She was quiet for a moment. Then: “I’m thinking about how it feels to be down there. Weightless. Suspended in the dark, with only the sound of your own breath.”
“Go on.”
She turned within the circle of my arms. The blue light played across her features, and her eyes—those green eyes that had been driving me slowly insane for three weeks—were luminous.
“It’s like being in another world,” she said softly. “A place where gravity doesn’t exist, and you’re free to just ... be.”
Her fingers found my chest. I don’t think she realized she was doing it. Her palm flat against my shirt, over my heart, which was hammering so hard she had to feel it.
“And I’d love to let go of control,” she whispered. “And just feel.”
Everything I’d been holding back—three weeks of distance, of Ms. Winters, of watching her through glass walls and pretending it was professional interest—broke.
I kissed her.
Not carefully. Not the way a man kisses a woman he’s trying to impress. I kissed her like I’d been drowning and she was air. My hand cupped the back of her neck, fingers threading into her hair, and she made a sound against my mouth—a small, devastated sound—that I would hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
She kissed me back. Her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me closer, and her mouth opened under mine with a hunger that matched my own. She tasted like champagne and something sweeter, something that was just her, and I wanted to memorize every part of it.
My other hand found her waist, her hip, drawing her flush against me. The silk dress was nothing between us. She arched into me and I groaned against her lips, one hand tightening in her hair, tilting her head back so I could deepen the kiss.
I wanted more. I wanted everything. I wanted to lift her onto the table behind us and take my time learning every sound she could make.
But somewhere beneath the roar of want, a voice that sounded inconveniently like the man I was trying to be said: not like this. Not in a borrowed room at a gala where anyone could walk in. Not when she deserved better than a stolen moment between business obligations.
I pulled back. It was the hardest thing I’d done in recent memory.
Her eyes were dazed. Her lips were swollen. Her hand was still fisted in my shirt.
“Charlie,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like mine.
She blinked. And I watched reality come back into her eyes like a tide—first confusion, then recognition, then something that looked heartbreakingly like fear.
The shift happened so fast I almost missed it. One moment she was in my arms, warm and open and mine. The next, the walls were going back up—I could practically see them rising behind her eyes, brick by brick, mortared with panic.
“We should get back,” she said, stepping away. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.
I let her go. Every instinct screamed to pull her back, to tell her this wasn’t a mistake, that what had just happened betweenus was the most honest thing either of us had done in years. But the look on her face wasn’t uncertainty. It was fear. And I would never be the man who pushed past that.
We walked back to the gala in silence. The noise of the party was jarring after the blue quiet of the chamber—too bright, too loud, too many people. Charlie smiled and made small talk with a composure that would have fooled anyone who hadn’t just felt her tremble against him.
I watched her glance at the door a couple of times, then back at me with determination.
I caught up with her as she was already moving toward the exit. “Can you get me a cab?”
“Take my driver.”
“A cab is fine.”
The panic was back. Not subtle this time—her breath was shallow, her eyes too bright. She wasn’t running from me. She was running from what she’d felt. The distinction mattered, even if it didn’t help.
I had a car and driver at the entrance in under two minutes. She climbed in without looking at me.
“Charlie.”
She glanced back. For one second—half a second—the walls dropped and I saw her. The real her. Scared, wanting, desperately trying to protect herself from something she didn’t know how to survive.
Then the door closed and the sedan pulled away.
