Obsession (His Obsession #1)

Chapter 1

Anna

The man at table nine wanted me dead. Or fired. Whichever came first.

He’d been at it for almost twenty minutes now, which was impressive, honestly, because his steak had been cold for at least ten of those and he was still going.

I stood next to his table with my notepad pressed against my thigh and my smile stapled on so tight my cheeks ached, nodding along while he explained to me, and to everyone within a fifteen-foot radius, that the standards of this diner were an embarrassment.

His words. Not mine. Though if I was being fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

The laminated menus had photos that were generous interpretations of the actual food, and my manager, Doug, had a talent for vanishing the moment any customer raised their voice above a polite murmur.

I’d watched him slip into the stockroom like a ghost the second table nine started escalating. Real leadership material, that guy.

"I ordered medium-rare." The man jabbed his fork toward his plate like he was cross-examining it. "Does this look medium-rare to you?"

It did, actually. It looked exactly medium-rare. Pink center, warm throughout. I’d checked it before I brought it out because I’d already gotten a vibe from this guy when he’d snapped his fingers at me to order. Fingers. Like I was a dog.

"I’m so sorry about that, sir. I can have the kitchen remake it for you right away."

"You can have the kitchen remake it," he repeated, his voice climbing. He was standing now. A man in a polo shirt, standing in a Wynwood diner on a Wednesday evening, performing outrage for an audience that didn’t ask for a show.

"Maybe you can also have the kitchen hire someone who knows the difference between rare and well-done. "

The couple at table seven looked away. The woman at table twelve pretended to be very interested in her phone. Everyone shrank, the way people do when someone decides to fill the whole room with themselves.

And me. I was shrinking too.

The feeling crawled up my spine before I could stop it. My body knew this choreography. The careful modulation of my face so the angry person didn’t get angrier. The accommodation. The smallness I’d been trained to perform. Shoulders down. Voice even.

Don’t provoke. Don’t challenge. Make yourself a smaller target.

My hometown back in Charlotte, North Carolina, taught me that dance. Someone there choreographed every step.

I didn’t want to think of his name. Just the thought of it made my wrist throb beneath the bracelet and that was enough.

"Sir, I understand your frustration, and I’d really like to fix this for you." My voice came out steady. Practiced. I hated how good I was at this. "If you’ll just give me a moment, I can…"

"What you can do is get me a manager who actually runs this place instead of sending the help to handle complaints she’s clearly not equipped to deal with."

The help. He called me the help.

Three weeks. I’d been doing this for three weeks.

Smiling through insults and carrying plates that weighed more than my dignity at this point.

Because the eight hundred dollars I’d brought with me didn’t last long in Miami, and Miley had already covered two months of rent while I tried to get back on my feet.

The guilt of that was starting to crush me in ways I didn’t know how to explain.

I opened my mouth to respond, not sure what was going to come out, probably something I’d regret, when a voice cut in from the next table.

"Hey, buddy."

Warm. Easy. Sweet on the ears, but I caught the bite sitting just beneath it.

I turned. A man in a casual blazer, maybe thirty, was leaning back in his chair with his napkin still tucked into his collar. He was handsome in the effortless, annoying way some guys just are. Strong features, brown hair pushed back from his face, a smile that was equal parts charm and trouble.

He looked at table nine.

"That steak looks pretty medium rare to me," he said.

Table nine frowned. "What?"

The man gestured lazily with his fork. "Warm red center. Seared edges. Exactly what you ordered, unless you forgot how steak works."

A few people nearby glanced over.

He continued, completely unfazed. "The lady wrote down your order correctly and confirmed twice. I watched her do it. So maybe the problem isn’t the food, or the waitress.

" His smile stayed easy, but there was no warmth behind it now.

"Maybe the problem is the guy holding the fork trying to bully his way into a free meal. "

Table nine sputtered. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

The stranger held his gaze. Calm as a Sunday. Not aggressive, not puffed up. Just steady, like a man who already knew how this was going to end.

Table nine sat down.

The entire restaurant exhaled.

I stared at the stranger, caught somewhere between gratitude and confusion, because who does that? Who actually steps in and helps? In my experience, people watched. People looked away. People pretended their phones were fascinating while someone else got torn apart five feet away.

