2. Dominic
Dominic
Jenna Pemberton’s control lives in the tiny things: the pause before she blinks, the precise angle of everything on her desk, the way she sets down a pen when she’d clearly prefer to snap it in half and use the pieces as weapons.
Her voice, her spine, the clean line of her mouth when she’s decided someone is too stupid to continue existing without supervision—those are merely the parts everyone notices.
Right now, she keeps that pen in hand, looks up at me with cool, dark eyes and says, “What do we need to talk about?”
There are several answers to that.
We need to talk about the terrace.
We need to talk about your mouth.
We need to talk about the fact that I spent twelve hours forcing myself not to show up at your apartment and have received no medal, parade, or applause for said restraint.
Instead, I lift the folder in my hand.
“Nakamura.”
Something moves across her face before she locks it down. Disappointment, maybe. Irritation. Hard to tell with Jenna. The woman can make a spreadsheet look emotionally available by comparison.
“Of course,” she says, and looks back at the contract.
I’ve been doing this dance with her for three years. Standing in doorways. Offering drinks. Letting her cut me down in public because at least when she’s using the knife, she’s looking at me. I hid what I wanted inside the joke so well that she still thinks the joke was the point.
The problem, naturally, is that I never changed the packaging.
I kept the grin. The flirting. The Pemberton in the low tone she pretends to hate.
From her side of the room, I probably still look like the same arrogant bastard who called her Bennett’s ice-queen assistant and announced that working with her should be fun.
Not my finest moment.
Also, not inaccurate enough to be defensible.
I move into the seat across from her and set the folder on the table between us. “Our Tokyo counsel says Nakamura wants us tired.”
“Strategic fatigue,” she says immediately.
“Yes.”
“Long meetings. Courtesy dinners. Translation questions that aren’t translation questions. Three rounds of revisions designed to make everyone so bored they concede out of self-defense.”
“That’s depressingly close to Hiro’s exact wording.”
“Then Hiro is competent.”
“He’ll be delighted to hear you approve.”
“I don’t approve. I acknowledge.”
“Praise, from you.”
“Don’t let it go to your head. There’s very little room left up there.”
I smile before I can help it. That’s the thing about Jenna. Even furious, even guarded, even when every word she says is designed to keep me at a clean professional distance, she still slides in under my ribs with ridiculous ease.
She opens the briefing folder and scans the first page. The cabin light catches on the neat fall of her hair, on the smooth line of her cheek, on the red polish covering nails that I desperately want raking down my back.
I should not be thinking about her nails.
Unfortunately, my brain has become a lawless jurisdiction where she’s concerned.
“What’s the ask?”
It takes me a moment to focus enough so I don’t blurt something obscene. “Twelve additional percentage points.”
Her eyes lift. “That’s not an ask. That’s a mugging.”
“It is aggressive.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Stupid?”
“Not the move. The number. They don’t expect twelve.
They want to see how panicked we are.” She turns the page, already working.
The shift is immediate and, God help me, beautiful.
Jenna in motion is a dangerous thing. She can hate me all she likes, but put a problem in front of her and every defense sharpens into purpose.
“Do they know about the South Korea exposure?”
“Not fully. Enough to smell blood.”
“Then we don’t bleed.” She taps the valuation schedule with the end of her pen. “You don’t counter at six.”
“Bennett authorized six.”
“Bennett just got married. His judgment is impaired by romantic optimism and endless sex.”
“That is a sentence I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to forget.”
“Good. Forget six while you’re at it.”
I lean back, watching her, willing my dick not to react. “What’s your number?”
“Four.”
“They’ll laugh.”
“They can laugh in a different currency. Four is the first counter. Five if they give us timeline certainty inside forty-eight hours. Six only if they agree to the secondary supply audit, lock the distribution calendar, and leave governance untouched.”
I stare at her for a moment.
“What?”
“You’re gloriously terrifying.”
“I know.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“I know that too.”
The edge of her mouth softens faintly. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a smile, but close enough to make my whole body feel like I just won a point in this ridiculous will-they/won’t-they game we can’t seem to get out of.
