23. Max #2
And then she’s right in front of me, her finger stabbing into my chest, right over the sternum. Hard enough that I feel the pressure through my shirt, the sharp point of her fingertip pressing into muscle and bone.
“You’re just a rich—”
Again. Same spot. Harder this time, each jab punctuating the word like a period at the end of a sentence.
“—arrogant—”
Again.
“—spoiled—”
Again.
“—brat—”
The final jab lands with enough force to push me back half a step. Her finger stays there, pressed to my sternum, and I can feel the heat of it bleeding through the cotton of my shirt, burning into my skin like a brand.
“—who hasn’t done a proper day’s work in his life.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
Her finger is still on my chest. I can feel the pressure of it. Her chest is heaving, and there’s color high on her cheeks—the deep, vivid flush of genuine fury.
She’s close now. So close that I can see the darker flecks scattered through the brown of her irises, the slight part of her full lips where her breath is coming fast, the rapid flutter of her pulse in the hollow of her throat.
So close that if I leaned forward even slightly, my mouth would be on hers.
I want to kiss her.
The thought lands with such clarity that it almost knocks me backward.
I glance at her lips, pink and looking impossibly soft, wanting to kiss her the way she just spoke to me—hard and relentless and without a shred of restraint.
No one talks to me like that. No one has ever talked to me like that. Not my employees, not my competitors, not even my packmates, who know me better than anyone alive. They all keep their distance, all measure their words, all handle me with the careful deference they think I require.
And this woman just called me a spoiled brat with her finger in my chest, and every nerve ending in my body is on fire.
Slowly, I close my hand around hers, trapping it against my chest.
Her breath catches, a small, involuntary hitch she tries to cover and can’t.
Her eyes snap to mine, wide and startled. The anger is still there, burning bright. But her weight shifts toward me, just slightly.
“Are you done?” I ask softly.
She doesn’t pull her hand away.
Her eyes drop to my mouth. One second. Two.
I bring my other hand up and close it around her free wrist. Her pulse hammers beneath my fingertips—fast, erratic, nothing like the controlled, steady rhythm she presents to the world.
“You know,” I murmur, “I generally don’t like it when people touch me without my permission.” My thumb traces a slow circle against the inside of her wrist, and she softens by a fraction, so slight that if I weren’t holding her I’d have missed it entirely. “Or shout at me.”
Her lips part before she catches it. The anger in her eyes is flickering now, warring with something else, and her breath comes shallow and fast.
She wants me.
“Somehow,” I say, and my voice drops to a whisper, “I don’t mind it when you do it.”
She trembles. A full-body shiver that starts at the wrist I’m holding and radiates outward, and I feel it move through her like a current, and the last of my restraint goes with it.
“But I think,” I murmur, leaning closer, until my mouth is beside her ear and I can feel the warmth of her skin against my lips, “I need to punish you for it.”
Then I kiss her.
My mouth crashes into hers and she kisses me back instantly, like we’ve both been holding ourselves back by a thread that just snapped.
The sound she makes against my lips—a sharp, desperate gasp that vibrates through my entire body—obliterates every rational thought in my head.
She kisses me like she’s angry about it, like she hates that she wants this, and the raw, furious hunger of it nearly takes my knees out from under me.
She tastes like coffee and fury and something underneath that is just her, dark and sweet and devastating.
Her free hand fists in the front of my shirt and pulls me closer, and everything in me goes electric.
I push her backward. Two steps, three, until her back hits the wall beside the door and the impact draws a sound from her that I feel in my spine.
My hands find her wrists and pin them beside her head, holding them there, and she lets me—she actually lets me—arching off the wall to press herself closer, kissing me back with a ferocity that matches mine blow for blow.
She kisses me like she wants to ruin me. Like she’s been waiting to ruin me since the moment she walked through my door, and now that she’s started she has no intention of stopping.
