Prologue

      The last thing Miranda Hayes expected to find as she popped into the ladies’ room after her shift was a man, let alone a man with his cock in some woman’s mouth.

      At first, she simply stood there looking into the mirror with her hands frozen over the taps and stared at the pornographic scene behind her. She’d seen him before in the building. Never here on her floor of Keyes Tower, where she worked fielding calls for an American insurance company, but she’d stood behind him a time or two while waiting in line at the café on the lower level.

      Double espresso, she remembered, as she watched him raise his hips off the toilet seat and go deeper into the woman’s mouth, with a carrot and pumpkin-seed muffin, no butter.

      She’d always imagined that the tall, blond man drove into the city in an SUV that had plastic toys hidden under the seats and a stick-family decal on the rear windshield. He probably worked in finance and dealt with things like securities or trusts or some other matters Miranda knew nothing about. While he only put in eight hours at the office, he probably told his wife he had to stay late so he could get his dick wet with whatever student intern he’d managed to sweet talk that day. Something to recapture his youth, to ignore the lines deepening on his face and the way his midsection was getting soft.

      Whatever his deal was, it was obviously working for him.

      With a low moan, he pressed his free hand on the top of the woman’s head. The soles of his shoes squeaked against the floor and the toilet seat rattled as he moved in tune with the roll of the woman’s shoulders.

      Miranda was running late. After sitting for two hours straight in her cubicle she really needed to pee, but if the lovers hadn’t noticed her yet she wasn’t about to draw attention to herself.

      She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and turned, and her stomach flopped as her gaze connected with his.

      The heat of embarrassment made her knees weak. She couldn’t look away, and the man seemed unperturbed. In fact, a smirk crooked at the corner of his mouth.

      He raised his brows. It was a smug, wordless question: did she like what she saw? As her humiliation burned clean into rage, the man raised his leg and pushed the stall door closed.

      Miranda didn’t try to make a quiet exit. She stamped her feet upon the tiles and slapped her hand against the bathroom door. As it whispered shut behind her she cursed it for not at least having squeaky hinges to make more of a statement.

      She went to the empty ladies’ room on the floor below. As she washed her hands afterwards, she was seething. If she weren’t in such a shitty mood to begin with, that sordid performance probably wouldn’t have irked her so much. She’d seen worse in her first job, working security at the mall – for some reason P3 had been a popular cruising area – and if she had simply been able to slip out of the bathroom unseen it would have just been something to chuckle about later when her sister asked her about her day.

      It was that grin and that