This. This is the moment I’ve been saving that dress for. Not the gala, not the champagne. Being held by someone who knelt on stone for me. Being wanted—not despite the body I brought, but because of it.
His thumb traces a lazy circle against my hip, and I close my eyes.
Then his phone rings.
The sound is shrill and wrong—a jarring intrusion that shatters the glasshouse quiet like a rock through a window. Every muscle in his body goes rigid beneath me.
“Dammit.” Low and sharp. Nothing like the voice that was saying my name thirty seconds ago.
I shift off his lap, legs unsteady, pulling my dress down as he reaches for his jacket. He fumbles the phone from the inner pocket and stares at the screen. His jaw tightens.
He stands, already adjusting his clothes. “I have to go. It’s work.”
No, “I’ll call you.” Just the apology and the departure, already in motion.
“What?” I blink rapidly, my brain not able to keep up with what’s happening. I can see him dressing and obviously about to leave, but my brain doesn’t want to comprehend that he’s leaving me, while my dress is bunched around my waist and I’m sitting here exposed in the Conservatory.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. He cups my face and presses a quick kiss on my lips, and then he’s walking out the Conservatory door.
I stand in the silence he left behind, the humid air clinging to my skin and making it difficult to slide my dress back down. It’s so wrinkled now, there’s no way I can go back into the gala, especially on my own.
The Conservatory feels enormous now. I press my hand to my swollen mouth and try to understand what just happened.
He didn’t promise to come back. He really didn’t seem like the kind of man to run out immediately after sleeping with a woman, but…
Sadness and the hot humiliation of feeling cheap crush over me as I realize I was wrong. So, so wrong.
Is it any wonder that I’m single if these are the kind of men in the dating pool?
CHAPTER 7
ARCHIE
Give me my phone.”
“No.”
“Whittaker,” I say, my voice heavy with frustration.
“Archie.” He doesn’t look up from the security monitor. “You’ve asked me four times today. The answer is still no. You know the protocol. No personal devices while on assignment.”
I know the protocol, and I know I can’t do anything personal on the ops phone I was assigned, because they’re all closely monitored. I can’t even look up her Instagram or email her, unless I want to get fired. It’s a good protocol, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to put my fist through the drywall and dig my phone out of the equipment case with my bare hands.
Instead, I pace. The safe house living room is twelve steps from the window to the hallway. I know because I’ve been counting them for a week.
“Sit down. You’re making me twitchy.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You look like you’re going to jump out of your skin.” He swivels the desk chair to face me, arms crossed. “You’re pacing so much, you’re wearing a groove in the carpet. What the hell has gotten into you?”
He knew the moment he looked at me when I showed up after getting called in. I came through the door in a wrinkled tuxedo with my bow tie stuffed in my pocket and my shirt untucked, and Whittaker took one look at me and said,Who were you fucking?
“Is this about the woman?” he asks. “The one whose pussy we could smell on you when you walked into HQ?”
My teeth clench. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about you. You showed up to an extraction detail in a tuxedo, reeking of sex, with lipstick on your collar. You haven’t been right since.”
