Page 47 of Dial F for Finance

I press the button on the underside of my desk. The lock on the office door engages with a soft, expensive click.

She spins toward the sound, then back to me. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Exactly what you want me to do.” I get up, come around the desk, unhurried, watching her hold her ground because retreating would mean admitting I affect her. Even now, her chin stays up while her breath goes shallow. “I’ve obviously given you too much space this week. This little legal offensive—walking into my office with paperwork instead of admitting you miss seeing me—is proving it.”

“It’s not an offensive, it’s a legal remedy. And I do not miss⁠—”

My hands come up and cup her face, both sides, thumbs resting along that lethal jaw, and the rest of her sentence dies somewhere in the four inches between us. Her hazel eyes go wide, then dark, and her pulse jumps under my fingertips like it’s filing an objection her body has already overruled.

“It’s OK, sweetheart,” I whisper. “I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Then I kiss her.

She makes a small, furious sound against my mouth—a whimper wearing a disguise—and for one full second she holds out, rigid, hands flat against my chest like she might push. She doesn’t push. She melts, the way she always melts, all that beautiful architecture going soft at once, until she’s up on tiptoe, crashing into me like we didn’t just negotiate this down to rubble days ago.

All of her intensity, her rigor, her resistance—it’s focused on the way she bites my lower lip and pulls, the way her hands fist in my jacket because she can’t find enough of me to hold on to.

“God, I hate you,” she says.

“I know,” I answer, because I do. And I love it, love that she has to say it, love that it lashes out from between her teeth, love the way she forgets herself in the next second and moans into my mouth. She shoves once at my chest. Then her fist closes in my jacket and she pulls me back. The skin at her neck is flushed, and when I run my thumb down her jaw and wrap my fingers around her throat, she presses into me with a shudder.

“Fuck you,” she whispers.

I keep kissing her, knowing exactly what I am to her right now—the thing she can’t resist and can’t forgive herself for wanting. I intend to remain both until she figures out they were never in conflict.

I end the kiss slow, drawing it out until her eyes take a beat too long to open.

“Feel better?” I murmur.

She blinks, comes back online, and I watch the fury reboot in real time. Before it can reach operational capacity, I turn her gently by the shoulders, walk her two steps toward the door, and give her ass a soft, affectionate pat.

“Go back downstairs to Mercer, sweetheart. I’ll come get you when it’s time to go home.”

She rounds on me. “What? No. I just gave you the legal paperwork that⁠—”

I press one finger to her lips.

She keeps talking anyway. It comes out as a string of muffled, garbled consonants against my fingertip, delivered with full conviction, and it might be the single most adorable thing I’ve witnessed in my thirty-eight years on this earth. I keep my face grave. If I laugh, she will actually kill me, and my signature is worth nothing if I’m dead.

“I’ll pick you up at six,” I say. “We’ll have dinner together like any normal couple. And you will not freak out.”

I drop the finger. She stares at me, vibrating with everything she wants to say, cheeks flushed, mouth wrecked, folder abandoned on my desk behind me like a hostage she’s forgotten she brought.

“You are,” she manages at last, “the most impossible man I have ever met.”

“Six o’clock,” I say, and unlock the door.

She leaves with her spine straight and her dignity mostly reassembled, heels detonating down the corridor toward the elevator, and I stand in my doorway watching her go, laughing quietly to myself the way a man does when the woman he loves has just declared a war she has no chance of winning.

“Now there’s a woman on a mission,” my assistant, Roz, says from her desk.

“She nearly took my head off.”

“That’s how you know it’s real,” Roz says, her lipstick a shade of pink not seen in nature. She appraises me with the fond disbelief of a surrogate mother who never understood why I insisted on going without a tie. “She likes you.” Roz leans in as if she’s about to share vital market intelligence. “She may even love you, if she’s willing to hand-deliver legal paperwork with that amount of energy. Most people prefer email.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“Mm.” She goes back to her monitor for exactly two keystrokes, then swivels her chair toward me, and I brace, because Roz swiveling is Roz with something to say. She’s been running this floor since the day I signed the lease—back when Cruz Financial was four desks and a coffee maker with a death rattle—and somewhere between then and now she appointed herself to a position I never posted and couldn’t eliminate if I tried.