4. Jo
— ? —
Jo
The files land on my desk with a thud that makes me jump.
“Hargrove account.” Nick is standing over me, close enough that the smell of him reaches me before the words do, expensive cologne and black coffee.
“Biggest project this firm has landed in years. You’ll be working closely with me on it.
Late nights, tight deadline.” Those dark eyes hold mine a beat longer than they need to. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Yes. You’re the problem.
Two weeks I have been here, and I have turned avoiding one Anderson man into a science.
Matthias’s schedule is memorized down to the minute, which meetings he takes, which hallways he uses, which coffee machine he prefers.
Fourteen straight days without being cornered alone with him, and I had started to feel almost safe.
I forgot to account for the other one.
Because Nick I can’t avoid. He finds reasons.
He drifts past my desk three and four times a day, files he doesn’t need from the cabinet by my cubicle, questions about my drawings sharp enough to prove he has actually been looking at them.
And every single time those eyes land on me, something warm and dangerous and entirely inappropriate turns over in my chest.
“Not at all,” I say.
Fuck the Anderson men. One of them destroyed my life. The other is going to be a different kind of disaster, I can feel it already, and I genuinely can’t decide which one frightens me more.
The first late night arrives on Thursday.
Takeout containers spread across Nick’s conference table alongside blueprints, the building quiet and dim with most of the staff gone home hours ago.
The cleaning crew has already come and gone.
The security guard waved goodnight twenty minutes ago.
And now it’s just the two of us, alone, surrounded by architectural drawings and the remnants of Greek takeout.
The awareness of Nick’s presence is constant and distracting, every time he shifts position, every time his sleeve brushes against mine as we lean over the same drawings, every time his fingers trace a line on the blueprints and all my brain can think about is what those fingers would feel like somewhere else.
Professional. Be professional. You are a professional.
He’s different like this, though. Away from the boardroom, away from the endless parade of meetings and phone calls, the armor comes off piece by piece.
His tie loosens first, then disappears entirely, shoved into a desk drawer.
His sleeves roll up to reveal forearms that have no business being that distracting.
And when he rubs his temples with obvious exhaustion, the kind of bone-deep tiredness he’d never show during business hours, the realization hits that this is the first glimpse of him as anything but perfectly composed.
And I notice all of it. The tendon that stands out along his forearm when he braces a hand on the table.
The way his watch sits loose against the bone of his wrist. My mouth goes dry.
Under the table, where he can’t see, I press my thighs together, and I hate myself a little for the heat that pools low in my stomach.
He’s my boss. He’s the most off-limits man in this building.
None of that does a single thing to slow my pulse when he leans in over the same drawing and his shoulder brushes mine.
“Long day?”
“Long decade.” That almost-smile appears, the one that makes his whole face look younger, softer, more human. “The Hargrove account is make or break for us. If we land it, the firm is set for the next five years. If we don’t...”
“You’ll land it.”
“You sound very sure about that.”
“Because I’ve seen your work.” A gesture at the plans spread between us, pages and pages of meticulous detail and innovative design. “This is really good, Nick. Not just competent, actually inspired. Any client would be lucky to have you design their building.”
He looks at me for a long moment, his dark eyes unreadable, giving me nothing.
The fluorescent lights hum overhead. The building settles around us with small creaks and groans.
And the silence between us draws tight and dangerous, nothing like the way a professional conversation is supposed to feel.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “That means more than you know.”
The moment stretches and pulls tighter and tighter until something has to snap. I break eye contact first, a blush heating my cheeks as my gaze drops to the blueprints, heart pounding so loud he must be able to hear it.
“We should get back to work.”
“We should.”
We both go still for a beat too long.
“What about dinner?” The question breaks the tension, and a surprised chuckle gets loose before I can catch it.
A nod follows. Burgers get ordered from a place down the street that apparently stays open until 2 a.m. for exactly this kind of late-night office emergency, and eating together at his conference table feels dangerously domestic.
The conversation flows too easily, that’s the problem. It flows with the ease of people who’ve known each other for years instead of weeks, no massive power imbalance, no complicated history with his brother sitting between us at all.
He tells me about his first disastrous client presentation, fresh out of architecture school, so nervous he could barely remember his own name.
“I was carrying the coffee, you know, trying to be helpful, make a good impression, and I tripped over absolutely nothing. Just my own feet. Spilled an entire grande latte all over the client’s wife. ”
“No.”
“Her white dress. White. Like, wedding-dress white.”
“Oh my God.”
“She had to finish the meeting looking like a Rorschach test. I spent the entire presentation trying not to cry while her husband glared at me like he was planning my murder.”
The laugh that breaks out of me is too loud, too unguarded.
Soda goes up my nose from the force of it, and suddenly napkins are everywhere as the coughing and spluttering takes over.
Nick is grinning, actually grinning, this wide, delighted expression that transforms his entire face, and watching me struggle to breathe seems to bring him genuine joy.
“That’s what you get for laughing at my trauma,” he says, but his eyes are warm.
“I’m not laughing at your trauma. I’m laughing at the mental image of you crying into a PowerPoint presentation while a woman slowly turns beige.”
“She was furious.”
“I would be too!”
The laughter subsides eventually, leaving something soft and warm in its wake. Comfortable. Easy. The kind of easy that’s more dangerous than anything else, because it makes forgetting all the reasons this is a terrible idea way too simple.
“You have ketchup.” My finger points at my own cheek to demonstrate. “Right there.”
He swipes at the wrong side, missing entirely. “Gone?”
“No, the other...” The words die as my hand moves without permission, reaching across the space between us, thumb pressing against his cheek to wipe away the smear of red.
