His fingers brushed mine through the fabric. There was a pulse in my body. Dom’s gaze lightly flicked to my lips, and I watched in disbelief as his brow hitched, surveying me with that lazy relaxedness of his.
But it all disappeared in an instant. He gave me a clipped nod before he turned away. His elbow dropped to the table, creating a clear barrier between us as he picked up a new conversation with his neighbour.
The noise of the party flooded back in around me. Rowdy conversations underlined by casual chitchat. But the light was too bright, the sound too intense, and the distance between Dom and me was suddenly so vast that it left me reeling.
I wanted to grab him, to make him look back at me so I could be sure that what had just happened was real.
“What do you think, Harry? Will you get involved in the elections this year?” Theodore Collins asked me from across the table.
My body was so numb that it took a deep breath to bring myself fully back into the room. I steeled myself, returning to my Fischer persona, the one that said nothing of how deeply I wanted to be touched.
“Not a chance,” I laughed, giving him my full attention, even though my whole body was acutely aware of Dom right beside me. “I thought politics was your area of expertise?”
I squeezed my hand under the table as I continued to tap my fingertips against my thumb to clear the tension built up by that look of Dom’s.
“Well, I have to confess it has crossed my mind. How do you think I would fare?” Mr Collins rubbed his chin.
“Pah! Nonsense, as if anyone would vote for you!” Lady Devereaux cut in with another one of her sly grins, and Ieased myself into more social wrangling. But my body pulsed as if Dom had struck me with electricity. I didn’t know how I was supposed to simply sit there and act like nothing had happened. Because I needed so badly to ask him what was going on.
Though he never gave me the chance.
The brunch ended, and Dom fled before I could say a word to him. By the time everyone had filed out, he was gone, and uncertainty crowded me again.
After everything I’d said and done with Molly last night, the heat that beat in my stomach for Dom shouldn’t even be there. It was just a moment. I might have even imagined it. It was probably my unmet need for Molly shaking me up and it had nothing to do with him.
I had to keep reminding myself I was marrying Molly. I was solidly with her, and I needed it to stay that way so we could start again when she came home.
But that didn't quiet the pulsing desire in my body, or stop me spending the rest of the day looking around the room for Dom.
Harry
At midday at my office desk in the Fischer main building, I was still attempting to type up a proposal for a housing project in Detroit that I had been working on for weeks. But all that was coming out of me was pure sludge.
And Anita knew.
She stood in front of me, arms folded, looking down at me with one eyebrow raised. She’d placed a round cardboard tub in front of me as soon as she reached my desk, one that I was very deliberately avoiding. I preferred dealing with her eagle-eyed look of disapproval than whatever was in that tub.
“You look like shit,” Anita said bluntly like she always did.
My eyes shot up from my screen to meet hers, along with my brows.
“I’m guessing you haven’t put anything healthy in your body since yesterday?” she asked.
I assumed she didn’t mean the two fingers I pushed inside myself last night while my ass was in the air as I begged to be fucked.
I hired Anita as my assistant when I gained traction within The Foundation. She was the only one out of all the applicantswho wasn’t desperate to please me. At fifty, she’d seen enough to not let me get away with slacking off, and I appreciated her deeply for it.
She always wore dark, sharp suits, her grey hair cut short. Never any make up, but a French manicure, and a harsh glare that made her angular face even bolder, especially when she was on a mission.
“Possibly. I may have sneaked in an apple last night.” But only because I knew how she morphed into a dragon hellbent on enhancing my fibre intake. If I didn’t have her and Dom, I would be living off cheap takeaways and coffee like I normally did with Molly. I only knew how to cook because Dom refused to let me buy my meals when we first met. One of the ways he wiggled into my life was inviting himself over to teach me and eat together. It was a habit we kept up, though not as frequently since I left the hospital.
Anita unfolded her arms, pointedly dropping a fork next to the tub. It was exactly as I feared: salad.
I grimaced as she gave me a look. Of course she would catch me. If she checked my bottom drawer, we both knew she would find the empty box from the bougie bakery I ordered cakes and pastries from every morning. She let me get away with that, but I couldn’t escape her office lunchtime order unless it was a business lunch.
I eyed the tub, full of all the healthy things I didn’t want to eat when I was pent up. I may be overweight, but it mostly came from stress. Dad liked to argue it was just our genes, whereasMum said fatness was a mental state. I preferred to believe it was simply that I was perpetually stressed, and I had been all my life. If I stopped working, or rather, if I stopped trying to help people, I might eventually lose some weight. But one was considerably more important than the other.
“I have the Hastings proposal all ready for you,” she said as she leant forwards to tap the top of the A4 folder she had left when she brought me coffee an hour ago.
