Chapter 10 Charlie
CHARLIE
Iwoke up with his mouth still on mine.
Not literally. But my body hadn’t gotten the memo. My lips felt swollen, my skin still hummed where his hands had been, and when I opened my eyes to the pale San Diego light filtering through my apartment blinds, I was so disoriented it took me a full three seconds to remember that I was alone.
The emerald dress was draped over the chair by the window where I’d left it last night. The diamond earrings sat on the nightstand in their velvet box. Borrowed things, returned to their temporary resting place. Evidence of a night I needed to forget.
Except I couldn’t forget his hands in my hair. The groan he’d made against my lips.
What kind of man stops?
The kind who’d lied to you at a bar, I reminded myself. The kind who’d bought your company. The kind who controls everything around him and calls it protection.
But that wasn’t fair, and I knew it. Even while I’d been kissing him back with everything I had, some part of me had been cataloging the evidence against my own argument.
He hadn’t pushed. He’d stopped. He’d handed me into a car with a look on his face like I’d taken something from him he couldn’t get back.
My phone was full of texts from Mia. I’d answered the basics last night—survived, emerald dress, intense, can’t tonight—and then turned it off before she could dig deeper. Now there were six more messages waiting, escalating in both curiosity and concern.
I ignored them all and got in the shower. I had a plan. The plan was: go to work, be professional, tell Asher Pierce that last night was a mistake, and then spend the next however many months pretending I didn’t know what his mouth tasted like.
It was a good plan. It was a terrible plan. It was the only plan I had.
He was in his office by the time I got to the facility.
Of course he was. The man probably hadn’t slept either, though he looked like he had—sharp white shirt, sleeves rolled, jaw freshly shaved.
The only tell was his eyes. They tracked me the moment I appeared in the hallway, and for one unguarded second I saw everything he was feeling laid bare.
Then the mask came down. Professional. Controlled. Waiting.
I knocked on the open door. “Do you have a minute?”
“Of course.” He set down his pen. Didn’t stand. Didn’t gesture to the chair. Just watched me with those impossible blue eyes and waited for whatever I was about to do to both of us.
I closed the door. That was my first mistake. Closing the door made it private. Private made it real.
“Last night,” I began.
“Charlie—”
“Please let me finish.” My voice was steady.
I’d practiced this in the shower, in the car, in the elevator.
I had the words in the right order. “What happened last night was . . . it can’t happen again.
You’re the CEO of the company that owns my project.
I’m the lead engineer on the most important technology in your portfolio. The power dynamics alone make this—”
“A mistake?” he said quietly.
The word hit the air between us and just hung there. A mistake. Three syllables that reduced the most honest thing I’d felt in years to an error in judgment.
“Yes,” I said. “A mistake.”
Something moved across his face. Not anger—I could have handled anger.
This was worse. A flash of something raw and undefended, there and gone so fast that anyone who wasn’t watching carefully would have missed it.
But I was watching carefully. I’d been watching this man carefully since the night he’d pinned a stranger’s wrist to a bar and told me to walk away from a drink I didn’t know was poisoned.
He controlled it. Folded it away behind the CEO mask with a precision that was almost surgical.
“If that’s how you feel,” he said. His voice was even. Professional. Exactly what I’d asked for.
I wanted to scream.
“It is,” I said instead. “SEAS is too important. For both of us.”
“You’re right.” He picked up his pen again. A dismissal disguised as agreement. “It won’t happen again.”
I stood there for a beat too long. Waiting for him to fight me on it. Waiting for him to say the thing I couldn’t say—that it hadn’t been a mistake, that we both knew it, that the real mistake was pretending otherwise.
He didn’t. He just went back to his papers.
I walked out of his office on steady legs and made it all the way to the stairwell before I leaned against the cold concrete wall and pressed both hands over my mouth.
It wasn’t a mistake. I knew it wasn’t a mistake. The way he’d kissed me—like I was something he’d been looking for without knowing he was searching—that wasn’t a mistake. That was the truest thing that had happened to me in ten years of keeping my head down and my heart locked up.
