This was the verse she used to build her courage. The truth she held fast to as she prayed for the right moment to tell Olivio what she knew she could no longer keep to herself.
She was so, so in love with him.
And she was hoping, praying, that once she found the courage to admit it, he would admit to being in love with her, too.
Chapter Six
SOMETHING WASN'T RIGHT.
It had been with him since Day Five. That was when he'd first noticed it, not as a thought so much as an absence, a gap between what he understood to be true about himself and the evidence his own body kept producing. He'd tried assigning it a category. Stress. Adjustment period. The natural disruption of having a new variable in the household. None of the categories held.
He knew the exact moment it had started.
Day Five had been a routine day. Chelsea had come to the office for a PR briefing, something about the charity gala the following week, the kind of appearance his team scheduled quarterly, a check in the box, background noise. He'd been in a call with the Vancouver property managers when Johnny had gone down to meet her in the lobby.
Routine. Unremarkable. He'd barely given it a thought.
What happened next was harder to explain.
He'd ended the call and walked out of his office to find them standing near the window at the far end of the floor, his wife with her back to him, some document spread open in her hands, her dark braid over one shoulder, and Johnny beside her, closer than the document required. Johnny, who was explaining something that had apparently just struck Chelsea as genuinely fascinating, because she had turned to look up at him with that open, unguarded expression she had, the one that operated outside the normal bandwidth of human facial expression, that did things to people without Chelsea knowing she was doing any of it.
Olivio watched his assistant's face go soft.
He'd seen that before. Not from Johnny. But he'd watched it happen in the lobby on Day One, when she'd smiled at an assistant who'd been sent down to turn her away. He'd watched it happen at the charity gala on Day Four, when the man beside her at the bar had spent forty-five minutes talking to her about his difficult divorce and had somehow left looking lighter, as though she'd absorbed some of the weight of it simply by listening.
He'd noted each instance with the detachment of a man cataloguing a known phenomenon.Interesting effect. Not his concern.
But this was Johnny.
And this was his floor. His office. His—-
He had crossed the room before the thought finished. He wasn't aware of the decision to move. He was simply moving, and then he was at her shoulder, and his hand had settled at the back of her neck with a possessiveness so absolute that it surprised him, and Chelsea startled and turned, and the brightness in her expression when she recognized him, replacing nothing, adding to nothing, simply arriving like a light switched on, made his hand tighten against her neck a fraction before he caught himself.
Tesoro.His voice had come out lower than he'd intended.Come. I'll do the briefing myself.
Johnny had made himself scarce with the trained efficiency of someone who had correctly read the room and had no desire to remain in it. Chelsea had followed Olivio into his office without question. He'd closed the door.
