When the food is ready, we eat at the kitchen island, our knees bumping under the counter. She tells me about her parents cooking growing up, about Sunday roasts and Yorkshire puddings. I tell her about the terrible MREs I survived on during deployment, about dreaming of real food in the Afghan mountains.
We’re halfway through our eggs when her phone buzzes.
She glances at it, and a conflicted look comes across her face. “I really do have to go this time,” she says, giving me an apologetic smile. “My editor wants to see my draft notes. Make sure the profile is on track.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
“That gives us the morning.” I set down my fork and go to her, pulling her against my chest. “Plenty of time.”
“Nate…”
I dismiss her protest by kissing her, slow and deep. When I pull back, her eyes are glazed.
“Shower first,” I murmur against her lips. “Then we’ll see where the morning takes us.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“The best things usually are.”
She laughs and lets me lead her toward the bathroom, and I think—not for the first time—that I would burn down the entire world if it meant keeping her here.
Obsession, Julia’s voice echoes.
Maybe.
But God, what a thing to be obsessed with.
CHAPTER 21
JULIA
Julia Van Veenstands before the wall of screens in her private monitoring station, arms crossed, watching the numbers scroll with detached focus. It shows her his heart rate, cortisol levels, dopamine spikes, the intricate dance of neurochemistry that tells her everything Vanguard won’t because the data doesn’t lie.
He spent the night with her.
Withher.
Mia Baxter.
The biometrics confirmed it hours ago with an elevated heart rate sustained through the early morning hours, oxytocin flooding his system in patterns she hasn’t seen since the early days of his conditioning. Bonding hormones. Attachment chemicals. The biological machinery of a man falling for someone he shouldn’t, for someone he can’t.
Julia enlarges the overnight data, studying the peaks and valleys like a seismograph of desire. There—11:47 p.m. A sustained spike in dopamine and endorphins, followed by the unmistakable plateau of physical release. And then again in the middle of night, and then in the morning, a slower build this time, but no less intense.
Not to mention earlier in the day, when Mia went straight from her tour with Julia right into Vanguard’s damn bed.
She closes the data window angrily.
It’s not the sex that concerns her. Vanguard has had sex before—carefully managed encounters with women who signed NDAs and understood their role was temporary. Julia has always allowed him that much. A certain amount of physical release is healthy, even necessary. Keeps him stable. Keeps him happy.
And with his engineering, he can’t catch or spread any diseases. Plus, his semen is sterile now, even though she does have more than a few tubes of it that she collected and froze prior to his surgeries, as a failsafe. Either way, there’s no risk of him accidentally impregnating someone looking for the ultimate sugar daddy.
No, what concerns her is what cameafterthe sex.
She pulls up his location data from the past twelve hours. She stayed. All night. Didn’t leave until nearly noon, and even then, his vitals showed reluctance—the stress markers of someone who didn’t want her to go.
Julia moves to her desk, pulling up the neural mapping she’s been running since the journalist arrived. The cluster of activity she noticed two weeks ago has doubled in size, spreading like a vine through his limbic system. Attachment pathways lighting up. Memory centers firing every time he thinks of her—which, based on the patterns, is nearly constant.
