I let go before I did something I couldn’t take back.
She sat down across from my desk. Crossed her ankles. Folded her hands on her lap. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I had been alive for thirty-two years and seen plenty. But none of them had ever made my chest feel like it was caving in just by sitting down in a chair.
She looked straight at me.
A blush crept up her neck and spread across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, warm and pink, and she pressed her lips together like she was trying to control it but she didn’t look away. Her pulse was visible at the base of her throat, ticking faster than it had when she walked in, and I could hear her heartbeat with my hearing, the way it stuttered and picked up when our eyes locked. She shifted in her seat, just barely, leaning a fraction closer before catching herself.
She was human. She didn’t feel the bond, not the way I did. But she felt something. I could see it in the flush on her skin and the way her eyes kept dropping to my mouth before snapping back up, the way her fingers tightened in her lap every time I held her gaze too long. She was attracted to me and she was trying very hard to be professional about it and I wanted to cup her face with both hands and watch exactly how red she could get.
Whitfield cleared his throat. “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Grey. Could you tell us about your experience?”
She turned to Whitfield and started talking. She was articulate and specific, no filler words, no hedging. She talked about her degree in business administration, an internship where she’d restructured the entire filing system within two weeks, organizational processes she’d built from scratch that were still in use at her previous workplace. Her voice was warm but precise. She knew exactly what she was worth and she wasn’t shy about it.
“And how do you handle pressure?” Whitfield asked.
“I worked two part-time jobs through college while maintaining a 3.8 GPA,” she said, with a half-smile that showed the dimple again. “Pressure and I are well acquainted.”
She was smart and she was funny and she was so damn beautiful sitting there in her pink blouse with that dimple and that confidence, and my canines were threatening to extend. I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood and forced them back.
She had no idea what I was, what any of this was. She had no idea that the man sitting across from her had just destroyed his own furniture because she walked in and smiled at him.
Whitfield asked about long-term goals. Andrea didn’t hesitate.
“I want to be excellent at whatever I do. I know that sounds simple, but I’ve found that if you focus on being the best at the job in front of you, the rest follows.” She paused, and there it was again, the dimple pressing into her cheek as her mouth curved. “Also, I should mention that I’m very good at this. I don’t mean that arrogantly. I just believe in being upfront.”
I almost smiled. I never smiled in interviews. I barely smiled at all. But this woman just told me she was the best candidate in the room with a dimple and zero hesitation and I wanted to hear her talk for the rest of the afternoon.
My wolf was panting. His whole body pressed forward inside me, straining toward her like she was the only real thing in the room. I gripped what was left of the armrest and held myself still.
Whitfield turned to me, clearly expecting me to ask my own questions. I was supposed to be running this interview. I hadinsisted on conducting it myself. I had a list of twelve questions that I’d written out this morning in the car because I didn’t trust Whitfield to be thorough enough.
I looked at her. She looked at me. The blush came back, softer this time, pinking the tops of her cheeks, and she held my gaze without flinching. Her fingers flexed once in her lap, then stilled, and her tongue darted across her lower lip so fast I almost missed it.
I didn’t miss it.
“When can you start?” I said.
Whitfield blinked. Andrea blinked.
She recovered faster. “Monday. I can start Monday.”
“Good.”
Whitfield turned to me with his mouth open, clearly about to say something about the remaining questions or the interview protocol or any number of things that I did not care about. I didn’t look at him.
Andrea stood up. She thanked us both, reached across the desk to shake our hands again. Up close she barely reached my chin. She smelled like something clean and faintly sweet, and my wolf was going so haywire that I had to lock my jaw completely to keep my expression neutral.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” she said, looking up at me with those big round eyes, and this close I could see they were a light green with flecks of gold near the center, and my wolf committedevery detail to memory like he was filing it away to keep forever. “I promise you won’t regret it.”
She walked out. The door closed behind her.
I stared at it.
Whitfield shuffled his papers. “She was quite good. Shall I cancel the remaining candidates for the afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
