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Dana lets out an acid little laugh. “Unlucky, sure, some of us get where we are on our work, and some of us earn a raise on our knees and get handed a corner office. We can all do the math on that one.”

Her jealousy is not even bothering to hide itself.

Margo spins around from the service bar. “If jealousy counted as job performance, Dana, you would be running this place by now. He walked past you twice and never once bothered to learn your name.”

Someone snorts. Dana’s face goes blotchy. “I was only making conversation.”

“Then make a little less of it,” Margo says. “That is a lot of jealous noise coming out of a station with nothing on it.”

Dana snatches up a rag and says nothing more. The rest of them drift back to their tables.

I get out ahead of Margo before she can even start. “One night, and that is the entire story. Everything else I know about him came straight from Maksim.” I press my spare apron flat into the box. “He has walked into my life twice now, and both times it detonated. That is not a good omen.”

Margo tilts her head, not quite following, but relentlessly hopeful anyway. “I mean, the man is basically perfect. Rich, terrifying, built like a goddamn wall, and clearly obsessed with you. This could be the start of a real romance.”

“It is not a romance.” I try to give last night a name, and the scene at the bar a name, and I come up with nothing that fits either one. It is more like standing on a runaway train that jumped its rails and kept barreling forward regardless.

“Beautiful stranger saves you, one impulsive night, dramatic reunion at work, slow fall into love.” She loops an arm around my shoulders. “That is a whole novel, Delaney.”

“Read a few less of those,” I tell her. Somewhere behind my ribs, though, a small, locked door eases open a crack. The salary five times my old one, the closeness of the new role, the way he looked at me on that floor. My mind starts to wander somewhere warm before I catch it and haul it firmly back.

At two o’clock I step out of a silent private elevator onto the top floor, my box balanced on one hip. Lev sits behind a desk the size of a small boat. Up here the chaos of the streets below doesn’t seem to exist at all. The city spreads out through a wall of glass, small and shining and very far below.

The last occupant’s cologne still clings faintly to the walls, already being written over by a darker, colder cedar that belongs only to him. He has changed into a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his forearms are bare and roped with muscle. My heart quickens, and so does a slick heat lower down, in a way I’m ashamed of.

My workstation sits a few short steps from his, close enough that we could pass papers back and forth without either of us rising. Assistants at real companies get their own offices, or at the very least their own walls. He could watch me all day without once lifting his head.

This is not an assistant’s desk. This is a cage dressed up in expensive furniture. He has arranged the whole floor so that I’m the one thing he never has to look up to see.

I set my box down and glance out at the view. “So this is the view from the top. A long way up from a cocktail tray.”

“Is that so,” he says, not looking up from his page.

“Is putting me right under your nose part of the business plan too?”

His hand stops mid page-turn. “You think all of this was about you?” His steel-gray gaze lifts and settles on me.

“No, of course not.” The denial comes out fast, before he can say it first and cut me somewhere tender. “Whatever happened between us ended this morning. I know that.”

He could have any woman he wanted, and every one of them would be tall and slim and polished, nothing like the soft, thick-hipped girl repacking pens into a drawer three feet from his chair.

“You sound like you want me to confirm it for you,” he says.

The way he reads me straight through is unnerving. “I just don’t understand any of this,” I admit, and my voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. “The sudden job. The desk pressed right up against yours.”

“You don’t need to understand it,” he says, and rises. He comes around the desk without any hurry at all. “Slipping out while I slept counts as running, Delaney. It doesn’t count as ending anything.”

The office seems to shrink as he closes the distance between us. The air itself goes thin.

“Two adults can share one night without owing each other a definition the next morning,” I say.

“I agree completely,” he says.

He agrees far too easily, and that puts me more on guard than any argument would have. A man like him doesn’t concede a thing unless he already owns the outcome. I mean to step back and find some room. My body has other ideas entirely. His arm sweeps around my waist first, and he hauls me clean off the floor as though I weigh half of what I do.

I grab at his shoulders on reflex as he sets me down on the edge of the desk. My skirt rides up my thighs, baring them, and he steps neatly into the gap between my knees.

“There is only one thing,” he says. “One person vanishing before the other wakes, with no word at all. I take that as a calculated little provocation.”