I pick up the folder and look at the page she’s marked, mostly so I have something to do besides stare at her. “You’re hiding three concessions inside the price.”
“Yes.”
“That’s vicious.”
“That’s contracts.”
I slide the folder back to her. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”
Her pen stills. “What?”
“Waiting you out. Wearing you down until you concede.”
“We’re talking about Nakamura.”
“I’m not.”
“Dominic.”
“Answer the question, Jenna.”
She sighs. “I think men like you are accustomed to wanting something and getting it,” she says, turning another page more aggressively than necessary.
“Men like me.”
“Don’t sound wounded. You know what you are.”
“I know what people think I am.”
That makes her look at me.
Good.
Then I ruin the moment by wanting too much from it.
Her gaze drops first. And I know better than to assume it’s from weakness—Jenna doesn’t do weakness.
What she does is decide, in the space of a breath, that I don’t get to see whatever just moved across her face.
It is, frankly, one of the more maddening things about being in love with a woman who treats her own interiority like a classified document.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said last night,” she says suddenly, the subject change so swift and unexpected that my brain doesn’t process it properly.
“Come again?”
“Don’t make me spell it out, Dominic.” She keeps her attention on the papers. “You know exactly what I’m referring to.”
“I don’t know, Pemberton.” I lean back slightly, watching the heat climb up her neck and loving every second of it. “A lot of things were said last night. If you’re going to apologize, you’re going to need to be—”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I said something regrettable. I’m acknowledging it for the record so we can both move on.”
I stare at her. “OK. Just so we’re clear—you don’t regret kissing me? Or you just regret saying that part out loud?”
Her mouth presses into a thin line. “I regret the entire evening,” she says. “As you pointed out, I’d had too much champagne. I was embarrassed. My judgment wasn’t where I’d want it to be. So, yes. You were right to reject my advances.”
It should feel good, hearing her say that. It doesn’t. It feels like watching someone take one of the greatest moments of my adult life and try to explain it away in contract terms.
“I wasn’t rejecting you,” I say.
Her eyes flick up. “I’m not interested in relitigating the point, Dominic. The moment has passed. You made the right decision.”
There it is again. The thing under the anger. The part she hides so well most people would miss it. I don’t. I’ve been studying Jenna Pemberton too long to miss the tiny crack beneath the polish.
I lean across the table. “I didn’t stop because I didn’t want you, Jenna. I stopped because I did.”
She looks away, but not before I see the hit land.
“If I’d taken you upstairs, you would have woken up this morning with champagne still in your bloodstream and enough room to convince yourself I’d used one reckless moment to get what I wanted.”
Her jaw flexes.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.”
That gets her eyes back on me, cool and dangerous. “You know a version of me.”
“Yes,” I say. “But I’d kill to see the version you don’t share.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it, like she’s about to admit something only to shred it on the way out. “If you’re angling for a confession, it’s not happening at thirty thousand feet.”
I smile, slow. “No need for a confession. I already know what you wanted on that terrace. Now I’m waiting to see what you want with a clear mind.”
She flushes, which I file away for private viewing later.
The attendant appears, hovering with lunch options and a look that suggests someone should be making an HR-safe attempt at normalcy. Jenna takes the tray, opens the little container, and begins eating like it’s a negotiation and the cheese has just insulted her personally.
We work in silence for a while. She reads, annotates, makes notes for me to review, sometimes flipping a page with just enough ferocity to make it sound like a dare.
I respond in kind, marking up one of the clauses in a way that’s borderline aggressive, and Jenna, not to be outdone, circles a figure in red and underlines it so decisively the paper nearly crumples.
I’m not sure if we’re collaborating or dueling, but either way, it might be the most erotic working lunch I’ve ever had.
I watch her for a beat, then signal for the attendant to bring us drinks. She sets another whiskey in front of me and offers Jenna sparkling water or wine. Jenna takes the wine.
“To relentless efficiency,” I say, lifting my glass as soon as we’re alone again.
She eyes me, then lifts her own glass. “To strategic fatigue.”
We drink.
If Nakamura wants us tired.
They have badly miscalculated Jenna Pemberton.