But his hand slides from my face down the side of my neck, and the screaming stops.
His fingers trail along my collarbone, feather-light, and then lower, tracing the neckline of my blouse. Not rushing. Not grabbing. Just...exploring. Like he’s mapping me with patience, with care, with the certainty of someone who has already decided that this territory is his.
I should stop this. I know I should stop this. We’re in my office. In the building he owns. I’m his employee and his unwilling fiancée and this is objectively the worst decision I could be making right now, and I don’t care, I don’tcare—
His hand finds the hem of my blouse.
I feel his fingers on my skin.
Bare skin. His hand against my waist, under the fabric, and the contact is so warm and so real and so much that a shudderruns through my entire body, not from cold, not from fear, from something that I have no name for except maybewant,pure and terrifying and so strong it scares me.
His hand moves up. Slowly. His touch flat against my ribcage, his fingers spread, and I can feel my own heartbeat slamming against his palm, and my breath is coming in short, sharp bursts, and I’m gripping his shirt with both fists now, and his mouth is on my neck, and I’m going to lose my mind in the design wing of Lykaios Holdings at 6:23 on a Wednesday evening—
His phone rings.
Not buzzes. Rings. A sharp, clean tone that cuts through the haze like a blade.
He goes still.
His palm is still on my ribcage. His mouth is still against my neck. I can feel his breath, warm and ragged.
Ragged.
His breathing is ragged.
That’s the tell. In three days of stolen kisses and quiet ambushes and the infuriating composure of a man who has spent his whole life mastering self-control, this is the first time I’ve seen a crack. His breathing, faster than it should be. His touch, still pressed against my skin, not moving but not withdrawing either, like he’s fighting something inside himself.
The phone rings again.
He pulls back.
When he straightens, his expression is already resettled into that mask, and if I hadn’t heard his breathing, if I hadn’t felt the tension in his fingers against my ribs in that last second before he let go, I would think he was entirely unaffected.
But I heard it.
And I felt it.
He looks at me. I look at him. My blouse is untucked. My lips are swollen. My hair, which started the day in a neat arrangement, is now something that could generously be described as “lived-in.”
He answers the phone. “Yes.” A pause. “I’ll be there in ten.” He ends the call without taking his eyes off me.
“Ruby,” he says by way of explanation.
Ruby. The woman with the sixth sense for impossible timing.
He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is so tender, so impossibly gentle compared to what his hand was doing thirty seconds ago, that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
“Eat dinner tonight,” he says. “Something other than onigiri.”
And then he’s gone. Walking away through the design wing doors like a man who has not just had his hand under my shirt, like a man whose composure didn’t crack even once.
Except it did.
I heard it.
I sit at my desk in the empty design wing with my untucked blouse and my swollen lips and the ghost of his palm on my ribcage, and I think about the week.
Five days left.