But the truth was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Not with SEAS on the line. Not with everything I’d built hanging in the balance between what I wanted and what was smart.
I wiped my eyes, straightened my blouse, and went back to the lab.
For the rest of the day, I buried myself in the sensor calibration data. Numbers didn’t lie and they didn’t kiss you in dark rooms. Numbers were safe. I ran the pressure tolerance simulations three times, adjusted the frequency parameters, documented every variance.
At lunch, Jason brought me a sandwich I hadn’t asked for. “You look like you haven’t eaten,” he said.
“I ate.”
“When?”
I couldn’t remember. He set the sandwich on my desk and left without pushing. Good man, Jason. He never pushed.
Through the glass wall of the lab, I could see his office.
The office he really used. His third floor CEO office was often empty these days – because he’d chosen to camp in a smaller office meant for an engineer, one on the same floor as my lab.
His light was on. It was always on. Twice I caught myself looking up without meaning to, and twice his chair was empty—he was somewhere else in the building, doing whatever CEOs did when they weren’t being told by their lead engineer that the best kiss of her life was a professional liability.
The third time I looked, he was there. And he was looking back.
We held each other’s gaze for exactly one heartbeat. Then I turned to my screen and he turned to his phone and we both went on pretending that the six floors between us were enough distance.
They weren’t.
That evening, I found a note tucked under the windshield wiper of the SUV.
No envelope. No letterhead. Just a folded piece of paper with two lines in neat, anonymous print:
Your research belongs to the people who funded it. Don’t forget where your loyalty lies.
I stood in the parking garage under the fluorescent lights, holding the note with fingers that had gone cold.
The concrete walls amplified every sound—the distant hum of the ventilation system, the echo of my own breathing, the click of my heels when I’d walked to the car feeling like a normal person having a normal day.
Someone had been here. Someone had touched my car. Someone knew where I parked and wanted me to know they knew.
I should tell Asher. The thought came automatically, and I hated that it did—hated that my first instinct was to go to him, to hand this problem to the man I’d just told to keep his distance.
Instead I photographed the note, shoved it in my purse and drove home checking my rearview mirror every thirty seconds.
The email arrived the next morning, as if choreographed.
Charlotte,
I hope the transition continues to serve you well.
I wanted to reach out personally to remind you that the original SEAS development records—including all preliminary prototypes and early testing logs—were produced under HydroCore’s independent research charter.
Any concerns about documentation access should be directed to me, not to outside parties whose interests may not align with your own.
I trust you’ll handle this with the discretion I’ve always admired in you.
Warmly, Richard
Warmly. The word made my skin crawl. And Charlotte, always Charlotte, wielded like a leash he refused to drop.
I read the email three times. The first time with rising anger.
The second time with the analytical eye of someone who’d spent ten years learning to decode Richard’s subtext.
The third time with a cold understanding of what he was actually saying: I know you found those memos.
I know you gave them to Pierce. And I’m reminding you who had your career in his hands for a decade.
The note on my car. The email. Both in twenty-four hours. Coincidence was not a word that applied to Richard Sterling.
I started composing a reply and stopped. Deleted it. Stared at the cursor.
Charlotte.
In the simulation chamber, Asher had whispered Charlie against my mouth like it was the only word he knew. Like my name—my real name, the one I’d chosen for myself—was something precious that deserved to be said carefully.
Richard had never once asked which I preferred. In ten years.
Asher had never once used anything else. From the very first night.
I closed the email without responding and forwarded it to Pierce Construction’s legal team with a single line: For your records.
The announcement came at Thursday’s status meeting.
“We’re moving field testing to Roatan,” Asher said, addressing the room with the same controlled authority he brought to everything. “The Gulf facility won’t be ready in time, and the acoustic deterrent anomalies need real-world conditions. We leave Monday.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it. Hadn’t looked at me once since the morning I’d called us a mistake.
In meetings, his focus went to Jason, to Priya, to Mike.
When he addressed me directly, it was Ms. Winters again, delivered with a formality so precise it felt like a wall built one brick at a time.
I should have been relieved. This was exactly what I’d asked for.
It was unbearable.
