Page 13 of Dial F for Finance

And I punished him for it because I was embarrassed. Ashamed.

Because what happens after he’s finally had me? Men like Dominic can be sincere one moment and lose interest once the challenge is gone. And this man has been chasing me for a long time. Surely that lengthy buildup will lead to disappointment on his part. He’d see I’m merely a human with cellulite and deep-seated attachment issues, and then what? I’m the one who gets hurt?

No, thanks.

I don’t think any woman on this earth could live up to the version of me Dominic has built up in his head. Least of all me.

So this is fine.

The game is over. He got close enough to taste the win, I made the entire experience deeply unpleasant, and now he’ll lose interest.

Perfect.

I set my pen down very carefully, which is the sort of thing one does when one is trying not to throw it at a pressurized wall.

The cabin hums with that eerie, overengineered quiet unique to obscene wealth. We are thirty-some thousand feet above basic commercial inconvenience, and apparently also above the possibility of behaving like a normal person.

I pick the pen back up.

I underline a clause so hard I nearly cut the paper.

This is excellent.

I spend the next eighteen minutes proving that a person can, in fact, ignore their constant awareness of the man in the back of the private jet and review a cross-border manufacturing agreement.

The Nakamura deal was supposed to be the clean solution. Asia-Pacific manufacturing, Japanese regulatory access, distribution muscle, all wrapped into one elegant partnership that would keep NeuraTech from becoming the world’s most expensive medical device no one could actually get into hospitals. If Nakamura walks, Bennett bleeds capital, Layla inherits a supply-chain war, Audrey’s device stalls, and Dominic becomes insufferable in at least three languages.

So I make margin notes. I flag three liability issues. I rework a sequence in case Nakamura tries to reopen the equity trigger after signing. I am a machine.

A very efficient, deeply irritated machine sitting inside a giant puddle of Dominic-sized regret.

I’m about to drop my head on the back of the chair and groan—fuck my life—when the office door opens.

I don’t look up.

Don’t you dare look up, Jenna.

“Pemberton,” Dominic says.

My pen stops moving.

My nipples go hard.

God help me.

“Mr. Cruz,” I say, because I’m apparently choosing violence at altitude.

A pause. Then he speaks, low and rough enough to ruin several perfectly good organs.

“We need to talk.”

CHAPTER 2

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?”