Chapter Four #2
Her cheeks heated. “You don’t have to be smug about it. When I tell you I don’t know what I’m doing, I mean it. I’ll just make a mess of it. And, honestly, no one really thought for a second you meant you wanted me to be your actual secretary.”
He left the stairs, and her heart raced as he drew near with that unwavering stare directed unblinking on her.
“I know how this works,” she said as he drew close enough that she was overwhelmed by evergreen. She cleared her throat. “Services are paid in pleasure, right?”
His jaw dropped a fraction. Not even enough to see his teeth, but it had all the effect of his jaw hitting the floor, given the subtlety of his expressions. He was quiet for a long moment.
Sera expected… something. Fight? Affirmation? Denial? Maybe for him to throw her against a wall and start hiking up her dress?
Her eyes wandered over him, appreciating the fine tailored suit and all that it concealed.
Perhaps, throwing her against the wall was more her fantasy than anything.
His lips were as rigid as his manners. The impulse to swipe her tongue along his mouth and draw out whatever secrets he kept locked away was powerful.
His shoulders sagged and he looked away.
“Are… you okay?” She asked, detecting a shift in the mood, but only instinctively. She could easily be misreading the signs. With North, she couldn’t be sure.
His eyes locked with hers, soft and sad. “Hardly ever.”
“Why can’t you just say what you mean? What am I supposed to do with that? ‘Hardly ever’? So you are literally never okay?”
He didn’t answer, just looked at her with the same maybe sad, maybe dead inside, maybe anything expression.
“You’re giving me nothing, here. But I know you can do it.
I know there’s feelings in there somewhere.
” She mimed looking at him from different angles, like she might find the buried emotion if she just had a better view.
She held out a hand, paused to assess his reaction, and then set her fingertips against his cheek.
His skin was impossibly warm. How? How was he the right kind of everything? The right smell. The right feel. The right looks. Every single one of her senses was clawing to get more of him.
When he didn’t move, instead letting her hand rest feather light on his cheek, she continued. Biting her lip, Sera pressed her fingers into skin and forced his mouth into a half smile. “There we go. See? You didn’t combust on the spot.”
His eyes searched hers. To reach his face, her body leaned ever so slightly into him.
Her breathing hitched. Her fingers slackened.
Moving from his cheek, she let her touch waft across his lips.
Her eyes followed the motion, and, in a normal situation, this would be the part where she took the kiss.
She wasn’t from a world of asking and waiting.
Of dancing around obvious attraction. Yet…
it felt wrong to take from him. Not now. Not even a kiss.
His hand moved up and caught her wrist, the barest pressure and he guided her hand away.
“Ah. The Game. I forgot for a moment.”
Game?
Oh. Right. That Game.
“Right.” She laughed, the gesture hollow and placating. “The Game. Exactly.”
“Well played, but I’m afraid… I may not be what you’re used to,” he said, almost like an apology. But apologizing for what she didn’t know.
“That is an understatement,” she said, then stepped away. The atmosphere was still charged, still bursting with her restraint and… possibly his as well. She smoothed her dress as she let out an uneasy breath. “So,” she adopted a levity to her voice, “why don’t we head in to work, boss.”
The sadness began to recede, barely perceptible in the first place.
“If you need more time, I can call on you tomorrow,” he said.
“Nonsense. I’m going stir crazy anyway. Wait.” Her eyes went wide. “You work in the Spire, don’t you?”
The Spire. The design and structure were a glorious melding of style and function. In the excitement of everything, she neglected to connect the dots that members of parliament worked in the Spire. A new sort of excitement began to simmer in her stomach. She might actually get to go inside.
“There are smaller offices around the ground floor. We only use it for important meetings or trials, that sort of thing. It’s largely a waste of space.”
“A waste of space? It’s a structural marvel.
The height alone is beyond anything that’s been constructed before, at least with a base that’s barely thirty feet in diameter, which would make the circumference,” her eyes lifted, running the math in her head before adding, “About ninety-four. Ninety-four point two five, technically.”
