Chapter 4
Tess
A week should be enough to get used to Dylan Shaw.
It isn't.
On my first day, just after the interview ended, he'd looked up as I gathered my things. "Miss Ramirez."
I'd paused with my hand on the chair.
"I believe we've met before."
"Yes. We’ve talked at the animal sanctuary fundraiser."
"Yes." His brow furrowed slightly. "That too."
Too?
He kept studying me, not in the assessing way he'd watched me throughout the interview, but as though he were trying to fit together two pieces that refused to line up. "I know I’ve seen you before."
Silence stretched between us.
His eyes went comically wide. "Club Indigo." The words landed like a pebble dropped into still water.
Heat crept into my cheeks before I could stop it.
His next question had caught me completely off guard. "Are you a Domme?"
"I was."
“Was?” He’d regarded me for a moment. "May I ask why?"
"It paid my tuition," I explained. "My apartment, groceries, textbooks... every stupid college expense that kept stacking up no matter how carefully I budgeted."
He didn't interrupt, so I’d continued.
"I enjoyed the club. Honestly, I did. There was satisfaction in the control of it, in reading people correctly, in guiding someone through a scene so thoroughly they left lighter than when they arrived.
But no matter how intense a night became, no matter how deeply someone submitted to me or how completely I slipped into the role expected of me, it always stopped at the surface of my actual life.
I could leave it behind when the night ended, lock it away alongside my heels and lipstick, and become Tess again without anything lingering beneath my skin afterward. "
That had been the end of it. He'd simply thanked me for coming and moved on to discussing my start date as though he hadn't just recognized his future executive assistant from an exclusive BDSM club.
I almost wish he'd reacted differently.
Embarrassment I know how to handle. Curiosity I could have deflected. Even disapproval would have been easier than the quiet professionalism he'd shown me. Instead, he'd treated Club Indigo as just another fact about my past, filed away with my degree and employment history.
Unfortunately, I haven't been nearly as good at doing the same.
Dylan Shaw is still gruff, impatient, and occasionally rude.
He barks instructions without looking up from whatever demands his attention.
He expects people to keep up. When they don't, he makes his disappointment painfully clear.
He is capable of reducing a grown man to nervous silence with a single look.
Half the office braces whenever he steps out of his office, and the other half scrambles to look busy whether they need to or not.
A week of working for him has taught me that the confidence isn't an act.
Neither is the reputation. Dylan walks through problems the way most people walk through open doors, already three steps ahead and impatient with anyone moving slower.
The combination of competence and confidence ought to be irritating.
Somehow it isn't.
Which is unfortunate.
Because somewhere between my first day and now, I've started noticing things I'd rather not notice.
The deep voice that carries through the office without ever needing to rise.
The sharpness of his jaw that should make him look cold and unapproachable, but somehow only makes him harder to ignore.
The way people straighten when he enters a room.
The way my attention follows him when he moves through the office, even when I have absolutely no reason to be looking.
It's ridiculous.
More ridiculous is the fact that I no longer roll my eyes at the steady stream of women Jeremy warned me about.
I understand them now.
Not because Dylan flirts. He doesn't.
Not because he's charming. Most days, he's one missed deadline away from biting someone's head off.
But because every now and then he says something in that rough voice of his, or fixes a problem nobody else saw coming, and for a second I stop seeing my grumpy boss.
I see a man.
That realization sits somewhere low in my stomach, unwelcome and impossible to ignore.
And that is a problem.
Dylan
The week settles into something that finally works.
I notice it in the way I reach for things and find them where they should be, in the way my mornings stop beginning with someone else’s mistakes waiting for me to clean them up.
Files stay where I left them. My calendar reflects the day I intended to have, rather than the one I usually end up salvaging halfway through.
I stand at the edge of my desk and watch her through the glass without meaning to.
She’s on the phone, one hand resting beside the keyboard while she listens.
When she answers, her voice stays calm beneath the pressure coming through the receiver.
