6. Eve #2
“He’s finished.” There’s a dark satisfaction in it, banked low. “They’ll come after him for what he stole. At minimum he never works in this town again. At maximum he learns a great deal about how prison food tastes.”
I should keep watching the glass. The glass is the entire point. The glass is the catharsis I came here for.
I turn to look at him instead.
And that’s the mistake.
His face is right there. Close enough to see the gold in his brown eyes, the start of stubble along his jaw, the line of his throat running down to where his collar falls open, where his pulse is going faster than a man watching a meeting has any business explaining.
I am, I realize, cataloging his pulse. I have lost the thread entirely.
The meeting could be on fire. I would not notice.
I am counting the beats in his throat and thinking about putting my mouth there.
His gaze drops to mine and stays.
“This is a terrible idea,” I whisper. Not because I think it. Because it’s the last honest thing my brain can still assemble.
“The worst,” he agrees, and doesn’t move an inch away. “I have a long and distinguished history of them. Ask my mother.”
His hand comes up. The backs of his fingers graze along my jaw, barely there, the lightest possible touch, and my whole body goes still and humming, every nerve I own relocating to that one square inch of skin.
My thighs press together without my permission.
My mouth has gone desert-dry. We are standing in a stairwell at his brother’s company, a man’s ruin playing out through glass twenty feet away, and all I can think about is closing the distance.
“Tell me this is just the adrenaline,” he says, quiet, watching me like the answer matters more than air. “Tell me it’s the dress and the chaos and the win, and I’ll step back, and we’ll go get that terrible lunch, and I’ll never mention it again.”
I can’t. It is not the adrenaline. It hasn’t been the adrenaline since that balcony, and we both know it, and he’s asking me to say it out loud in a stairwell because he is, underneath all that planning, just as terrified of being wrong about this as I am.
“It’s not the adrenaline,” I say.
His breath catches. His thumb moves along my jaw, once.
Through the glass, Simon shoves back from the table and stands, jabbing his finger at the room. Security appears at the glass door. Hands land on his shoulders.
“He’s coming,” I manage. “He’ll use the stairs, he always uses the stairs, he thinks elevators are for people who don’t work hard enough.”
Dean moves fast.
His hand closes around mine and pulls me around the corner into the narrow alcove by the emergency exit.
His body turns to shield me from the hall, his other arm bracing flat against the wall beside my head, and we are suddenly, completely, alone in eighteen inches of space that feels like the entire world.
I can feel the heat coming off him. I can feel my own heartbeat in my throat, in my wrists, in places I am absolutely not going to name in a corporate stairwell.
Footsteps. Simon’s voice, raised, getting closer: “...illegal search, every one of you, I’ll sue this company into the ground and salt the earth.”
He passes within a few feet of us without a single glance, too busy being the most important victim in the building. Security trails after him. The elevator he claims to hate chimes and swallows the whole furious procession.
And then it’s quiet, and we’re still pressed into eighteen inches of space, and neither of us has moved.
Dean exhales. His chest rises and falls against me. His arm is still braced by my head, and his eyes have come back to my mouth like they never really left it.
“That was close,” he says, and his voice has dropped to something low.
“Which part.” My hands have found his chest somewhere in the last thirty seconds. I don’t remember putting them there. I can feel his heart going under my palm, fast and uneven, and knowing I’m the reason for it undoes something in me that I have spent a long time carefully keeping done up.
“All of it.” His free hand settles at my hip, his thumb pressing slow through the silk, testing, giving me every chance to step out of the eighteen inches.
I don’t take any of them. “Eve. I have wanted to do something genuinely stupid since the second you walked into that lobby in this dress, and I have been a very patient man, and I am running out of patience at a frankly alarming rate.”
“Then do it,” I hear myself say, and there it is, the bite, the part of me that didn’t die at the altar after all. “Or are you going to plan it first? Draft a contingency? Loop in your IT guy?”
His pupils blow wide. A breath leaves him that’s almost a laugh and almost a groan. His head dips. His breath ghosts across my lips, close enough to taste, close enough that the last inch of air between us feels like the loudest thing in the building.
The emergency door bangs open.
We come apart, but not fast enough.
Kiara stands in the doorway, eyes wild, mascara in black rivers down her face, her clothes wrecked, her hair a disaster of its own. She looks like she’s been crying for hours. She looks like she’s been waiting.
She also looks like she wants me dead.
“YOU.”
She lunges.