I start typing an email I don’t need to send to anyone, fingers moving on pure muscle memory while my brain is busy screaming.
Rules, I remind myself,myrules.
Except my body doesn’t care about rules. My body is watching the line of his thigh tense, the way his shirt shifts at his waist.
He has to be doing this on purpose.
I don’t look.
I look again when he switches legs.
My email refreshes, and I see a new one show up in my inbox out of the corner of my eye. I look, and my stomach drops.
For one second, my fingers go cold.
My eyes skim the sender again, like it might change if I blink.
It doesn’t.
I stop breathing.
Antonio’s shoes scuff lightly on the floor as he shifts positions again, and the sound scrapes across my nerves.
“Antonio,” I say quietly.
His head lifts instantly. The workout stops mid-rep like someone flipped a switch.
“What is it?” he asks, already rising.
I point at my screen with a hand that’s not altogether steady. “I just got an email from Bellandi Operations.”
“Don’t open it,” he snaps, even though he’s already told me not to open emails from them.
“I haven’t,” I snap back, then immediately regret it.
He crosses the space quickly and comes up behind my chair.
And then he leans over the back of my chair, one hand braced on the top edge, the other planted on the table near my laptop like he’s caging me in.
He’s close enough that I can smell him.
Not cologne. Not soap.
Light sweat and heat and him.
The clean, sharp scent of a man who just pushed his body hard in my living room.
My pulse trips.
My mouth goes dry.
There are tiny droplets on the skin at his throat, along the edge of his collarbone where the shirt has darkened slightly. His chest rises and falls, and I can see the flex in his arm where it holds his weight on the table.
It takes quite literally every ounce of willpower not to lean in and bite him right on that bicep like I’ve lost my damn mind.
I grip the edge of the table instead.
My body and mind are at complete odds with each other.
