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Because there's no pretending anymore.

This isn't sex for me.

It isn't an arrangement. It isn't curiosity or attraction or the thrill of getting too close to a man I should've kept at a professional distance.

I'm making love to Mitchell. And he doesn't even know it.

Maybe that's the most frightening part of all. Or maybe it's the most beautiful.

I don't know.

I only know that when he looks at me again, I don't hide. I let him see everything I'm brave enough to show him.

And I hold on.

To him.

To this.

To the wild, fragile hope growing inside me that maybe I'm not the only one whose heart has gotten tangled up in what we started.

I let Mitchell have mine.

I just hope like hell I won't regret it.

Chapter 24

Mitchell

The next few days are complicated.

That's a fucking understatement.

The next few days are a slow-motion collision between the happiest I've been in longer than I can remember and the knowledge that I'm sitting on a secret with the potential to blow the whole thing straight to hell.

Because something changed between Layla and me that night.

At the restaurant. At home afterward.

I felt it.

She didn't say anything. Neither did I.

But I've spent my entire adult life reading people. Negotiations. Investors. Competitors. Employees. Politicians.

Layla is harder to read than most because she's spent her career learning how to keep her own reactions under control while studying everyone else's.

But I know her now.

At least I'm beginning to.

And that night she let me in. Let me see something. Something vulnerable. Something that made the possessive bastard inside me want to grab hold of her and never fucking let go.

The next morning, I woke up with her curled against me. And for the first time since this started, thirty days didn't feel like an agreement.

It felt like a deadline.

One I'm rapidly beginning to hate.