He looked at me and winked. "You’re welcome."

And that’s when my brain caught up to my eyes.

I knew that face.

I knew that wink.

"Wait." I blinked. Looked again. "Miles?"

His grin stretched wider. "Anna Wilson. I was wondering if you’d recognize me."

Miles Hunter.

From my International Media and Communication elective at UNC Charlotte, fall semester of junior year.

The guy who once convinced an entire study group he’d been recruited by the CIA and kept the bit going for three straight weeks.

The funniest person in any room he walked into and, apparently, still was.

Polished, successful, and unfairly good-looking, he stood there watching me bus tables in a stained apron with a pen behind my ear and someone else’s ketchup on my sleeve.

The embarrassment hit harder than anything table nine had dished out. It rose from my stomach to my face, warm and awful.

But Miles didn’t make me feel small. He didn’t give me the look.

The one that said oh no, what happened to you? The pity tilt of the head, the careful softening of the voice. I’d gotten it from old classmates who’d seen my social media go quiet, from acquaintances who’d heard pieces of the story. That look made me want to disappear.

He treated the reunion like running into a friend. Which, I guess, I was.

"Sit down for a sec." He pointed to the chair across from him. "Can you take a break?"

"I don’t really get breaks here."

"Then pretend you’re taking my order." He pushed a menu toward me with a mischievous grin. "I’ll make it look convincing. I’m a great actor."

I sat. Mostly because my feet were killing me and table nine had used up whatever fight I had left.

"So what are you doing in Miami?" he asked.

I kept it vague. "Fresh start. New city."

He nodded. And I could tell, from the way his eyes stayed on mine, that he heard what I wasn’t saying. He respected the silence around it. Didn’t dig. Just let it sit there between us.

"I get that," he said. "Miami’s good for reinvention."

We talked for ten minutes. He told me he was Vice President of Public Relations at his family’s gaming company, Hunter Interactive, which sounded impossibly glamorous compared to my current situation of delivering steaks to ungrateful men.

He asked about my photography, and I told him I was between gigs, which was the most generous version of the truth I could manage. He told me about Miami, about the good spots to eat, about how the traffic would make me want to scream, but the sunsets made up for it.

He was funny and warm and didn't once glance at my stained apron with anything resembling judgment. I caught myself laughing like I had nowhere else to be, and for a second, I almost believed it.

Before he left, he dropped something on the table. A business card, thick stock, embossed lettering.

"We need an executive assistant," he said. "Real salary. Benefits. The whole deal."

I picked up the card and turned it over. Hunter Interactive. The name alone sounded like a world I had no business stepping into.

"It’s where you're working, right?"

"Yeah. It's one of our businesses. My brother needs an assistant," he confirmed. "Fair warning though, he’s a little eccentric. He barks, but he doesn’t bite." He paused, tilting his head like he was reconsidering. "Much."

I laughed. "Reassuring."

"You’d be good at it. I remember you, Anna. You don’t quit." He stood, buttoning his blazer. "Call me. Seriously."

He left a tip on his table that was bigger than my entire shift’s earnings. I watched him walk out the door, his card still warm between my fingers, and for the first time in weeks, the future didn’t feel like a wall I was walking toward with my eyes closed.

I called that night, sitting cross-legged on Miley’s couch with the business card balanced on my knee.

I agreed to the job. Because I needed money to survive in Miami, and Miley’s name had been on every utility bill for two months, and the weight of someone else carrying me was becoming harder to bear than any terrible boss could be.

Two days later. Saturday. The Wynwood Farmers Market.

Miley dragged me there because she believed fresh air cured everything except bad credit, and after the week I'd had, I figured worse prescriptions existed. The market was packed. Stalls lined both sides of the street, overflowing with produce and handmade soaps and those twelve-dollar candles that smelled like someone’s idea of what relaxation should cost.

Miley was currently holding one up to her nose with her eyes closed, inhaling like it contained the meaning of life.

"This one smells like if autumn was a person," she announced.

"That’s not a thing."

"It’s absolutely a thing. Autumn would smell like cinnamon and old books and, like, a cardigan." She held it toward me. "Smell."

