Chapter 4
LEX
I've been avoiding him for two days.
Not obviously. I'm a CEO. I know how to create distance without anyone noticing the architecture.
I take my breakfast in the cabin instead of the lodge.
I schedule my conference calls during the times Hayes would normally walk me through the compound.
I keep my conversations with him brief, professional, and focused entirely on security updates.
He lets me.
That's the part that's making me insane.
Hayes Donovan, who pushed his way past every boundary I set in the first four days, who memorized my coffee order and dragged me up a mountain and put his hand on my face like he had every right to touch me, is suddenly giving me exactly the space I asked for.
He's still there. Forty yards away. Walking beside me when I leave the cabin, scanning the tree line with those sharp hazel eyes, checking in at mealtimes with a brief update on the investigation.
But the teasing is gone. The warmth in his voice has cooled to something purely professional. He calls me Ms. Morrison again.
I should be relieved.
The word "should" has never irritated me more.
It's day six. Evening. I'm sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of wine I found in the cabin's small pantry, reviewing the financials Sully pulled from Thomas Whitfield's personal accounts.
The numbers tell a story. Three large deposits over four months, each one timed within forty-eight hours of a data leak.
The sourcing is layered through shell companies, but Sully's peeling them back methodically.
Thomas Whitfield. My VP of Research. A man I hired personally, mentored through two promotions, trusted with formulas worth more than the GDP of small nations.
He sat across from me at my kitchen table in San Francisco six months ago and told me the company's research integrity was his highest priority.
He was already selling me out.
My hand tightens on the wine glass. The anger is clean, familiar, useful.
Anger I know what to do with. Anger has a target, a strategy, a resolution.
It's the other feeling, the one that lives lower in my chest, the one I haven't been able to name or aim since a man with dimples touched my jaw on a mountaintop, that's the problem.
A knock on my door.
I check the time. Twenty-one hundred. Hayes's nightly check-in is usually at twenty-one-thirty. He's early.
I open the door.
He's in dark jeans and a thermal, same as always, but he's been out in the cold. His cheeks are flushed, his hair pushed back from his face by the wind, and he's holding a to-go container from the lodge kitchen.
"Cade made pot roast," he says. "You skipped dinner."
"I wasn't hungry."
"You skipped yesterday too." He holds the container out. "Not a request."
I take it because arguing about pot roast with a man standing on my porch in the March cold feels absurd even by my standards. The container is warm in my hands. The smell is obscenely good.
"Thank you."
He nods. Turns to leave.
"Hayes."
He stops. His shoulders shift when I say his name. A small tightening across the back of his thermal that he probably doesn't know I can see.
"You can come in."
He turns back. Studies me for a beat. Whatever he reads in my face, he takes it as the invitation I'm barely willing to admit it is, and steps inside.
The cabin feels smaller with him in it. He fills space differently than most men.
Not just physical presence, though that's considerable.
It's the way he occupies a room with quiet attention, tracking details, processing, filing things away.
He sees my wine glass, the financial reports spread across the table, the reading glasses I've pushed up on top of my head. He sees all of it and doesn't comment.
"Sully send you the Whitfield financials?" he asks, taking the chair across from me.
I sit back down and open the container. The pot roast is perfect. Thick-cut vegetables, rich gravy, tender meat. Cade Marshall cooks like a man who believes food is medicine. "He did. It's damning."
"Damning enough to move on?"
"Almost. The shell companies need to be traced to their ultimate beneficiary.
If it's a competitor, we hand everything to the FBI and let them build the prosecution.
If it's something else..." I take a bite.
It's absurdly good, and I'm hungrier than I thought.
"If it's something else, we have a bigger problem. "
Hayes leans forward, forearms on the table. "Something else meaning what?"
"Meaning the break-in at my penthouse wasn't just intimidation.
It was a message to someone. Proof that they have access.
Proof of concept." I push the financials toward him.
"A corporate competitor stealing research data is expensive and illegal.
