Page 63 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I did not lose track of myself. I knew exactly what I was doing in every second of it. I knew the corridor had no camera I had not already clocked. I knew the angle of the blind corner before I walked her into it. I knew, the way I knew the exits of every room I had ever stood in, that following a woman who did not know what I was into an empty corridor was the single most undisciplined thing I had done in a decade.

I did it anyway.

And then she closed the inch between us.

She had kissed me.

I left her the choice because leaving her the choice was the only honest thing I had to offer a woman I was lying to about everything else, and she looked at me with all that suspicion still burning behind her eyes and chose me anyway.

I felt her decide. I felt the exact moment the calculation stopped and the wanting won. I felt the exact moment she’d moaned into my shoulder, and my cock had hardened like a steel pike.

Mine.

The word arrived without permission and would not leave.

I straightened her collar afterward because I needed something to do with my hands, so I didn’t spin her around, drag her pants and panties down, sink my cock in her wet little pussy, and fuck her the way she needed to be fucked. She walked out and I let her. I stood in that corridor and listened to her stride change, faster now, too busy thinking, and I understood with total clarity that I had just made my own work immeasurably harder.

A controlled man does not follow.

I had followed.

I had built my life on knowing better, and she had walked into a women’s restroom and proven, in under four minutes, that I did not know better at all.

And I wanted to do it all over again.

After a long moment, I left the restroom. I had stepped into a side corridor when Mara Chen found me.

“You look awful,” she said.

I turned to see Mara standing with a coffee in one hand and a folder tucked under her arm. Her expression suggested she had known at least three terrible men in her life and was currently ranking me among them.

“Thank you,” I said. “I was worried the lighting was too flattering.”

“Don’t be cute. It’s unsettling from you.”

“I am widely considered charming.”

“By whom?”

“My brothers, when they want something.”

“That explains the delusion.”

I glanced back toward the hall, though Kit was long gone, and Mara saw me look. I sighed. Intelligent women were inconvenient sometimes. She walked away, leaving me with the hallway, the conference noise, and the knowledge that she was right in at least two ways.

Kit deserved the truth, but I was not ready to give it. Not all of it, at least not yet. Not while Mikhail’s people still circled. Not while my own name had only just entered her life as something other than a ghost. Not while she might still bolt before I could close the distance between danger and protection, so I did what I had done from the beginning.

I controlled the available paths.

The next opportunity came near the end of the day. Kit avoided the closing reception. I had known she would. Receptions were where professional dignity went to die in plastic cups of wine and networking conversations. She exited through the side hall near the waterfront entrance, laptop bag on one shoulder, hair still pinned up, though more strands had escaped throughout the day. She looked tired, but not weak. Kit never looked weak. But there was a thin line of exhaustion at the edge of her mouth and a faint crease between her brows that made my hand twitch again.

She needed sleep.

Food.

A locked door.

My hand on her bare ass if she argued with the first two.