I tighten my grip on her wrists, pressing them harder into the wall, and she makes that sound again—that desperate, hungry gasp—and I feel it everywhere. In my chest. In my gut. In the blood pounding through my veins so hard I can hear it in my ears.
Her mouth opens under mine and the kiss deepens, turning rough and urgent, all teeth and tongue and a raw, graceless need that I haven’t felt in years.
Maybe ever. Her body is taut against mine, every line of her pressed to every line of me, and even through the layers of clothing I can feel the heat of her, the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the way her fingers curl into fists above my grip.
I pull back just enough to breathe. Just enough to drag my lips along the line of her jaw, my mouth finding the spot just below her ear where her pulse is hammering fast enough to match mine.
“Still want to leave?” I whisper against her skin, and I feel the goosebumps erupt beneath my lips, spreading down her neck and across her collarbone like a wave.
“Fuck you, Max.”
But her voice is wrecked and breathless, nothing like the cold, precise weapon she’d been five minutes ago. And the knowledge that I did that, that I’m the one who cracked her open, hits so hard I lose the thread of everything else.
“You keep saying that.” I lean in. Drag my mouth along her jaw, feeling her shiver under the touch. “I’m starting to think you mean something different by it.”
And I kiss her again. Harder this time. Deeper. Pouring everything into it—the rage and the fear and the helpless, furious wanting that I’ve been burying since the day she walked into my office with those dead eyes and a spine made of fucking steel.
Her wrists strain against my hands. Not pulling away—pulling closer. Like she wants to touch me as badly as I want to touch her, and the only thing stopping her is the grip I won’t release.
I almost don’t release it. I almost stay exactly where I am, pinning her to the wall of my office in the middle of the afternoon, kissing her until neither of us can think straight.
But then the clarity hits. Sharp and sudden, like a pane of glass shattering.
What the fuck am I doing?
I drop her wrists and step back, and the distance between us opens like a wound, cold air rushing into the space where her body was pressed against mine seconds ago.
She stays against the wall. Her lips are swollen, her cheeks flushed, her hair mussed from where the back of her head was pressed into the wall. Her chest is heaving. Her eyes are wide and stunned, like she’s surfacing from underwater and hasn’t figured out which way is up yet.
I take her in, and what I see guts me.
Because she doesn’t look like Sophie Dysart, the harmless assistant. And she doesn’t look like the hollow-eyed operative who sat in this office last week with all the warmth of a loaded gun.
She looks like a woman who was just kissed so thoroughly that every defense she’s built has come down at once, and she has no idea how to exist without them.
“Jesus Christ, Sophie, what the fuck are we doing?” I say, running my hands through my hair. My voice sounds nothing like me. Rough and shaken and painfully human.
She doesn’t answer. She just stares at me, her hand drifting up to touch her lips—an unconscious gesture, like she’s checking to make sure they’re still there—and the sight of it makes something behind my ribs twist painfully.
“I shouldn’t have done that.” I drag both hands down my face, turning away from her. I can’t look at her right now. If I look at her I’ll kiss her again, and if I kiss her again I won’t stop. “That was—I was out of line. Completely and entirely out of line. I apologize.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Sophie.”
“I should go.” Her voice is quiet. “I should—yes. I should go.”
I turn back to face her, but she’s already moving, straightening her blouse and smoothing her hair. By the time her hand reaches the door handle, Sophie Dysart is back in place—poised, professional, not a hair out of line.
Except her hands are trembling. She grips the door handle to hide it, but I see.
And for some reason, that’s the part that breaks me.
She opens the door and steps through it, pulling it shut behind her without a word.
And I’m left standing alone in my office, the taste of her still on my lips, my heart slamming against my ribs like it’s trying to break free, and the terrifying certainty that nothing in my life is ever going to be the same.
My phone buzzes on the desk. I look at it without seeing it.
Griffin’s warning echoes in my memory like a prophecy I should have listened to.
Don’t try anything with her.
Too late, Griffin. Too fucking late.