Chapter 7 #2
Then that mask slid back into place so smoothly I almost thought I’d imagined that flash of... whatever it had been. He sounded so sure of himself, I rolled my eyes before I could stop myself.
“Did you just roll your eyes at me?”
His tone had changed. Still controlled, but with a slightly gruff edge beneath it that sent a shiver down my spine. One I recognized from that night.
“What if I did?” I heard myself say, and oh God, this was dangerous. This was flirting, and I knew better than to tempt a man who could make me come undone with nothing but his voice.
“If we were back at the club,” he said, his tone dropping into something low and rough, “that would have earned you a spanking.”
Heat flooded my body so fast it left me dizzy. I pressed my thighs together, my mind imagining being bent over his lap, his palm connecting with my bare skin, the exquisite sting followed by the even more exquisite pleasure of his fingers sliding between my thighs…
I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel and a muscle in his jaw clenched. He felt it too, this impossible, inconvenient pull between us that refused to die no matter how many professional boundaries we tried to erect.
I forced a smirk, grasping for levity like a lifeline. “You’re quite full of yourself, aren’t you?”
“I call it confident.” But his voice was steadier now, the charged moment passing. We were both pulling back, retreating to safer ground.
I turned back toward the window, willing my heartbeat to slow. “For what it’s worth, I’m moving in with my parents to keep the peace. Not because I think it’s necessary when you could protect me anywhere. This is just their way of trying to control my life.”
“And why would they want to do that?”
I laughed—a short, humorless sound. “Because that’s who my parents are and what they’ve always tried to do.
The Hayward name comes with certain expectations.
.. at least for me, it does. Unlike Charlie, who gets to live his life freely while I’m dragged back home and locked up in my parents’ house like Rapunzel. ”
“Noted,” he replied. He slid a look my way, slow and deliberate, his eyes traveling over me in a way that felt almost like a physical caress. “I wouldn’t dream of locking you anywhere, Miss Hayward,” he drawled.
My breath hitched. My nipples tightened beneath my top, and a pulse of heat throbbed between my legs.
That voice. That tone. I heard the undercurrent in it, the echo of our night together when locks and restraints had carried a very different meaning.
When being bound had meant freedom, and submission had felt like the most powerful thing I’d ever done.
His eyes met mine for just a moment, dark and knowing, before returning to the road. Neither of us spoke for the rest of the drive.
A short while later the SUV pulled up outside my apartment building. Tate was out of the car and around to my door before I could reach for the handle. He opened it, offering me a hand that I didn’t take because touching him right now felt like playing with fire.
“This way,” I said, walking toward the entrance.
As we crossed the lobby inside, I couldn’t help notice how Tate moved.
His eyes swept the space in constant motion—checking corners, cataloging exits, assessing every person we passed.
His body was relaxed but coiled, ready to react in an instant.
He positioned himself slightly behind me and to my right, close enough to intervene but far enough to give me space.
It was subtle. Professional. And inexplicably, devastatingly hot.
I’d never thought of myself as someone who found the bodyguard thing attractive. It had always seemed like such a cliché. But watching Tate in his element, all controlled power and protective intensity made something flutter low in my belly.
He’s doing his job, I reminded myself as we stepped into the elevator. That’s all. But my body didn’t seem to care about semantics.
Arriving on the sixth floor, I led him to my place. As soon as we were inside, I realized my apartment felt different with him in it. Smaller, somehow. More intimate. Like his presence had shifted the very air, charging it with an electricity and awareness I couldn’t escape.
“I’ll wait here,” he said, positioning himself near the living room window where he could see both the door and the street below.
I nodded and escaped to my bedroom, grateful for the momentary reprieve.
Packing should have been simple. I’d done it dozens of times for trips, for weekends away, for the occasional overnight stay when my parents summoned me home for some function or another.
But my hands were shaking as I pulled clothes from my closet, and I kept losing track of what I was doing, my mind drifting back to the man standing in my living room.
I grabbed toiletries from my bathroom, threw in enough outfits for a week, and added my laptop and tablet. Then I made my way to my workroom.
This space was my sanctuary—a converted second bedroom filled with dress forms, fabric swatches, and sketching supplies.
My designs covered every available surface: evening gowns in various stages of completion, the Stella Original cocktail dress line I was working on, and my latest project—the menswear collection that had been consuming most of my creative thought process.