“Essential personnel only,” he continued. “Charlie—” He caught himself. The briefest pause. “Ms. Winters, Jason, minimal support staff. Forty-eight hours to prepare equipment and briefing materials.”
The slip—Charlie to Ms. Winters, corrected mid-sentence—landed in my chest like a bruise. He was trying so hard to give me what I’d demanded. It was killing both of us.
“The property has direct deep-water access and lab space,” Mike added, filling the pause that Asher’s correction had left. “Security will be tighter there as well. Given recent . . . concerns.”
His eyes flicked to me. He knew about the note. Of course he did. Mike knew everything, the same way he’d known about the company car, the same way he’d looked at me in the break room like he was handing me something fragile.
Roatan. Asher’s private island. His house. The place Mike had mentioned once, in passing, as somewhere Asher rarely visited anymore. I didn’t know why. I only knew that the man who controlled every variable in his universe had a place he avoided, and now he was taking me there.
Forced proximity. Tighter quarters. No conference rooms to retreat to, no parking garages to stand in while I fell apart. Just the ocean, the work, and a man I’d kissed in a blue-lit room and then told it meant nothing.
I nodded professionally. “I’ll have the equipment prepped and briefing materials ready by Saturday.”
He nodded back. We didn’t make eye contact.
Monday. Three p.m. The Gulfstream waited on the tarmac, white and gleaming in the afternoon sun.
Jason was practically vibrating with excitement beside me as we crossed the airfield. “Is this real? Are we actually getting on a private jet?”
“It’s transportation,” I said, echoing words I hadn’t heard Asher say but somehow knew he would have.
He was already aboard. Of course he was. Seated in the main cabin, jacket off, reviewing documents, a glass of water untouched on the table beside him. He looked up when I stepped through the door and our eyes met for the first time in four days.
Four days of Ms. Winters. Four days of professional distance so carefully maintained it felt like a performance. Four days of me getting exactly what I’d asked for and wanting to set it all on fire.
“Right on time,” he said.
“Punctuality is a virtue.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
The interior was obscene—leather, polished wood, screens, a conference area in the back. I chose a seat across from him because it was the logical configuration and absolutely not because it was the closest I’d been to him since the morning I’d wrecked everything.
Jason dropped into a seat across the aisle, already pulling out his laptop. “This is amazing,” he said to no one in particular.
The engines hummed to life. I pulled a technical report from my bag and opened it on my lap. Page one. Acoustic deterrent frequency analysis. Words I’d read six times already.
I stared at the same paragraph for twenty minutes.
The problem wasn’t the report. The problem was that Asher was six feet away, and I could smell his cologne—something clean and warm that I’d first noticed at the bar and then again in the simulation chamber when his mouth had been on my neck—and his hands were resting on the table as he read, and I knew exactly what those hands felt like threaded through my hair.
He turned a page. I watched his fingers. Then I hated myself and looked out the window.
The Pacific was falling away beneath us, all that blue stretching to the horizon, and his reflection was ghosted in the glass. I could see him without looking at him. Could trace the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he held his pen like it owed him something.
He glanced up. Our reflections met in the window. I didn’t look away fast enough, and neither did he.
Then he went back to his documents. And I went back to pretending to read a report I’d memorized three days ago.
Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, Jason fell asleep.
The cabin was quiet except for the engine hum and the occasional rustle of paper.
Asher hadn’t spoken to me since takeoff.
I hadn’t spoken to him. The silence between us was so loud it had a texture—heavy, charged, full of everything we weren’t saying.
I turned another page I hadn’t read and thought about his hands.
Outside the window, the sky was turning gold and pink above the clouds, the kind of sunset that would look beautiful from a beach in Honduras.
From his beach. Where I’d be sleeping under his roof, working in his space, breathing air that smelled like whatever he smelled like when he wasn’t wearing a suit.
I’d told him it was a mistake. I’d told him it wouldn’t happen again. And now I was on his plane, heading to his island, sitting six feet from a man whose hands I couldn’t stop thinking about, pretending to read a report about acoustic frequencies when the only frequency I was tuned to was his.
It was going to be a very long two weeks.