Page 17 of Working for the Heiress

Her mouth was closer than it had been. Or mine was. I couldn't tell which of us had moved. I leaned forward, just to the place where my forehead met hers, and I stopped there, because the next inch would have been the line between now and perdition.

"Lili."

"Conrad."

Her breath was on my mouth. My hands were at my sides and they were closed into fists I had not formed on purpose. Her hand was still on my face. The other one had come up too, somewhere in there, and was at my chest, palm flat, not pushing, not pulling, just there, the way a person rests a hand on a horse to keep it still.

Everything inside me wanted to claim this woman with my body, make her mine. But there was a truth stronger than the primal need coursing through me. I pulled back.

"Not while you work for them."

She didn't move.

"Conrad —"

"Lili. Not while you work for them."

She closed her eyes.

I felt her nod against my forehead. Small. The lashes of one eye brushed my temple. She did not lift her hand from my face. I did not lift mine from where it had migrated to her hip without my noticing.

For one second, two, three, we stood like that in her office with her father's incriminating evidence on the desk behind her.

Then somebody came down the hallway at a run.

It was Diaz, and he was hollering before he got to the door.

"Holt! Holt, where the hell — Holt. Conference room. Now."

I stepped back from Lili the way a man steps back from a hot stove.

I am not proud of what I felt in that second. Relief that the spell had been broken. Resentment, too. A surge of professional adrenaline that I welcomed because it gave my body somewhere else to put what it had been about to do.

"Holt — oh. Ms. Ashford. Sorry. A storm cell just got upgraded. We got three birds in the air and the front's coming in faster than the morning forecast had it. All-hands in the conference room in two minutes."

He was breathing hard. He'd come from the hangar at a sprint.

"Pilots?" I said. My voice calm and professional—the total opposite of the chaos in my veins.

“Hartwell’s coming down the Pinedale corridor. Ortiz is south of the Wind Rivers on the lift job. The third bird — Daley — is doing the medical transfer to Cheyenne."

"Wind speeds?"

"Forty at altitude and climbing. Front's moving at twenty-five."

"Get the conference room. I'll be there."

Diaz was already gone. I heard him hit the side door at the end of the hall.

I looked at Lili.

She was still where I had left her. The hand that had been on my face was at her throat. The hand that had been on my chest was at her side. She was looking past me, at the window, at the sky.

"Lili."

"I know." She turned. She crossed back behind her desk. She was moving fast now, back in crisis mode of a different variety. "I'm coming."

"You don't have to be in the briefing for an active weather call. Sharon can —"