A hostile entity with physical access to a CEO is a leverage operation.
That's a different threat level entirely. "
He scans the documents. His reading pace is fast, and his eyes track the key data points without me having to highlight them. When he looks up, the easygoing charm is gone. The man looking at me now is the operator. Cold assessment, tactical mind, combat focus.
"You think someone's trying to force a sale," he says. "Destabilize the company, terrify the CEO, drive the stock down, and make an acquisition bid."
"It's a theory."
"It's a good theory." He sits back. "Have you told Warren?"
"Not yet. I want Sully to confirm the financial trail first. I don't move on theories."
"You move on data."
"Always."
He watches me eat. I let him, because the alternative is telling him to stop and I'm not confident I want him to. His gaze is warm in the cool cabin. Steady. The look of a man who is genuinely interested in what I'm thinking and not just waiting for his turn to talk.
Robert never looked at me like that. Robert looked at me with admiration, with desire, with competitive respect. But never with the quiet, focused attention of someone who simply wants to understand how my mind works.
"You're staring," I say.
"You're eating. I've been trying to get you to eat a full meal for two days. I'm savoring the victory."
"You've been trying. From forty yards away. With professional detachment."
"You wanted space. I gave you space."
"I didn't ask for space."
"You moved all your meetings to conflict with our sessions.
You started taking breakfast alone. You stopped making eye contact at dinner.
" He counts each one off without accusation.
Observation. Just observation. "You didn't ask for space with words.
You asked for it with behavior. I read behavior. "
The accuracy of it stings. Not because he's wrong, but because being read this precisely is a vulnerability I'm not accustomed to.
In twenty years of board meetings, negotiations, and surgical teams, I've been the one reading the room.
Having someone read me this clearly is like being opened on an operating table while still conscious.
"You're right," I say. "I was avoiding you."
"I know."
"It wasn't because of anything you did wrong."
"I know that too."
"It was because of what almost happened on the mountain."
"The almost-kiss." He says it plain. No drama, no weight. Just naming the thing I've been circling for two days.
"Yes."
"And you've been avoiding me because you wanted it to happen, and that scares you."
I set my fork down. "You're very confident for a man who's making assumptions about what I want."
"I'm confident because I was there. Because your pulse was hammering. Because you looked at my mouth three times before I touched you. And because you've been avoiding me ever since, which tells me the almost bothers you more than the actual would have."
My chest tightens. He's right. The almost is worse. The almost lives in the space where I can still pretend I wouldn't have kissed him back, and that pretense is getting thinner every day.
"Hayes. You're thirty-three years old."
"I'm aware."
"I'm forty."
"Also aware."
"I'm your client."
"I've reviewed the arrangement."
"This is a terrible idea."
"Probably."
"I don't do reckless. I don't do impulsive. I spent ten years cutting open human hearts, and the only reason those people survived is because I never once let emotion influence my hands."
"Your hands aren't holding a scalpel right now, Lex."
My name. He's never said it before. Not Lex. Always Ms. Morrison. But Lex drops from his mouth low and warm and certain, and my entire body responds to it. A flush climbing my throat. My fingers curling against the tabletop.
He stands. Pushes his chair back. Comes around the table.
I don't move. I sit there with pot roast and classified financials in front of me and watch a thirty-three-year-old man with hazel eyes and steady hands close the distance between us with the deliberate calm of someone who has done the math and accepted the risk.
He stops beside my chair. Looks down at me.
His hand comes up and brushes a strand of hair behind my ear.
The touch is light. Careful. His fingers trail down the line of my jaw, the same path he traced on the mountain, and this time there's no phone buzzing in his pocket.
No interruption. Just him, and me, and the weight of six days of watching and wanting and pretending we aren't.
"Tell me to stop," he says. Quiet. Direct. No games.
My hand comes up and wraps around his wrist. I can feel his pulse. Elevated. Strong. The pulse of a man who is not as calm as he looks.
"No," I say.
He tips my chin up and kisses me.