Billy tried. I’ll give him that. In two years, Billy learned that I liked chocolate chip cookies and preferred texting to calling and got cold easily. Three facts. Two years. And even those three facts came with conditions: he knew I liked cookies because I mentioned it on our third date, and he brought them sometimes, when he remembered, when it was convenient, when he wasn’t too busy being a wolf shifter with a pack that didn’t know I existed.
Alexei has known me for three days, officially, consciously, as a person and not a name in a file, and he knows I don’t eat breakfast. He knows I arrive at 8:47. He knows I stay late. He knows I talk to the cleaning crew. He noticed the coffee stain on my travel mug and the next morning there was a new one on my desk, the same brand, the same size, but in the deep blue color I’d once mentioned to Trish in passing was my favorite.
He knew about the air vent above my desk.
The air vent.
Who notices an air vent? Who notices that a specific person sits under a specific vent that creates a specific draft, and then sends a maintenance crew to fix it without saying a word?
A man who is paying a kind of attention I’ve never experienced in my life. Attention that doesn’t announce itself. Attention that just...shows up, in the form of a fixed vent and a blue coffee mug and meals without fish, and expects nothing in return.
How does he know these things?
How does a prince notice the coffee mug preferences and air vent complaints of a junior product designer?
Unless.
Unless he was paying attention long before the elevator in Miami.
That thought is a door I’m not ready to open.
I leave the bathroom, go back to my desk, and throw myself into work with the focused desperation that only a woman actively avoiding her own feelings can achieve. The V-Series Vanish prototypes need a second round of testing. The dispersion algorithm has a calibration issue in high-humidity environments. There are seventeen emails from delegates I met at the Convergence Expo, all requesting follow-up information, and answering them gives me three blissful hours of thinking about scent neutralization instead of the way Alexei’s lips feel against mine.
Three hours.
And then, at 6:15, when the design wing is empty and the evening light is turning the mountains outside the windows into purple silhouettes, I feel it.
The shift.
The air changes. Thickens. Warms. That gravitational pull that I’m starting to recognize the way you recognize the opening notes of a song you’ve heard too many times, instantly, with your whole body.
I don’t look up.
I keep my eyes on my screen and I keep typing and I pretend that my pulse isn’t accelerating and that the hair on my arms isn’t rising and that every cell in my body isn’t already leaning toward the door before he’s even through it.
“You’re working late.”
His voice, low and close. He’s in the design wing. At my section. Standing at the edge of my desk like he belongs there, which he doesn’t, except he does, because he owns everything in this building including, apparently, my ability to think clearly.
“The humidity calibration—”
“It can wait.”
I look up.
That’s a mistake.
Because the evening light is doing something cruel and beautiful to him. It catches the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the blue-black sheen of his hair, and turns all of it into something that belongs in a cathedral, carved in marble, worshipped from a distance. He’s taken off his jacket again. His sleeves are rolled. And he’s looking at me with that expression I’m learning to recognize, not quite a smile but something that lives in the same neighborhood.
“You skipped lunch today,” he says.
“I was busy—”
“The salmon.”
I blink. “What?”
“The lunch delivery included salmon. You ate the rice and the vegetables but left the salmon. You always leave the fish.”
