Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nick
“You poured espresso into your water bottle this morning. That isn’t a power move, Nick. That’s a clinical sign of collapse.”
I lift my gaze from the contract spread across my desk and glare at Jonah over the rim of my actual coffee cup. “If you’re finished diagnosing my caffeine intake, feel free to get back to your job. Unless you’d like me to schedule time in your calendar for a follow-up evaluation.”
He doesn’t flinch. Instead, he tilts his head slightly to the left and gives me that infuriatingly calm, perceptive look that has made me want to punch him at least once a week for the better part of twenty-five years.
“You kissed her,” he says, his tone as casual as if he were commenting on the weather forecast. “Or she kissed you. It hardly matters which. Look at yourself.”
I don’t answer him. The silence is louder than words.
Jonah lets out a low whistle, long and edged with something almost sympathetic.
He leans back in the chair opposite mine, lacing his hands behind his head in a gesture of lazy superiority I find especially intolerable today.
“Well. That explains the caffeine overload, the permanent scowl, and the fact that you’ve read the same paragraph in that contract three times since I walked in. ”
“It was one kiss,” I say, my voice clipped. “It didn’t go any further.”
This time.
“But you wanted it to.”
Of course I did.
She had looked up at me with those wide, furious eyes, her mouth swollen from the force of what we were doing, her breathing ragged in the quiet space between us.
When I leaned in, when she closed the remaining distance and pulled me down with a desperation that eclipsed reason, everything else fell away.
Control fractured. Logic disintegrated. Restraint ceased to exist.
Now I’m here, sitting behind my own desk, feigning interest in projected earnings and pipeline metrics, when the only thing occupying any real estate in my mind is her—the taste of her, the feel of her, the sound she made when she kissed me back with the intensity of someone fighting for breath.
“Damn, Nick,” Jonah mutters, his voice stripped of sarcasm now. “You’re deeper in this than you realize.”
“No,” I say quietly. “I have it contained.”
He snorts without humor. “Is that what you think? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks more like you’re circling the drain with no plan to stop.”
I push back from the desk and cross to the window because staying seated is suffocating.
Outside, the skyline stretches in a perfect grid of steel, ordered and cold, a panorama of everything I’ve built and controlled.
Under any other circumstances, its precision would calm me.
Today, it only reminds me that I’m standing in a sealed box, pretending I’m not coming apart at the seams.
“She works for me.”
“So?” he replies without pause.
“She’s younger.”
“Still not hearing a problem.”
“She deserves better.”
Jonah exhales through his nose, an irritated, restrained sound. He rises from his chair and stands with his arms crossed, his gaze sharp and unwavering.
“Your problem is that you’ve spent your entire life controlling everything. The boardroom. The company. Your time. Your mind. Your own goddamn heart. Now you’re standing here shocked that someone exists who makes all that control look like the facade it is.”
I don’t respond. Because he’s right. And the truth of it settles into my chest with punishing weight.
“She isn’t a fling,” I say after a moment, my voice subdued. “She isn’t someone I can fuck and walk away from without consequence.”
“Then don’t walk away,” Jonah says simply, his tone stripped of judgment.
I turn my head just enough to glance at him over my shoulder. “It isn’t that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple. You want her. She wants you. Either do something about it or stop looking like you’re dying by inches.”
I drag a hand down my face. The burn of rough stubble against my palm is grounding, but it does nothing to ease the ache spreading through my chest.
“If I touch her again,” I say, my voice low and final, “I won’t let go.”
Jonah watches me for a long, silent moment before he shrugs once, unapologetic. “Then don’t let go.”
He turns and heads for the door, pausing in the frame with his hand braced on the edge. “Figure it out, Nick. Before she decides to figure it out without you.”
The door closes behind him with an audible click.
I remain standing by the window, staring out at the city I’ve mastered, unable to move. Unable to breathe.
Because the reality is, I have always known what I want. I knew it the night she walked into that gala wearing a dress that should have been illegal, her eyes lit with defiance and something far more dangerous.
She didn’t falter when I pushed her, didn’t shrink away or bend to accommodate my intensity. She pushed back with equal force, meeting my challenge without hesitation or fear.
