Just looked at me like he’d already undressed every layer of me and wasn’t particularly impressed. Or maybe he was, and that was worse.
I jerked my hand back and took a step away, tucking the clipboard against my chest like a shield.
I had work to do.
Not fantasies. Not distractions. Not jawlines like his or forearms that looked like they could pin a woman down and make her forget her own name.
This job mattered.
The Dane brothers hadn’t plucked me out of a stack of Atlanta planners just because I was good with monograms and could tell peonies from garden roses. They chose me because I was the best. Because I had a reputation for pulling off the impossible without cracking a single nail. And this? Six weddings. One month. VIPs, cameras, military-grade egos. It wasn’t just a production—it was a career launcher. A legacy maker. A headline waiting to happen.
I knew for a fact there were planners all over Charleston, probably half the ones on King Street alone, who were furious they hadn’t gotten the call. Not to mention the names out of New York or Chicago—the coastal elite with their luxury price tags and year-long waitlists. But the Danes had trusted me.Me.
I wasn’t going to let them down because I’d gotten soft over a pair of haunted eyes and a voice that dripped like molasses laced with sin.
Still, my gaze dropped—traitorous, slow—to the way his shirt stretched across his chest. The way his belt rode low on his hips. The quiet flex of his thighs when he shifted his weight, casual and unaware of just how obscene his stillness was.
He looked like he’d be brutal in bed. Focused. Unapologetic. The kind of man who didn’t ask permission before he pinned you and made you beg. I imagined what that mouth would feel like against my skin. What that body would do to mine.
Heat curled low in my stomach.
No. Hell no.
This was business. Strictly business. And I didn’t sleep with clients. Especially not clients who made my pulse stutter like a broken metronome.
I cleared my throat and forced my eyes back to his. Level. Unflinching.
“I have work to do.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
But he stood there, unmoving. Watching.
I turned before he could say anything else and forced myself to walk. One step. Then another.
The skin on my wrist tingled.
He hadn’t been rough. Hadn’t even held me tight.
But I felt it anyway. Like a fingerprint on glass. Like a mark that wasn’t going to fade anytime soon.
And as I walked back toward the house, I realized something far worse than the fact that I’d let him touch me.
I wanted him to do it again.
4
SILAS
Ihadn’t planned on running into Portia Lane on that damn dock. I’d gone out there to clear my head, to shake off the war room’s stench of coffee and compromise. But there she was, clipboard in hand, her long legs, her caramel skin glowing like she’d been poured from the sun itself.
That cut on her palm, small but sharp, had drawn my eye, and her stare—defiant, like she could burn me down with a glance—had hit me like a slug to the chest.
For a split second, I felt it again. That pull. Like a wire tightening around my ribs, urging me to step closer, to see how far I could push her before she broke.
Fuck that.
I didn’t need distractions. Didn’t want them. If I wanted to fuck, Charleston was crawling with women who’d spread their legs for a nod and a whiskey shot. One-nighters were easy—clean, no strings, no breakfast conversations.