He raised an eyebrow at her rushed words and Sera reigned in her excitement. “But, I could see inside, right?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Then why are we moping around here? Let’s get the fuck going.” She bounded for the stairs.
Maybe he was trying to manipulate her, playing a very long game, very well. Or maybe he was genuine—which she still could not accept—but either way, she might as well take the opportunity to fulfill her childhood dream.
Despite opinions to the contrary, Kieran was not an unfeeling monster.
Sera’s words had cut into him more than she realized.
Her fixation on using her body to manipulate a situation, the belief that there were no other means to get what she wanted.
How her life seemed to have amounted to what she could trade her body for.
He did not wish to pity her for her reality, and he didn’t.
He did, however, hate it.
He lifted his eyes from the paper he'd been attempting to read—though he only skimmed the headlines about Divinity fueled crime waves and another thwarted bank robbery by the Emerald Archer—to glance over Sera’s shoulder.
She sat across from him in the carriage.
A faint, almost transparent form clinging to her.
As it had been for the past two weeks, though he had only seen her in passing.
He had thought to give her time to settle in, as well as get a better hold on his baser biological responses to her and her insistent flirtation.
Two weeks was sufficient. While the pretense of needing a secretary had started as a lie, he also had a neglected pile of busy work and she had broken into his home, after all.
Sera’s head was twisted toward the window of the carriage the entire ride into the Ring.
He had ridden the same path every day for the past two decades.
The view was as mundane as his reflection.
There was charm in her excitement. I should ask Joy to take the long way home.
So she might see more views of the city.
Kieran stopped breathing.
The fleeting impulse nearly choked him. Altering his schedule so that Sera might enjoy the scenery pushed the boundary of simple kindness. He breathed out.
He would not care about her.
He refused. Never mind that his protection would be next to useless, he had sworn to never harbor affection or attachment for another.
His life was devoid of meaningful connection. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.
As was his fate. Ninety-six.
He had long ago accepted his solitude. Eighty-nine.
He closed his eyes as the tightness in his lungs eased. Thank the gods she was preoccupied with the sights and did not notice his turmoil. He would have had a challenging time concealing it at the moment.
His guilt.
His shame.
Why didn’t you save them?
He continued a slow count backwards from one hundred.
What good are you?
Around fifty, the voices of his parents receded.
Nearly three decades later, he wasn’t entirely sure it was their voices and not just a ten-year-old boy’s lens of his parents’ grief.
Misinterpreting their lashing anguish and thrown accusation and unjustified blame in the heat of unimaginable pain.
Kieran was wiser now. He understood that he was not to blame for the death of his two younger siblings.
But believing it had been so easy once upon a time.
Building his identity around the guilt and self-flagellation had started before he knew how to stop.
Especially when his parents shut down. Shut him out.
It was grief, nothing more.
But he was ten. And alone. And he had thought it was all his fault.
The carriage stopped and Kieran opened the door, hopped down, and raised his hand in offering.
He gaped at the appendage like it had offended him.
Offering a hand? Yes, it was expected to help a lady to and from a carriage, but Kieran had never offered his hand before—his limits for societal convention ended at physical contact.
Was this an emotional response to her implications that she had received very little genuine kindness? Unacceptable.
Her fingers slipped into his hand before he could pull away and he was at once elated and horrified by the sensation of her skin.
And the sensation was everywhere. Warmth and pressure, just as debilitating as when she touched his face earlier.
He stared at their hands as she let her fingernails drag along his palm eliciting a maddening trail of pleasure—the sort of pleasure that drives a man to desperate extremes for more.
As her fingers slipped free and summer air hit his palm, Kieran realized he hadn’t taken a breath.
He closed his fingers, waiting for his pulse to regulate. His body had responded as if attacked, flooding him with adrenaline.
It was a reaction to touch, nothing more.
Simple and, yet, infuriatingly inconvenient.
This was a fleeting, but manageable desire for contact.
He acceded that she appealed to his baser impulses, but this…
intensity was born of scarcity. Kieran had closed himself off all too well and now he was reaping the consequences.
He would have to find a way to alleviate this problem in the future.
It seemed that touch would be inevitable while in Sera’s company.