And in that moment, I knew.
I want her. In every possible sense.
It isn’t about sex, though God knows I want her in my bed. It’s about everything else. I want her in my mornings, with her hair tangled from sleep and her eyes heavy with dreams she hasn’t yet shared. I want to know the sound of her laughter when she’s tired and unguarded.
I want her sharp wit, her irreverent observations, her ridiculous notebook filled with color-coded lists and tiny, looping handwriting.
I want to hold her steady when the world strips her defenses away, and I want to see if she curls into me the way she did that day in my office when she kissed me with a desperation that stripped me of my own armor.
That’s what terrifies me.
Because wanting her isn’t a casual decision I can compartmentalize and manage. It isn’t safe. It’s the kind of wanting that consumes. That rewrites everything I thought I knew about desire and purpose and consequence.
It is, quite simply, everything.
And the thought of what it would do to me if I lost her—if I let myself reach for this only to fail her—I’m not certain I’m strong enough to survive that kind of failure.
I spend the entire day avoiding her.
I reroute meetings to other managers. I send clipped, sterile emails in place of direct requests.
I remain locked in the executive suite under the guise of strategic planning, but the truth is simpler and infinitely weaker: I’m hiding.
The entire day is an exercise in silent humiliation because I know exactly what I’m doing, and I hate myself for it.
Yet every time I think I’ve regained control, she infiltrates my periphery.
I catch sight of her ponytail disappearing into a conference room down the hall.
I hear her voice through a partially open door during a client call, cool and professional, unshaken by any of what has occurred between us.
She sounds infuriatingly competent, unbothered, focused entirely on her work, and somehow that only deepens the ache clawing through my chest.
I want her more for it. For that composure. For that strength.
By mid-afternoon, I have abandoned all pretense of productivity.
My eyes track data across my screen without comprehension.
My hands curl into fists against the desktop, twitching with the need to do something—call her, text her, leave this office and demand we finish the conversation we have never allowed ourselves to begin.
But I remain seated.
I grit my teeth against the urge. I let it burn its way through me, hollowing out everything that makes me civilized.
And then the door opens.
No knock. No courtesy. No polite announcement from Emily over the intercom.
She just walks in.
As though the space belongs to her. As though the air I am struggling to draw into my lungs is hers to claim. Technically, she has every right to be here, but the instant my eyes land on her, the world reduces to a single point of focus.
She’s wearing fitted black trousers and a soft ivory blouse that draws attention to the curve of her neck.
Her lips are slightly parted, as if she has been mouthing the words she plans to say before stepping in.
Her eyes, those eyes that undid me the first time I met them, are sharp with purpose and something far more resolute.
“Apologies,” she says briskly, her tone efficient and cool. “I didn’t realize you were occupied.”
I cannot speak.
I watch her mouth move, shaping words I cannot absorb. She’s saying something about the Hamilton pitch deck, updated revenue projections from McKenna’s team, a clarification on the Q3 launch timeline. Each word is delivered with precision and composure, yet none of it registers.
Because all I can hear is the echo of her breathing when she kissed me.
All I can feel is the memory of her mouth under mine, soft and desperate and demanding, tasting of coffee and challenge and surrender.
All I can think about is how badly I wanted her then, and how impossibly more I want her now.
And then she speaks again, her voice dropping lower, her chin lifting in that small, stubborn tilt that I have come to recognize as her last line of defence.
“If this is too complicated,” she says quietly, her gaze meeting mine without flinching, “I can request a transfer. Or something.”
No.
The word tears through me with the force of a detonated charge.
I rise from my chair so abruptly the legs scrape across the polished floor, the sharp sound echoing in the silence between us. “No.”
She flinches at the tone, but barely. She holds her ground with that quiet, unyielding resolve I have come to expect from her, the same resolve that both infuriates and undoes me in equal measure.
I step around the desk, closing the distance between us with a deliberate precision I no longer bother to conceal. The pull between us is undeniable. It is magnetic, elemental, and I’m too exhausted to keep resisting what has already claimed me.