His skin is warm. Stubble scratches against my palm, rough and real. And then his eyes meet mine and I forget the next breath entirely. Neither of us moves. Neither of us looks away.
My hand is still on his face. His breath is warm against my wrist. And he’s looking at me like, like I’m something precious. Something he wants to be careful with. Something he’s been waiting for without knowing he was waiting.
“Thanks.” The word comes out low, rough, barely above a whisper.
“You’re welcome.”
Still not moving. Still frozen in this moment that feels suspended outside of time, outside of consequences, outside of all the reasons this can never happen.
His hand comes up slowly, so slowly, and his fingers brush against mine where they rest on his cheek. The touch sends electricity shooting up my arm and straight into my chest.
“Jo...”
Reality crashes back in like cold water.
I pull back too fast, jerky and graceless.
My elbow catches the edge of my drink and sends it toppling, soda spreading across the table in a dark puddle that races toward the blueprints.
We both lunge for napkins at the same time, hands colliding, and somewhere in the chaos of saving the Hargrove project from a root beer flood, the tension breaks.
But it doesn’t disappear. It banks down into a low warm current under my skin, steady and impossible to ignore, and that terrifies me far more than the root beer flood did. This is how it starts. I have been here before.
“I should go.” The words come out reluctantly, scraped up from somewhere that knows this is the right decision even if every other part of me wants to stay. “It’s late. Rory’s babysitter charges extra after midnight.”
“You have a son?”
The question is curious, not judgmental, but my guard goes up anyway. Walls that took years to build, sliding back into place with practiced ease. “Rory. He’s six, though he’ll tell you he’s almost seven if you give him half a chance.”
“That must be hard. Single mom, new job, long hours.”
“It’s not easy.” The honesty surprises me, slipping out before the walls finish forming. “But he’s worth it. He’s worth everything.”
Nick nods slowly, like this information is being filed away alongside everything else he’s noticed about me, the way I take my coffee, the designs I fight hardest for, the careful distance I keep from his brother. “Then you should definitely go. Get some rest.”
The goodbyes are awkward in the way that first almost-somethings always are. Too formal. Too careful. Both of us pretending we don’t know what almost happened over a smear of ketchup.
“Same time tomorrow?”
“Same time tomorrow.”
The elevator ride down is too quiet, leaving too much room for thinking. For replaying the feeling of his skin under my fingers. For wondering what would have happened if the soda hadn’t spilled. For reminding myself, over and over, exactly how badly this could go.
He’s your boss.
He’s Matthias’s brother.
This can only end badly.
The parking garage is dim and empty at this hour, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead at the exact frequency of a horror movie waiting to happen.
My heels echo off concrete as the walk to the car stretches longer than it should, every shadow suddenly suspicious, every sound amplified by the cavernous space.
The car is where it always is, fifth level, near the stairwell, tucked between a concrete pillar and someone’s oversized SUV. Keys already in hand, a habit learned from years of walking alone at night, of being told to have your keys ready, to check the backseat, to be aware of your surroundings.
The piece of paper waits under the windshield wiper, a pale flag of surrender.
At first, it looks like a parking ticket, white rectangle, flapping slightly in the ventilation system’s artificial breeze. But parking tickets don’t get hand-delivered to the fifth level of a private parking garage at eleven o’clock at night.
The paper crinkles between my fingers as it unfolds, the words swimming into focus under the buzzing lights.
“Go away or you’ll regret it.”
The handwriting is blocky. Deliberate. Anonymous in the way of someone trying very hard to be unidentifiable, each letter formed with careful precision that gives nothing away.
Every muscle locks into place. The keys dig into my palm, clutched too tight, the metal edges biting into skin.
Someone was here. Someone stood at this car, in this spot, while I was upstairs with Nick.
Someone watched. Someone waited. Someone wanted me to know they could get to me whenever they wanted.
The shadows between parked cars seem to deepen, stretch, reach toward me with invisible fingers. A sound echoes from somewhere, footsteps? An engine? Just the building settling?, and suddenly every horror movie ever watched is playing on loop in my head.
Run.
The word surfaces from somewhere primal and doesn’t need to be told twice.
The car door yanks open. The locks engage before the seatbelt is even on. The engine starts with a roar that sounds too loud in the empty garage, and then the car is moving, peeling out of the space with a screech of tires that echoes off concrete walls.
Check the mirrors. Check the blind spots. Check the rearview, over and over, watching for headlights that might follow, for shapes that might emerge from the shadows.
I drive the whole way home with white knuckles on the steering wheel and a heart that won’t stop racing. Every car that pulls up behind seems suspicious. Every red light is an eternity of vulnerability. Every shadow hides a threat.
Matthias.
It has to be Matthias.
The same hand, the same threatening tone, the same possessive fury that showed in his eyes that day in the conference room. He wants me gone. He wants me to run like I ran seven years ago, to disappear and stop being a reminder of who he really is.
But proving it’s impossible. There’s no signature, no fingerprints, no evidence that would hold up to any kind of scrutiny. Just a piece of paper with a threat and a gut feeling that might mean nothing.
And telling anyone? What would the words even be? And say what, exactly? The note has no name on it, no fingerprints, nothing that points anywhere. There is nothing to take to anyone, and everything to lose by trying.
The note goes into the glove compartment with shaking hands.
The fear gets shoved down deep, into the same place where all the other fears live, the fear of failing Rory, of not being enough, of being the same stupid girl who trusted the wrong man at twenty.
Tomorrow, everything will be fine.
Tomorrow, this will feel like nothing.
Tomorrow.