"Hayes." She says it quietly. Testing it. My name in her voice is low and careful, and my whole body responds to it. Blood and heat and a want so sharp it's almost pain.
"There you go," I murmur.
We're close. The rock is narrow, and the morning sun is warm on my back, and her face is eight inches from mine. I can count the pale freckles on her nose. I can see the ring of darker blue around her irises. I can see her pulse in her throat, fast, faster than a woman this controlled should allow.
Her gaze drops to my mouth again. Stays this time.
My hand moves to her jaw. Slow. Deliberate. Giving her every opportunity to pull back, to slam that wall back into place, to become Ms. Morrison again. My fingers graze the line of her jaw, and her skin is impossibly soft. She doesn't pull back. Her lips part. A small sound escapes her throat, involuntary, surprised, and the sound travels through my nervous system like a lit fuse.
I tilt her chin up. She lets me. Her eyes are wide, her breathing shallow, and this close I can see that the ice queen is melting and she's terrified of it.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
The buzz cuts through the moment like a knife through glass. Lex blinks. The walls slam back into place so fast I can almost hear them. She pulls back, straightens, turns her face toward the valley, and takes a sip of coffee like nothing happened.
Like my hand wasn't just on her face. Like she wasn't about to let me kiss her on a mountaintop at seven in the morning.
I check the phone. Sully. Text message:
Encrypted call from Morrison Pharma legal team. Urgent. Routing to cabin 4.
I pocket the phone. "Your legal team's calling. Urgent."
She stands immediately. CEO mode. Shoulders back, jaw set, every trace of the woman on the rock gone so completely that I'd doubt she existed if I couldn't still feel the warmth of her skin on my fingertips.
"We should head back."
"We should."
She starts down the trail without waiting for me. Her pace is faster than the climb up, and I fall in behind her, watching her navigate the rocky sections with the same controlled precision she uses for everything. But her hands aren't steady on the coffee mug. And twice, on the switchbacks, she touches her jaw. Right where my fingers were.
She knows. I know she knows. And she knows I know she knows, which is probably what's scaring her most.
We make it back to the compound in twenty minutes. She walks straight to her cabin without a word, presses her thumb to the lock, and steps inside. The door closes behind her.
I stand on the gravel path between our cabins and watch her kitchen light click on. Through the window, I can see her silhouette moving toward her laptop, already pulling up whatever urgent matter her legal team needs to discuss. Already rebuilding every wall I spent an hour carefully dismantling.
My jaw still tingles where her breath touched my skin. My hand still remembers the shape of her face.
Four days. It took me four days to know I'm in serious trouble. Not the kind of trouble Deck warned me about, the professional kind where I lose my focus and compromise the detail. This is the other kind. The personal kind. The kind where a forty-year-old woman who thinks she's too old for me, too controlled to feel things, too smart to risk her heart, looked at my mouth on a mountain and forgot every reason she's supposed to keep her distance.
I want her. Not just physically, although physically is becoming a constant, low-grade emergency that cold showers and early morning runs are doing nothing to resolve. I want the woman behind the walls. The one who watches families with hungry eyes and makes dry jokes she immediately regrets and said my name like it was something fragile she was afraid to hold.
I'm falling for a client. A client seven years older than me who thinks I'm too young. A client I'm supposed to protect, not pursue. A client who has every reason in the world to keep me at arm's length and one terrifying reason not to.
She felt it too.
I head to my cabin, strip off my hiking gear, and step into the shower. The water is cold because that's all the plumbing offers this early, and it does absolutely nothing.
I press my forehead against the tile and let the water run over my shoulders. Close my eyes. Try to think about the threat assessment. The compound perimeter. Whitfield's financial anomalies.
Her mouth. The way it parted when my fingers touched her jaw. That small sound she made, involuntary, like I'd reached inside her and found something she didn't know was there.
My cock is hard. Has been since the trail, if I'm honest. Since she said my name in that low, careful voice like she was tasting it. Since her pupils blew wide and her pulse hammered in her throat and she looked at my mouth and stayed looking.
I grip myself. The contact pulls a groan out of me that bounces off the tile walls, and I don't have the bandwidth to be embarrassed about it because all I can see behind my closed eyes is Lex. On that rock. Morning light on her skin. No makeup, no armor, just the pale freckles on her nose and those silver-blue eyes and the way her body turned toward me like gravity had made the decision for her.
I stroke slow. Let the fantasy build the way I'd build it if I had her.
