Page 90 of Boardroom Mask

Legs quivering, I walk down the corridor toward the restrooms.

I’m halfway down the corridor, between the copy room and the supply closet with the busted handle, when a hand shoots out from the old photo darkroom and closes around my wrist.

I don’t even scream. Some part of me was expecting this.

Kir pulls me through the door and shuts it behind us. The darkroom hasn’t been used in years. It’s tiny, maybe six feet by eight, crammed with dusty shelving units and stacks of cardboard boxes that nobody’s touched in decades. There’s no window and no light; the place is designed to keep it out.

“You’re out of your mind,” I hiss.

Kir presses me back against the shelving unit. A box of something topples off the top shelf and lands on the floor with a soft thump.

“You came,” he croons, his cinnamon scent flooding me, easing and exciting everything it touches at the same time.

“I was going to the bathroom,” I insist.

He simply laughs.

“Okay, fine. I was coming to find you. But only to tell you that showing up at my office is?—”

He puts his thumb on my bottom lip and drags it down. I stop talking.

“Don’t ruin it by pretending you’re angry,” he says.

“Iamangry.”

“You didn’t look too angrylasttime I saw you.”

His thumb is still on my lip. I can taste the salt of his skin. In the pitch dark of this tiny room, I can’t see his face, and something about that trips the old wire in my brain, the loophole that makes this work, makes it all okay, that lets me want things without having to look at the person I’m wanting them from.

“You watched,” I whisper. Until this moment, I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. I thought I knew, IknewI knew, but I wasn’t positive. The confirmation makes me feel giddy and high.

Kir’s voice is an unholy rasp. “Every. Fucking. Second. That performance,” he murmurs against the skin of my throat as he leans in and slowly nuzzles the tip of his nose up behind my ear, “was the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me. And I grew up with Lukas Lazarev as a father.”

A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it. He catches it with his mouth, kissing me deep and hungrily in the dark.

When we break apart, I’m breathing hard and gripping his tie in my fist. “You can’t just show up here,” I tell him. “This is myjob.”

“I had a meeting with Rick.”

“Rick?” I grimace at the unfairness of it all. “I’ve worked here for two years and I’ve never called him anything. I don’t think he knows I exist.”

Kir laughs. “Maybe you should try being more personable.”

I yank his tie in response, but he just laughs again. “You shook my hand out there like I was a stranger,” I snap. “Am I a stranger to you?”

He strokes the inside of my knee with one fingertip. “Would you have preferred I bent you over the copy desk in front of your colleagues? I mean, ask and ye shall receive, but I don’t think your bosses would approve.”

“Is it so much to ask for some acknowledgment that I exist?”

“Why, the wink wasn’t enough?”

“The wink made it worse!”

His thumb traces my jawline in the dark. “You liked it.”

“I wanted to strangle you.”

“That can also be a form of affection, in my experience.”