Whoever’s on the other end tries pushing harder.
I can tell from the slight pause that follows, the kind meant to force concessions out of people who rush to fill silence.
Tess doesn’t rush anything.
She waits them out, answers in the same even tone, and thirty seconds later, the conversation ends without the problem ever making it to my office.
A week ago, that call would have landed on my desk.
Now it doesn’t.
I look back toward the monitor, forcing my attention onto numbers and deadlines while she answers the phone, clamps the devices between her shoulder and ear while entering something into the computer.
No glance toward my office. No need for acknowledgment.
Just quiet competence settling through the room with the same steady control I remember from Club Indigo.
She makes a note without glancing toward my office and moves straight into the next task. No pause. No check to see if I noticed.
I push away from the desk and sit, the leather of the chair giving slightly under my weight. The file in front of me is open, but I haven’t turned the page in a while. My hand rests on it anyway, thumb catching the corner and bending it just enough to feel the resistance before I flatten it again.
This is what I hired her for.
That’s all this is.
A knock sounds against the doorframe, close enough to pull my focus up immediately.
She’s already stepping inside when I look up, the file in her hand angled toward me.
“You wanted to review the Anderson shipment?”
The question is delivered professionally. Nothing about it should catch my attention.
It does anyway. For one brief, unwanted second, I understand exactly why men followed her lead.
I nod and motion her in. “Close the door.”
The words come out before I think about them.
She turns, her palm settling on the handle before she pushes it shut behind her.
The click lands softer than I expect, but it still changes something in the room.
The space feels more contained, the distance between us reduced to what sits across the desk instead of what stretches beyond it.
She crosses toward me without hesitation, the fabric of her professional dress shifting quietly with each step, controlled and unhurried in a way that doesn’t ask for attention and still holds it.
She sets the file down within reach and opens it, angling the pages toward me as she starts explaining what she changed.
Her voice stays level, measured, giving me exactly what I need without excess.
I follow the structure at first, track the way she’s separated the suppliers and linked them back to the schedule, and I recognize the logic immediately.
It fits the way I work. It removes friction instead of forcing me to adjust to it.
I should stay with that.
Instead, my attention drifts the moment she shifts her weight slightly forward, bracing her hand against the desk as she turns a page.
The movement is small, practical, the kind that shouldn’t register beyond function, but it pulls my focus anyway.
Her shoulders roll back for a fraction of a second, as if she’s easing a tight muscle, and the line of her body changes just enough to catch my eye before she gets back her composure.
The reaction hits before I can stop it, low and immediate, tightening through me. My grip firms against the arm of the chair, the leather pressing into my palm as I shift back a fraction, forcing space between what I’m seeing and what my body does with it.
I drag my attention back to the file and close it, setting it aside before I can keep pretending I’m still following the details. My fingers linger on the edge for a moment, grounding myself in something solid while I pull everything else back into place.
“You’ve taken pressure off every part of this operation.” The compliment slips out before I can reconsider it. I don't usually waste time handing out praise.
Her gaze lifts to mine without delay, steady and unchanged. “That was the point.”
She doesn’t soften it. Doesn’t dress it up. She says it like the outcome was obvious from the start, like there was never a version of this where she didn’t deliver exactly what was needed.
Something shifts in my chest at that, not sharp enough to name, but there all the same. She isn’t looking for approval. She isn’t performing. She did the job and expects the result to stand on its own.
The air feels different than it did a minute ago. Warmer, closer, like the space has narrowed without either of us moving.
“You’re settling in faster than I expected.”
“I don’t like inefficiency.”
My gaze drops again before I catch it, pulled back to her mouth in a way that doesn’t feel like a choice.
It happens fast, the shift in focus followed immediately by the response in my body, heat tightening low, sharper now because it’s not unfamiliar anymore.
I feel it sink into my core, persistent enough that ignoring it takes effort, and I straighten slightly, pressing my fingers into the desk as I force my attention back where it belongs.