It was a departure from my usual work, a risk I’d been hesitant to take. But something about designing for men felt right in a way I couldn’t quite explain. The clean lines, the structured tailoring, how a well-made suit or dress shirt could transform the way a man moved through the world.
I was carefully packing the various pieces that I hadn’t yet sewn together when I felt him. I don’t know how I knew because he hadn’t made a sound, but suddenly the air behind me felt different, heavier, and when I turned, Tate was standing in the doorway, watching me.
His gaze traveled over the room slowly, taking in the organized chaos of my creative process. Then his eyes found mine, and the intensity in them made my stomach flip.
I thought about how I must look to him—surrounded by my work, my passion, the thing I’d built despite my parents’ dismissals. Did he see it? Did he understand what this meant to me?
Then I thought about the other way he’d looked at me, that night at the club.
How his eyes had devoured me as he’d slowly peeled away my clothes.
The way he’d watched me come apart under his hands, his mouth, his whispered commands.
My body remembered everything. Every nerve ending lit up, skin prickling with awareness, heat pooling low and insistent.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” The words were out before I could stop them.
He tipped his head curiously. “Ask you what?”
“Why I left that night, without saying goodbye,” I said, because if I were him, I’d want to know the answer to that.
I watched his expression carefully, but he gave nothing away. “Feeling the need to alleviate your guilty conscience?”
I hesitated, because he was right. I did feel guilty for leaving without an explanation. “Maybe.”
The silence stretched between us. Finally, he spoke. “I figured if you wanted me to know your reasons, you’d tell me.”
His tone was indifferent, but I heard what he wasn’t saying. That he’d wondered. That my disappearance had affected him more than he wanted to admit.
“It wasn’t you. It was... me. What we did that night,” I continued quickly, before I lost the nerve. “I liked it. A lot. More than I expected to. More than I probably should have.” I took a breath, steadying myself. “But it was supposed to be just one night of rebellion.”
“Rebellion against what?”
“Against... everything.” I gestured vaguely, encompassing not just this room but my whole life.
“You’ve met my parents. You’ve seen how they are.
I’ve spent my entire life being good, Tate.
Following the rules, meeting expectations, being the perfect Hayward daughter.
I went to the right schools, made the right friends, attended all the galas that were important to my parents with a practiced smile.
I’ve never done anything reckless or spontaneous or just for me. ”
I turned back to my designs, running my fingers over the sketches I’d labored over for weeks.
“That night at the club... I just wanted to know what it felt like to let go. To stop being so goddamn careful all the time.” I looked at him over my shoulder.
“One night where I could be someone else. Someone free of all constraints and expectations.”
Something flickered in his expression. Acknowledgement, maybe, or understanding. “And was it? What you wanted?”
It was so much more, I wanted to say. It was everything.
You made me feel things I didn’t know I was capable of feeling and I’ve thought about you every single day since.
And having you alone in my apartment right now is making me want to throw every professional boundary out the window and beg you to touch me again.
But I couldn’t say any of that.
“It was one night,” I said instead. “It was supposed to stay one night. Being with you was everything I wanted, and I panicked, and I ran.” I shrugged, trying for casual and probably failing.
He was quiet for a long moment, studying me in a way that made me feel utterly exposed. “For what it’s worth,” he finally said, “I’m not sorry it happened.”
My heart stuttered. “You’re not?”
“No.” His voice was low and rough. “But I am sorry it’s complicated now.”
Complicated. Such a small word for the impossible tangle we’d found ourselves in. “Me too,” I whispered.
We stood there in my workroom, the air thick with everything we couldn’t say, everything we couldn’t do. The professional distance we were supposed to maintain felt paper-thin, ready to tear at the slightest provocation.
Then Tate cleared his throat and took a deliberate step back. “We should go,” he said, his voice neutral once again. “Your parents will be expecting you back soon.”
I sighed. Right. My parents. My childhood bedroom. My gilded cage. I gathered the last of my sketches and packed them carefully into my portfolio case.
“I’m ready,” I said, even though I wasn’t. Not really.
But as I walked past him out of the room, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body, I knew one thing for certain. Whatever this was between us—this impossible, inconvenient, utterly consuming attraction—it wasn’t going away.
And I had a feeling that sooner or later, one of us was going to break.