in this very office. Kai had teased him mercilessly for the first half hour of getting back here until Tian threatened to kick him out, and he stopped.
Qian was mulling around in the couch area, pacing for lack of anything better to do, scrolling his cell, and reading his last messages from Suying. She was working right now, but he missed her already. Being a non-admin staff member meant Qian was only needed when they had physical errands, required a driver, a delivery guy, or special requirements, and really ought to get a more permanent job role if this was to be his life. He knew he didn’t match up to the skill, intelligence, or nobility of his girlfriend’s job, and it had started bothering him.
There was a weirdly tight atmosphere, even though all seemed quiet and peaceful, and Tian was hard-focused on his laptop screen, trying to figure out the budget to fill a gap in Inhlaes’ marketing.
“I have gone through everything with a fine tooth comb and can’t wiggle any more money their way. I wanted them to have a two-fifty budget, but I am short forty-five. The problem is that OTS is not bringing in enough to cover operations, even though we are in a better place than two months ago.”
Kai frowned at the Excel sheet on the desk, seeing the overall layout of where money was being shuffled, and skimmed them again. With his quick and experienced eye, he couldn’t even make it happen.
“Tian, I couldn’t make money appear where there isn’t any either. You are being too hard on yourself. Finances are stretched thin, and even though Inhale deserves all the focus, it’s not plausible. We have too many good products shuffling to market that you need the payback from. Unless you’re interested in an outside investor, it will have to stay at what you have managed to pull together.” Kai raised a brow at his friend, hinting heavily that he would fill the deficit for Meilei’s app, and Tian shook his head.
Kai would have donated the money in a second if he had thought Tian would have taken it. He would do anything to repay Meilei, and money was nothing. He had enough of it that fifty-k was pocket change.
“Yeah, better not prod the bear. She’s already sucking in anything her money touched to remove all comfort from my life. She even took the apartment bought with my trust fund when I returned to the States to pick up again. That money was from my grandfather.” Kai’s mom was a law unto herself. She did not care if something was not lawful as long as it served her purpose.
“Just hope financial abuse is the only path she takes and life stays this quiet. Just be glad you are in a rented place now that you pay for yourself and have no connection to Yanhue. You would be sleeping on my couch about now.”
Kai grimaced, knowing that he had saved himself the headache of finding a new one by choosing his own to begin with, and now he was staying, he should start looking for a permanent one to buy.
Tian and Anna were in apartments that had been supplied with the privilege of running OTS, yet Kai and Qian were always the types to figure that out themselves. Maybe it was the fear of the past and knowing his mother’s control over their money if they displeased her. Qian’s father was not much better. Qian, too, had the sense to lay down some investments and become self-sufficient should he stop working in the family business. Qian had silently invested in many of Kai’s independent projects so the cousins would be stable for a lifetime. Technically, Qian did not need to work, but he wanted to, even if he had no head for business.
The peace was broken by the erratic, noisy entrance of the door being booted open, something crashing into it that was heavy enough to make a thud. It seemed like an uncoordinated person used their shoulder to force the door in. And then, furious yet teary, Anna swept in like a hurricane. Her atmosphere and aura resembled a tornado, and she was clutching her cell like a woman possessed. She spun and slammed the door behind her, startling them, and Kai straightened and frowned her way.
“What’s up your ass?” he jested, thinking she was having another Anna drama relating to some lowly employee who didn’t jump when she told them to. Sometimes she could be a spoiled bitch. They all knew she could be a major drama queen.
“Someone must have given her cold coffee.” Tian jested quietly for Kai’s ears only as they teased the obvious mess of her.