I stood on the steps of the Oceanographic Institute while the valets brought cars around and the last guests filtered out, and I could still feel her.
Her hand fisted in my shirt. The sound she’d made when I kissed her. The way her body had curved into mine like it had been designed to fit there.
My phone buzzed. Mike.
Mike: She get home OK?
I had her tracked. Not creepy—Mike had arranged a security detail weeks ago, after the parking garage footage. Standard protection for a key asset. That’s what I told myself.
Asher: Safe. Heading back to the apartment, it looks like.
Mike: Good. You heading back?
I stared at the text. Back to what? The empty hotel suite? The laptop full of acquisition reports? The silence that I’d been fine with—content with, even—until a woman in an emerald dress had kissed me like I was the answer to a question she’d been afraid to ask?
Soon.
I pocketed my phone and stood there a while longer. The Pacific was out there somewhere beyond the lights, doing what it always did.
I knew, standing on those steps, that everything had changed. Not the kind of change I could manage with a phone call to Cheryl or a directive to legal. The kind that rearranges you from the inside, quietly, without consent.
Charlie Winters had kissed me back. Had trembled in my arms. Had run because she’d felt it—whatever this was—and it had terrified her.
I understood. It terrified me too.
The difference was, I had no intention of running.
I loosened my tie and walked to the car alone.
10
CHARLIE
Iwoke up with his mouth still on mine.
Not literally. But my body hadn’t gotten the memo. My lips felt swollen, my skin still hummed where his hands had been, and when I opened my eyes to the pale San Diego light filtering through my apartment blinds, I was so disoriented it took me a full three seconds to remember that I was alone.
The emerald dress was draped over the chair by the window where I’d left it last night. The diamond earrings sat on the nightstand in their velvet box. Borrowed things, returned to their temporary resting place. Evidence of a night I needed to forget.
Except I couldn’t forget his hands in my hair. The groan he’d made against my lips.
What kind of man stops?
The kind who’d lied to you at a bar, I reminded myself. The kind who’d bought your company. The kind who controls everything around him and calls it protection.
But that wasn’t fair, and I knew it. Even while I’d been kissing him back with everything I had, some part of me had been cataloging the evidence against my own argument. Hehadn’t pushed. He’d stopped. He’d handed me into a car with a look on his face like I’d taken something from him he couldn’t get back.
My phone was full of texts from Mia. I’d answered the basics last night—survived, emerald dress, intense, can’t tonight—and then turned it off before she could dig deeper. Now there were six more messages waiting, escalating in both curiosity and concern.
I ignored them all and got in the shower. I had a plan. The plan was: go to work, be professional, tell Asher Pierce that last night was a mistake, and then spend the next however many months pretending I didn’t know what his mouth tasted like.
It was a good plan. It was a terrible plan. It was the only plan I had.
He was in his office by the time I got to the facility. Of course he was. The man probably hadn’t slept either, though he looked like he had—sharp white shirt, sleeves rolled, jaw freshly shaved. The only tell was his eyes. They tracked me the moment I appeared in the hallway, and for one unguarded second I saw everything he was feeling laid bare.
Then the mask came down. Professional. Controlled. Waiting.
I knocked on the open door. “Do you have a minute?”
