Her fingers curled, knuckles whitening around the napkin. She wasn’t blushing now—she was unraveling, inch by inch. And I was the one pulling the thread.
A dangerous goddamn thing, her in public outside of the mystique of Sanctum.
I leaned closer, my voice nothing but a low current meant only for her.
“And if no one told you that before now…then they were fucking blind.”
Emotion flickered across her face—hope, disbelief, want. A lethal mix. One that hit harder than I wanted to admit.
The kitchen door swung open behind her, pans clattering, voices rising. The moment snapped us out of the moment, but didn’t vanish. It simply burrowed deeper.
I sat back enough to breathe. Barely.
“Eat,” I said softly, though the edge in my voice betrayed me.
She cocked her head, almost as if she was deciding if she’d challenge me, but she picked up her fork instead and took a bite of her food.
Tonight had been a really, really bad idea.
Chapter 19
Mira
Dinner was so many things, but it all funneled down to one word—unexpected.
Sebastian Reid had layers. None of them matched the hard-ass boss I’d endured for weeks, and definitely not the airbrushed version magazines loved to shove down the world’s throat.
And yet here we were, sitting in this tiny bistro tucked between a record shop and an old bookstore—the kind of place you found only if you were lost or lucky. And somehow, being here with him felt like both.
The food was better than anything I’d ever eaten. But it wasn’t the salmon or the wine that had undone me.
It was Sebastian.
When we finished and the conversation finally lulled, Mr. Reid stood, slipped a couple hundred-dollar bills onto the table, then extended his hand toward me.
For a second, I just stared.
He was being a gentleman—polished, practiced. Maybe something inherited rather than learned.
But when my hand slipped into his and he pulled me to my feet, the world shifted. We didn’t step apart. We didn’t breathe. We just stood there, tension crackling like a live wire between us.
He was my boss. Tomorrow he’d be my boss again. Hell, in twenty minutes he’d be my boss again.
But right now?
Right now he was a man who looked at me like he wanted nothing more than to back me against the nearest wall.
And I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted it so fiercely it scared me. Wanted to know how his control would feel when it finally broke. Not because he was my boss—but because he wasn’t acting like one at all.
A pot clattered in the kitchen, shattering the fragile moment between us. He stepped back.
“Let’s get you back to your car.”
And just like that, the CEO slid back into place. He gestured for me to step in front of him and followed me, his hand resting on the small of my back again. We barely made it halfway before the server ran up to us.
“Bash, wait, don’t go.”
Bash?