I leaned in. "It smells like a candle, Miley."

"You have no soul." She set it down and picked up another one, turning it over to check the price and wincing only slightly. "Okay, what about this? Coastal something. Sea salt and driftwood."

"You don’t even know what driftwood smells like."

"I know what twelve dollars smells like, and it smells like this." She grinned, tucking the candle under her arm. "I’m getting it. Don’t judge me."

"I’m judging you so hard right now."

"Judge away. I’m employed and I deserve nice things." She pointed the candle at me. "And before you do the thing where you do math in your head about how twelve dollars could buy groceries, stop. We’re allowed to have joy, Anna. Joy smells like sea salt and driftwood. Apparently."

I smiled, and it didn’t feel forced. Miley Torres had been my anchor since the day I showed up in Miami with two suitcases and a savings account that would make a college freshman cringe.

She’d opened her door without asking a single question, handed me a pillow, and told me the Wi-Fi password. I tried to find a job in my line of work, photography. Picked up a few small gigs here and there, but nothing that came close to paying the bills.

Just when I was losing hope, Miley got me the diner job through the restaurant where she worked as an assistant chef. She’d been feeding me, housing me, and pretending it wasn’t charity with the dedication of someone who deserved a trophy.

She disappeared into a soap stall, and my phone went off.

I turned away from the stall, pulling my phone out while I sipped my iced Americano.

A message from Mom.

She was asking about my week, whether I was eating enough, whether Miami was treating me well. The usual. I typed back a response, eyes on the screen, feet moving without direction.

I wasn’t watching where I was going.

A kid on a scooter came out of nowhere, weaving between people at a speed no child should’ve been allowed to reach in a crowded market. I sidestepped to avoid getting clipped, only for my foot to catch on the uneven pavement.

I pitched forward, coffee sloshing, and crashed directly into someone’s back.

The Americano exploded on impact. The lid flew off, iced coffee drenching the back of whoever I’d just body-checked.

Momentum carried me forward, completely off balance now, and my hands shot out on instinct, grabbing the stranger’s shoulders because the ground was coming up fast and I was not about to eat concrete in front of three hundred people on a Saturday morning.

He tried to twist free. Jerked away from me, actually, like my hands burned him.

I gripped tighter. Because gravity was winning and my survival instincts didn’t care about personal space.

The momentum did the rest. He turned. I lurched forward. And my face smashed directly into his.

Lips against lips.

For one absolutely deranged second, I was kissing a stranger in the middle of the Wynwood Farmers Market.

Not intentionally. Not romantically. More like two people colliding at the exact wrong angle while one of them was covered in iced coffee and the other was trying very hard to peel a strange woman off his body.

His hand shot out for balance and landed somewhere it should not have landed.

Specifically, my chest.

His palm, right there. Grasping.

My brain did the math in about half a second and came up with: this man is touching your boob in public and you are still holding onto him like a koala.

We both froze. Him with his hand on my chest. Me with my fingers still digging into his shoulders. Our faces an inch apart, my coffee dripping off his chin.

His eyes dropped to where his hand was. Then snapped back up to my face. The horror in his expression was so pure, so absolute, that in any other circumstance I might have laughed.

Then we scrambled apart like we’d both touched a live wire.

I stared at him. He stared at me.

He was striking. That was the first coherent thought my brain managed to produce after the chaos.

Tall, very tall, with dark hair kept neat and precise, not a strand out of place. Gray eyes behind sleek rectangular glasses. A jaw that could've been drawn with a ruler. Unhelpfully beautiful, every single one of his features.

He looked like someone who'd never spilled anything in his life, and I had just baptized him with an Americano. The fabric of his linen shirt clung to his chest, soaked through, and my brain chose that exact moment to stop being useful.

He looked down at himself. Then at the coffee cup on the ground. Then at me. His expression cycled through emotions at a speed I couldn’t keep up with.

Shock. Disgust. Horror. More disgust.

And then a fury so cold and controlled it made the steak man from the diner look like a toddler having a tantrum.

He opened his mouth.

What came out, in a voice with a British edge sharp enough to cut, was:

"Bloody hell."